No Easter football next year? Hold your outrage

Is nothing sacred? There will be no Premier League or Championship football at all over the Easter weekend next season. The lower leagues will slog on, of course, but the top tiers will be suspended, as typically, for an international break – “a move expected to trigger outrage”, according to the Daily Mail, which has taken a sneaky peek at the schedules.

Interesting, because historically outrage attended the notion of playing football on Good Friday. Now it’s apparently all set to attend the notion of not playing football on Good Friday – or not playing the highest quality football, anyway. This is either a major statement about the evolution of religious observance in our time or a major statement about the evolution of outrage, depending on your view. Or maybe it just says something quite minor about the Daily Mail.

Anyway, we’re clearly being invited to frame this hiccup (not without precedent, as it happens) as another pending sledgehammer for the traditional football calendar, and another feckless cultural betrayal by the game’s so-called guardians. And in fairness, fans are only just fully overcoming their alleged indignation after last Christmas’s one-Prem-fixture-only Boxing Day, another abandonment of football practices deemed outrage-triggering when announced, and producing the thinnest 26 December for top-flight football since 1982.

And incidentally, that Boxing Day in 1982 featured only two league fixtures in total because it fell on a Sunday, and people back then still had some reservations about permitting football on the Sabbath, Boxing Day or not. Different times, obviously, and long before Sundays were officially and transcendentally declared “Super” by Sky Sports.

So maybe we should be taking to the streets over this planned Easter treachery – perhaps staging a demo outside the FA’s offices at Wembley in bonnets, possibly involving eggs in some way.

But hold that anger for a moment because, at the same time, we’re being warmly encouraged right now to share the view of Arne Slot, Liverpool’s manager, that top-flight football isn’t much cop anyway. “The Premier League is not a joy to watch,” Slot solemnly declared last week – mostly, it seems, because Arsenal have started scoring from corners and electing to defend the leads they have earned, while the defending champions are sixth.

It’s quite the contradictory moment, all in all. The Premier League is evidently incapable of supplying the joy for which we once depended on it – yet the suggestion is that we still want to slather our future Easters with that joylessness, and are going to be upset when we can’t. It’s a bit like that moment in Vivian Stanshall’s film, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, when Sir Henry, the ageing and irascible aristocrat, puts his knife and fork down at the end of a meal and announces: “That was inedible muck and there wasn’t enough of it.”

In this regard, it might be helpful to remember that, although it continues in the Championship and below, the tradition of making teams play twice over Easter was abandoned by the Premier League in 2012, by which point managers had long since dropped the term “traditional Easter double-header” in favour of the term “fixture congestion”. It might be inedible muck, in other words, but there was already less of it. (Once upon a time, Easter featured triple-headers. Pep Guardiola would have burst.)

Anyway, isn’t there a clear bright side to this Easter development? Many of us have stuff to do over the Easter weekend, so it’s quite a good time, in fact, to have an international break. Indeed, on precisely these grounds, maybe now is the time to have a look at moving international football into the Christmas holiday, too, Christmas tending to be a busy sort of time. Positioning those grindingly vacant weeks at points on the calendar when we’ve got plenty of other things with which to be entertaining ourselves could prove positive.

Indeed, it could be an ­important step towards the ideal situation in which international football is entirely corralled where it was surely meant to be: within its own space in the summer holidays, away from the football that really matters.

Outrage? We’re already coming round to this plan.

Photography by Craig T Fruchtman/Getty Images