Kickoff times are set in somebody else's time zone

Overseas broadcast windows now dictate when domestic matches start, and the accumulated cost is paid by players and local supporters.

A lunchtime Saturday kickoff in Europe is a prime evening slot in East Asia, and that is the entire reason it exists. Not tradition, not policing, not stadium availability. A distribution deal in a market eight hours ahead, sold on the promise of live matches at a watchable hour, which the domestic calendar then has to deliver.

The trade is real revenue, and I am not going to pretend it is irrational. Overseas rights now exceed domestic rights for several major competitions, and a league that ignores its largest paying audience is choosing to be poorer. But the costs are distributed in a way nobody votes on. The early kickoff means a squad that played a late European fixture on Thursday has a compressed turnaround. It means away supporters travelling before dawn. It means the atmosphere in a stadium at noon, which everybody can hear on the broadcast that paid for it.

The compounding version is what should worry administrators. A single early kickoff is a minor inconvenience. A club playing continental fixtures gets them repeatedly, always attached to the same short turnarounds, because the broadcast slots that need filling are fixed and the clubs available to fill them are the ones with the biggest overseas followings, who are also the clubs with the most congested schedules. The burden falls on precisely the squads least able to absorb it.

There is a fix that leagues resist for revenue reasons and that I think they will eventually be forced into. Sell the overseas window as a slot rather than as a fixture, and rotate which clubs fill it, with a rest-interval rule that vetoes any club below a threshold turnaround. You lose a little value per slot. You gain a product where the marquee teams are not visibly tired in the one window your biggest market watches.

Nobody sells it that way because the buyer wants the specific clubs, and the buyer is paying. So the calendar keeps being written in a time zone where nobody has to catch the six o'clock train home.