How likes of Match of the Day and The Sunday Game retain relevance in a digital age

When Cristiano Ronaldo made his second debut for Manchester United, 13 months ago, Match of the Day attracted more than two million views on the BBC’s iPlayer, a record number for the show on that platform.

In terms of digital traffic flow, it was a perfect storm. On the same night, Emma Raducanu, the teenage sensation of British tennis, contested the final of the US Open, live on Channel Four, and because the tennis overlapped with Match of the Day, a herd of football fans turned to the iPlayer to catch up, once Raducanu’s match had finished.

Manchester United’s game had been a three o’clock kick-off, which meant it couldn’t be shown live in the UK by any of the other Premier League’s broadcast rights holders. Of course in the digital age, with its rampant piracy, broadcast signals are kidnapped on a terrifying scale, and if you were desperate to see Ronaldo’s hammed-up return to Old Trafford in real time, there would have been any number of bootleg options on your phone or laptop.

For many other people, though, it would have just meant waiting for Match of the Day.

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In the digital age, time is the enemy, and the conflict never stops. There is no tolerance for a time-lag, or heaven forbid, lost time. Why wait? In the wide world of sport, if an event is not live on TV, or on a streaming service, you can be certain that social media will be your boots on the ground, relaying every twitch of the action. If you need to know now, there is no reason to live for a second in ignorance.

For the old pillar institutions of sports broadcasting, such as Match of the Day and The Sunday Game’s evening show, that evolutionary leap in how sport is consumed provided obvious challenges. Counter to all the impulses of the digital age, it was their job to come late and last to the story. For their established audiences, waiting was not an inconvenience. For the younger audiences they would love to attract, delaying the wonder was not a selling point.

At some stage along the way, highlights programmes were reclassified as an anachronism. They represented an era in sports broadcasting when live events on television were strictly rationed. The major sports – especially in this part of the world – were convinced for a long time that this arrangement was in their commercial interest: if everything was live on telly, how would they fill the grounds?

When the absurdity of that thinking was exposed, live output was the growth hormone in every broadcast deal. Highlights programmes and magazine programmes would always be included in the contract, to help fill the dead hours between one live event and the next, but on this plate of red meat, those programmes were the parsley.

In the increasingly diverse and cut-throat war for eyeballs on screens, major live sports events were one of the few surviving strands of appointment television.

And yet, highlights programmes still have a pulse. In the dizzying madness of the schedules, they are the last outpost of moderation. This is not an argument for moderation, because that argument was lost years ago, but somewhere along the way a sweet spot was passed without any of us recognising it.

On Saturday and Sunday you can binge on live sport from daybreak to midnight now, without ever feeling hungry or ever feeling nourished. How much live sport do we watch, simply because it’s there, and it’s easy? Is there not a certain tyranny in that? How much of it has the quality of elevator music? How much do you remember? Did you ever consider cutting back? Think about it.

Match of the Day has successfully defended its brand partly by expanding its footprint. Its Sunday night sibling has a different tone and a slightly different personality. MOTDx is fronted by Jermaine Jenas and is aimed at a younger audience. Saturday night remains one the most competitive arenas in the TV schedule, but Match of the Day retains a steady 20 per cent audience share. It still works.

Des Cahill’s announcement last week that he was stepping down as the anchor of The Sunday Game’s highlights programme triggered a conversation about where that show should go next.

It has been at a crossroads for a while: the programme’s makers have felt oppressed by the GAA’s rat-a-tat-tat championship schedule, and their weekly chore of pouring a quart into a pint pot. Next season, however, there will be an exponential increase in the number of games and even more pressure to convey a flavour of everything.

The Sunday night show desperately needs room to breathe and it urgently needs a Saturday night companion, at least during the busiest eight or 10 weeks of the championship.

In 2018, when the GAA introduced the Super 8s in football and round robin formats in hurling, RTÉ tentatively explored the possibility of a Saturday night highlights show, only to discover that Sky Sports held the rights. They weren’t using them.

The GAA’s latest round of broadcast rights negotiations were delayed by the pandemic, and also by a desire to wait and see how the reform of the fixtures calendar and the football championship would play out. An announcement was expected in early summer, but hasn’t materialised yet. The indications, though, are that Sky Sports are going to cut back on their output. And the Saturday night highlights option? Presumably someone thought of that.

Whatever you do with the format, though, events still matter most. The biggest audience Match of the Day has attracted in the Premier League era was in February 2011, on a day when 41 goals were scored, the second most prolific day in Premier League history.

This summer, outside of the All-Ireland finals, the biggest audience for The Sunday Game’s highlights show was the day of the brawl between Armagh and Galway. On a day like that, The Sunday Game becomes part of the story.

Even in the digital age, there is merit in being late.