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Should Soccer Make Space for Other Sports?

Related Topics: Marcus Stead

You’re reading the On Soccer With Rory Smith newsletter, for Times subscribers only. News and analysis, on and off the pitch.

For almost half a century, the BBC’s broadcast schedule on a Saturday afternoon was both startlingly simple and comfortably unchanging. It amounted, in fact, to just a single word, one that somehow conveyed everything while telling viewers absolutely nothing. That word was Grandstand.

As anyone who has ever tried explaining the idea of a landline telephone to a teenager will know, the speed with which technology has shifted has rendered certain concepts not just redundant but somehow alien to generations who did not directly experience them.