New reason put forward for further delay in announcing Newcastle United Live TV matches
An announcement on Newcastle United Live TV matches was due on Friday.
The scheduled announcement was to let us know which of the 10 games in December and January had been selected and had their time and/or day changed.
In total, Newcastle have 10 Premier League games across December and January that could move.
It is now four days since the December/January games should have been revealed.
So far, six of the eight NUFC games played have been moved for Live TV, with another three of the next six also moved up to the end of November.
Bad enough so many games getting moved but at least fans should be entitled to as much warning as possible, to enable them to sort the best/cheapest transport and accommodation options.
So why the delay on this anticipated announcement?
Well, it is claimed that the Premier League and TV companies may have conspired to give themselves an extra big headache this time.
Amazon Prime have the rights to two entire rounds of games. All of those scheduled to be played on Boxing Day and all 10 PL games in the first midweek of December.
As it stands, there are currently six PL games to be played on Tuesday 3 December and four on Wednesday 4 December.
However, due to a combination of Europa League action on the previous Thursday and the TV choices already made for the end of November and moved to Sunday 1 December, four PL games are taking place on that Sunday.
The knock-on effect for the midweek games is that four of the six games currently scheduled for Tuesday 3 December, include teams that have games only two days earlier on the Sunday (including Sheffield United, who Newcastle are due to play on the Tuesday).
No club will want to play games only two days apart so what if those games were moved from Tuesday 3rd to Wednesday 4th December?
Well then this apparently causes a big problem for Amazon Prime.
Not surprisingly they want to get as much bang for their buck as possible and having only two games on Tuesday 3rd December and an overload of eight games on Wednesday 4th is not good at all.
So rumour has it that Amazon Prime would then see the compromise to keep them happy, being for some games to be then moved to Thursday 5th December to give them a better spread of those televised/streamed live games.
However, moving games to that Thursday would then impact on the next weekend and so on…
Who knows the exact details of the hold up but the above scenario is surely at least one of the reasons for the delay, if not THE reason.
There will have to be some compromises by some but we all know the one group of people that absolutely ZERO thought will be given to.
That’s right, us mugs who are still sitting here waiting to find out when games will be played in seven weeks time, with not even an apology or explanation in the meantime as to why there is this delay in announcing the December and January Live TV games.
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