Premier League clubs are currently living through their very first financial setback. After nearly 30 years in a land of plenty and ever more plenty, this affects us all.
What’s happened?
Clubs have a pressing need for more income because:
1. The pandemic slashed cash flow from matchday income and commercial deals, making clubs much more dependent on income from TV rights.
2. This has strengthened the hand of TV companies in negotiations over the price they pay.
3. In the latest agreement for UK TV rights, fees paid to clubs are DOWN 22% per televised match.
4. If upcoming negotiations for international TV rights go the same way and produce another drop in income, Premier League clubs will face a very difficult choice.
Cut costs or increase income
Premier League clubs have never been forced to cut costs because income growth has been staggering. For example, in less than 30 years, TV fees are up 1,000%!
Cost cutting demands did emerge during lockdown, when clubs and politicians tried to exert pressure on players to cut their pay. But have you seen any players suffering pay cuts? No? Me neither. Consequently, as we look to the next few years, clubs cutting costs is about as likely as a hot day in darkest winter.
Facing remorseless competition from other Premier League clubs, spending more and more has always been – and will remain – the easy option.
The only way forward?
If the game we all love is to survive and prosper, only one way forward is realistic. TV income has to grow – which means audiences must be increased. This will be a hard ask for two reasons:
Premier League football is already a world-class brand watched in tens of millions of homes and bars in countless countries. Overseas fans have already shown huge loyalty in that they watch live match coverage no matter what time of day or night it’s on TV.
With such an outrageously successful product, one question burns way the brightest…. In order to pull even bigger TV audiences, what improvements can the game now make to become even more attractive?
Original thinking is the key
In recent years, football authorities had obvious opportunities to make the game more exciting by using VAR and amending the offside law, both to favour attackers. But these tweaks to make the game more thrilling were ignored.
Thankfully, this is not normal. As an industry, football has frequently initiated swift changes to improve the sport as a spectacle for fans. I can think of over twenty changes we’ve seen in years gone by, and here are just a few:
- 3 points for a win instead of 2
- Goal difference instead of goal average
- Substitutes, first for injured players, and then for any reason
- Yellow cards – and red
- Matches played on all days of the week
- Goal line sensors
- Under pitch heating
How to put finances back on a positive footing now
The price paid for TV rights must increase. So, we need Premier League football to deliver everything we already see PLUS more edge-of-seat moments:
- More goals producing more outright screaming cheers (yesssss)
- More saves (oooooh)
- More goal line clearances (phew)
- More goalmouth action (ohhhhh)
The facts
Football is selling fans and TV companies a 95-minute entertainment product. Yet, in the most recent Premier League season:
- Average of goals per game fell for the second year in a row to 2.69
- Less than one in four matches produced 4 or more goals
- 30% of matches ended with one or both teams failing to score at all
- In one third of matches, fans saw at least one of the teams scoring only once
- The most common results were 1-1, 1-0, 2-0, 2-1 and 0-0
There’s certainly room for improvement.
The solution?
Maybe the solution is, quite literally, to move the goalposts!
In the last 100 years, the size of the goal has not changed at all – it’s never even been questioned, much less reviewed. Yet, during that time, goalkeepers – and their athleticism and flexibility – have changed dramatically.
Average height of British men increased over the last century by more than ten centimetres. The impact of leaving goal size unchanged, therefore, is to make the goalkeeper’s job much easier – and this reduces the numbers of goals we see. Increasing goal size now is totally logical.
To make a meaningful difference, how much bigger?
Currently, the height of a professional goal is 244cm and the width is 732cm. The precise dimensions for new goal size would need testing and research, but let’s start with a proposal.
What if we add 36cm to the height of the goal and 108cm to the width? That would be a 31% increase in the area of goal to shoot at – and this should immediately produce more goal attempts, more saves and of course more goals.
How many more? From the goalkeeper’s viewpoint, this extra 31% is ALL in the areas of the goal that would be hardest to reach, so goals per game would likely increase at a faster rate than 31%.
Bigger goals might produce 40% more goals, lifting the average goals per game figure to more than 3.7. That’s over 380 more goals per season, an average of one extra goal per Premier League game.
What would be the results of this change?
One extra goal every match would:
- Make MOTD even more worth staying awake for. On average, the Premier League would give us 10 extra goals every match week
- Increase unpredictability, with leads changing hands more often
- Produce games with more comebacks from losing positions
- Substantially reduce numbers of goalless draws and one-goal games
- Reduce the number of clean sheets
- Raise the number of teams scoring 3 or more in a game by 50%
- Result in every other game having at least one team scoring 3 or more goals
- Increase the number of hat tricks
- Create leading scorers with an average of over 30 goals a season
- Top 6 teams average around 95 goals per season. Mid-table teams would be scoring around 75 goals in a 38-game season, and even stragglers would be scoring around 50 times a year
Conclusion
As you can see, when the time comes to renegotiate TV contracts, bigger goals will give fans everywhere more bulging nets, more and better saves and more heart-stopping action more often while watching the game we all love.
From a financial viewpoint, bigger goals really can produce the excitement and drama that would drive the case for bigger payments to football from TV companies around the world.
There’s no time to waste because too many games have been too dull to fascinate fans and attract the large numbers of new fans that our game will need in the years ahead.
The time for bigger goals has come!
1 comment
Lets go the whole hog and make them 2metres wider and 1 metre taller. We will have 15 goals a game. More goals doesn’t make it better. When goals become more frequent the delight of a goal becomes less thrilling. Less skill required, even Benteke will score an hat trick every game, ‘perhaps not’. Sorry manufacturing big scores doesn’t do it.
Comments are closed.