As Johan Cruyff once pointed out, in football the clock is always your enemy. If you’re winning the clock moves too slowly. If you’re losing it’s always going too fast. The clock only really tells you two things: how much chasing you still have to do, and how much longer you’re going to be chased. This is the source of its power too. In a game that has no formal structure beyond the half-time break, no set phases, just the steady depletion of time, the clock is key to the entire spectacle, the ultimate source of all tension, fear, pain, joy.
All of which perhaps explains why Amazon Prime’s Every Game Every Goal show is, for all the undimmed maestro-power of Jeff Stelling, the most painful, jarring and genuinely exhausting football programme ever devised. This is the football TV show as category mistake, a bravura production that expresses above all else a profound misunderstanding of its subject matter. Albeit in a way that is oddly reassuring, at a time when the game feels more than ever up for grabs.
