In Praise of Free Football on TV

May 25, 2025

Rewind your video cassette to a soggy winter weekend in the mid-1990s — any one will do. You’ve found yourself locked out of the Premier League by a dad who won’t pay for Sky and won’t let you stay up for Match of the Day. But don’t cry, kid, there’s a beautiful alternative waiting for you over on Channel 4. It’s a place where espresso-fuelled footballers draped in Diadora and Lotto jink and swagger on the sun-baked fields of a far-away land. You’re about to discover Football Italia, and it’s everything you need.

For a generation suddenly starved of free football on TV, Channel 4’s Gazzetta Football Italia was the answer. The vibes have echoed through the decades with such resonance that thousands of people still maintain a long-distance relationship with the Italian football club they adopted in the ‘90s. If you had the misfortune of being born in a world post-Gazzetta, there’s a YouTube channel dedicated to it. Fill your Diadora Brasils.

Much has been written about the show in recent years, so I won’t retread familiar ground. James Richardson is a national treasure, that’s the last I’ll say. The reason people are still talking about it is because it was free to watch in an era when there wasn’t much to watch. Therefore, it became a cultural touchstone for an entire generation. But in 2008, we let free Italian football slip through our fingers like a bribed goalkeeper and it was gobbled up by BT Sports.

They paved paradise and put up a pay-per-month.

Subscribe to survive

Our television landscape has changed a lot since those halcyon days. In an era of expensive TV packages and fractured streaming channels, football fans have been smacked about so fervently that many have drifted away from England’s top-flight altogether. Non-league clubs have been the beneficiary, with spectator numbers swelling across the country. People want to watch football and be engrossed by the drama, but they don’t want to get fleeced. Little by little, fans are drawing a line in the sandy six-yard box, and it’s about fucking time.

Even so, flying in the face of sense and decency, the value of Premier League TV rights has soared to astronomical new heights in the domestic market. The prices paid for the rights to broadcast foreign football, however, have tumbled — quite significantly in some cases. That particular bubble has burst.

Ahead of the 24/25 season, Serie A and Ligue 1 were so insulted by the amount they were offered in the UK, they set up their own direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels. Whispers from within those channels suggest that subscription numbers in the UK make for very grim reading. That’s not surprising. The vast majority of UK Football fans tuned in for continental content because it came bundled with their Premier League package. How many were up in arms when the content disappeared? How many cancelled their contract? Not enough to sustain an expensive TV streaming platform, that’s for sure.

If subscriber fees aren’t covering overheads, DTC is a dead-end. Ligue 1 and Serie A gambled on persuading people to part with £80 to £100 respectively for a season pass. Those prices aren’t outlandish, but the target audience is limited to a puddle of English enthusiasts and a clutch of continental expats, all of whom are already forking out for other digital subscriptions. It’s a hard sell in a saturated market. And now that the season is over, they have to start worrying about retention for next season. Fear the churn!

Where do these leagues go from here? Expensive advertising campaign? Low-ball, early-bird price offering? Bundle the leagues together as a combined package? All well and good, but the headwinds aren’t going anywhere — pardon the business-speak.

Sooner or later, it seems likely that, beret in hand, they’ll trudge back to Sky Sports & Co. and spread themselves over the barrel. But before they do, let me say this loudly…

Buy me a coffee

There is another way!

Over the last year or two, I’ve been steadily increasing my intake of Norwegian football thanks to the free content on the One Football app. My daughter and I have adopted Rosenborg BK as our household’s second team (after Bromley) and tune in for almost every game. It’s a bit of fun really, but why not? I’ve even got half an eye on a trip to Trondheim to catch a game in person.

Some of One Football’s content, like Serie A games for example, requires a subscription, but there’s an embarrassment of live football available for free. I’ve taken a shine to Norway’s Eliteserien, but you can also tune in for top-flight games from Austria, Switzerland, Slovakia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, and many more besides.

Meanwhile, if you’re an early riser, J-League games are broadcast for free on the league’s YouTube channel, and I can also recommend downloading the Destination Calcio app to soak up the drama of their free Serie B games. Sampdoria's death-spiral towards relegation this season had all the tragicomic hallmarks of Italian opera. "La commedia è finita!"

If the sound of One Football’s offering is giving you shivers of that time during Covid when we started watching Russian football just because it had crowds in the stadium, shake it off. Not only are the games free and entertaining, they often have no commentator on the broadcast, meaning the stadium ambience is turned up to eleven. Can we normalise that? I like commentators, particularly Adam Summerton (another national treasure), but I want the option to just have the stadium atmos cranked up. It’s bliss, honestly.

So, wait, my genius solution is to give the expensive football content of Serie A and Ligue 1 away for free? We’re talking PSG, Juventus, Inter Milan, all for zero pounds and zero pence?

Yes.

The leagues available for free on the One Football app have sold their rights on the cheap because some money is better than no money. In return, their league has the opportunity to gain exposure and followers in a foreign market. It worked for me, and I bet I’m not alone. Are British scouts tuning in to look for hidden gems on One Football? If they’re not, they should be. There are more Sverre Nypans out there.

Serie A and Ligue 1, however, have a greater depth of footballing quality and much more clout, so lumping their games on a free app and leaving it at that wouldn’t do them justice. They deserve better than that. They deserve the Gazzetta treatment.

Golaccio!

If you spent the majority of the ‘90s hiding in the remnants of a rave, you might have missed the fact that Channel 4 didn’t just broadcast a game or two on Sunday afternoons, they laid on a Saturday morning highlights show called Gazzetta Football Italia. With its mix of highlights, interviews, and news headlines delivered from picturesque piazzas, Gazzetta gave fans a flavour of the culture and put Italian football in context. Suddenly, you found yourself caring about plotlines that were playing out a thousand miles away.

But that was the ‘90s, what about now? How do you persuade the digital generation to care?

If Ligue 1 or Serie A held their nose and hopped into bed with the likes of BBC, ITV, or Channel 4, it would be a bold move considering live TV numbers are dying a tragic death. But these broadcasters are all looking for exciting new ways to grow their on-demand offering and are open to ideas.

With some seductive branding and a generous dollop of Instagramification, harnessing the undercurrent of fashion and culture in their countries, these leagues could reinvent their offering and create a new following in the digital age. I’m selling the dream here, but would people in the UK really tune in, or is this just a nostalgia-tinged pipe dream?

Nostalgia is exactly the point. The people of our soggy island place great value in the romance of brand-France and brand-Italia. We’re not just talking sun-soaked holidays and fashion labels here, our cooking and property shows are full of continental content, and our roads are replete with Renaults, Peugeots, Fiats, and Ferraris. Okay, maybe not the last one, but the point is the French and Italian football leagues are missing a trick by not tapping into the British obsession with their cities and culture.

These leagues are wrestling with failing TV deals in their domestic markets, so giving content away for free in a foreign market could be viewed as madness. But to misquote the Englishman who put Verona on the map, there’s method in the madness. High-quality English language content can be packaged to simultaneously supply America, Canada, and Australia, all of whom have large, football-hungry diaspora communities and a football culture that’s expanding rapidly. Why just charm the UK when you can enchant millions more with the same content package? The prospect of reaching millions of households makes international brands with big ad budgets very thirsty. Who needs subscribers anyway?

We’re not talking about an open goal here, there’s still a defender or two to beat, and striking the sweet spot would be vital, but setting football free from subscription isn’t the utopian dream it’s made out to be. While the Sky Sports model isn’t going anywhere, premium streaming platforms can’t keep increasing forever; there just isn’t room in our wallets. But I staunchly believe there is another way.

Gazzetta Football Italia showed that, when done well, pairing continental football with a free-to-air broadcaster can create a passionate and long-lasting following. The gamble Italian football took in the ‘90s is still paying dividends today, and in a digital age, when subscription budgets are maxed out and patience strained, it feels like it’s time to gamble again.

People take note when something new comes along and breaks the mould. These disruptors, as we’re supposed to call them, often look at what has worked in the past and reshape it to embrace the now, but what would Gazzetta Football Italia’s modern equivalent look like? Or how would its French equivalent parler to the millennial mass market?

Serie A. Ligue 1. Hit me up. Let’s chat.

Now, while you’re all watching cricket, I’ll be watching Rosenborg grace the chilly summer fields of Norway. Skål!

Addendum for From Bromley with Love

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with Bromley FC. Fair question. I believe there’s a strong correlation between the growth of Bromley’s fanbase in the last decade and a growing dissatisfaction with the product being served up at the top level of British football. The distance between Premier League clubs and their fans widens with each passing year, and even die-hards will admit that they struggle to connect with the corporate PLC or fashion brand their football club has turned into.

Fans want drama and atmosphere, but they also want connection. It’s only human to want to feel like you’re part of something, and when it comes to football, we want to believe that our attendance and attention makes a difference. You get that feeling at lower league clubs, which is why so many have taken a shine to Bromley. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the club has been flying on the pitch of late — taking a significant chunk of the borough’s population to Wembley Stadium three times in a decade is a great growth strategy. I don’t know why more clubs don’t do it.

But with success comes haunting echoes of the corporate dissonance that fans thought they’d left behind. Bromley FC has grown, ticket prices have risen, and velvet ropes cordon off more and more of the stadium. Even so, the players and staff are never far from the fans, and many of them stick around after the full-time whistle to sign autographs and chat. You don’t get that at The Emirates. And don’t sleep on the women’s matches on Sundays, where kid-friendly activities and friendly vibes are bountiful. The point is, despite the inevitable growing pains and grumbles that have accompanied Bromley’s rapid rise, a connection remains.

Guard it well.

While I’m here, do you have any tips for free football content that I might be missing out on? I’m not talking pirate material or VPN trickery here, I’m talking genuine stuff that is worth seeking out. Drop your tips in the comments section below.

From Bromley with love

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