Sky Sports Transfer Deadline Coverage a Joke

Watching Through The Night from Sky Sports, their nightly sport news show, is usually an enjoyable experience. But Friday night’s episode on the final night of the August transfer window was so full of hype and nonsense that I had a sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The show was on Sky Sports from 11pm to midnight UK time, but was shown slightly tape-delayed (as it always is) in the US on Fox Soccer Channel from 7-8pm ET.

With the transfer window closing at midnight, the Sky news announcers were foaming at the prospect of a major signing being unveiled on the show. Except that a major signing never happened.

Instead, what we got was laughable. Across the crawl at the very bottom of the screen, the words “Breaking News: Shefki Kuqi joins Fulham from Crystal Palace” were the biggest “scoop.” The Sky Sports news announcers kept on going to their reporter standing outside West Ham’s Boleyn Ground to see if any major deal had been done at the eleventh hour. It hadn’t.

I felt sorry for the reporter standing outside the ground in the middle of the night with nothing of substance to report. But the problem was all Sky and their building up of the hype to grab the viewer’s attention. The danger is when nothing happens — as it did last night — the hype falls flat on its face.

It would have been better for Sky to report on the news as they usually do, but only break in when huge transfer signing announcements were announced. But for Sky, that would be too boring in their books.