The absence of live TV matches on Saturday afternoons may inconvenience fans of England’s 20 best sides. But the many smaller clubs in the league pyramid below the top compete with the big teams for fans. Removing the blackout could significantly harm the nation’s unique footballing heritage.
The UK has a hugely rich footballing heritage. Every town and even village has a football club. The pyramid structure of the sport in England is such that while in a given game week, there are only ten matches in the Premier League and 12 in the Championship (the second tier), in the seventh tier, there are 30 matches, in the eighth tier, there are 54, at the tenth level 102, and at the 11th level 187 matches on average.
Furthermore, a unique feature of football in the UK is that large numbers of fans continue to pay to attend games far down the pyramid. For example, average attendances are more than 3,000 in the fifth tier of English football (the start of non-league football, as this is below the football league structure).
This is more than ten times the attendances at the equivalent level in German football, despite Germany having the most comparable structure of the sport. These fifth-tier attendances in England also far exceed those in the third tiers of football in France, Italy and Spain. In England, average attendances are still more than 200 all the way down in the eighth tier.
While the focus is naturally more often on England, these patterns also extend to Scotland, which has the highest rate of football attendance per capita in Europe. Relative to population size, over two and half times more people attend the average top-flight game in Scotland compared even with England.
Non-league clubs are important community assets, and they provide vital opportunities to socialise and a unique fan culture. In addition, evidence shows that watching live sports can have significant social benefits through improved wellbeing and reduced loneliness (Keyes et al, 2023). Often, the clubs also provide a range of youth teams for boys and girls, providing physical exercise and inclusivity for younger generations.
Despite these community benefits, as the leading clubs get richer, fears grow about the long-term survival of non-league clubs further down the football pyramid. These smaller clubs receive nothing like the income from sponsorship, merchandise and TV rights sales that is enjoyed by the big clubs. It follows that for non-league clubs, gate receipts from attendance at games are a vital source of revenue.
What is the TV blackout rule?
A distinct and longstanding policy to help to protect lower-level football in the UK is the TV blackout rule – which applies article 48 of European football's governing body, UEFA (the Union of European Football Associations). This rule prevents live matches from being broadcast between 2.45pm and 5.15pm on a Saturday, thus encompassing the traditional 3pm kick-off time of football at all levels across the country. In England, the rule applies when 50% of Premier League and Championship matches are scheduled for Saturday at 3pm.
Such broadcasting rules were first introduced by UEFA in 1988 at a time when revenue from ticket sales was seen to be under threat from the growing demand for televised football.
At the turn of the century, many European countries still maintained blackout rules. But it is now unique to the UK. For example, in Germany, Italy and Spain, all top-flight matches are broadcast live. Perhaps the blackout feels antiquated and out of touch with where the game is going in an online age.
There have been regular suggestions that the blackout in England be abolished by the Football Association (FA), especially around the time that new TV deals are being negotiated. Last year, Prince William even expressed his annoyance at the rule as it prevented him from watching Aston Villa games.
The latest incarnation is perhaps one of the more significant. Labour MP Tom Hayes (whose constituency includes the Premier League club Bournemouth) has written to the Labour prime minister (who is well-known to be a fan of Everton, another Premier League club) about bringing it to an end – claiming to ‘back fans and back football’.
We recently documented that the areas of England with Premier League clubs have many more Labour MPs than areas with non-league football, especially non-league in the south of England. Thus, it may well be that constituency voices of the governing party’s MPs are more sympathetic to Hayes’s proposal than would have been the case before the general election of July 2024.
There are certainly arguments in favour of the FA abolishing the blackout. Ending the blackout would benefit Premier League clubs and fans. That level of football is where the broadcasting revenue is generated, and presumably more revenue would be generated by televising more matches. In addition, illegal streaming is a concern.
But before there is a rush to end a rule that has been in place for so long, it is important to consider the impact on the football pyramid as a whole.
How might ending the TV blackout affect lower-level football clubs?
Televised Premier League football at 3pm on Saturdays would worry clubs further down the pyramid. Fans who would otherwise watch their local team might now instead watch Premier League content on TV. In addition, with the likelihood that more Premier League games would now be scheduled at 3pm on Saturdays, rather than moved to avoid the blackout, more fans may also choose to attend top-flight games in person rather than their local non-league club.
Despite a wide body of academic work looking at the determinants of attendance at football matches, there is none that looks at ‘cross-product substitution’ between top-flight and non-league attendance in England. In our new research, we aim to provide such evidence, and thus contribute to the debate on removing the blackout rule.
Given the longstanding imposition of the blackout, we cannot compare periods with and without the rule in place. Instead, we examine how attendance at non-league games changes depending on variation over time – first, in top-flight games from across the nation; and second, in top-flight games taking place in close proximity to the non-league game.
The brilliant website www.nonleaguematters.co.uk provides attendance at each game down to the 11th tier of the league system. We can then use geo-coordinates to establish where these teams play, and hence we can look at the impact on attendance of a bigger local rival playing on the same day.
We look at the 229,000 matches in tiers 5-11 of the league structure since the start of the 2011/12 season for which attendance records and estimates are available. We control for the distance between the two teams, how evenly matched the two teams are, the level of the league in which the match took place, the day of the week (including public holidays), the week of the year, and general team-year variation.
Having done this, in our preliminary analysis, we then add a simple count of the number of Premier League matches taking place on that day. This isn’t a perfect measure, but our controls mean that it captures the difference between a Saturday with no Premier League matches and a Saturday with multiple Premier League matches taking place.
We find that each Premier League match taking place reduces non-league attendance by 0.8%. This may seem like a small amount, but it means that a full set of Premier League matches reduces non-league attendance by 8%. Furthermore, there are hundreds of non-league matches taking place since the pyramid really widens out below the fifth tier.
On average, there are 653 matches each Saturday in our sample, with an average attendance of 252. If we take an average admission price as £10, then an additional Premier League match taking place on that day is consistent with the average non-league matchday revenues being £201.60 lower – a trivial number by Premier League standards, but not for non-league clubs.
Across all 653 matches on a typical Saturday, this equates to £131,645 of revenue lost with each extra Premier League match taking place on the day.
Moreover, this impact of Premier League matches was strongest during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the Saturday 3pm blackout was suspended but fans could still attend non-league football in person. The increased availability of televised matches in that period gave a more ready alternative for fans who might have attended non-league matches.
When we include geographical information, we find that the impact of a bigger local rival in the Premier League or Championship playing on the same day has an even larger impact on attendances (3-4%), over and above the basic cross-product substitution effect outlined above.
The blanket nature of the blackout rule makes it difficult to estimate directly the effect that its removal would have on attendance at games. But our results suggest that we can plausibly argue that the Premier League football taking place, even if not directly at 3pm on a Saturday, results in at least some cross-product substitution, which reduces demand for non-league football.
This suggests that abandoning the blackout would be bad for the non-league game as matchday revenues are a vital source of income for the clubs. If moves are made to televise even more top-flight football, it would assist non-league football if the blackout period were to be maintained and televised matches were moved to other days of the week.
Finally, the health of the football pyramid may also be affected more generally through the ever-increasing focus on the Premier League at the expense of the lower-level game.
With increasing numbers of Premier League clubs being owned by North Americans more familiar with franchise-style sports league arrangements, there is a risk that eventually the competition will close itself off to the threat of relegation. The phenomenon in recent seasons of promoted teams from the Championship struggling to survive in the Premier League is perhaps a warning in this direction.
In principle, England’s new independent football regulator will guard against the ending of promotion and relegation, but it needs to be aware of the more subtle threats to this process. In Scotland, where the Scottish FA as separate jurisdiction, different decisions may be made.
This article is based on research in progress by Matthew Olczak, James Reade and Carl Singleton. It is, as yet, unpublished, but has been presented at a number of international conferences: 1st Reading Football Economics Conference, September 2019; 19th Gijon Congress on Sports Economics, May 2025; 5th Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and Operations Research Society Annual Conference, Aston Business School, May 2025.
