Match of the day as we know it won’t be broadcast on Saturday night, but there are plenty of other places where you can catch Premier League highlights.
The BBC program was first broadcast in 1964 and has long been the preferred source of illumination of first-class matches in the UK.
But with broadcaster Gary Lineker and pundits Ian Wright and Alan Shearer out of the picture due to the BBC’s impartial stance, fans are looking elsewhere for their signature fix. Here are the alternatives to MOTD.
Today’s match will be broadcast on Saturday night, but it won’t feature any studio experts, the usual commentators or player interviews, showing only highlights of the matches.
This is because the BBC’s group of MOTD presenters and commentators have all refused to work on the programme, in a show of solidarity with Gary Lineker.
The longtime host angered the Conservative government and its supporters when he slammed the new asylum policy on Twitter earlier this week, saying the language used in it was similar to “the one Germany used in the 1930s”.
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It was announced on Friday afternoon that he would “step down” from his duties until an agreement could be reached on the use of social media, but it quickly became clear across multiple sources that he didn’t want to, so he had to let go.
The broadcaster claims to have taken such action to ensure it remains politically neutral, but the whole move has brought this supposed neutrality into question with other BBC presenters receiving no repercussions for expressing conservative views in the past and associating senior officials with them too closely. Conservative Party.
In regards to today’s match, the plan was to air the show as normal with someone stepping in to line up, but it quickly became clear that wouldn’t be possible with so many presenters and pundits saying they were refusing to appear as a show of support for their colleague.
As a result, it was announced that the show would only feature highlights of the day’s matches with no studio experts present. Following this announcement, the BBC commentators withdrew and the FIFPro confirmed that the players would not be giving post-match interviews.
A big part of Match of the Day’s appeal is the studio action and personalities, so without that aspect many would want to find an alternative source for Premier League highlights. In this regard, there are a lot of options.
As well as showing a selection of matches live, Sky Sports also broadcasts highlights of every Premier League game on Saturday night, starting at 20:30 with Game of the Day on Sky Sports Premier League. For those in the US, match highlights are shown on NBCSN on Saturday nights, in a show also called Match of the Day.
Sky and NBC both show highlights of each game for free on their YouTube channels too, as do a number of other broadcasters from around the world.
