Do you care about other results being spoiled while watching football matches?
Hello, I'd love for the ~sports and specifically ~sports.football topics to be more common, so I figured I would post something that's been on my mind a lot lately: Do you care about other results being spoiled while watching football matches?
I don't have as much time as I used to to watch football all day, so I tend to watch games either on weekends if I can, or via recordings of matches. I'll usually put on a game each night, sometimes actively watching it and other times just as some background noise on my second monitor while I game or browse the web, but still pay attention to the goals and big moments in the game.
Recently the Champion's League Round of 16 started, so I've been watching those games in the evenings when I can. And what happens is that while I'm watching one game, the commentators/announcers will just randomly say "Oh btw, so-and-so just scored in the other game, making it 1-0". And it sucks because I was looking forward to watching that game next. But by watching one game I end up knowing the results for both games because the announcers update you all throughout the coverage of the game you're watching.
I get that the games happened at the same time in real life, so the announcer was letting people know of the results live as they happened, but why? Does it bother anyone else or do most people just not care or don't watch games after the fact?
I remember watching games as a kid on Brazilian television, and they had a much better solution to spoilers: an animation would appear on the screen whenever a goal was scored in another match, then after a few seconds the information would pop up about who scored and what that game's current score is. It gave you the perfect opportunity to change the channel or just look away and cover your ears for a few seconds if you were planning on watching the other games later. It's not a perfect system, since when there's only two games happening at the same time (like in this CL round of 16), you know exactly when a goal was scored in the other match, just not which team scored it. But it's miles better than just straight up announcing 'oh look the other team has tied, the other game is now 1-1'.
I can understand how in certain circumstances, other results might be super important to someone watching a game, like the last day of a league when all the matches are played at once, or the final games of a group stage where your team depends on other results to advance. But those should be the exceptions, not the norm. Maybe update people during half time or something, which already happens anyways. But let me watch the games spoiler-free at my own pace please.
I think you're in a small minority of sports fans for this one. It sucks, because you're not going to be feeling catered to, but you just have to live with the fact that in this day and age, you will likely get spoiled on sports results unless you find some way to lock yourself in to a room with no internet and watch a sports feed with no announcers or excessive score displays.
Most fans only have the capacity for watching the teams they care about and just passively scoop up news and chatter about how the rest of the league is performing. Hell, most people will forget about what they heard anyways and still be surprised when they get told again. They just have other things they worry about.
My suggestion? Watch the game more on an analysis level and not on a surprise level. I would use it as an opportunity to see "why" the scoring events happened and not just that they did. What coaching decisions/formations were used? Where there any key injuries or substitutions? Did someone just get plain beat? In any sporting event, it's not just the scores but the mood in between. There's a bigger story that's told that's not in the scoring highlights and that's the more interesting part of the event (to me, at least, but I might just be weird like that)
That's definitely the optimistic way of looking at it! It's just a very different feeling when you already know the result. I guess it depends a lot on how intently I'm watching the games. Am I looking to actively watch it or am I more just using it for background entertainment. The former seems academic while the latter feels more casual and lighthearted.