Football Focus died long ago and was no longer fit for purpose

It’s like being at a 98-year-old’s funeral. There aren’t many witnesses left to see the body carried out.

All the friends have gone. In the case of Football Focus, it died on Wednesday at a ‘mere’ 52, though that is an equivalently grand old age in the televisual spectrum, a medium that began with the BBC at Alexandra Palace in 1936. Before that it was all ‘sound’, as it was known in Broadcasting House – radio in other words.

When did anyone last watch Football Focus? Hundreds of thousands still did, but its viewership had turned off in droves. There were 849,000 or so devotees in 2019. There were 827,000 in 2019, Dan Walker’s last year as presenter. There were 564,000 in 2023.

By 2026, the market has collapsed and BBC Sport has decided time has moved on and that the old show that provided the lowdown on pre-match action on a Saturday lunchtime is no longer fit for purpose.

In fairness, the old 3pm kick-offs that were standard then no longer are. Matches morning, noon and night on Sky, TNT and Amazon have seen to that, new broadcasters paying the avaricious Premier League huge bounty to indulge them and send our sporting wares around the world. No bar in Dubai, say, does not show Brentford versus Liverpool. It’s a potent mix of commerciality and evangelism that works for both sides, transporting a sporting religion everywhere.

And that is before you get to the manner modern audiences consume the genre. As well as on big screens in Irish bars the world over, it is devoured on phones, tablets and laptops – various ‘platforms’. It is in short-clips and on streaming channels – all anathema to an older audience for whom Football Focus and Match of the Day were welcome punctuations to a Saturday in a simpler, easier-to-understand age, but this ‘advance’ is a fact of life as undeniable, alas, as the advance of AI.

BBC Sport has axed Football Focus having determined the old show that provided the lowdown on pre-match action on a Saturday lunchtime is no longer fit for purpose

I agree with BBC director of sport Alex Kay-Jelski, who admitted the audience has moved on

Football Focus, which has been hosted by Alex Scott since 2021, has looked like a programme desperately trying not to show it was out of its time but had ultimately run out of road

Some of us would rather switch on via a remote-control to a channel we know to watch our sport from the sitting room, but the world has moved on, a point made by BBC director of sport Alex Kay-Jelski, who said the axing of Football Focus was made prior to last week’s revelation that more than one in 10 jobs were to be lost at the Corporation in an attempt to save £500million – taxpayers’ money, incidentally.

He said: ‘Football Focus has been a hugely important programme in the history of BBC Sport and has played a key role in telling the stories of the game for generations of viewers.

‘This (decision reflects) the continued shift in how audiences engage with football and our commitment to evolving how we deliver content to reach fans wherever they are.’

I agree. The world has changed and this is a demonstrably washed-up old programme, going at the end of the season. It is a far cry from what it was for those of us who were reared on Bob Wilson, goalkeeper-turned-broadcaster and the ultimate trustee of the show in the imagination of many of us, who set the scene before Grandstand’s famous theme music struck up.

It sat alongside the more irreverent Saint and Greavsie aired on the ‘other channel’ from 1985 to 1995, ITV – one of three or four channels on offer to us in those more innocent days. Did Football Focus and Saint and Greavsie overlap? I think so. Yes, 100 per cent, as I think across more than half a lifetime. Did we hop from one channel to the other? Probably so.

But Football Focus has hung on desperately for its survival these last few years. With Wilson long out, and Ray Stubbs gone, we had the ubiquitous Alex Scott presenting the programme holding a mug, as if down to the kids. It was an emblem of a show that had run out of road, trying demotically to appeal to an audience that wasn’t there. We reached for the off-switch.

Not that they couldn’t still produce a decent feature or interviews, or good journalism, but this was a programme desperately trying not to show it was out of its time, not least in an era of a multiplicity of channels.

While I deplore many of the BBC’s modern affectations – the abolition of the classified results for just one, or while we are at it, Garry Richardson’s Sportsweek on Radio 5 Live, covering the group stages of the World Cup from here, not America – Football Focus has left us, lamented, but frankly, there are few mourners left to see it go.

Its time was up. And we can raise a mug to its memory.