“At three o’clock on Saturdays, we know who we are, where we belong, and where we should be even when we aren’t,” wrote Daniel Gray, the author and historian, in his 2016 book Saturday, 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football.
Gray calls that sacred point in the English week “football time”, the opportunity for hundreds of thousands to escape the humdrum and stresses of everyday life and find a fleeting, common sanctuary. “What a privilege that is,” he concludes.
Saturday afternoons remain the time when English football’s heart beats fastest — the historic home for a national obsession — but their relevance is dwindling.
According to Opta, just 128 of the Premier League’s 380 games — a third — kicked off at 3pm on a Saturday last season and the pattern will extend. Today, only five fixtures begin at 3pm; next week is the same story.
The EFL, too, is playing fewer games than ever before in the traditional slot. The first half of this Championship season will see only 37 per cent of games kicking off at 3pm on a Saturday under the terms of a new domestic TV deal, down sharply from 53 per cent last year. Leagues One and Two are also bowing to an evolution that will be televised.
Modernity is gradually swallowing tradition. Football’s dependence on broadcast revenues means ground is given to those who deliver enormous sums and, still shackled by a TV blackout dating back to the 1960s, the only option is to move games away from 3pm on a Saturday. A record of 1,094 live games will be televised to a domestic audience from English football’s top four divisions this season.
Bliss for the armchair supporter in the UK, who can now watch football from Friday night to Sunday evening almost uninterrupted most weekends, but less so for those fans travelling the length and breadth of the country every week.
Football’s advancement cares little for nostalgia, but does a kick-off time really still matter to supporters?
Saturday lunchtime and few games will be bigger for Sunderland this season than the visit of local rivals Middlesbrough. There are half a dozen police riot vans flanking the St Peter’s Metro station where visiting fans arrive and eventually there will be 42,781 supporters who click through the Stadium of Light’s turnstiles.
Most head back into a mild afternoon in high spirits after a 1-0 victory, but it is another home game shifted from 3pm.
Just one of Sunderland’s home games has kicked off in the traditional slot this season and the next will not come until Oxford United visit on October 26. Middlesbrough, meanwhile, have had four of their six Championship games this season moved to 12.30pm on a Saturday.
The Stadium of Light was full for Middlesbrough’s visit, but 12.30pm kick-offs are attracting smaller crowds (Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images)
Gray, whose words began this article, is a Middlesbrough season ticket holder.
“There’s history and culture behind the 3pm kick-offs, but it’s also the perfect time of the day for a football match,” he tells The Athletic. “The chance to do things on a morning, see family, travel to the game and then relax into it.
“Football fans will always adjust to it but it doesn’t make it right. As a fan experience, the 12.30pm games change everything. It’s all a rush, especially if you’re travelling away or coming from a long distance for home games. You don’t enjoy the rituals as much and it really impacts the atmosphere. On a very basic level, not as many people have had a chance to go for a pint.
“Unscientifically, I would say it also shows in performances. The football can be gloopier and slow, as if the players haven’t quite woken up either.”
Micky Lough, a Sunderland season ticket holder, agrees. “Our fanbase is coming from East Durham, County Durham and even Northumberland,” he says. “For fans like that it has a huge impact. It’s not just on matchday rituals but also from a purely logistical point of view. You might have children who play football on a Saturday morning and it becomes a nightmare getting to a game.
“The atmosphere does suffer as well. We have four Saturday 3pm kick-offs (at home) from now through to January. We’ve got a New Year’s Day game at home to Sheffield United kicking off at 8pm, which is just horrendous when most people are back to work the next day.
“We’re going to get to a point where, as decent value as our season tickets are, is it worth a fan’s while getting one when there’s so many games they’d have to rule out? And if some of your regulars stop coming, the atmosphere suffers again.”
English football has not arrived at that point yet. About half of the fixtures in an average Premier League round are moved from their original 3pm Saturday slot, but its most recent annual report outlined that stadiums had run at 98.7 per cent capacity during the 2022-23 season. Demand for tickets outstrips supply, no matter how inconvenient a kick-off time might be.
The Premier League’s biggest clubs, especially, have grown familiar with alternative dates on Sundays and Mondays. Moves can come at unhelpfully short notice, but rearrangements are ultimately to satisfy a domestic TV deal that includes five preordained time slot packages (Sat 12.30pm, Sat 5.30pm, Sun 2pm, Sun 4.30pm and Mon/Fri 8pm) shared by UK broadcasters Sky Sports and TNT Sports.
Those involved in the Europa League or Conference League on Thursday nights will always enjoy even fewer Saturday afternoon fixtures. West Ham United played just seven of their 38 Premier League games at 3pm on Saturdays during the 2022-23 season that concluded with them winning the Conference League final against Fiorentina.
EFL clubs, though, are still acclimatising to their new norm. A five-year deal struck with Sky in May saw the EFL commit to broadcasting over 1,000 games live every season in return for a total package worth £935million ($1.25b). That represented a 50 per cent rise on the value of the previous deal, but the kickback was that the number of games broadcast live would climb seven-fold.
📉 The natural result? A huge drop-off in the number of EFL games kicking off at 3pm on a Saturday
Between now and 6 January 2025, just 37% of EFL Championship games will be played in the middle of a Saturday afternoon pic.twitter.com/77787rmPCX
— Game State (@GameStateUK) August 9, 2024
Leeds United, with a fanbase as big as any in the EFL, became TV regulars long ago. Of their 24 Championship games through to New Year’s Day, only seven will kick off at 3pm on a Saturday.
“We don’t really want to be on TV every week because it’s a nuisance sometimes,” says supporter Jon Howe. “It can completely prevent some people from getting to games. It’s an old argument, but the football fans who make the experience are the last to be thought about. Their loyalties are played on.”
Most weekends now see one Championship game on a Friday night (yesterday saw Luton travel to Plymouth — a 500-mile round-trip), three on a Saturday lunchtime and another on a Sunday afternoon. Two games each from League One and League Two also make the move to 12.30pm on a Saturday. Among the fixtures played out in that slot already this season have been Burton Albion versus Stevenage, attended by 2,378 fans, and Accrington Stanley at home to Port Vale in front of 2,628.
“It is incredibly difficult to strike the right balance when it comes to traditional kick-off times and meeting the needs of modern broadcast deals,” says Liam Scully, chief executive of Lincoln City, who had their last home game with Wigan Athletic moved to a Saturday lunchtime.
“We have got to respect and acknowledge our history and footballing culture, but also ensure we move with the times and remain relevant in an ever-increasing competitive sports and entertainment environment.”
Lincoln recently took on Wigan in the 12.30pm slot (Chris Vaughan/Getty Images)
Scully says there was “unanimous support” for the new TV deal from the EFL’s 72 clubs, who will each benefit financially this season. Every Championship club, for example, stands to make close to an additional £2million in broadcast revenues.
It remains too soon to know how big an impact playing on a Saturday lunchtime will have on clubs, but early indications suggest crowds have fallen. Of the 19 EFL games to have kicked off at 3pm on Saturday so far this season that had an exactly corresponding fixture in the same division last term, 16 were played in front of a smaller gate. QPR versus Millwall, for example, had 15,350 in attendance for a televised fixture last Saturday yet the same fixture attracted 17,184 in February.
“Every side has to work hard at attendances in general — from numbers through the turnstiles to the matchday experience,” adds Scully. “In our experience, it is wrong to determine how full terraces will be on the timing or broadcasting of a game alone as so much goes into and around this number and we work hard at various levels and departments to ensure this is not the case.”
Will gains in TV money outweigh any lost revenue on the gate? “I think it would be very one-dimensional of me to suggest any loss financially on an earlier kick-off would be outweighed by increased TV revenues when there are so many factors which go into attendance and viewership figures,” adds Scully. “I will say that greater coverage is an opportunity for us to take Lincoln City to a broader audience, which we are incredibly excited about.”
Saturday afternoons had always been the comfiest fit for English football. What began as a fiercely working-class game, football offered a consistent source of entertainment at a time when most people were free to attend.
The 1850 Factory Act, passed in the UK parliament to protect workers’ rights, had outlined that a working week must end at 2pm on a Saturday, leaving millions with time on their hands to hasten football’s rise late in the late 19th century.
Factories, shipyards, docks and mines would empty out every Saturday, with many workers heading straight to the local football ground to replace work with pleasure.
The 3pm slot was always favoured but initially not sacrosanct. “If you go back to the early days of football, the late 19th and early 20th century, kick-off times changed across the season because they didn’t have floodlights,” explains Dr Alexander Thomas, curator at the National Football Museum in Manchester.
“They typically didn’t come until the 1950s, so you’d alter your kick-off time to coincide with natural light. Kick-offs would move from 3pm to 2.15pm and then sometimes to 1.15pm, which was the earliest kick-off you’d get in the depths of winter.
Tottenham fans pack White Hart Lane for a game against Blackpool in December 1961 (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
“But that block of time on a Saturday afternoon was when the working man and woman could get away from work and make it to a game.
“You had a lot of things coming together. More people moving from rural to urban areas, with a lot of towns and cities growing massively. Then it was a question of where people came together for leisure and finding that civic identity. The rituals of town life. You then found rhythms and traditions.”
The Saturday 3pm slot became just that once floodlights were approved by the Football League and, in turn, bred offshoots of tradition. The classified football results, the sports papers printed the same evening, all were synchronised. Generations of fans became conditioned.
English football doggedly clung to its 3pm rituals, even introducing a television blackout that instructed no live games could be broadcast between 2.45pm and 5.25pm. The theory, pushed most forcefully by Burnley chairman Bob Lord in the early 1960s, was that a TV alternative would damage attendances across all levels and, under Article 48 of UEFA’s rules, a domestic league remains able to ringfence a weekly two-and-a-half-hour window prohibiting live football output.
Its initial design was to protect the English football pyramid and its traditions but, in time, the blackout is eroding one of them. The abolition of the blackout, something that has been considered in recent times at the top end of the game, may be the best hope of games gravitating back towards 3pm.
GO DEEPER
English football’s 3pm blackout must be protected and maintained
“I believe it is our job to look at the overall picture and consider what should and should not be done to ensure we have a healthy and thriving football pyramid in an evolving landscape,” says Scully. “That will always and has to be the priority.”
The reality, though, is that the English game is now obliged to consider more than just matchgoing fans. Saturday lunchtime games are primetime viewing in East Asia, where the Premier League’s popularity is enormous. Night matches, meanwhile, carry appeal to fans in North and South America. The spread of games is now well-established and necessary if gigantic TV revenues are to be maintained.
The English game is parting with its traditions of time, but does 3pm on a Saturday still represent something more?
“If you take football as the whole pyramid, then the majority are still 3pm on a Saturday,” says Gray. “It does remain football time. Even when we’re being forced to go to these awful 12.30pm games, which is the worst kick-off time of all, we’re still consumed by football by 3pm. It just happens we change our matchday routines. Instead of a pre-match pint it is a post-match pint watching the 3pms come in on a TV or a phone.
“There’s something very important for life to have anchors like that and a privilege of following football is having anchors like that. You have routine and a sense of belonging.
“I know that’s an overly romantic way of seeing it, but most of us who turn up, cynical as we might be, are romantics. And I do feel the unity of football is lost when it’s all so sporadic and spaced out over four days.”
Progress with a price.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
