The most surprising element of the 1985 football on television blackout is that it hadn't happened earlier. Thirty years earlier, when the BBC's Sportsview became the first television programme to regularly feature telerecordings of Football League action, the Player's Union threatened to ban their members from playing in featured matches; a year later a League committee report expressed concern that as much as ten minutes of action had been broadcast in one week leading to what it described as "football indigestion".
The decades since had only seen mistrust grow between League members keen to protect their crowd income and television looking to serve a growing audience, every renewal of rights with BBC and ITV subject to wars of attrition over what both sides deemed to be an acceptable cost price. The 1978 'Snatch Of The Day', LWT's thwarted attempt to take all League footage for themselves, was sold to the clubs as a halving of the amount of football that would be shown onscreen, giving fans less of an option to stay at home instead and thus contribute to falling attendance figures.
Matters had nearly come to a head two summers before, 1982-83 ending without an agreement being signed for the following season. The top clubs privately talked of a breakaway Super League, working on the belief a new deal would have to give them the lion's share of League money in accordance with their greater exposure on screen as well as taking a more open line towards shirt sponsorship. Simultaneously this was an era where many clubs began to struggle under the weight of falling advertising revenue and gate receipts, which despite this being the era of hooliganism and dilapidated ground some key figures blamed on the attraction of stopping at home instead. Notts County chairman Jack Dunnett declared "in my opinion TV has ruined football. I and my club would not be worried at all if soccer went off the screens next season." That Dunnett was also Football League president was concerning to broadcasters, and while he added the clubs under his care were keen to broker some sort of agreement it was known his ideal was less coverage in less viewer-friendly slots for more money.
A thwarted attempt to sell the rights to Telejector, a company supplying projection screens to pubs and clubs, weakened the League's position, as did a threat by new League sponsors Canon to withdraw their £3m agreement after one year if an absence of coverage led to a shortfall in the greater brand exposure the company had signed up for. In the end, despite the bigger clubs openly seeking greater representation, it was the lesser League members who forced a two year deal to be signed six weeks before the new season began, fearing loss of key financial resources. (Just as they would nearly a decade later when Sky and ITV faced off for Premier League rights, but that's a whole other story)
If the clubs were in little mood to accommodate televised football, television and its viewers seemed to share the weariness. The start time of Saturday night highlights shows were drifting out towards midnight, the 1982 World Cup final registered a nearly fifty per cent decrease in UK viewing figures compared to 1978 and as many as eight million viewers had deserted the two highlights shows over the previous four years. Just before ratification of the 1983 deal, which give both BBC and ITV their first ever live games (bar a one-off experiment by ATV in 1960), ITV Head of Sport John Bromley told the press "football has got to recognise that it is no longer one of the great sports on television... it has lost its way, it is all over the place and is gradually strangling itself to death." A year later, after losing weeks of outside broadcasts to industrial action, ITV refused to take up a League offer of more live games to make up for the clubs' loss of income.
So while it may not have been surprising that the two broadcasters' joint offer for a four year deal early in 1985 was turned down, what did cause an impasse was that it was voted against by club chairmen having already been agreed in principle by the League management committee. While the chairmen were at least broadly keen to see football's place on the box retained, their priority demands were for no increase in the total of live games but for a much higher price all round. Although viewing figures for live games had risen while Match Of The Day and The Big Match fell off, committee chairman Sir Arthur South claimed his representatives saw highlights as the greater priority.
To emphasise their issue, a directive was given by the chairmen that the League's negotiating team now had a mandate to pull out of all talks if demands for a new contract were not accepted, threatened to pull their clubs from the FA Cup under a little known regulation, and just to further make sure the negotiation team was joined by Tottenham-owning television sceptic Irving Scholar and two men who were keener to be seen on television than agree with its representatives, Ken Bates and Robert Maxwell. It was noted that Maxwell, who termed the offer "mad, bad and sad", had been a prime mover in attempting to get the two competing channels to bid against each other to push the price up, only to find they were only willing to enter joint bids.
At this point Bromley not unreasonably lost his rag, thundering to a journalist "we have got no more cash, not a single penny, and we are not interested in renewing the current arrangement... They have hooligans kicking each other on the terraces, lousy facilities and boring players and they say it's television's fault nobody goes to the game any more... I'm not talking idle threats, but the realities of life. Soccer has no god-given right to its slots on TV and if they don't want to talk sensibly there are plenty of other things to take their place." After a later refusal by the committee to attend summit talks he gave the League a deadline of the first week of June to come up with an acceptable package. The offer was immediately rejected upon disclosure. One day later the Heysel disaster happened, the aftermath shown live on BBC1.
English football had hit its nadir all round, further entrenched when it was confirmed the day before 1985-86 began that no more domestic action would be shown until further notice, giving the sport no opportunity to restate its case and position to a wider audience. Manchester United won the first ten games of that season, still a top flight record, without a scrap of visual evidence. West Ham's new striker Frank McAvennie scored eighteen league goals by Christmas, yet when Martin Tyler took him from LWT's South Bank studios across Waterloo Bridge and back for a feature as part of ITV's new show Saint & Greavsie only two people could put a name to the face, and one of those was a passing Billy Connolly. Team-mates of the time have suggested it was that lack of exposure that helped McAvennie make such an impact because opponents didn’t know how he played.
In the meantime nearly half of the First Division games played in the first four weeks of the season had been watched by fewer than 15,000 people, while the traditional power base clubs informally known as the Big Five set up clandestine meetings towards a breakaway league that were only quelled when Dunnett offered First Division clubs more voting power and specific financial boosts. Meanwhile Maxwell walked out on the television committee after an argument at the Football League AGM ending, when he launched an unprovoked attack on his own committee chairman South and touted Everton's Philip Carter as his replacement, only for Carter to declare full support for South. Bromley subsequently revealed Maxwell had never met with him.
The continued depression at the top end of the pyramid may well have focused League and TV minds, as come late October the parties met again to thrash out an agreement regarding the cut top clubs would receive and total numbers of live games. Tellingly, despite BBC budget cuts and ITV readjusting after the loss of advertising income since the launch of Channel 4, the top clubs openly believed television had merely deliberately kept football off screen for this long to avoid saturation coverage before the following year's World Cup. Bates keenly told the press television had more to lose than the League in the event of a full season's impasse, even though sports departments had plenty of other popular events to broadcast in football's place. The Observer's Hugh McIlvanney wrote of those chairmen who were reportedly convinced television had secretly budgeted as much as £60 million for the rights that "they made the dumb mistake of trying to read the opposition's hand in a mirror that turned out to be clouded by the steam rising from fevered imaginations." The negotiations broke down again, both sides blaming the other.
What the Super League clubs hadn't realised was they were budgeting their future on income from TV and sponsors, yet television increasingly distrusted them after all the infighting and sponsors didn't want to be associated with the game in its current state. The FA were eventually forced to officially declare it had no interest in overseeing a breakaway, just after Canon again warned they would not pay the full amount in their original sponsorship contract until a certain number of hours of televised League football of all stripes were agreed upon. Those statements seem to have helped focus minds, as on November 29th a deal was hacked out for the rest of the season for £1.3 million, half a million down on nine months earlier. Ratified five days before Christmas, football finally returned to television on 5th January 1986 with a live FA Cup third round match between Charlton and West Ham. That was still too late in the day for Canon, who withdrew from a potential renewal of their deal at the end of the season citing the lack of advertising opportunity. Years later Carter would admit to the Independent "the money we got was peanuts but it was a question of getting back into the swing. It was a stupid situation, if I can say so now. I think it actually brought home to people that there was something wrong with not having our national sport on television."
In truth neither side had come out of the affair well. The League had forced themselves into a corner and ended up managing to reduce the cost price of their own product, while the TV companies had to all intents and purposes used the lack of people interested in the greater part of their own output as a bargaining tool, the breakdown in communications seemingly allowing the greedier clubs at the top end to take advantage of their decreasing income to enact a survival of the fittest plan that would eventually lead to the disintegration of the League structure itself. The one thing all sides now agreed on was live coverage, which had completely reshaped the landscape of televised football and would in time open up another avenue that would similarly prove terminally damaging to the Football League, BBC and ITV alike.
