Amazon’s vision for soccer broadcasts feels safe and potentially game-changing

As English football braced itself for the entrance of overheated bookshop Amazon into the Premier League’s broadcast milieu, there was one question on everybody’s lips. Not the tax one. Or the one about data. Or working conditions.

No, we all wanted to know: Where are they going to put the scoreboard?

After all, BT Sport, who were the last lot to try and elbow their way into Sky’s territory, had broken convention and common sense by putting the score in the bottom left. Sure, sometimes it got in the way of seeing important parts of the pitch. But it was fresh. It was daring. It said: we are here to do things differently.

Amazon chose not to do anything so overtly daring — smack in the middle! dodging from corner to corner as play switches! no scoreboard at all! — and stuck to the tried and tested top left. But they couldn’t resist a little finesse, a minor inversion. Instead of Liverpool 5-2 Everton, we got 5 Liverpool Everton 2, the team names split by the Premier League lion and Amazon’s trademark arrow-smile.

Beyond that, Amazon’s broadcast was thumpingly, almost sarcastically, safe. Familiar names with familiar voices, in neutral television studios, asking the usual questions and receiving the usual answers. At least it was nice to once again hear Jim Rosenthal, a veteran of British sport broadcasting who has covered almost everything. His voice is guaranteed to inspire Proustian tingles in anybody over the age of 30.

On the other hand, Tim Sherwood made the world a smaller place, when he told everybody that Watford would be fine because some of the squad are proper men, and also English:

The broadcast’s familiarity emphasised something interesting about football broadcasting in general: the almost total irrelevance of the wrapping.

Perhaps irrelevance isn’t quite the right word; there are people who will tune in to Monday Night Football early to watch Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher analyse terrible defending and exchange clever banter. “Manchester United!” says one. “Liverpool!” says the other. The audience gets the joke, and smiles happily. It’s unknowable how many people would tune in if there wasn’t a game afterwards, although you could probably take a good guess.

Perhaps “interchangeability” is a better word. Or “fungibility,” if you’re feeling fancy. Slot a pundit in here, take another one away there. Shake up the goal show here, hire James Richardson there. This is not to denigrate the quality of a lot of the work being done by various channels around their live games. BT Sport, in particular, have made some excellent documentaries, but that doesn’t drive subscriptions.

And since the allocation system for Premier League broadcasting is such that nobody has the same game, the idea of choice is limited to “subscribe and watch” or “don’t subscribe and don’t watch.” A million Rosenthals or a million Sherwoods won’t make a difference.

No, the truly interesting thing about Amazon’s big week wasn’t who sat on the punditry couches. It was more structural. It was the option to switch between games according to preference and prejudice. Not a fan of Spurs or Manchester United? Or, perhaps, just bored of Jose Mourinho? Both entirely understandable positions. Why not watch Chelsea-Villa, or Leicester-Watford, or whichever other game you like?

As a model, Amazon have ignored the Sky/BT broadcasting structure that is descended from the original Match of the Day and The Big Match idea, in which television chooses a few games per round and then spreads them over a couple of days. Instead all the games go out, and everybody gets to silo themselves off as they please. Then after we’ve enjoyed our teams doing their things, we all come together for the second half of the 20.30 kick off.

Clearly, this is quite handy for fans who feel underrepresented by Sky’s and BT’s choices. And there’s an interesting question to be answered here: do English football fans want to watch their own teams, or the big games? Sure, Mourinho’s return to Old Trafford may be where the narrative was, but does that trump an actual vested interest?

While this is presumably all quite familiar to anybody who picks and chooses their NFL streams, for me, as a viewer used to the Big Match principle, it’s a slightly odd sensation. Televised Premier League football is already an atomised experience, but it generally comes with the knowledge that others elsewhere are watching the same thing.

Everybody will understand your joke on Twitter; everybody will have made a better one. The second screens are unified by the first; so are the conversations after the fact. But Amazon’s pick-and-choose offering fragments the audience. “Watch a game last night?”

It, of course, fits quite nicely into Amazon’s ongoing project to know you better than you know yourself. Not just as a “Premier League fan,” but a “Watford fan”. Or even better: “Watford fan that switches over to Old Trafford after half an hour if things are going badly, then hops on to Merseyside once the goals start flying in there, then switches back to Watford for the last ten minutes just on the off-chance. Then orders Alexa to play ‘sad playlist.’”

Perhaps this fractured broadcast landscape is the future. We can probably safely assume that if they could, the biggest clubs would break free of the Premier League’s collective bargaining and make their own giant piles of money. Amazon are already in our living rooms on telephones and smart TVs. And they are already pottering around clubs, making documentaries and shaking hands. They seem an obvious partner.

And by partner, we mean that they seem to be exactly the kind of dystopian megacorp that could underwrite The Premier League 2.0, The European Super League, and any other appalling contortion of the already appallingly contorted world of football you can imagine, all in exchange for a better look inside your head. And we haven’t even begun to think about the effects of broader streaming on such incidental matters as people actually going to the game.

But on the other hand, it was nice to hear Jim Rosenthal again. And having the highlights right there was useful. And hey, didn’t realise the X-Files was on here. Just one episode then. Just the one.