The scoreboard graphic has grown a floor of its own

A small clock and two names have become a fifth of the screen, and the parts of the pitch that matter are underneath it.

Find an old broadcast of a match from the nineties. The first thing you notice, after the shorts, is how much pitch there is. The score sat in a corner in a plain box, roughly the size of a matchbox, and then it went away.

Now the top of the frame carries team badges, a competition logo, a clock, an aggregate score, a possession bar and sometimes a small animated flourish. The bottom of the frame carries a ticker of other scores, a hashtag and a promo for the film that follows. Somewhere in the middle, twenty-two people are playing football, and the two corners of the pitch nearest the camera are permanently obscured.

This is not a nostalgia complaint. It has a real cost, and you notice it most on a set-piece. A corner comes in, the camera is wide, and the near post is behind a sponsor bug. In cricket the tail of a hook shot vanishes behind a run-rate panel. In basketball a baseline inbound happens underneath a strip of graphics telling you a player has four fouls, which is useful, and also that the game is presented by a mobile network, which is not.

The defence is that graphics are how a viewer joining late gets oriented. Fair. That takes a score, a clock, and nothing else. Everything past that exists because a sponsorship deal needed a home or because a department needed to prove it had shipped something.

The other defence is that people watch on phones now and need bigger text. That is real, but it argues for a different graphics package per platform rather than one designed for the smallest screen and then imposed on a wall-mounted television.

What I would like is an option to turn most of it off. Not a hidden accessibility toggle, an actual button. Score and clock only. It already exists in the world, oddly enough, in the world feed that broadcasters receive before they lay their own package on top, which is clean because it has to be. Somebody has already made the version I want.

Cricket, to be fair, gets closer to this than most. The scorecard strip is dense but it sits low and thin, and it tells you the things you would otherwise have to ask for: overs, partnership, the bowler's figures. Density is not the problem. Decoration is.