I want to know how on earth they got away of pushing last Saturdays Spurs -v- West Ham all the way back to tonight (Thursday)? Only 48 hours after after both clubs played on Tuesday and allowing some other clubs to play two games in that period.. Yet the last day of the season all games must be played at the same time to give fair advantage.. What a joke that is.
It's a pain the **** for tickets holders when games are constantly being switched.. The sooner all games are available as Per Per View rather than scheduled across the whole weekend the better.
Surely you're not complaining about any disadvantage to Spurs are you? When I saw that the game had been moved from New Years Eve I automatically assumed it was the police that made the decision - potential for a bit of trouble at this game and the police not having enough units available because of New Years. I have no idea if that was the actual reason but it definitely wasn't moved for TV purposes though. The game was scheduled to be shown on Sky on Sunday anyway as part of one of their 3 game Super Sundays.
That said, it worked out as a huge advantage to Spurs and West Ham - both sides went into their boxing day fixtures knowing they had a full week before their next game, which allowed them to not have to worry about resting players for the weekend (unlike their opposition that day) and of course had a full weeks preparation for their game on Tuesday (again, unlike their opposition that day). With the exception of a couple of sides, due to TV scheduling, pretty much every side ended up playing 2 games in 3 days at some point over New Years.
Regarding your point on making all games available on pay per view, over the weekend, I don't think that'll ever happen. The PL want to keep the value of the rights as high as possible and doing that will lower the value to Sky/BT - there wouldn't be a noticeable increase in viewing figures (and subscribers) if Sky were showing 4 games live simultaneously than if they were showing just 1 game. Most of the supporters from the other 6 teams would end up watching the other match anyway. The League want to sell the rights to more games but as we've seen with the new rights auction coming up, they're doing so by adding new TV slots (we're going to have Saturday evening kick-offs from 2019).
The only games that we'll ever see being shown simultaneously are the Boxing Day, New Years Day, last day of the season and midweek rounds simply because they can't have 10 different kick-off times for each of these rounds of fixutres.
Saturday 3pm games will still be barred from UK TV. The lower league clubs will always veto any plans to show them fearing for their attendances.
As above, that's not the reason why all PL games aren't being shown on TV though. They could easily move all the Saturday 3pm's to Sunday's.
