British Television & The World Cup: A Difficult Birth

A Hampden Ultimatum

In 1950, with one match left to play in the Home International tournament, both England and Scotland had secured their places at the World Cup finals in Brazil. FIFA had designated the tournament as a qualifying group and offered two spots to the four competing nations. But in the build-up to the final match between the two qualifiers at Hampden Park, the secretary of the Scottish Football Association, George Graham, declared that Scotland would only accept the invitation if they travelled as British champions. England won the match by a single goal, and the SFA, true to its word, stayed at home.

This peculiar decision was a fitting chapter in the Home Nations’ early, standoffish relationship with the World Cup. A dispute over ‘broken time payments’ for amateur players had led to their withdrawal from FIFA in 1928, meaning England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland simply sat out the first three tournaments. It wasn’t until 1946 that common sense prevailed and they rejoined the fold. Scotland’s self-imposed exile in 1950 may have felt like a lucky escape when news of England’s humiliating performance filtered back, but for English football fans, there was one small mercy: no one at home saw it. The tournament was not shown on television.

Enter Eurovision

Four years later, the landscape had changed. The European Broadcasting Union had been formed in 1950, and its Eurovision network, set up to promote co-operation between national broadcasters, launched in Geneva in June 1954. This was just in time for the World Cup finals in Switzerland. The BBC, still holding its monopoly on British television, was the official broadcaster. For the first time, World Cup football was on British screens.

By the time of the 1958 tournament in Sweden, the BBC had competition. The launch of commercial television in 1955 meant ITV joined the fray, and both broadcasters would cover the finals. Yet their power was limited. Live matches were broadcast across Europe via the Eurovision feed, but only one match could be relayed at any given time. With simultaneous kick-off times, the BBC and ITV were forced to show the exact same games, with neither having any say in which fixtures were selected for broadcast.

This arrangement proved particularly frustrating for the smaller Home Nations. Scotland, having finally deigned to participate, did not appear live on British television at all. Wales, qualifying for the first and only time to date, were even more hard done by. Their group match against the hosts Sweden was shown, as all matches involving the host nation were. But their impressive group play-off victory against Hungary and their quarter-final against Brazil were both ignored by the Eurovision selectors. English supporters fared slightly better, seeing their team’s group match against Brazil and their play-off defeat to the Soviet Union live, but it was a poor showing from a team recording one of its worst ever World Cup performances.

The Tyranny of Distance

Live coverage was still a fragile, continent-based affair.

When the tournament returned to South America in 1962, hosted by Chile, it created a major headache for European broadcasters. The technology for transatlantic live broadcasting was tantalisingly close; the first Telstar satellite became operational on the tenth of July 1962. This was just three and a half weeks too late for the World Cup, which had already finished. The logistics of the pre-satellite era meant there would be no live television coverage of the 1962 finals in Britain. Supporters wanting to follow events as they happened had to turn to the radio.

Film footage of the matches was flown back to the UK and shown on a two-day delay. The arrangement was so compromised that ITV decided not to get involved at all. The BBC alone carried the tournament, showing only England’s matches, which culminated in a now-familiar quarter-final exit to Brazil, and the final itself. For British viewers, the 1962 World Cup retained an air of mystery, a distant competition of delayed highlights and crackling radio reports.

Within four years, however, everything would change. The arrival of regular televised football, first on ITV and then with the BBC’s Match Of The Day, combined with rapid technological advances, was altering the game in Britain forever. The next great leap forward in World Cup broadcasting would happen, ironically, in the country that had once been so stubbornly resistant to the entire concept: England.