Summer of nothing? What can TV do to help bereft sports fans?

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, cancellations and postponements have hit major sporting events across the United Kingdom and around the world. Sports fans looking forward to a summer that included Wimbledon, Euro 2020 and its Wembley final, the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics have been knocked for six.

Some events, such as cricket’s inaugural “The Hundred” tournament – due to take place from 17 July to 15 August – have avoided cancellation so far, but with teams needing to prepare and travel, all international events must be considered in the balance, including the Tour de France, which has been moved from its original July start date to 29 August. With an England and Wales Cricket Board meeting scheduled for this Thursday, “The Hundred”, along with the Test series against the West Indies, looks unlikely to survive the week.

Meanwhile, the lockdown is having a wider impact. In football, staff at certain clubs have been furloughed, while players on some teams have taken pay cuts. The cancellation of numerous tennis tournaments has left players without a clear source of income for the foreseeable future. Olympic athletes, who have trained for four years in pursuit of a podium place on sport’s grandest stage, have been denied the release of competing this summer, with the Games, like the Euros, rescheduled for 2021.

Fans, of course, have been struggling to satiate their hunger for sporting action, with anxious broadcasters’ empty schedules at first offering no assistance. Those paying out for Sky Sports channels and BT Sport, meanwhile, have been left wondering whether to cancel their subscriptions.

“Against the bigger concern of how we live our lives and concern for people’s health, sport pales into relative insignificance,” says Philip Bernie, head of TV sport at the BBC. “But clearly it’s very badly affected what we do, and it’s been very disappointing.”

Over at ITV, the channel’s head of publicity, factual and sport, Grant Cunningham, says that initial reports of the Covid-19 outbreak meant the possibility of losing live sport “was in our minds”. But the difficulty of predicting how the situation would develop meant that “back-up plans really couldn’t be made with any significant degree of clarity”.

ITV Sport had broadcasting rights to this month’s Grand National and shared rights to the Euros. The “Virtual Grand National” was held in place of the former, with proceeds going to the NHS, while the latter will be replaced by an airing of the entire Euro 96 tournament.

The BBC had broadcasting rights to the Olympics, Euros and Wimbledon – the three sporting events in the coming months with the highest profiles – so had to make short-term arrangements to provide fans with their sporting fix. It made an announcement earlier this month that it would air the opening ceremony from 2012’s London Olympics, as well as select highlights from the Games.

The BBC will also show some of the standout football matches from recent decades in June and July, including highlights from Euro 96. In the absence of Wimbledon, some of the greatest moments from the history of the All England Club will also air.

“There is no direct substitute for major live sport events, such as the Euros, which can dominate the schedule for at least a couple of weeks,” ITV’s Cunningham admits. “And, because the decision to postpone the Euros was taken roughly three months out from the actual tournament, you have to consider what the mood of the nation might be by the time you reach what would have been its start. Also, because of the restrictions in place, which have impacted on overall production, you have to consider what could be produced to replace it, as well as what programmes are completed that might be brought into the schedule.”

Subscription services like Sky Sports and BT Sport, meanwhile, are in a trickier position, with paying customers already staring at greatly reduced TV guides, owing to the lack of Premier League and Champions League football, in particular. The latter is a BT Sport exclusive in the United Kingdom and the service’s main selling point, and its absence has left subscribers feeling short-changed, while Sky Sports has long relied on its football programming to attract large numbers of customers. They also have multiple channels and hours and hours of programming to fill – unlike the terrestrial channels, where sport has not been a staple for many years.

BT has set up a credit plan for BT Sport subscribers, which means that they will not be charged for the service or can donate their payment to the NHS, initially on a month by month basis, a spokesperson told The Independent, but customers have to apply for it. The gesture has been passed on to customers who get their BT Sport package through most third-party suppliers, such as broadband providers like Virgin, Sky or Plusnet, but again, in most instances, the customers have to apply for it.

Sky, meanwhile, has enabled customers to cease payments while retaining channel access “until action resumes”, but similarly to BT Sport’s process, customers must do this manually.

Both Sky and BT are staring at a combined revenue loss that has been estimated at £1bn if the Premier League does not return by August.

In the meantime, both have had to really strain the sinews to make their schedules a draw. Sky has launched a new mid-morning football show, featuring Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, Graeme Souness and Jamie Redknapp, and has drummed up some great stars to accompany some re-showings of classic events. Ben Stokes, Joe Root and Jos Buttler, for instance, have watched the Cricket World Cup final from last summer and the dramatic fourth day at Headingley in the Ashes.

BT Sport is re-airing many old fixtures from the Premier League, Champions League and other European competitions, such as the Man United vs Chelsea Champions League quarter-final from 2010/11, while The Football’s Not On is a new show “looking at the funny side to missing the beautiful game”. BT are hoping that “guests, songs and pranks will keep spirits up until football returns”.

For sport as a whole, the resumption of action is also an ambiguous term that will become more scrutinised if sport returns in stages, perhaps behind closed doors to empty stadiums.

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The BBC’s Bernie says the broadcaster has not yet developed a plan for content should the suspension of sport endure beyond the summer, but that it has learnt from recent events and will likely be better prepared if a similarly disruptive situation arises in the future.

“You learn from experience all the time in life and this is not an experience anybody wanted or would want to go through again obviously, but there have been lessons learned pretty rapidly. It’s been so sudden, the onrush of changes to the way we all live. I think we all hope, above all else, that they’re lessons that we don’t need to implement, but they’re there.”

If anything, the crisis has proved that there really is no substitute for live sport. It has also shown that cobbled-together highlights shows can’t compete with brilliantly made documentaries about sport. Fans who are not expecting to see much live cricket action for the next couple of months, for instance, will find passion, drama and insight into the world of cricket in The Test on Amazon Prime, which charts 18 months in the life of the Australian cricket team from the Cape Town ball-tampering scandal to the end of the 2019 English summer, beginning with the 5-0 one-day international series thumping by England in 2018. It’s utterly compelling, in a way that no amount of roundtable chat can compete with.

Programme-makers, with their backs to the wall, may just have to up their game.