ITV’s Match Of The Day Headed For Saturday Teatime

Match Of The Day could find its new home in ITV’s Saturday teatime schedule, replacing existing light entertainment programmes like Blind Date and Stars In Their Eyes.

ITV is considering plans to show its version of the BBC sports programme which aired at 10.30pm, in a new early evening slot in an attempt to breath new life in to its Saturday schedule.

The broadcaster, which poached the rights to show the Premier League match highlights last July with a £183 million bid (see How The Premier League Will Cash-In On Kick-Offs), is contractually obliged to show the programme between 7pm and 10.30pm on a Saturday and is considering a number of start time options.

An ITV spokesman today confirmed that the company had no plans to negotiate a 6pm slot but revealed: “Premiership highlights will be shown earlier than the late night slot occupied by BBC’s Match Of The Day, and football fans can be sure that the service will be an improvement on that provided by the BBC.”

ITV’s current Saturday evening audience is used to programmes like Blind Date and Stars In Their Eyes. Football highlights would mark a change in content which would inevitably mean a change in audience make-up from Light Entertainment fans to sports enthusiasts. If the average audience of MotD is inherited by the new programme, the resulting 4m viewers would fall short of the usual audiences of light entertainment programmes which currently command between 5 and 7m viewers in Saturday’s early evening slot. ITV’s head of sport Brian Barwick is confident that his channel’s offering would add to the audience the BBC got for the highlights, but this will entail attracting an audience as yet unused to viewing sport, or perhaps anything, at that time. A new target audience could mean new advertiser and revenue opportunities, but also requires the sacrifice of a displaced light entertainment audience for what is usually a mainstream family channel.

ITV have confirmed that the new programme will not be called Match Of The Day and plans to announce its new Saturday evening schedule closer to the start of the new football season.

ITV: 020 7843 8000 www.itv.co.uk

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