This English revolution will be barely televised …



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Publish Date: Thursday, June 6, 2019 8:26 am

In July of last year, more than 26 million people watched the audience – mainly in anxiety, although it was a multicultural country, of so that some will have been apathetic and that others would have been completely amused – England has slanted against Croatia in the semifinals of the tournament. World Cup. Thursday night, this exciting team from England will play another semifinal and about 5% of that number could watch. And this estimate is probably optimistic. If England triumph in this match, then in the final of the League of Nations on Sunday, the biggest enemy of the recognition of this feat will be the absence of hearing. Dancing like no one is watching, that's one thing. playing football in the same vacuum is another.

If an English team triumphs in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does that make any noise? Does a tournament that only takes place on Sky Sports look like a tournament? In fact, this last international chapter looks like a series of back-to-back playoffs, and it's absolutely not the fault of Gareth Southgate or his players – who are hitting as hard as they can on the drum. trophy". and indeed should – but almost entirely because it's on Sky Sports and not terrestrial TV.

The truth is that more people are likely to watch the English women's team in their Sunday afternoon World Cup group match than the English men's team in a possible final of the League of Nations Sunday night. And it's not quite an encouraging sign of progress; this is largely because the potential audience of terrestrial games is lower than that of pay TV. My misogynist father will watch the women in his living room on Sunday afternoon; he will not leave the house to watch the men at his local club on Sunday night. It will not give any value to a victory in the League of Nations and many other occasional football fans.

BT announced this week that the victory of the Champions League final over Liverpool against Tottenham has attracted the largest pay-TV audience in ten years, with more than four million. Four million Britons attend a 100% British final. As a reminder, more than five million people watched Newport beat Leicester in the FA Cup in January. This does not mean that Liverpool's triumph has been denigrated by its lack of terrestrial television – or that the success of Newport has had a deeper impact – but international football is a different beast. In 2019, no one really cares about England until they are a) completely terrible or b) in a major tournament.

And we should be concerned because it is an exciting team from England, the vast majority of which will be at Euro 2020 next season. No outside field player is over 30, more than half of the team has won a major trophy or a major final this season. Also, at Raheem Sterling and Harry Kane, we have real world-class attackers. At Jadon Sancho, we potentially have another one. This is a team for which you have to be crazy, a team to love and celebrate.

And we should be concerned about this because it is an exciting new competition – for which we have qualified in the most painful and democratic way – opposed to equally young and far-sighted teams. The fact that Portugal is the only one of the four teams to "boast" of field players over 30 clearly shows that at least three of these four teams could join France as European superpowers of the next decade . It's a good gang to join and it's even bigger to lead.

Journalists still write guides explaining all the interest of the League of Nations while in reality, all we should say is that England is playing against three other major countries European and has a chance to win a real trophy. It's not the Tournament, it's not the Community Shield or Club World Cup; it means more than that. It's just too bad that a tournament that should have a mass appeal is watched by a small minority.

Sarah Winterburn

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