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Fascinating stats! How often your Bundesliga club plays in prime time
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- Fascinating stats! How often your Bundesliga club plays in prime time
Fascinating stats! How often your Bundesliga club plays in prime time
As of Thursday, exact kickoff times have been set for every match in the first half of the Bundesliga season. That means we can now say precisely how often each team will play at which times and, most importantly, on which days.
A glance at the figures makes one thing immediately clear: "smaller" clubs play far more often at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoons—the traditional Bundesliga prime-time slot—than the country's big, historic clubs.
It is no coincidence that Paderborn (14) and Elversberg (11), two newly promoted sides without much top-flight history, feature in the top three of the Saturday crowd.
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The reason—apart from some clubs' involvement in European competitions—is obvious: teams that do not generate huge TV interest are much easier to "hide" in the simultaneous-match coverage than in standalone broadcasts.
The simultaneous-match format, with its many goals and dramatic twists, remains as popular as ever, while a standalone match between, say, Paderborn and Elversberg would presumably attract far less interest.
Clubs like Bayern Munich are the losers in this development—or, more precisely, their fans are. Bayern will play on a Saturday afternoon just three times during the first half of the season, and not once at home.
For supporters facing a longer journey, for whom Saturday is sometimes the only realistic day to travel, that is a bitter pill to swallow.
But apparently that is the price you have to pay for supporting a giant...
This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇩🇪 here.
