With coverage of the Premier league, The EFL, La liga, Serie A and Bunderslegia are all available to us it’s hard to appreciate what a struggle it was to get football on television in the first place. Football was where you went on a Saturday and it wasn’t what you watched in the evening either. As with now to get decent reception the owners of a set would have had to get someone like a TV aerial installation Tewkesbury based company, such as the one linked here, to come and sort it out for them. However the first televised match was facing some stiff competition if it was to compete with the other programs trying to get broadcast at the time.
Arsenal were the first team to agree to a televised match in 1937. Back then there was only one channel and it was the BBC. The game would be shown in black and white and Arsenal were approached purely because they were the closest ground to the BBCs studios.
The “match” was to be between Arsenal’s 1st team against their reserves. Three cameras were at the ground, a small fraction of the amount used now. One was in the stands with the other two and pitch level. It was billed in the Radio Times as a chance to marvel at Arsenal’s footballing skills and training routine, being one of the top sides in the country. They had 15 minutes to impress, sitting in between a bawdy comedy, a Movietone news report and a Mickey Mouse cartoon.
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