The Premier League shattered numerous records for live attendance this year, including both the sheer number of people going to matches and the percentage of each stadium filled nationwide.
But alongside the surge in supporters making the fortnightly pilgrimage to their local stadium has come an explosion in the Premier League’s TV audience, which has grown enormously – abroad as well as at home.
This has been driven at least in part by the great technological strides that have made watching football at home as good as – and sometimes even better than – watching in person.
As the new season gets underway, those features can be seen in Sky Glass, which tech review site T3 called “the smartest of all smart TVs”. A clear contender to be the best TV for football, it comes integrated with Sky Sports, which broadcasts more Premier League matches each year than any other UK broadcaster or streaming service.
The Premier League revealed in June that the average attendance for the 2022/23 season across 380 matches hit 40,267, up from 39,950 the season before. Grounds were also fuller than at any previous point in the league’s history, with the average stadium at 98.7% of its capacity, up from 97.7% during the previous campaign.
Driving that record attendance was no doubt people’s desire to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of a live match; the chanting of the crowd and the emotion of the players. But where televisions used to offer a more remote experience, these days the noise of a rocking stadium can now be convincingly reproduced at home.
Sky Glass’s six built-in speakers, for example, work together to give room-filling 360-degree Dolby Atmos® surround sound. The technology creates a 3D sound field in your home, putting you right in the middle of the action – and all without you needing to install speakers all around your room.
As television displays have improved and coverage has become more sophisticated, it is now arguably easier to get right up next to the action in detail in your own home than it is when you are watching in person in a stadium.
Sky Glass’s 4K Quantum Dot display uses what Sky calls “Intelligent Zonal” technology, as well as High Dynamic Range (HDR) colour and brightness, meaning you end up with an incredibly crisp image.
Couple these advances in display resolution with the fact that you can pause and rewind the action and it is no wonder most pundits watch football on screen, even when they are sitting in the stadium. Seeing players’ reactions and goal celebrations up close, scrutinising managerial tactical changes and reviewing key moments, like offside calls and red cards, are all easier with Sky Glass than they are at the ground.
In his article for The Guardian tracing football’s “tribal roots”, the broadcaster and author Ian Buruma described the so-called “beautiful game” as a social experience, which “inspires strong emotions – primitive and tribal – evoking the days when warriors donned facial paint and jumped up and down in war dances, hollering like apes”.
Tennis, Buruma noted, “does not create frenzy on a national scale”, nor does boxing. Only football seems to generate this primal, communal impulse.
In England, as in other countries, tribal affiliation is often familial, passed down from parent to child, and usually geographical too meaning friends grow up supporting the same teams. But as families and friends disperse across the country, moving for jobs, relationships or other opportunities, Sky Glass helps keep you connected with its exclusive interactive camera, Sky Live, that allows you to watch matches together with a fellow supporter, even when you’re not together.
The set-mounted camera places your friend’s face alongside the on-pitch action so you can celebrate (or commiserate) together as goals go in. Sporting misery may love company, but athletic ecstasy definitely does too.
(Image credit: Sky TV)
Admirers of football often praise the sport for its fluidity, with players recognised as much for their grace on the ball as their strength and stamina.
Sky Glass has been designed with a similar ethos, with an explicit ambition of offering an elegant, seamless experience, taking care of picture, sound and content without the need for additional soundbars, set-top boxes or dishes – or the messy tangle of cables that comes with them. All the necessary tech is built-in.
Simplicity is also evident in the voice controls that come baked into Sky Glass. You can choose a different game entirely, just by asking. And if you decide you want to watch something else before returning to watch an evening kick-off, you can tell the device to take you to whatever show or film you wish to watch, even navigating through non-Sky services like Netflix and Amazon.
Glass gives viewers the convenience of two ways to pay: either upfront, or through monthly instalments with 0% interest. There is no need for a separate box, dish or television aerial: you just need power and a wi-fi connection and away you go.
For football fans, this season is already bringing new stories, worries, goals and glories. Some people will be watching their dreams unfold in the stands, but for an experience that brings you possibly even closer to the action, many will be seeing it all unfold from the comfort of their couch on their Sky Glass.
