The little score in the top corner of the screen has only been there since August 1992. David Hill was running Sky Sports and, as Richard Sandomir told it in the New York Times years later, was sick of switching on a match and having to wait to find out the score. So he put it in the top corner and left it there. The BBC had one by the end of 1993, and nobody has taken it off since. Two names, two numbers and a clock, and you can get the whole match off it while you’re hunting for the remote.
I think about that box a lot, because everything football has turned into on a screen since then is basically the same call being made over and over. The thing itself needs 61,276 people in Anfield and ninety minutes of their lives. Everything else, the highlights, the fantasy app, the games I’m about to get to, is somebody choosing which bit of that to keep.
The bits that get kept took a long time to earn it. You’ll Never Walk Alone was a Gerry and the Pacemakers record that went to number one at the end of October 1963 and got played at Anfield before matches because that’s what they did with the top ten. When it dropped out of the top ten and off the playlist, the Kop kept singing it anyway, and the club’s own history has fans asking where their song had gone. The Kop itself was a bank of earth opened in September 1906, and the story goes that Ernest Edwards of the Echo named it after a hill in the Boer War, though the club now says the supporters, plenty of whom had fought on that hill, probably got there first and Edwards just wrote it down.
So that’s sixty odd years for a song and about a hundred and twenty for a name. The red shirt took a while too. Which means that when a game designer wants a football feeling, they’re borrowing something it took generations of people to make, and they’re borrowing it in an afternoon, so it always looks a bit thin. It’s also why a lad most of us never saw play can still get to you. Have a read of what James Balagizi said about the club when he left this month and you’ll get what the badge carries.
Nearly all the popular online slot games with a football theme boil the whole match down to one moment, and it’s always the penalty. NetEnt’s Football: Champions Cup, from 2016, gives you five goals at picking a spot to shoot and then a spot to save. Pragmatic Play’s Spin & Score Megaways, from 2022, skipped the penalties for a reel that tumbles and, in its feature round, a multiplier that climbs with each win, which is nearer to how a match actually feels, because a match is mostly momentum.
The penalty gets picked because it’s the only bit of football that was already shaped like a slot before anyone built one. One player, a fixed camera, a result in two seconds that is either yes or no. The rest of the game just doesn’t go in a box like that, and I don’t think it ever will. The barest version of the whole idea is Evolution’s Football Studio, a live card game in a studio dressed like a broadcast set, where the only bets are Home, Away and Draw and the presenter fills the gaps between hands by talking about the weekend’s actual results. Football is just the set dressing and the small talk.
None of this is Anfield and none of it is trying to be. The bits that set quickly are what make it onto a screen, the colours, a stadium under lights, a chant looping in the background. Sixty years of a song won’t go into a loading screen, so that gets left behind. Nobody wants the throw-ins. But when a slot puts a floodlight behind its reels, it’s borrowing the same things Hill borrowed in 1992, and Hill’s box has been growing ever since, and the away end going quiet still isn’t in it.
