Turn the crowd up and turn the music down

The atmosphere is the one thing a broadcast cannot manufacture, and audio mixes keep burying it under bed music and studio chatter.

Sound is half of watching sport and it gets treated as an afterthought by nearly everyone except the audio engineers, who are usually excellent and are usually overruled.

Consider what the effect microphones around a pitch actually pick up. The specific crack of a well-struck ball. A goalkeeper organising a wall in a voice that goes up an octave. A centre-back calling for a step. Twenty thousand people drawing breath at the same moment before a corner arrives. That last one is the thing that makes live sport different from every other kind of television, and no amount of production can fake it.

Then a broadcast rolls its music bed under a replay, drops a stinger sound onto a graphic, and cuts to a commentary pair whose microphones are mixed loud because someone once got a complaint that they were hard to hear over the crowd. The atmosphere ends up as a distant wash, the same at a rain-soaked midweek game as at a derby.

The clearest evidence of how much it matters was the run of matches played in empty stadiums, when broadcasters offered artificial crowd noise and a natural-sound option. The synthetic version was strange, but the thing everyone actually learned was how much a real crowd carries the narrative. Without it, a shot going close felt like nothing. Sound was doing the job we thought pictures were doing.

Cricket's stump microphone remains the best audio innovation in sport, because it gives you information nobody else has. The nick that nobody appeals for. A slip cordon slowly losing interest. A bowler muttering. Football has the equivalent available and mostly chooses not to use it, for reasons of language and litigation.

My preference would be a straightforward mix option in the app, the way some services already offer alternate commentary languages. Full stadium sound, no commentary, no music. Watch a big match that way once. The build-up before a penalty is unbearable in the best possible sense, and you will notice you are leaning forward.

The music bed adds nothing. It never has. It exists because silence makes producers nervous, and a stadium is never silent anyway.