Saturday at 3pm is football as it should be

Estimated reading time: 6 subtlety

Football, on Saturday, at 3 p.m., offers a glorious antidote to the load of life. A drug that is prescribed by the very existence of the person, to be taken once a week. The side effects are wide-ranging.

Saturday, 3 p.m., is both traditional and equally sacred. Symbolic of football as the game of the people. He is cruelly protected by football purists; A fundamental component of English football culture.

The intensifying cold, the chanting of “Get Your Plans”, the smell of fried onions and hamburger cars wafting through the air, the streets abounding in colorful shirts from a variety of eras, and the click-click-click of the carousels resonate. Around.

This obsession, because it is one, is common to generations of addicted people who stand on the religious side. These faithful souls never had a chance. Football is just too strong.

However, football is in an endless state of evolution. It’s the hamster on the global commercial wheel. It runs, or it falls!

Of course there were changes. Had to be! And it’s a shame the money spilled into the game now dictates the trophy distribution.

The true opiate of the masses

The same awe and excitement created in the stands supporting an ongoing continuous narrative; And nineteenth-century fans, for the most part, would feel just like us about it. We still check in at 3pm on Saturday afternoon; Always did, and always will!

Players who overpaid. Monday night football. Absurd ticket prices. Neon boots. While many of these changes are necessary, or enforced, or unstoppable, for many, something in a football game is lost if it does not start at 3pm on a Saturday. Collective affection for Saturday afternoon remained widespread.

This is the essence of the indoctrination of any young fan. It’s as if woven into the rich carpet of football; Sewn into the collar of the sport.

The sandy menu of football is long. And although many have described it as a ‘final and perhaps decisive’ reduction in the 15:00 tradition of English football, others believe it is the last journey of football, or a tradition that if lost, would mark the full control of television broadcasters in the game.

The root of this tradition dates back to the nineteenth century when the Factory Act of 1850 was enacted, and with it the restriction and reduction of working hours on the Sabbath. Simply put, all work will end on Saturday at 2 p.m. Leisure weekend was born. And the growth of football has begun.

More free time has led to workers attending local drinking establishments, which in turn has led to churches setting up football, athletics and sports clubs, with the aim of encouraging and persuading these liberated people to healthier activities.

Saturday at 3 p.m., allowed employees enough time to move to their nearest club, or to today’s game, promising the games would end in daylight.

From the end of World War II until 1983, the year the league games began to be broadcast live, 11 top-flight games were usually held every Saturday at 3 p.m. (divided into 22 teams).

Game mode

32% – or 121 – of last season’s 380 games, opened at 15:00 on Saturday, down from 38% in 2019-20 and 42% in 2018-19. This means that the traditional “football as it should be” slot has seen a 16% drop in its number of games.

And although many will find solace in the fact that last season only 40 games were seen less on Saturday at 3pm than in the Premier League debut season, some thirty years ago, they are comfortably forgetting the other 82 games they played then.

It may also surprise you to find out that Saturday’s record number, 15:00, according to our detailed analysis of 11,432 games, by the end of the 2020-2021 season, was in the years 2000-2001, when 170 games were launched. Slot (45% total).

The average for the last 29 years stands at 36%, with 4,099 Premier League games kicking off on Saturday, 15:00.

traditionally

Now seems like a reasonable time to mention that since its inception, the Premier League has banned TV broadcasts of games scheduled for Saturday, 3pm kicks. It is not possible to broadcast a Premier League game, a football league or the English Cup live in the UK between 14:45 and 17:15.

This follows a rule set by Burnley chairman Bob Lord, who successfully persuaded the Football League chairmen who play on TV on Saturday afternoons to adversely affect attendance at lower league games.

The theory is that if Manchester United play Liverpool in a televised game on Saturday afternoon, attendance elsewhere could be adversely affected when fans stay home to watch.

Cristiano Ronaldo’s second arrival at Manchester United last month was not televised, nor were the first 15 minutes of his Juventus debut in 2018, both because of the UEFA sanction for a halt to broadcasting.

There are six clubs that have ever been present in the English Premier League, of which Everton had the highest percentage of games scheduled to sit at 3pm. In fact, the Merseyside club enjoyed 24.39% more of them than Manchester United, who only 31.03% fell on the same day of the week, and at the same time, received the worst allotment in the league’s thirty-year history.

And what could have been; The Red Devils had the highest victory percentage during the traditional kick – 77.71%.

Chelsea had 37.78%, Tottenham 37.16%, Arsenal 34.34% and Liverpool 32.98%, although they all played between 1125 and 1130 Premier League games. In terms of winning percentages on Saturday, slot 15:00; Arsenal stand at 70.80%, Chelsea 64.47%, Liverpool 63.34%, Tottenham 56.70%, Everton 55.28%.

Of the current senior league teams, Southampton enjoyed the highest percentage of Saturday kicks, 15:00 – 55.56%. The Saints played 864 top games.

Leicester (52.22% / 306 games), Norwich (52.03% / 192 games), West Ham (48.66% 968 games) and Crystal Palace (48.54% / 233 games) make up the top five.

Back to those who played in each of the 30 seasons and the percentage declines between the 1992-1993 and 2020-2021 seasons make for an interesting read. Tottenham have suffered the biggest drop with 37.73% less than they had in their Premier League debut season, while Arsenal (-26.55%) and Chelsea (-26.32%) can consider themselves unhappy, especially given their steady win percentage.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the current EPL teams with the lowest win percentage on Saturday afternoon are Norwich 40.63%, Wolves 41.82% and Crystal Palace 44.21%.

Deselect the characters and what they do show is tectonic competition, a definition battle in the dictionary, head to heart. Moreover, the figures do emphasize the existence of a thin, or imaginary line, that even the powerful and revolutionary forces of English football are not happy to cross.

And writing this article exactly, in thirty years from today, I’m sure we’ll all feel the same about football, and its traditional Sabbath at 3pm, then. It, should and probably always will remain, a symbol of football as the people’s game.

Saturday 15:00 According to the numbers: