Father Gascoigne

I know it's seeded in the knockouts. I was one of the very few people on the internet that was in favour of it when it was first announced to much derision years ago, so I'm very familiar with how it all works. I'm not for a second saying they should go back to the old format. And I'm not denying that other people are enjoying it and deeming it a success. It's just my personal preference. I like a sense of order to my sports leagues. With this format, I don't get that. It's too bloated, has even more mismatches than before, and requires too much mental work to comprehend a round's fixtures in any big-picture context. Sure, this club might climb into the top 8, but without doing the mental calculations of how the other 17 fixtures affect the rest of the ladder, it's not easy to grasp the importance of any given fixture. I may be alone in this, but it's hard to build any meaningful narratives from it as it's all over the place. To top it off, most of it is just posturing for seeding. In the NFL, seeding is really important, as the number one seed will play all their single-legged knockouts at home. In the CL, where ties in the knockouts will be two-legged, they may as well not make any difference. There is much less advantage of playing the second leg at home now that the away goals rule has been binned. In essence we've spent six months eliminating 12 teams and not much else. I don't know if you follow the NBA, but it shares many of the elements with the new UCL. If you do, you'll know how meaningless this league phase turns out to be in hindsight once the knockouts kick in. It all had the veneer of importance while it was taking place, but it was paper thin. Once people cotton on to that, as they have in the NBA, interest in the group stage will stagnate and drop off, as it does in the NBA. I like the single-table format. It's the way to go. I just feel they need to improve on it in the future by paring down the number of teams and thereby increasing the number of evenly-matched fixtures. This will make it easier to follow and provide more matches worth tuning in to.

While I prefer the single-table format and championed it when it was announced, I've found myself watching less than usual. I'm looking forward to the knockouts but have only caught highlights of the group stage. One issue with this format is that there is too much unpredictability and change matchday-to-matchday. You can go from 21st to 9th in one round. Apart from obvious marquee matchups like PSG x Man City, most of the other matches this week felt like noise. They mostly all had big ramifications for the standings, which paradoxically made them feel small. And because the group stage is only a lead-in to the knockouts, the great benefit of the single table--being able to judge the attractiveness/importance of matches--is missing. I can't see the associations voting for it, but I feel it would be best if the 36-team group stage was pared down to something more modest.

Right, it would be the cumulative population of an area that encompasses a 10-mile radius from the stadium location. My bad on conflating that with city population.

That's fair. In fact it stands to reason that, as a percentage, smaller cities will almost always come out ahead. While larger cities have advantages, they have one major disadvantage. The more populated a city--necessitating a larger urban sprawl--the more difficult it is for a person to access a stadium. A fanatic might not think a 15-mile distance and hour's drive is a problem. Where you run into problems is applying that to the rest of the population, where such considerations make a huge difference in deciding to attend.

There was a study done a few decades ago looking at where most of the people that attended Premier League grounds lived. They found a very high correlation between attendance and people that lived within 10 miles of the stadium. If I remember correctly, the number of people that attended who lived outside this limit were almost negligible. If you gathered the statistics to show population levels within a 10-mile radius of the stadium, you could absolutely measure whether a crowd is good or bad in comparison with other cities. Brisbane's metropolitan population is over 2.5 million. But that figure would be much lower if you only used the population that lived within 10 miles of Suncorp. Add to that a huge number of Broncos games are on free-to-air in primetime (night) timeslots, which would no doubt have some effect on attendances.

It's not just you. It's almost everyone. Those that point to T20 as evidence of new formats fail to appreciate the difference between the challenges that faced cricket and virtually every other sport invented.

Rugby league | The Guardian It's died down in general now that it's the off-season for both SL and NRL. But if you go to that link, you'll see SL gets coverage up until the Grand Final.

I repeat: Baseball at 7th and basketball at 9th is objectively wrong. I don't even want to start on field hockey being third. Basketball is comfortably the second most followed sport. Any claims to the contrary are proffered by delusional folk, those that live in a bubble, or both. It's surface level data analysis. India is big...India plays field hockey...therefore field hockey is one of the biggest sports on the planet. Indians also play and follow football in large numbers, and yet no one would use India as an example of football's popularity. Both of these sports are completely marginalised in comparison to cricket, which makes claims about field hockey's popularity redundant.

Should have clarified that better. I didn't mean to imply that cricket is the most popular, just that fans of all three major football codes in England--who otherwise wouldn't follow one of the other two codes--are frequently fans of cricket if they follow another sport at all. At least that's the impression I get. You and Eddie are better placed to comment on what the vox populi believes. But I'm struggling to understand how it's possible to live there and conclude it's not popular when the BBC/red tops/qualities give it so much coverage, and with engagement levels high--referring specifically to the national team. Is it because England don't play on a weekly basis? But that would be like concluding Wimbledon isn't popular because it's on for two weeks every year.

Mostly garbage statistics. Baseball being 7th and basketball 9th is comical and says everything about the veracity of the figures. Rugby league gaining 700k fans in Australia in the space of one year is equally absurd. No logic to it. It's been a major sport for eons. It's been operating at the upper end of its popularity potential for a long time now. You're not going to discover 700k new fans here under any circumstance. Never set a foot in England but I read the online version of your publications, both red tops and quality. My impression is that the England cricket team has very good coverage and engagement and appeals to more people than the RU team. Like here in Australia, cricket seems like the only sport that brings together the followers of all the different football codes.

Be that as it may, a points deduction that leads to a relegation would mean a minimum of two years without Champions League football for players. You'd have to be supremely optimistic to think they'd all stay. Short of clauses and selling, City could seek to loan out certain players who would otherwise push to leave. Otherwise, there'd be an exodus. The precedent exists with Juventus. When they were relegated, they sold Ibrahimovic, Cannavaro, Vieira, Thuram, Zambrotta, Emerson and Mutu in the one window. Nothing has been sorted yet, and City may not face any punitive measures, but the possibility is on the table, so it's fair game to speculate about players and contracts. There's been a suggestion doing the rounds that City's signings and re-signings suggests the club and the players involved know there won't be any serious sanctions. We'll have to wait and see. But on the question of relegation clauses, I'd be surprised if every top player at any club didn't have such a clause in their contract.

There's nothing ridiculous nor convoluted about it. It's straightforward, inclusive, and champions the Corinthian spirit sport was founded upon.

PL rights in UK won't become available until the end of the decade, so they'll be waiting a while. But it's hard not to consider DAZN a major player in sports now. They own majority of Serie A rights in Italy, share La Liga rights in Spain, share Bundesliga rights in Germany, share Ligue 1 rights in France, have bought out Australia's largest sports pay-TV provider. It seems only a matter of time before they become a key player in UK. I think you're right; UK CL rights will come up in 2027. I'm guessing they wrest that and TNT's PL packages by decade's end. But because they'll have to move the needle as you allude to, it gives Sky an advantage in keeping Super League. With the Saudi's investing in DAZN, I think it's inevitable that they overtake TNT.

It's important to read between the lines here. They're claiming second most viewed sport but then point to the darts final outrating Silverstone. The problem with that is that F1 has more than one race a season. How many darts events are drawing over 2 million on an annual basis? There aren't that many football games on Sky that draw over 2 million from what I remember looking at BARB figures way back. Granted Silverstone is probably the best rating F1 race in the UK, but I suspect the other F1 races have a much larger regular viewership than darts. It's not through chance that Sky pay GBP200m a year for F1 and (now) GBP25m for darts. One is vastly more valuable to Sky's business model than the other. Saying that a one-off final outrated a single F1 race and claiming that this proves darts is the second most watched sport on Sky is misleading. It's not quite as egregious as FIFA and IRB/WR's ludicrous claims, but it shares the same spirit.