The last Friday of a horrible August. It’s rained nearly every day this summer, and I was feeling under the weather. I had Mpox (or Covid) of the ankle having tweaked it on some slimy steps (forty-something man problems), and something I ate had gone through me the day before. I felt weak and demoralised, so this all meant a night in with my feet up. It was also Transfer Deadline Day.

I confess I was somewhat curious, as I hadn’t watched one in years. How much had it changed? What could possibly go wrong, other than making me feel worse for wasting my time and enriching my sense of self-pity?

Sky Sports News has always had the same problem as other 24-hour news channels, it exists mainly for niche and decorative purposes. Deadline Day is supposed to be the two days of the year where it corrals enough eyeballs to break free of its background telly status. Normally it’s only useful in settings where it can be muted, as with any news channel with a ticker you can read – say, in your local Chinese takeaway to distract customers or the delivery driver as he waits to collect the next batch of orders or for cleaning staff to glance at in the lobby of the ghastly hotel or airport they’re working in. The value of this service is ever diminishing too, as people now carry their own screens to pass the time with content, or news, of their choosing.

Being hampered by an inefficient medium that’s well on the way to becoming obsolete isn’t the biggest issue for Sky’s coverage of Deadline Day. The channel has eschewed the hokey behaviour and characters that occasionally made it moderately amusing or surprising. No more Jim White and Jim White’s adrenal gland pulsating quicker than the batphone, the schtick’s migrated to Talksport’s audience of cabbies and white van men. The bung manager generation is gone, Harry Redknapp’s long retired, Barry Fry’s gavel too. Agents are too professional to allow a Peter Odemwingie event these days. You used to marvel at some of the presenters they employed, such lame affectations of Alan Partridge that even Chris Morris wouldn’t dare use them on The Day Today and clearly too defective to be trusted with serious politics and current affairs programming.

Sky Sports News has made a mis-calculation here by succumbing to a degree of political correctness by excessively sanitising the product, euphemistically often referred to as going woke. Encouraging anything remotely associated as luddite, odd, nonsensical, working class or edgy has been done away with. In this era of content saturation being a dull television programme is worst thing possible. Why would you watch this just to check if the clown show that is now Chelsea football club will continue their completely absurd transfer policy right to the death (the answer was yes, they would), when your chances of seeing a bloke in a Lycra gimp suit are as diminished as seeing the rolling of a ciggie behind the ear of a reporter in Stoke, or that bloke getting a purple dildo shoved in his ear? I mean, what were you doing at quarter past six on the Friday evening of the 30th August 2024, were you watching? Or is it best to catch up in the off-chance something weird happens. Did a man walking up to the camera outside Stamford Bridge with a rubber ballsack make you want to watch the next Transfer Deadline Day?

Mostly this is filled with unremarkable ex-professionals speaking in cliches, updates of a player having his prostate checked at a training ground by a doctor, or speculating that the cargo in the people carrier having just arrived, could mean “something’s happening”. This was dishearteningly interspersed with too many adverts and of course startled, by the harsh lighting and their life choices in general, reporters on location, sequestered from the public, standing outside club stadiums or in training grounds all day until it gets dark. The isolation of the on-location reporters, except at Stamford Bridge, which they rectified by the time I tuned in, makes sense in this era of safe spaces. One female reporter did feel perturbed by the rowdy behaviour of some lads one year, but no harm was done and she gave them a bollocking on air, which, you guessed it, was pretty funny. In a way this separation works as a perfect analogy for how the media and political class have viewed the general public for the last twenty years, with contempt, derision and suspicion, to always be kept at a distance, and gaslit into submission by overwhelming propaganda. By nine o’clock I returned Sky Sports News to its natural (and palliative) state – muted and on in the background as I typed this piece out.

And as I sat at my desk, the juxtaposition of following transfer deals on the internet being a more personalised, instantaneous, humorous and thorough experience was rammed home. I may not post on it anymore, but the platform ran by that smug billionaire, that should get a vasectomy and who never got over being bullied at school, is particularly effective for disseminating information on Transfer Deadline Day. A certain Italian gentleman with over twenty million followers runs a particularly effective football transfer news aggregation service. Yes, he’s the one of the worst things imaginable, a brownnosing grifter. Still, between him and his medium of choice, you get all the news on one feed, and you don’t need to be near a TV. You can be doing anything else – walking the dog, organising your stamp collection, or be out clubbing, go for piss, and get caught up in less than a minute. Sky Sports News cannot compete with wanky interactivity and choice of this scope.
 
Watching Sky Sports News Transfer Day, for the final time, ended my self-pity party and a sense of schadenfreude at its impending demise heartened me greatly. Evolution takes no prisoners and was always coming for it, but the Sky Sports bosses have embraced a Last Days of Rome method of coping – a Potemkin fixation on a superficial grandeur mixed with the misplaced impenetrability of a washed-up bloated Elvis – that makes it impossible to sympathise with its plight. The studio looks expensive, the production is slick, the wardrobe and makeup budget significant, you have male presenters who, unlike their predecessors, look normal enough that they wouldn’t cut your daughter up into a million pieces and all the female presenters are chic and pretty, yet you’d find more enthusiasm and humour at a veterinarian’s clinic that Rolf Harris used to loiter in. In the next room you know animals are being euthanised, and everybody appearing on Sky Sports News can’t hide their indifference to Transfer Deadline Day deserving the same fate.