Maybe it’s the influence of Succession, maybe it’s that we’re now fascinated with every aspect of the game, or maybe it’s that the people involved are such fixtures in our lives. But sometimes it feels like the football media storylines are just as good as any of the prestige dramas that people constantly tell you to watch.
So here are a few of the most notable from 2024, featuring a national institution fading into the background, the World Cup joining Selling Sunset and Narcos, and the most awkward interaction you’re likely to see that shows there’s plenty of work to do when it comes to sexism in the game.
For a few generations of football fans in the UK, it’s impossible to remember a time when Gary Lineker hasn’t been part of their lives. Over the past 25 years, he’s been the lead presenter of the BBC’s flagship highlights show, Match of the Day, for so long a crucial way of seeing Premier League football when the live games are all on subscription channels.
The announcement of Lineker’s departure in November wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it presents an interesting challenge for the BBC: the question is perhaps not who they should replace him with, but whether they should directly replace him at all. A rotating cast with no single main anchor has worked for Sky Sports over the last decade or so, and a similar arrangement involving Kelly Cates, Mark Chapman and Gabby Logan looks like the favourite option as things stand. Perhaps it’s the shrewdest way to transition from an institution.
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The Champions League coverage on CBS sometimes seems to be an extended banter parade that is occasionally interrupted by some football, a format made for isolated viral social media clips. With that in mind, perhaps it was inevitable that some of the badinage would go awry, as happened in March when Jamie Carragher made a jarring and off-colour remark that seemed to imply presenter Kate Scott (at the time Kate Abdo) hadn’t been faithful to her fiance, now husband, Malik Scott.
It was at best an uncomfortable, more realistically cringe-your-spine-out moment, with Thierry Henry and Micah Richards looking like they wanted to be absolutely anywhere else. Scott addressed it in their next broadcast, lightly chiding Carragher and saying he had apologised, but while she seemingly didn’t want to make more of it than that, it’s worth noting that Carragher hasn’t said anything similar to any of the male presenters he’s worked with.
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British viewers have become so used to the expert analysis on Sky Sports’s Monday Night Football, which was a revelation when Carragher and Gary Neville began a decade or so ago, that it no longer feels exceptional. Guests come and go, but you no longer feel like you’ve missed something if you’re not watching.
However, when Henry was a guest recently, it reminded us that, whatever his faults as a coach and however much his analysis is overshadowed by the banter on other shows, he has an exceptional football brain. One insight about Amad’s goal against Manchester City in which Henry spotted that the Manchester United man shifted his eyes towards the spot the ball would bounce, rather than to the ball itself, thus allowing him to execute a delicate piece of control, was masterful.
More please.
The numbers may look like a rounding error in comparison with the sums paid for men’s football broadcast rights, but the five-year, £65million ($82m) TV deal signed by the Women’s Super League in October is at least a step in the right direction. The rights will be split between Sky Sports and the BBC, with up to 21 matches per season shown free-to-air — either on traditional television or streamed on YouTube — and north of 100 games broadcast on the subscription service. It means that the vast majority of WSL games will be available to watch via some means.
It feels like a sensible charting of the middle ground between securing as much money as possible for the women’s game, while at the same time ensuring it is available to as many viewers as possible. There are questions about how this will impact attendance figures at games and whether the agreement will look like a steal for the broadcasters in a few years, but this feels like a victory for the women’s game.
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On the face of it, Amazon broadcasting its last Premier League game (for now) in the same year as their first Champions League coverage might look a bit odd. The streaming service’s 20-game allocation of English domestic football — spread over two matchdays — was slightly weird, and introduced a third subscription that viewers would have to pay for, after Sky and TNT, but the coverage was generally well-received. Enthusiastic presentation, small innovations like the substitutions indicator (marks next to the score icon which showed you how many replacements each team had left) and the fact you could watch every game that was on, rather than a select few, were all positives.
But Amazon decided that its continued involvement was no longer viable when the Premier League TV deal came up for renegotiation in late 2023: the 20-game package that it paid around £30million for was no longer available, with the smallest allocation of games being the 56-game batch that TNT bought. That would have cost Amazon closer to £300million, so it backed out, focusing instead on the single Champions League game per game week it has.
Amazon’s final Premier Leauge games were broadcast in December, but the start of their Champions League coverage in September might turn out to be a better way of establishing itself in football: even if it’s only a single game every round, a more consistent presence will help lodge Amazon in the viewers’ brains more effectively than a twice-a-season novelty.
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If Amazon has dipped its toe in the football water, Netflix has taken a massive run up and leapt right into the middle of the pool.
It announced in December that it has won the exclusive rights for both the 2027 and the 2031 Women’s World Cups in the United States — the first time that a global tournament of this nature will be broadcast on a platform which made its name with glossy dramas and increasingly bleak true-crime documentaries.
It’s part of a move into sports, which featured the recent Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul boxing match and two NFL games on Christmas Day, and is clearly a coup for Netflix, but will it be good for the game? The Women’s World Cup has grown in popularity over the years, at least in part because it was available to all U.S. viewers on Fox, but now it is behind a paywall, how will that impact the potential for the game to grow? And is it a good idea to give the game’s biggest worldwide event to a company with barely any live sports experience, let alone football?
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Even now, the things that people overreact to on the internet have the power to surprise you. Take Carli Lloyd, who has said a few things to react to in her time, but a throwaway comment during the Copa America brought a torrent of abuse on the two-time World Cup winner.
Working for Fox, Lloyd loosely compared Christian Pulisic with Lionel Messi — not, it must be clarified, suggesting that the former was as good as the latter — which was then wildly misinterpreted and blown out of all proportion, leading to the grimly predictable sort of abuse that women in football tend to get.
“Some of the things that have come at me have been hurtful, disgusting, verbally abusive,” Lloyd said in an interview with The Athletic’s Adam Crafton. “In this realm of commenting on Copa America, people are telling me to get back into the kitchen, that I don’t belong in men’s sports. You have to have thick skin. I’ve had thick skin throughout my playing career and that has hardened me… And I pride myself on being honest and saying what I think. And that’s not always the popular choice.”
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Well, maybe ‘nobody’ is an exaggeration, but some reports suggested that the audience for the big finale in December between LA Galaxy and New York Red Bulls was down by 47 per cent from the same fixture in 2023 on broadcasters Fox and Fox Deportes. Paul Tenorio reported that the league was more encouraged by increased viewership during the regular season, and that we also don’t know how many people watched via the MLS Season Pass app on Apple (who don’t release viewer figures), but it’s clearly a cause for concern.
Was this just a blip? Could it be explained by the disappointment of not having Lionel Messi in the finale, after Inter Miami were knocked out earlier in the play-offs? Or is it something more serious about the way soccer in the U.S. is distributed and promoted?
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MLS Cup final sees decrease in broadcast audience, a worrying trend since Apple deal
For a while, it looked like the Club World Cup, Gianni Infantino’s big swing at a lasting legacy with the first edition to be held in the U.S. in the summer, would only be watched by a very limited audience. And then DAZN, the live sports platform that is yet to really establish itself in the U.S, arrived with $1billion in its hand and a promise to let the world know about Gianni’s grand plan, broadcasting all 63 games of the new tournament on its streaming service for free.
On the face of it, DAZN paying that amount of money for something it was going to give away for nothing looks insane, but they will have the rights to sub-licence the coverage to a range of local markets. There had been suspicions that it was all linked to Saudi Arabia’s continuing love affair with FIFA, and that their Public Investment Fund would be injecting a large sum into DAZN. However, a PIF spokesperson told Reuters in October that they had “no current plans” to invest in the platform, so who knows where this is going.
The saga over the organisation and media rights might turn out to be more interesting than the football.
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Explained: FIFA and DAZN’s $1billion broadcast deal for the 2025 Club World Cup
(Top photos: Getty Images)
