Extra Time: European Football’s Battle With The Time Zone
As another European club season gets under way, I’m reminded of the days in Montreal when my football following was something of an ascetic exercise. When the Premier league moved into the decisive December-January junction, not only would I have to rouse myself from a warm bed embraced only five hours earlier from the local student pubs, I would have to trudge through three feet of snow in temperatures hovering near minus thirty degrees Celsius, stinking of stale Quebec lager, to my local café. After peeling off three layers and settling down to some hot coffee, I would then prepare myself to convince the owner to flip the TV to the right channel, and then to put the sound on. Not too loud — I didn’t need to feel like I was there, especially in my fragile state – just audible enough to hear the tell-tale roar at the decisive strike.
The possibility of this snowy ritual taking place a world away wasn’t foremost on the minds of the moneymen who collected tickets from tens of thousands of British working-class men, women and children most Saturday afternoons in the late 19th and early 20th century. The three o’clock kickoff was meant to accommodate the Saturday half-day. Workers exhausted from a week of toil in the ‘satanic mills’ of industry were more than happy to be “Lords of the Earth”, as J.B. Priestly once wrote, for a couple of hours at the football ground.
Today, with the advent of satellite television able to provide instant live coverage around the globe, viewers are able to watch live matches five or six timezones away. The ‘three o’clock’ kickoff is a moveable feast, and European football’s unique popularity means many have fans grown up watching Serie A, the Bundelsiga or the Premier league at odd times of the day. Afternoon games are enjoyed in the Middle East over supper, in North America at the crack of dawn, in Australasia in the late evening. These time differences can have a subtle but intriguing effect on how local audiences enjoy the game.
It may seem daft or pretentious to think of something like the time of day when talking about football. Surely it doesn’t matter when the game is played — it should just sit there like a one-size-fits-all, universal absolute. Yet the circumstance of how and when we watch football can influence what we take from it. Making plans with friends, choosing the right pub, planning on the fly if your club crashes out of a cup competition when you’re stuck miles from home in a unfamiliar city, often it’s these rituals that make the memory – think Colin Firth rolling around on the apartment floor at the end of Fever Pitch. And as any Cistercian monk will tell you, rituals revolve around time.
For example, depending on where you live in North America, European club matches start anytime from 7 to 10 AM. Games are watched over coffee, eggs, toast, and bacon. Traditionalists will wait an agonizing hour or two at the local pub eyeing the flat screen until beer can be served, but most of the time, matches are enjoyed at home in the quiet of a Saturday morning. For this reason, European soccer in Canada and the US tends to be a more solitary affair. The sobriety of the dawn helps reveal the game’s many idiosyncrasies. It’s hard, for instance, to imagine something like Brian Phillip’s Run of Play getting written in the haze of a laddish, alcohol-fueled English afternoon.
I would also imagine that, for many Australians, watching the Roma or North London derby at midnight must have some sort of doomsday quality, the coda to a long night out. Like Saturday Night Live, it’s something you have to stay up to watch, and can also for that reason be a big letdown– the dull outcome to many a ‘Grand Slam’ or ‘El Clasico’ is probably felt with a sharper tinge of regret. While I wouldn’t pretend to know the experience, I do remember that, during the 2002 World Cup, the midnight start time turned ho-hum group round games into titanic epics, half-blurred by one or three pints too many.
It’s therefore hopeful that, for all of globalization’s milquetoast sameness, it hasn’t yet found a way to conquer the peculiarity of time. I enjoy the haughty distance the five-hour difference gives me from the mad-rush of the European soccer machine. Richard Scudamore’s vision of European football as traveling circus takes that away, which is why I’d rather stay at home and watch the bustle of a St. James Park or a San Siro comfy on my chesterfield with a hot cup of coffee at ten in the morning than witness the same thing at my local park at three in the afternoon. It may not amount to much, but the myriad ways time affects the ‘football ritual’ may be European soccer’s most underrated asset, and the modern-day football moneymen and women, who once used the clock to great exploitative effect, may have missed it.
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for football maniac in Indonesia, we always sleep early first then wake up a moment before European bigmatch kick-off around dawn. Most of us are ready to do that even they will go to work in the morning
I’m in Toronto too. Funnily enough, my husband and I have both perfected the timing of cooking breakfasts. Start at half time and ready to eat just as the second half begins. It can be a bit of a mad rush sometimes, but the alternative is just too heartbreaking.
Here on the West Coast, early kickoffs in England mean a game starting around 4am. Thank god for Tivo. La Liga is nice for us–games starting sometimes as late as 12pm.
The Champions League is also a nice mid-day diversion. When I was a grad student, unless I had a class to teach, I could watch the full game–I have a general rule of no beer before noon, so that’s about 15 minutes into the first half. Now that I’m working, I anticipate some long lunches (without beer, in case any of my employers are reading) in my future…
Like Inca says, whenever I’m back home in California watching the EPL means either a) a midnight nap with three alarms set for 4am, or b) lots and lots of coffee and no further plans until late afternoon. Still, it’s worth it(?) most of the time.
It’s actually not so easy here to see a live game too…..There’s many time I’ve stumbled to bed at 5am after a bit of a bender only to have to drag my sorry ass down to Old Trafford for a 12:30 K.O. on a Sunday lunchtime.
It hurts.
Do I learn?
Uh-uh.
AHHH. The sacrifices we make
I know the feeling too. Following the Copa Libertadores from the middle of the English night can be a nightmare at times, not least because CONMEBOL make the kick off times less and less Euro-friendly as the competition drags on. Covering last year’s final for my site meant staying up until close to 6am to watch the game then write it up, and getting up the next morning at 9:30 for work (fortunately, I don’t start til 10:30).
And yet, the late, late nights and blurry internet stream pictures are an integral part of my Copa experience, and I wouldn’t change them. When I move to Argentina in a year or two it’ll be much better to be able to see the games at close quarters, of course – but I’ll never forget the epics it produces that subsequently stop me being able to sleep, even though it’s turning light outside and I’m shattered…
Great article on a subject matter every football fan can relate to. Oh, the memories of waking up at 4:30 am here in Chicago to watch Milan play Boca Juniors in the Club World Cup in Japan last December…can’t pretend that I don’t cherish every minute of the unique experience though.
We enjoy our Champions league matches in Saudi Arabia at 10:15pm,considering they are played on Wednesdays we couldnt ask for a sweeter time as that is the end of the week.
I used to live on Pohnpei, an island in the middle of the Pacific (look it up if you don’t believe me), and for reasons that I can no longer recall we would get live coverage of the Monday night game in England. Which meant that I would sit there in my shorts in the tropical morning drinking coffee while watching people huddled together for warmth in the pouring rain at Hillsboriugh and Ewood Park and similar places. It was great.
Now I live in Europe, but the time zone thing can still get me – Romanian time is an hour ahead of CET (and I have children now) meaning that all those European matches don’t kick off until 9.45, so I have to be fairly selective about which ones I stay up for. And as for the post match highlights-of-the-other-games show, forget it.
It’s actually not so easy here to see a live game too…..There’s many time I’ve stumbled to bed at 5am after a bit of a bender only to have to drag my sorry ass down to Old Trafford for a 12:30 K.O. on a Sunday lunchtime.
It hurts.
Do I learn?
Uh-uh.
Very interesting article Richard! A subject particularly close to my heart as something I spent a fair bit of time researching before I actually worked for a living. I’m still fascinated by these processes of “Glocalisation” though and wasnt it that Appadurai bloke who said that the global is always local somewhere. I’m still looking for the book that tackles these questions: how are these matches ‘consumed’ in a decontextualised setting? How does support for a team – membership of an imagined community – reshaping local ties and local structures.Now matter how hyper-real football may have become in distant decontextualised sites, its consumption still takes place in local social and cultural settings and it is therefore consumed in a limitless variety of ways. The idea of the fan 20 years ago stood in the rain on an empty terrace 20 years ago watching a strictly local event, to the concept of a goal being scored and instantaneoulsy celebrated by a group of mates in a bar on the other side of the planet is really intriguing – but I’d never given that much thought to how time could play a part in this consumption as well. You’ve given me a few things to think about. Cheers mate.
I like to watch live football as my first choice only. I’d rather tivo it than get up at 4am or stay up till 2 am or whatever. Now if I win the lottery thats when I’ll watch whenever and quit working.
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futball – it’s grate game evryone!
In GMT+5hrs zones, in Montreal, it really is TRUE LUXURY to settle in watch DECENT Premiership at 10am, or worse, to eggsbacon with a latte, moving on to pints at half-time. In fact its the Rugby 6 Nations which brings the most charged atmosphere at the big sports-bars, as the French, English and the Irish always are in large numbers.Soccer crowd a little more straggley, but friendly all the same. Its really difficult to explain this atmosphere to Europeans. TRUE LUXURY.
Football is with out a doubt (in my mind) the greatest sport there’s ever been, I play football religiously and I can tell you that it is an art form, people who can play the game naturally don’t know how gifted they are! if someone told you to go an tackle someone and that someone manages to get directly behind you with the ball without touching you or comitting a foul you’ve gotta see the magic. it’s a team game that’s gets easyer when everybodys on the same wave lenght. WITHOUT A DOUBT THE GREATEST SPORT THERES EVER BEEN.
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Football itself a BATTLE always. Its really a nice and very informative post. Thanks for the article.