Making a Game of Going Around the Grounds for the Saturday Blackout

The English football pyramid is uniquely deep. Looking at the football scene in other European countries, you rarely see the level of interest or coverage of teams in divisions below the second tier – let alone the third, fourth, or fifth. Central to this is the 3 o’clock blackout on Saturdays.

Games can’t be broadcast in this window, so when fans want to stay on top of most of the scores, they’ll turn to premium TV or free-to-view score centres. A staple of these shows is going around the grounds, touching base with reporters positioned at almost all stadiums hosting a 3 o’clock game.

For stadium aficionados, this can set the stage for an additional game to play on top of following the action.

Calling Which Stadiums Will Be Visited First

While it’s certainly picked up in popularity after adopting the internet, the game of bingo is still novel enough to make a 3 o’clock viewing party more unexpected. Just looking at the bingo online games, it remains a diverse and accessible game that can be tailored to all kinds of themes.

From the jackpot room to the Deal or No Deal Bingo 90 room, players pile into these different themes, types of bingo games, and prize pools. To draw from these for this idea, it’s best to look to the 75-ball game. Here, you get the square ticket layout of five rows, five columns, and the free space in the middle.

With this setup, everyone just needs a pen to fill in the boxes with stadium names and a bigger pen to daub off the results as they come in. Putting up a prize for the winner would, obviously, up the ante, too. You’ll need to run through a list of home stadiums, put in the ones where you think goals will be scored first, and wait for the show to go to the reporter stationed at the ground.

Perhaps Only Three More Seasons for this Game

The 3 o’clock blackout is a long-standing rule in British football broadcasting. It was originally instituted to ensure that local fans would continue to go to stadiums to watch games. Without any of the larger games being broadcast at this time, fans wouldn’t need to choose between their local team and the big derby, for example.

It’d be fair to say that the blackout has continued to work well, as shown by the health of the many leagues below the top flight and the relatively strong attendances per tier. The UK, however, is the last in Europe to uphold this kind of blackout. Now, the Premier League and EFL are considering ending the blackout.

Broadcasting deals don’t expire until the end of the 2028/29 season, but the leagues will look to auction their rights and present their offering to potential broadcasters as early as 2027. British football TV rights are worth billions already. Remove the blackout, and it’s easy to see how revenues could rise, especially with how facility fees are paid each season.

For now, at least, football’s blackout bingo game is an original way to follow the scores and hope that your selected stadiums end up on screen before any of your competitors.