Not so long ago, an employee of Sky Sports asked a member of staff at Leeds United how the broadcaster should go about making peace with the club’s support. Like clockwork, every televised game involving Leeds was generating chants about Sky, chants no television company would choose to air before the watershed.
The only answer Leeds could offer was this: perhaps stop sending them to Plymouth Argyle at lunchtime on a Saturday, which is precisely where Leeds were yesterday, completing their very concentrated trawl around Great Britain’s south west; so concentrated that Daniel Farke might as well have based his squad out of a party villa in Weston-super-Mare. They covered 2,200 miles in 15 days and, at last, his players are out the other side of a long, long road trip.
They are emerging from it unscathed, too, and for that, Farke will feel grateful and self-satisfied. The club had a plan for how they would manage their way through, using air travel and smart recovery processes to negate the kilometres, but although this leg of the season is done, the tussle with broadcast schedules goes on. Farke did not have much to say about a 12.30pm date in Plymouth specifically. What narked him when he griped about rearrangements last week was what comes next: night matches, midweek slots and a string of tight turnarounds leading up to a Friday trip to Sheffield Wednesday, much of it at the behest of Sky.
🤯 “What have I just seen?!” pic.twitter.com/CoMOJfvGuY
— Leeds United (@LUFC) February 17, 2024
Any manager of Leeds should be told in advance that life in the Championship involves accommodating the EFL’s broadcast partner. The battleground between the club and Sky is as old as the hill Sky would happily die on.
Outside of the Premier League, virtually no club attracts viewers to an English club match like Leeds. On the first weekend of this season, when four fixtures in the Championship averaged just over 630,000 viewers, Leeds at home to Cardiff City exceeded every other by going close to one million. In fairness to Sky, no broadcaster ever built a business by actively seeking to minimise its audience and it will tell you it thinks hard about which games to show live, but time and again, it follows the numbers and numbers in the EFL are what Leeds do better than most.
For Farke and other coaches before him, annoyance with the disruption is a competitive emotion. Schedules become complicated, the knock-on effect can be dips in performance, and the spread of televised dates is simply never even across the division. Now and again, someone will remember what football was founded on by pointing out that travelling crowds get the rough end of the stick, too, although the sport’s interest in the match-going supporter is right up there with its commitment to sharing wealth. And over the years, the tension between Leeds and Sky has been fuelled by precisely that: the nature of TV contracts and the way income from them is divided.
When Massimo Cellino threatened to shut Sky out of a game between Leeds and Derby County in 2015, dragging the EFL’s then-chief executive Shaun Harvey away from his Christmas holiday, the Italian’s public utterances about fixture disruption were a front for great annoyance with the rights deal done between the EFL and Sky. Live games paid additional facility fees on top of central distribution cash, but in rough terms, Championship clubs earned much the same as each other from broadcast earnings. Cellino saw how often Leeds were televised in comparison to other sides and decided the club he owned were being short-changed. Briefly, he threatened to take legal action to secure oversight of Sky’s confidential deal.
3 points ✅
Unreal away support 👏🏽#MOT pic.twitter.com/yqWzXC96AG— Ethan Ampadu (@ethanamp26) February 17, 2024
His successor as owner, Andrea Radrizzani, continued that fight and for a short time pushed the idea of creating ‘Premier League 2’ to replace the Championship, a model in which TV earnings would be paid as a share of the Premier League’s broadcast income. The concept never got off the ground and neither did a mooted friendly between Leeds and Derby that, had it gone ahead, would have been used to try to demonstrate how clubs could earn money by selling games individually themselves rather than through a collective agreement. Leeds have long had the feeling that they are worth more to broadcasting contracts in the EFL than those broadcast contracts are to them. They certainly work for the EFL, whose latest deal with Sky came in just shy of £1billion.
And so, as rearranged kick-off times aggravated people for months and years, choice chants aimed at Sky became prevalent among Leeds’ crowd, especially on the road. Yesterday’s game did not make it to the first whistle before the most familiar of them was aired at Home Park, where a 1,700 ticket allocation sold out regardless of the 12.30pm start. It persisted long after full time, too, the away end going after the cameras with more bite than ever.
To their credit, the schedule behind Farke has not hurt him or his squad. Their form shows eight league wins back-to-back and they had the sense and finance to fly to and from their spate of long away fixtures, stay overnight after games like Tuesday’s 4-0 win over Swansea City, and keep their sleep and training patterns as sensible as possible. They were seven points short of second place in the Championship on New Year’s Day. Now, by virtue of yesterday’s 2-0 victory at Argyle, they hold second place by a margin of two.
The ability to turn up and do it again and again, anywhere and anyhow, while barely shipping a goal, has been as impressive mentally as it has been physically, and unsurprisingly there were hints of tired legs and minds at Home Park in between Willy Gnonto’s 10th-minute opener and Georginio Rutter’s 72nd-minute clincher. Since January, though, Leeds have been as inevitable as the Championship’s television picks and ahead of them now is the litmus test, Leicester City at home. Farke will not need to remind anyone that a team are only as good as their last performance. Or that nothing matters more than their next.
(Top photo: Harry Trump/Getty Images)
