Clear consequences of the TV record hunt
Angry Klopp “eats up” horrified journalists
December 7, 2023, 11:34 a.m
After the 2-0 win at Sheffield United, Jürgen Klopp is anything but joking. Defender Joel Matip is out injured for a long time and a TV presenter is also annoying with “jokes”. Then he gets angry. His outbreak is also a consequence of the football entertainment machine that is being perfected in England.
Jürgen Klopp once again argued with a TV reporter and put his finger in the money-dripping wound of English football. The coaching icon of Liverpool FC also benefits from this. But one after anonther. Actually everything was fine on Wednesday evening after this 2-0 win at Sheffield United.
The Reds had once again stalked league leaders Arsenal and were able to celebrate again a little later: Manchester City’s 0-1 defeat at Aston Villa manifested the crisis in results of their long-term rival Pep Guardiola, who has now been without a win for four games with his Skyblues and for the time being has lost touch with the top.
But Klopp was in no mood to joke when he stood at the Amazon table after the game and talked to presenter Marcus Buckland. They chatted, Buckland talked about all the competitions Liverpool are still involved in and talked about the upcoming game against Crystal Palace. This will take place on Saturday at 1:30 p.m. CET, i.e. at 12:30 p.m. local time.
“Jürgen, I apologize”
The lunchtime game is at the bottom of Klopp’s popularity scale. He had complained about this many times in the past and so he felt embarrassed because the conversation was going in a bad direction. That was Klopp’s “favorite kick-off time,” joked Buckland, hitting the completely wrong note for the former Mainz player. “It’s really brave of you to make a joke about it,” he complained: “I realize that you don’t understand it that well and you work in football, so why should I explain it again? If you make a joke out of it , you are ignorant.”
Buckland’s attempts to appease Klopp also came to nothing. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful,” said the moderator. “You already were,” Klopp yelped back. “Jürgen, I apologize,” it echoed back, but the answer was not very forgiving: “But everything is fine. You can say what you want. I can’t say what I want – because that would really be something different.”
Why do England even play at 12.30pm?
So far, so Klopp. In some moments, the 56-year-old has no interest in holding back his incomprehension. Then the other person feels it. This has happened again and again in Germany, just remember his interview with ZDF man Jochen Breyer after a BVB defeat at Real Madrid in the spring of 2014. And this is not news in England either: Klopp can be just as thin-skinned as he is successful. This time it was probably due to the injury of former Schalke player Joel Matip, who tore his cruciate ligament in the game against Sheffield United and may be out for the rest of the season.
The Saturday date, which Klopp has vehemently criticized for years, is one of the selling points for the Premier League’s TV rights. It exists to circumvent the Saturday TV blackout for football between 2:45 p.m. and 5:15 p.m. local time. But it also exists to brighten up the league for key Asian TV markets such as China, Hong Kong and Singapore.
The price that the clubs pay
The Premier League has many different slots for different markets. It generates revenue internationally and nationally that other leagues can no longer dream of. Just this week she celebrated a new national record deal. The highest-paying TV contract that has been concluded in Europe to date will bring the league almost eight billion euros over a period of four years from 2025/2026, or around two billion euros per year. In addition, roughly the same amount of around two billion euros comes from foreign marketing every year. This is also why the English league is ahead of the other leagues in Europe.
The clubs’ price for this is the fragmentation of match days for the different TV markets. In return, they give up a piece of their self-determination. Who plays when is decided – within certain limits – by the TV providers and not the clubs. The clubs’ price for this is the selling out of old traditions. Even the TV blackout that is supposed to drive spectators to the stadiums is no longer set in stone, but rather is just another hidden reserve for the next rights poker.
In the end, the players in the game of football, which Klopp rightly classified as “entertainment” in his angry conversation with Buckland, benefit from all these gigantic sums. But sometimes the Liverpool icon tears up and he overdoes it with his entertainment. Then there will be something to report again. The machine has to run.