There is a version of football Saturday that older fans carry around with them like a photograph they cannot quite bring themselves to throw away.
You know the one. Up early, maybe a fry up if you are lucky. The familiar buzz building through the morning. Into town, a pint with the same faces you have shared a pint with before every home game for as long as you can remember.
The walk to the ground, scarves and replica shirts, the noise building as kickoff approaches. Three o’clock. Ninety minutes. Then home, or back to the pub, or both. The entire country doing roughly the same thing at roughly the same time.
That Saturday. The one that structured the week, gave the weekend its shape, and made football feel like something that belonged to the people in those seats rather than the cameras pointing at them.
That Saturday is gone. And the people who killed it are the same people who made the Premier League the most watched football competition on the planet.
What Television Did to the Fixture List
When BSkyB secured the rights to broadcast the newly formed Premier League in 1992, the deal changed English football forever. The money was transformative. Grounds were rebuilt, players improved, the overall quality of the product rose dramatically. Nobody is disputing that the television deal made the Premier League what it is today.
But the deal came with a cost that was never put to the people most affected by it, and that cost has compounded with every renewal since.
Broadcasters do not want all their games at 3pm on a Saturday. They want games spread across the weekend and the week to maximise their scheduling options and their audience reach. Sky wants a Saturday lunchtime game and a Saturday evening game. TNT wants Sunday.
Amazon wants midweek. And because the Premier League needs all of them to keep the money flowing, the fixture list bends to accommodate every single one of them.
What you are left with in 2026 is a Premier League fixture schedule that looks nothing like a traditional football calendar. Saturday at 12:30. Saturday at 5:30. Sunday at 2pm. Sunday at 4:30. Monday night. Friday night. Midweek rounds that fall on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays depending on European commitments. And the traditional 3pm Saturday slot, once the heartbeat of English football, now protected only by a broadcasting blackout rule that feels increasingly like a relic from a different era.
The fixture list is no longer built around the supporter. It is built around the broadcaster. And the person sitting in the stands with a season ticket is expected to simply adapt.
The Season Ticket Holder’s Reality
Let us talk about what a season ticket actually costs, because this matters enormously to the argument.
At the top end of the Premier League, a season ticket can cost anywhere between £800 and over £2,000 depending on the club and the seat. Even at the more affordable end of the table, a season ticket represents a significant financial commitment for most families.
People save for them, budget for them, sacrifice other things to afford them. They buy them because they love their club and because they want to be there, in the ground, every home game.
What they are not told when they hand over that money is that they are signing up for a season of fixture chaos that will test every other commitment in their lives.
Your employer does not care that your club has been moved to a Monday night. Your childminder does not stay open for a Sunday 4:30 kickoff. The last train home does not wait because the game went to extra time on a Friday evening. The family dinner that has happened every Sunday for twenty years does not reschedule itself because Sky has decided this particular fixture deserves the prime afternoon slot.
Season ticket holders are adults with jobs, families, responsibilities and lives that do not pause because a television executive in a boardroom somewhere decided their game needed to move. And yet the implicit expectation from the broadcasters, and increasingly from the clubs themselves, is that supporters will simply reorganise everything around whatever slot their game has been assigned.
The arrogance of that assumption is breathtaking when you sit with it for a moment. You have paid thousands of pounds for the right to attend your club’s home games. In return, you will find out when those games are taking place with as little as a few weeks notice in some cases, and you will be expected to make it work regardless of the disruption.
The Broadcasters Versus the Fans
It is worth being clear about something here because this piece is not an argument against television coverage of football. Far from it.
For the fan at home, the modern Premier League calendar is genuinely brilliant. You can watch live top flight football on almost any day of the week. The production quality is exceptional. The analysis, the coverage, the access to games from around the country, it is a remarkable product and millions of people enjoy it every single week from their sofas.
That is not nothing. Television brought football to people who could never afford or access live games. It grew the game globally, created a generation of supporters in countries where football was barely on the radar thirty years ago, and generated the revenue that turned English clubs into some of the most competitive in the world.
The argument is not against television. The argument is that somewhere in the pursuit of broadcast revenue, the season ticket holder, the person in the seat, the lifeblood of the match day atmosphere that makes the television product worth watching in the first place, stopped being a priority.
And that is a problem that nobody at the top of the game seems particularly interested in solving.
What Is Being Lost
The 3pm Saturday was never just a kickoff time. It was a cultural institution that football built over more than a century and that became woven into the fabric of British life in a way that almost nothing else has managed.
It was the thing that connected generations. Your grandad went at 3pm on a Saturday. Your dad went at 3pm on a Saturday. You went at 3pm on a Saturday. The ritual was the same, the time was the same, and that continuity was part of what made following your club feel like something that mattered beyond ninety minutes of football.
There is also something that gets lost in the conversation about fragmented kickoff times that is harder to quantify but no less real. When the whole country was watching football at the same time, there was a shared experience to it. The 4:45 results coming in on the radio while you were still in the ground. The conversations on the way home when everyone had seen the same games at the same time. The Monday morning office debrief that worked because everyone had been watching on Saturday afternoon.
That communal experience has been fractured almost beyond recognition. Games are spread so thinly across the week that the collective moment has largely disappeared. You might be watching your team on Sunday afternoon while your mate is waiting for his club’s Monday night game. The shared rhythm is gone.
The Deal Was Never Made With You in Mind
Here is the honest truth that the Premier League and its broadcast partners will never say out loud.
The television deal that generates billions of pounds every cycle was not negotiated with the season ticket holder in mind. It was not designed around the fan who travels four hours for an away game on a Sunday. It was not structured to protect the Saturday afternoon ritual that supporters built their weekends around for generations.
It was designed to maximise broadcast revenue. Full stop.
The season ticket holder is, in the language of the people who made these decisions, part of the guaranteed base. They will show up. They always show up. Their loyalty is so deep and so unconditional that it can be taken for granted while the product is packaged and sold to a global television audience.
And that loyalty, that extraordinary, stubborn, irrational love for a football club that keeps people renewing season tickets year after year regardless of results or inconvenience, deserves better than to be treated as a guaranteed revenue stream that requires no consideration or respect.
Television money saved the Premier League. It also slowly and deliberately dismantled the matchday experience for the people who matter most to it.
The cameras love the atmosphere in a packed ground on a Tuesday night under the lights. They just never stop to ask the season ticket holder what they had to cancel to be there.
