Newsflash, BBC and Sky Sports: not every young person possesses the attention span of a hyperactive Labrador puppy. We don’t all wear obscenely baggy jeans, drink fruity IPAs or blast awful music aloud on trains either. We are not all the same.
But that, it appears, is hard to fathom for decision-makers at our flagship broadcasters these days. In their desperate and doomed pursuit of preserving an audience for years to come, they appear to have tarred me and my fellow Gen Z-ers with the same, dismissive brush.
They will point to the cold, hard data. Plenty of that was bandied around yesterday following the decision to axe Football Focus at the end of the season. We, the Noughties babies, simply don’t want this kind of proper content anymore, you see.
The shrinking attention spans of our ‘TikTok brains’ – poisoned by a hit of seven-second-long content being available on demand at a tap of a finger – are, at least partly, to blame for the death of this great British institution.
Well, I refuse to take one for the Gen Z team on this one. Not least when it involves taking a bullet for broadcasters who appear to have failed to grasp the nuances of their audience.
Because what those who have issued the royal decree on what my generation will and won’t watch have failed to grasp is really quite simple. That us football fans are all rather alike, actually.
Football Focus is the latest Saturday lunchtime staple to fall victim to the doomed pursuit of teenage attention spans
Our Saturday mornings are sacred. The moment we look forward to all week. The crescendo of debate on WhatsApp groups. The time you spend plotting the charge to your pre-match boozer of choice. The contortions in the darkest pit of your stomach that only your team’s result later that day could induce.
It’s what unites us; whether you’re Chelsea or Cheltenham, Tottenham or Torquay. And it remains the case, whether your first thought in the morning is a trip onto TikTok or turning on the Today programme.
A key accompaniment of that Saturday experience is a high-quality football programme. For previous generations (without wishing to make you feel too old, dear reader) titanic figures such as David Coleman, Frank Bough and Des Lynam would set the tone in the afternoon on Grandstand.
More recently, over on Sky Sports, Soccer AM and its irreverent approach to the football weekend left you choking on your cornflakes.
Yet what does a Saturday morning on the box look like now, with Football Focus in its dying embers? What is there to inform, delight or spark a debate?
I’ll tell you what: nothing. Zilch. Nada. Well, that is unless you are interested in an Arsenal and a Manchester City fan debating who has the best starting XI in a studio that looks as though a teenage boy was allowed to run riot with a credit card through Ikea.
This is Saturday Social, by the way, whose so-called experts have played as many games of professional football as my nan. It’s silly, it’s vanilla and it’s wholly uninspiring. Put it this way, if an episode was being taped in your garden, you’d close the curtains and tell them to keep it down.
Flick over to Sky Sports News and you might find the odd big name tackling the big talking points, though it might mean you have to sit through torturous rounds of Fantasy Football chat.
Grandstand’s presenters unite for their 40th anniversary back in 1998
Soccer AM’s irreverent content wipes the floor with the offerings available now on a Saturday morning
Call me crazy, but I’d rather watch something actually happening in front of my eyes, than inane chat about wildcards and bench boosts (no, me neither).
And don’t count on Auntie to save the day after dumping Football Focus onto its scrapheap of sport. Would it really have been so radical to stick the show on a bit earlier to avoid clashing with the lunchtime kick-off and give it some of the love and attention it has sorely missed for too many years?
There should still be room to inform and debate, provoke thoughts and emotions in a way that clips and soundbites will never be able to. Yet the current, soul-destroying offering and even bleaker looking future has robbed us of a special part of the football fan experience – no matter whether your age starts with a two, five or eight.
So please don’t blame Gen Z for the replacement of great football TV with hit-and-giggle nonsense produced solely for the relentless pursuit of ‘going viral’ – we don’t want to watch this tripe either.
