Why Some UK Pubs Stopped Showing Football Live

**TL;DR: **Pub subscriptions to Sky Sports and TNT Sports for commercial premises cost thousands of pounds a year, scaling with rateable value. Combine that with the 3pm Saturday blackout, declining wet-led pub trade and stricter licensing, and a lot of UK landlords have quietly decided live football isn't worth it any more.

The image of the British pub on a Saturday afternoon - red shirts, draught beer, a Sky Sports News ticker scrolling across the screen - is starting to feel a bit outdated in many parts of the country. The reasons aren't sentimental. They're financial.

How much does it cost a pub to show football?

Sky's commercial subscription packages and TNT Sports for business are priced based on the rateable value of the venue. A small village pub might pay several hundred pounds a month combined. A bigger city-centre venue with a higher rateable value can pay well into four figures a month. Annually, you're often looking at a five-figure sum just for the right to legally show live matches.

And those subscriptions are non-negotiable. Using a domestic Sky or Now TV subscription in a commercial setting is illegal and pubs that get caught can be fined heavily. The Federation Against Copyright Theft and the broadcasters themselves run regular sting operations.

The 3pm Saturday blackout

This is the bit a lot of casual fans don't realise. UEFA rules dating back to 1965 prohibit live broadcasts of football in the UK between 2.45pm and 5.15pm on Saturdays. The intent was to protect lower-league matchday attendance. The effect today is that the most traditional football-watching window in the British week - Saturday afternoon - has no live Premier League pictures legally available, anywhere, to a UK audience.

• Premier League games at 3pm on Saturday: not broadcast live in the UK at all.
• Lower-league games at 3pm on Saturday: same blackout applies.
• Foreign coverage occasionally leaks via dodgy streams, but that's illegal too.
• The result: pubs can't show flagship 3pm matches even if they wanted to.

Plenty of fans see this as outdated, especially as live attendance figures have hit modern highs without the blackout being needed. We touched on related cultural questions in the social side of football predictions.