#89 How has TV coverage helped grow the sport of soccer, as well as shape our understanding of it?
Soccer 101
TSS
4.9 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2022
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode, Ryan is joined by Graham and Taylor (but not Graham Taylor) to discuss the history of soccer on TV. When was the first broadcast? When did live games start getting shown with more regularity? How did the Premier League breakaway change the role of television in the sport? All that, plus important innovation and the where we go from here!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Soka 101, the podcast where we tackle the questions about the beautiful game you never knew you had. |
| 0:22.3 | On this episode, we're talking about TV and its role in the sport. |
| 0:26.8 | How did the old boo-tube help soccer grow? |
| 0:29.6 | How has its money changed the game? |
| 0:31.3 | Where will the game on our screens take us in the future? |
| 0:34.4 | All this and more will be answered by myself, Ryan Bailey, my good friend Taylor Rockwell. Hello, Taylor. Hello. And my other good friend, Graham Ruthervin. Hello, Graham. Hello, Graham. Very nice to have you here on Soccer 101. We are talking about soccer on TV. Graham, let's go back, way back to the past, back to when things were black and white and |
| 0:55.6 | boots were heavy and balls were stitched and shorts were long and so on and so forth. |
| 1:00.4 | The 90s. A little bit further back from the 90s, let's go about 60 or so years back from that. |
| 1:06.1 | Let's talk about the very start of soccer on TV. Where did it start, Graham? So the first televised game, |
| 1:13.5 | technically speaking, and there is a little bit of qualification here, but technically speaking, |
| 1:18.5 | the first televised soccer game was a BBC experiment in 1937. They broadcast part of a game |
| 1:26.1 | that had been specially arranged for the purpose of the test, |
| 1:28.6 | and that game was between Arsenal and Arsenal Reserves, |
| 1:31.7 | and it was to test whether they could broadcast a live sporting event. |
| 1:36.5 | The first nationally broadcast match proper was an international match between England and Scotland a year later, |
| 1:43.3 | but even then, the BBC only showed |
| 1:45.9 | part of the match. They only had the capability to show part of that game. They couldn't show |
| 1:50.4 | the whole match. The first time a whole match was showing live on television was the 1938 |
| 1:56.2 | FA Cup final, which was a game between Press North End and Huddersfield Town. And even so, |
| 2:03.9 | the number of people inside the stadium, inside Wembley, was far greater than the number of people |
| 2:11.2 | that were able to watch that game on TV. Because at that time, in 1938, there were only |
| 2:17.1 | about 10,000 people in the country in the |
... |
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