Bring the fans back

“From using previous recordings of stadium ambience, a Frankenstein’s mixture of various sounds is hooked to a live broadcast.”

On any lazy Saturday, I enjoy slumping myself down on the sofa, chin pressed against the ribcage, filling in the time by watching the football scores roll in. But since the blanket ban on fan attendance across the country since March, even watching sport on the TV has become a saddening (and at times, frustrating) experience.

With the absence of chants and celebrations from the stands, networks have resorted to the underwhelming and out-of-sync artificial crowd noise.

From using previous recordings of stadium ambience, a Frankenstein’s mixture of various sounds is hooked to a live broadcast, then a faceless figure watching the game tries to mimic the type of crowd noise to go with what they are seeing happen, during every moment, over the course of the entire game.

For example, the mechanical crowd will cheer when a goal is scored, boo when a player is sent off, and so on and so forth.

The first issue is that the sound does not reach the same level of volume or intensity; any flesh and blood crowd wanting to reach an identical decibel will only have to perform a collective exhale, rather than cripple their voice box by jeering at the top of their lungs, which is the usual protocol. A crowd of 50,000 fanatical football supporters make more than a whimper, I can assure you.

Nor does the artificial crowd ever jeer or boo at the correct time. This is unavoidable as its cause is human reaction: the delay between the brain registering the event has happened, then commanding the index figure to push a button, but it is a travesty, nonetheless. Although only noticeable for a split second, this delay still manages to sour the experience. It is even worse when the controller accidentally deploys the wrong sound-effect for the situation and then has to make a snap correction, completely disrupting the flow of the game.

You could always switch over a channel to watch the game without the artificial crowd, but this is not always available, and if it is, the atmosphere is so dilapidated that singing the football chant, ‘it’s like a library in here’, would be most appropriate.

To the fans who would religiously attend the home stadium every other week in normal times, this must be particularly infuriating, not to mention the salt in the wounds of having to tolerate their less than stellar replacement on the TV.

Naturally, the feeling of disenfranchisement must amplify when one’s team is in good form. Cambridge United - a team I used to see play in my younger days - are off to an impressive start to the season, currently sitting in the automatic promotion places of League Two. I have close family who are supporters that are missing out on this joyous experience (which does not swing round too often). In turn, the lower league clubs, who do not have the privilege of receiving big-money packages stemming from TV deals, have had their lifeblood of ticket sales closed off for the foreseeable future.

Outside of football, the Grand Slam of darts tournament is in full swing, with the subsequent PDC World Darts Championship set to commence in December. There will be no party atmosphere at the famous Alexandra Palace this year: no inventive costumes; no witty messages scribbled on placards. In exchange, there will likely just be the artificial crowd for company.

This bitter situation has arisen out of a justification to protect these same fans from the Coronavirus, a disease with an incredibly high survival rate, countless cases being asymptomatic, with the disease being too weak to be noticeable. Regardless, as dedicated lockdown sceptic and former senior judge, Lord Sumption repeats, a free people must be able to make this decision for themselves, not decreed for them by an overbearing state apparatus. We shouldn’t forget that the Coronavirus exists, nor should we forget the principle of proportionately; getting the fans back will be a step in reversing this imbalance.