Sky cools on Friday Night Football
March 1, 2017
By Nik Roseveare
Sky Sports has seemingly given up on airing Premier League football on Friday nights after just half a season.
The pay-TV broadcaster has selected no Friday games among its live matches for April, after covering no such fixtures since December last year.
Unless Sky picks a Friday match in the first two weeks of May – when the Premier League season comes to an end – it will end the season having aired just four Friday night fixtures, despite having 10 available slots in a package it paid millions of pounds to acquire.
Sky’s Friday Night Football programme was launched with much fanfare and fronted by Sky Sports’ icon Jeff Stelling and TV presenter Rachel Riley, making her first foray into football presenting. Sky Sports aired three Friday night games in the opening weeks of the season – including a headline clash between Liverpool and Arsenal. Then, after a three month break, Hull City hosted Everton on December 30th 2016 – which would now seem to be the last Friday night fixture of the season.
Sky insiders claim that rather than Friday Night Football being a “failed experiment”, it has struggled to fit into the Premier League schedule due to other competitions.