No home interest?
In June 2004, 24 million people watched the 91Èȱ¬'s coverage of . Nothing - not even a Final between Italy and Germany which ends 6-6, then goes to 27-26 on penalties - will now induce anything like that volume of viewers to tune into next summer.
It's a long-established fact of life that home interest boosts TV sport viewing figures - a Lewis Hamilton win in Formula One, or a GB triumph in Olympic hockey or rowing lead to the die-hards being joined by millions of floating viewers. The same applies to football, so naturally the heroic , as well as , is not good news for the 91Èȱ¬ or ITV who jointly hold the rights to next summer's Finals.
As football fans, we're the same as anyone else in wanting our teams to qualify, though we'll still enjoy watching and working on the top-quality fare on offer. As programme-makers, we now have a little more thinking to do about next summer's output.
We've always produced regular features on the hosts and a variety of competing teams at any tournament.
At , one of our primary objectives was to reflect the modern Germany which staged the event so well, as well as to profile players and teams from across the competition.
The big games - say Italy v Germany or Holland v France - will sell themselves regardless, but home nation involvement (England only in 2006) undeniably provides a continuous narrative through the programmes, and helps maintain mass viewer appeal through some of the less obviously appetising games.
Once we've analysed the game in progress for seven or eight minutes at half-time, we've often run a preview or review feature or a live two-way interview from the camp or camps to keep the pot boiling.
In my time working at 91Èȱ¬ Sport - being the first football tournament on which I worked - was the only time we had no UK involvement. Even then, we had Jack Charlton's Ireland to follow and the time difference meant the games were mostly late at night, so we were less exposed in terms of transmitting in peak audience slots.
The only tournament with no British or Irish involvement in my lifetime was the .
I've blogged about this before, but the football on show was some of the best played at any international tournament. In those days, though, football in general was in the doldrums and 91Èȱ¬ and ITV in their wisdom decided that the audience would be disinclined to watch Johnny Foreigner enjoying himself without us.
Despite having the rights to show the whole competition live, the two networks ran late-night highlights only, bar the Final and a Spain v West Germany group game. The much-shown clip of John Motson exploding as a glorious Platini-inspired in a truly great semi-final was never seen live.
As a football-obsessed 19-year-old, I remember thinking the scheduling was appallingly parochial, but at least I was a student so could generally stay up beyond midnight to catch up with it. I think the tournament pretty much passed unnoticed by a lot of the country.
I hope that won't happen this time - final scheduling decisions won't be taken until after the draw at the end of next week, but I would hope the 91Èȱ¬ and ITV coverage will be comprehensive.
Certainly, we'll be putting everything into the coverage as usual - in some ways we'll have to try even harder - and it should be an excellent footballing tournament. England didn't contribute a lot to , but it still saw arguably the most consistently high standard of football at any tournament since the . I'm too young to remember 1970, but it looks brilliant whenever footage is dug out of the archive! Feel free to respond and disagree with my previous statement - it's just a personal view, looking back at the last three decades or so.
Speaking of draws, the one for the World Cup qualifying groups takes place in South Africa from 3pm this coming Sunday.
It will be streamed on this website, via the red button on 91Èȱ¬i if you have digital TV, and will also be carried on 5 Live and News 24. It's one forthcoming football event in which we can safely say all the 91Èȱ¬ Nations will be participating!
