The Premier League and their principal broadcast partners, Sky Sports and TNT Sports, represent an axis of greed that is laying waste to the traditions of English football that millions of supporters hold dear.
Their disregard for the fans, their indifference to the history of the game, their scorn for the bonds built up between clubs and supporters, has rarely been brought more into the open than in the looming decision to wipe out the vast majority of Boxing Day games this year.
There are no extenuating circumstances here: the abandonment of Boxing Day fixtures is a cultural betrayal on a grand scale, yet another staging post in the steady journey towards the obliteration of customs so often crucial to passing on the love of the sport to a new generation.
Football has been played on Boxing Day in this country for more than a century. There was a time, along with Christmas Day fixtures, when it might have been the only chance working men ever had to see a game.
Even if times have changed, the disdain that Sky and the Premier League now hold for the rump of English supporters, for working families, could barely be more obvious.
Because the truth is that Boxing Day games have always been one of the traditions that makes English football different. It is one of the things that has given it unique character. It is one of the things that ordinary football fans have revelled in.
Boxing Day games are a tradition of English football stretching back decades – until this year
There will only be one game on Boxing Day this year, as revealed yesterday by Daily Mail Sport
Going to the game the day after Christmas Day has been part of the rhythm we have ruled our lives with.
I have read all the excuses. We all have. I have read the figures. How the Premier League have to satisfy the rapacious demands of the broadcasters and provide 33 weekends of football a season, how their hands are tied by UEFA’s expansion of the Champions League and so on and so on.
It’s all garbage. If the Premier League cared about traditions, they wouldn’t have signed contracts that allowed for this. If the broadcasters cared about traditions, they wouldn’t enforce a contract that allowed for this.
Of everything in the calendar, of everything in contracts that groan with the weight of billions of pounds, the very first thing they should have agreed upon was that the Boxing Day games are sacrosanct.
But these are people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. They are incapable of understanding that in their thirst for more and more and more, they are destroying their golden product by steadily stripping it of everything that makes it special.
They do not seem able to see that they are destroying the character that has made the Premier League such an attractive product for them to sell. They are destroying the identity that made it golden.
No wonder that so many fans are aghast at what the Premier League, Sky and TNT are doing. At a time when fans need the escape of going to the game more and more, the league and their broadcasters are tearing at its fabric for all they are worth.
I hope that supporters fight it. I hope that they fight it with the same vigour and effectiveness with which they fought the greed and the cynicism of the six leading English clubs who tried and failed to join a European Super League in April 2021.
At a time when fans need the escape of going to the game more and more, the league and their broadcasters are tearing at its fabric for all they are worth
No wonder that so many fans are aghast at what the Premier League, Sky and TNT are doing
English football is being taken away from them and it is being taken away from them in plain sight. This Boxing Day fandango represents another step in the separation of the elite division of the game from its fans.
The Premier League, Sky and TNT can present themselves as powerless victims of the greed of others but everyone can see through that. They are at the heart of this cycle of greed and, sooner or later, they will learn its cost in the disillusion of their customers.
The EFL will still play games on Boxing Day but then the EFL still have a sense of what it means to be close to their communities. They still feel a duty to those communities. The Premier League and the broadcasters increasingly give the impression they do not care.
On Monday night, I went to Vale Park to watch Port Vale’s game with Stockport County in League One. I’m a County fan so I am biased but at the end of the game, the Stockport manager, Dave Challinor, went into the crowd to get a flag which bears the name of a young supporter, George Thompson, who took his own life in 2021.
It was the fourth anniversary of George’s death and Challinor took the flag on to the pitch and he and the Stockport players held it up in tribute. It was a powerful symbol of the strength of the bonds that still exist between clubs and fans in the lower leagues.
The Premier League are losing that. The bonds are weakening all the time. The planned obliteration of the Boxing Day fixtures is the latest and most insidious part of a march of greed that is wiping out all in its path.
