Blackouts are the reason people go looking for dodgy streams

Every argument for regional broadcast restrictions was written before anybody could watch a match on a phone in a car park.

A fan lives twenty minutes from a stadium. The match is sold out. He cannot watch it on television, because his postcode falls inside a protected area, and the rule that created that protection was designed to stop people staying home instead of buying a ticket he could not buy anyway.

That is the state of a lot of broadcast blackout policy, and it has become self-defeating in a way that is not even subtle.

The original logic was reasonable in its time. Attendance revenue mattered enormously to smaller clubs, gate money was the difference between solvency and not, and if a match was on free television locally, some people would stay in. Fair enough for a world where the alternatives were the television or nothing.

The alternatives are no longer the television or nothing. They are a browser tab, a low-grade stream hosted somewhere with a flag of convenience, riddled with pop-ups and running forty seconds behind. Blackouts do not convert those viewers into ticket buyers. They convert them into people who have learned where the pirate sites are, which is a habit that then applies to matches that were never blacked out in the first place. The policy trains the behaviour it is meant to prevent.

There is a version of this that would work, and some competitions have edged towards it. Sell a cheap, local, low-frills stream of the exact match that is blacked out. Fixed camera, one commentator, priced like a cinema ticket. It converts nobody's season ticket into a night on the sofa, because the people buying it were never in the stadium, and it captures money that currently flows to nobody.

The counterargument I take seriously comes from lower-league clubs, where a home crowd of two thousand really is the business, and where a streamed alternative could shave a few hundred off the gate. But even there the honest answer is that the away supporters who cannot travel are the natural market, and they were never going to be in the ground.

Blackouts persist mostly because rights contracts are long, complicated and written by people protecting a clause. Not because anybody has recently checked whether the thing still works.