Views from the Sieve

With Sky trying to end the blackout at 3pm for premier league matches. How do you think it will affect the pyramid and Dagenham in particular?

I Personally think that if sky get their way on this it will destroy lower league football, sky and TNT currently have live football on every day of the week including Saturday evenings, they have already rewritten kick off times for the FA cup final and unfortunately in no time it has become “the norm” so on cold or wet winter’s Saturdays clubs like ours will struggle big time to keep our heads above water, so as I mentioned before I’m not a fan, but money talks and the big boys in the premier league will happily screw us over for a few more pennies. It will definitely happen eventually.

The NL board will back it probably, as they've been bought by the Prem.

I guess it remains to be seen exactly how much it would affect attendances. I don't think it's any surprise we had a bigger than usual attendance on Saturday when there was no prem. I suspect the 12.30/5.30 TV games, plus the prevalence of IPTV services, already harms attendances at our level. The cat is already out of the bag on that one, I barely know any football fan who doesn't have one of those services.

Yep. I think more people are starting to get disillusioned with the premier league in terms of cost moving games at a whim for tv which hopefully will mean we can attract a few in the coming years. But I look at the EFL now with a selection of games kicking off at 12:30 and again sums up the control television has over football.

I'm interested in this because I feel like Dagenham would be one of the most hypothetically affected clubs by this due to our ties to WH. So some questions :

1 - Would this really affect attendances in towns like (for example) Grimbsy and Torquay? Like really? People would stay in and not go just to watch Crystal Palace against Aston Villa?

2 - How many people would need to stop going for it to make a difference to us? We had 1300 home fans on Saturday, pretty similar to last year, how many would we need to lose before we got in to trouble?

FWIW I think it might be alright to trial it for a bit, just to see what happens, but, I know if they trial it it'll just happen anyway

Far too many games on tv as it is. Absolutely zero consideration for match going fans, who should come first in any decision