It’s been a big week in the biggest club football competition in the world, with Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal all featuring in the second leg of the quarter-final.
Last night I was returning late from the cinema and realised I was without a radio to listen to the Chelsea v Liverpool fixture. Perhaps I could listen to Five Live via the internet I thought as I stood at the bus stop. I had my phone with me, but most sports commentary is broadcast on AM, and phones only ever have FM radios. But much surfing around the BBC’s mobile website (it rather insisted I use the mobile website) did not reveal a link to their audio stream in Real, the preferred format of many phones. I know it’s there somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. I perhaps could have visited Talksport website, but they seem to prefer Windows Media which is pretty useless on any phones except Windows Mobile.
So it was in vain hope that I switched to FM and discovered that BBC Radio London were broadcasting the game (Nik Goodman also listened – but switched to FM driven by the broadcaster itself!). That got me home until I could watch the second half on ITV1 – and what an outstanding game it was!
Anyway, on to tonight’s games, with Manchester United out in Porto while I was at Arsenal watching them play Villarreal. Now I often like to listen to radio commentaries of games in the ground. Arsenal is very good about showing replays of major incidents – unless they’re in any way contentious when the big screen certainly won’t show them so as not to incite the crowd.
I tuned into Five Live on my little DAB radio and perhaps unsurprisingly, they were covering the Man Utd game. Never mind. Let’s check out Five Live Sports Extra – the BBC’s digital sports channel. Surely they’d be covering the game?
No.
Hmm. OK. Much as it goes against the grain, I thought I’d give Talksport a whirl. I know that they’ve also been covering Champions’ League fixtures which aren’t sold on an exclusive basis like TV fixtures are. Despite the cost of sending out commentators and an engineer to Portugal, that’s where Talksport went with their commentators sitting no doubt a few feet from Alan Green and his Five Live team.
OK. Let’s try BBC London. I know that they’d done a deal with Chelsea previously for all their Champions’ League fixtures, but maybe they’d be covering it. Nope. They didn’t even seem to have a sports programme on.
I flicked around at this point but new it was useless. There are no other radio stations in London that cover football. Certainly no commercial station does. [Capital] Gold once used to, and I listened to that station regularly. But they stopped years ago, and I’ve not listened since. Xfm has aired a few games in the past, but no longer. Forget Heart or Magic. My own station, Absolute, has never covered live football. And nobody else was doing so either.
So on Tuesday, three stations in the capital were covering the same game featuring a London club – a game that was being broadcast on free to air terrestrial TV.
Tonight there was another London club playing. The game was only available on subscription TV (Sky) meaning that millions of potential listeners were unable to hear it.
It’s a sorry state of affairs – it really is.
I’m surprised that the BBC didn’t find space on Sports Extra for it, but I’m also disappointed that commercial radio is in such a state that it won’t bother with sport at all – the exceptions being Talksport and some local services in big football areas like the North West and North East (I can’t imagine that Man Utd playing in the Champions’ League would not be covered locally as well as nationally).
I know that RAJAR – the radio ratings system – doesn’t serve one-off fixtures very well, making it hard to sell to sponsors. And for all I know Arsenal or UEFA charged a fortune for the rights to this game. But I rather suspect that nobody was interested. And it’s the public that loses out.
Arsenal won 3-0 on the night at 4-1 on aggregate. They’ll meet Manchester United in the two-legged semi-final. Those games will be on the radio.
[Update] Amusingly, a work colleague was driving back from somewhere on Tuesday night and was trying to find the Arsenal game. He couldn’t of course, but on AM he did find a Spanish station that was covering it. Despite not speaking Spanish he was able to listen just picking out the names: “Fabregas…. Van Persie… Walcott!”