Football Focus is in peril due to plunging viewing figures ahead of its 50th anniversary with the show struggling to recover since Dan Walker was replaced by Alex Scott, according to an expert who spoke to the Mail.
The 49-year-old programme has lost more than one third of its early-season audience in the space of four years, with the average weekly viewing figures for August falling from 849,000 in 2019 to just 564,000 last month.
The most dramatic fall in viewing figures coincides with Alex Scott replacing Dan Walker as Focus’s main presenter in 2021.
In Walker’s last season before he was moved on the average weekly August audience was 827,000, before dropping to 809,000 in 2021, 599,000 12 months later and 564,000 this year.
Scott is not being blamed by her bosses, though, and remains highly regarded at the BBC, who are set to give the former England defender a prominent presenting role at next summer’s Olympics.
Brand and culture expert Nick Ede told MailOnline that the departure of Dan Walker was a huge blow to the Beeb, with new host Alex Scott struggling to stem that tide of viewers who left with him. …
The future of Football Focus is the subject of urgent talks at the BBC due to a dramatic drop in viewing figures.
Could it have anything to do with the diversity hire replacing the white bloke? Of course not. And if it is (which it isn’t) then it just shows how deplorable the audience is, who must be duly ignored.
Worth reading in full.
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Female Footie player – Black, on a show whose viewers prefer men, probably White and hetero, who understand the game. Who isn’t tired of her? Isn’t there a Lesbo footie channel she can parade onto?
The endless messaging and propaganda means it is all just a cockup. In reality – Turn. Off. The. Idiot. Box.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/tv-star-alex-scott-reveals-28094204
(lesbo love, secret long term lovey)
I suspected that it was a tuppence licker, but hadn’t seen it written down anywhere.
“Could it have anything to do with the diversity hire replacing the white
bloke? Of course not. And if it is (which it isn’t) then it just shows
how deplorable the audience is, who must be duly ignored”.
Absolutely, Mr Jones. Their former audience was a bunch of racist, misogynist Neanerthals who have driven away the sensitive, right-thinking, woke, LBGT+ QWERTY audience that has tradtionally watched the programme. A statistically robust survey of 1000 people conducted by Mark Drakeford conclusively showed that this was the case.
As a denizen of God’s own country (although run by the devil) I love the last line.
I don’t have too much of a problem with Alex Scott. She’s personable and knows a bit about the game, in much the same way as Gary Lineker, but the content of the programme has changed in line with the BBC’s idiotic fixation with women’s football should receive equal priority to the men’s game.
If, as I sense, the majority of the programme’s previous audience consisted largely of men expecting an update on the prospects for their teams, the success of the BBC’s strategy would depend on there being an equivalent number of viewers willing to join the audience to follow the women’s game.
Despite the media’s constant promotion of the women’s game, and their insistence that it is gaining in popularity, the viewing figures tell a different story.
Yes but the viewers are wrong – they must be made to comply.
Get woke, go broke.
It was the same when Mary Ann Ochota joined Time Team.
Not her fault at all, but it killed this wonderful series stone dead.
When we elevate skin colour, ethnicity or sexuality over competence there’s a problem.
People switch off.
Well she’s there because she’s black and she’s a woman hosting a show about a game that’s mostly supported and played by men in a country that’s almost 90% white. All because the deranged identarians of the BBC think the raging bigotry and prejudice of its fee paying viewers must be challenged.
To which the most appropriate response is fuck off BBC, and fuck off while you’re doing it.
Don’t forget; and when you get to wherever you are fucking off, fuck off again. Repeat as necessary.
I couldn’t bring myself to watch the BBC, whoever is presenting and whatever the show. Same goes for most other TV channels. The only one I can stomach are those that show just old stuff, and even then you need to mute the sound and look away during the ads.
With you on that tof. The mute button is always to hand on the rare occasions we put the idiot box on.
Could I respectfully suggest then, that you consider cancelling your direct debit and stop funding this stuff.
Today they had bloody Lineker on interviewing somebody or other. I turned it off.
I once bought some fruit n veg from the Lineker family stall on Leicester market.
Once.
I haven’t been interested in football since I reached puberty.
(Before that I supported the great Leeds United team of the late 60s and early 70s. Because I was born there.)
We’re at the point where it’s safest to assume that non-whites, women and sexual deviants are utterly incompetent at their jobs.
Which doesn’t matter that much if they’re TV presenters, but does if they’re allowed to design bridges. Or treat the ill. Or fly planes.
Not a downvoter. I don’t think we (or employers) should be assuming anything. One would hope that employers have some reasonably reliable and objective ways of determining how good someone will be or is at a given job. The danger starts when employers disregard hard evidence for political reasons. I know plenty of competent women and non-whites (though I am not aware of any competent sexual deviants as I have never knowingly worked with one).
But your more important point, IMO, is that playing politics in employment causes different kinds of damage depending on the role. So far that damage may be limited, but as the malaise becomes deeper we will get to the point where we experience disastrous consequences – and of course the same is happening in the field of “science” where the trend for pretending the world is as you want it to be or say it is, regardless of the evidence, leads us to “climate change” and “covid pandemics”, pretending it’s likely we can dislodge Russia from eastern Ukraine, etc.
I wasn’t arguing that all non-whites, women and sexual deviants are incompetent.
Indeed you were not
“One would hope that employers have some reasonably reliable and objective ways of determining how good someone will be or is at a given job.”
As a former employer, one of those objective ways includes, how much grief will I and my company get if we have to rid ourselves of this person; will there be grief if they don’t get the promotion they think they should; what will be the cost of replacing, and what will be the reliability of, someone with a womb which is likely to be filled at some point in the near future.
Wishing it so, legislating it to be so doesn’t make it so. People really aren’t inanimate figures on a big chess board just to be pushed around at the whim of the political filth for the benefit of their clients and cronies, with no independent agency to push back, do something different.
Yes those are all good points though if firing or not hiring “diversity hires” leads to more grief than firing or not hiring more competent horrible white Nazi people, then you’re not getting the right people in the right jobs. But we know that’s where this is going – the rich west will eventually become as crap as the third world.
Football topic , not this one but yesterday a 27 year old Sheffield Utd woman footballer died !.. Media coverage just tells us that , as if it’s normal , on & on it goes 🤯
The downvoters have failed so badly in life that it’s not just that they can’t afford £5 a month but that a financially-incontinent fascist-communist -neo-feudal part 1984, part Brave New World tyranny doesn’t think they’re worth £5 a month.
Chuckles!
…and if the same phenomenon applies to rugby – why wouldn’t it – we’ll soon be seeing the viewing figures drop there too. For the first time ever I’ve given up, first listening to, then watching several world cup matches, because of the squawky lady commentator who has suddenly become a feature of what is, after all, an intensely masculine experience. Sorry ladies, but when I watch rugby, I want to hear from men only.
The BBC doesn’t care how many people watch their programs. The adage “Go woke. Go broke.” doesn’t apply to them because…the license fee.
I’m amazed 564,000 are still watching it.
It’s obviously a slow day for news at the DS?
All sports channels now play the Gender Politics game. They all seem to feel the need to have a woman on every panel discussing football games. They are determined that women be injected into every football program. If these TV producers think that football fans want to listen to women they mostly have not heard of rather than to people who have played at the highest level like Souness, Carragher, Neville, Ferdinand etc then that is up to them, but they are WRONG.
I’ve never even heard of Football Focus despite being more than ten years older than it, so its demise won’t affect me in the slightest
Diversity & Inclusion™️ is manipulative, but the real issue is it insults the intelligence of the audience which it is believed is too dumb to realise it is being manipulated, and it’s also an ‘up yours’ for any that do, ‘we just don’t care, bigot!, you’re nothing’.
Adam Smith: consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production. Applied here: the audience is the sole end and purpose of all programmes.
And, as he also (might have) pointed out: the interests of the Leftie-loon, tree-hugging, save the Planet Grauniadistas is to be considered only as much as it serves the interests of the audience.
The sooner BBC is privatised and moves to a subscription channel, the better.