Football has a problem: there isn’t enough football. The world’s most popular thing is too popular. Fans seem to find it ludicrous that our entertainment is constrained by flesh and blood, that we can’t – like with everything else – just watch live football when we feel like it.

It started to get like this when Sky bought the Premier League rights and set up the Sky Sports channels. They had realised people really like this stuff. People like it enough for you to air football content endlessly. Throughout the 2000s came Premier League Years, where people could watch football that happened ten years ago. If you were bored of that, you could switch over to Sky Sports News, where you can still watch presenters speak of Granit Xhaka’s move to Sunderland in the same dramatic register as a Gaza

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