As Johan Cruijff once noted: in football the clock is always your enemy. If you win, the clock moves too slowly. When you lose, it always happens too fast. The clock really only tells you two things: how much chasing you have to do, and how long you’ll be chased for. This is also the source of his power. In a game that has no formal structure after halftime, no fixed phases, but only a steady exhaustion of time, the clock is the key to the entire spectacle, the ultimate source of all tension, fear, pain and joy.
All this perhaps explains why Amazon Prime’s Every Game Every Goal show, despite the undiminished maestro power of Jeff Stelling, is the most painful, shocking and truly exhausting football program ever devised. This is the TV football program as a category error, a bravura production that above all expresses a profound misunderstanding of the subject. Albeit in a way that’s strangely comforting, at a time when the game is more up for grabs than ever.
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Week one of Amazon’s Premier League rights segment ended on Thursday evening. Week two falls during the Christmas season, with only one year to go after that, as Amazon failed to secure a package in the broadcast rights round announced earlier this week. It was a very interesting interlude. Prime has been good in many ways, employing a wide variety of broadcasters, presented here at the outset as a kind of celebratory chorus line, an expert Band Aid: Jim Rosenthal, Steve McManaman, Francis Rossi, Sting. Gabby Logan is excellent in the role of main anchor. Ally McCoist has reached a point where he doesn’t really need to say much at all, just sacrifice Ally McCoist sounds and Ally McCoist energy, now entrenched as the nation’s wise, football-loving uncle.
It all flew by as you’d expect, until we got to EGEG, a show with an undeniably mouthwatering premise as some sort of NFL Red Zone-esque affair, with a remit to cover every key moment in each game as it happens. . No filler. No scabs. Just always jam.
On Wednesday evening, six matches were played in the space of four hours, presented from some kind of fake high-rise hotel suite, like the set for a mid-nineties drug deal film, by the apparently rock-solid Stelling.
Jeff remains heartwarmingly unchanged. He still looks like the handsome man from a 1950s razor ad. There’s more polish and TV sheen, moments where he resembles a very convincing and youthful wax figure of Jeff Stelling. But he still has that unique ability to speak fluent uninterrupted football, to add full stops, commas and grammar to free verse.
With him were Dion Dublin, the football equivalent of Magic FM, and a surprisingly hypnotic Tim Sherwood, looking good these days, grizzled and lived-in, like a little soprano cousin filling the room at a sit-down. Siobhan Chamberlain had the clearest message and worked very hard to say coherent things and soften the strangeness in the room. Nedum Onuoha, at the other end of the bench, just seemed to know.
This format works well in more regulated sports with natural breaks and set plays, where the state of play on each cut is immediately understood. It works on Football Saturday or TNT’s excellent The Goals Show, because those are basically sitcoms. You are there for the characters. But football in the raw, with a loose assignment to talk about the photos in real time? What is actually the importance of witnessing an isolated ‘key moment’? Without context or rest time or the silences between notes, there is no story here, just noise. It feels like dilution and not addition.
The best part was that the presenters had to wait 24 minutes for a goal to talk about, filled with things like “LET’S RIGHT BACK TO THE AMEX WHERE THERE’S A CORNER”.
But when things accelerated, we were in complete sensory overload. It was delightful and more, but it also felt like I was living on the Internet, a place of pointless overstimulation, like being stabbed in the eye with a needle covered in football, a place where all information is basically noise and color and people say : “Aargh,” and: “Oooh,” and: “No!”
This is a broadcast format that tries to pass the time, to rip the clock from the wall, to erase the spaces and the silences, to turn this stubbornly unscripted sport into a homogenized product sound. And honestly, miraculously, given the endless micromanagement, football just doesn’t work that way.
The net effect of EGEG was a sense of pride in the enduring quality of the Premier League, which is in the midst of a brilliant, regenerative season and which, for all its glitz and modernity, still depends on storytelling, on the music between the notes, no matter how hard the administrators try to work it into something else. This is very important at the moment. There is a battle going on in all sports in this sense: the desire, armed by digital media, to not only own the content, but to reshape it, to make it addictive and more consumable, ever closer to the sporting equivalent of a tube of Pringles.
There have been some attempts to get hold of football, to make its chaos more bearable. Guidelines that force players to hurry up in the middle of the game. The (perhaps) unintended consequences of VAR. Time is again the key word. Those two large, fixed blocks of 45 minutes each, a Victorian idea of what sport should look like, have proven insurmountable and highlight how top-flight football remains one of the few non-bite-sized elements of popular culture.
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Hence, the EGEG style tries to make direct eye contact, but at the same time fails to understand that this is the enduring power of football. Don’t believe the market research that says kids don’t like long things (translation: market researchers don’t like long things). The fact that football can lag behind the NFL and IPL as advertising drivers is a result of its best feature: those clean open spaces, the sense that sometimes this thing still likes to be boring or quiet, to move at its own pace to simmer.
There may be a reason why Amazon let its Premier League rights lapse, why Apple didn’t bid at all and why the overall TV deal is still up this week. This is a product that doesn’t really need to be cut into anything new.
Zoom out a little and, despite all the madness surrounding it, perhaps modern football will be our own version of Hollywood in the golden age, or music in the 1970s, riotous and exaggerated, but still at its core something close in high art, still Prince and Apocalypse. Now still Messi and Pep.
Back at the EGEG studio, the evening ended in a glaze of fun exhaustion. Jeff kept going, as he does, still pumping out that free jazz. By the end, Tim looked like a man making an epic comedown at five in the morning, sitting on the sidewalk, staring at the lights of the kebab shop and talking about the twins. Above all, there was an atmosphere of quiet heroism as we got through it all. We are safe for now. The game is good. We won’t end up in some flowing future world just yet. Despite all expectations, the gift is going well, thank you very much.