The final-day whip-around is the best format in sport

One studio, ten simultaneous matches and a director making decisions in real time, and somehow nobody has tried to make it a weekly thing.

Ten matches kick off at the same moment on the last day of a league season. A studio takes all ten feeds, a presenter holds the room together, and for two hours you get the best live television anybody makes.

What makes it work is that the edit is the sport. A director is watching ten games and choosing, ball by ball, which one is closest to a goal. The result is a broadcast with no filler in it at all, because there is always something happening somewhere. Compare that with a single match on a flat Tuesday, where you can go twenty minutes without an incident and the coverage has to pretend otherwise.

It also produces a genuinely rare thing on television, which is unfeigned reaction. When a goal goes in at a ground that changes the table, the studio finds out at the same moment you do. Nobody has prepared a line. You get people talking over each other and a presenter trying to remember which of four scenarios is now live, and it is thrilling precisely because it is slightly out of control.

Cricket has a version in the closing overs of a group stage, when qualification is decided on net run rate and two matches are running at once. Motorsport has one built in, since a race is inherently many stories happening simultaneously and the direction is the whole product. American sports have leaned into it hardest, with dedicated channels that jump between games all afternoon, and those channels have the most passionate audiences of anything on the schedule.

So why is it kept for the last day? Partly rights, because the feeds usually belong to different broadcasters and pooling them requires an agreement everybody only tolerates once a season. Partly a belief that viewers want one match, start to finish, with a narrative arc.

I do not think that belief survives contact with how people actually watch now, which is one match on the television, one on a laptop, and a scores app refreshing on the arm of a chair. Viewers have been building their own whip-around for years. The broadcasters could just do it better, with proper cameras and a director who knows when a corner in the seventy-eighth minute is worth cutting to.

Once a week. Saturday afternoon. It would be enormous.