A noon kickoff is a catering problem before it is a tactical one

Broadcasters set start times to suit distant markets, and the first department that absorbs the change is the kitchen.

Move a match from eight in the evening to half past noon and the coaching staff will talk about intensity and heat. Fine. But the department that has to redesign its entire day is catering, and nobody buys them a seat at the rights negotiation.

Start times are sold. That is the whole point of a broadcast contract in a global sport: a league is not selling matches, it is selling slots that land in prime time somewhere with money in it. An early domestic kickoff is an evening kickoff in another hemisphere. The fee reflects that. The schedule follows the fee.

What arrives downstream is a chain of small, expensive adjustments. The main pre-match meal moves before dawn. Hotel kitchens contracted to open at six now need to open at four, which is a staffing negotiation with a hotel that has its own labour agreements. Bus departure shifts. The session the day before is rescheduled because the squad has to sleep earlier. Multiply that across a season of irregular slots and you get a team that never settles into a rhythm, not because anyone planned it, but because forty separate broadcast decisions each made local sense.

Leagues rarely compensate for this directly. They compensate collectively, through the pooled rights money that pays everybody's wages, then leave individual clubs to eat the operational cost. A club with a travelling operations manager and a chef absorbs it. A club without one sends players to a buffet.

I think the fairer arrangement is obvious and will not happen. Slot allocation should carry a small logistics payment to the clubs affected, scaled by how far the fixture sits from the standard window. It would cost the league almost nothing against the value of the slot and would push the burden onto the party that took the money.

Instead we have the current arrangement, where the broadcaster revenue is precise to the pound and the operational cost is vague, unpriced, and absorbed by staff on modest salaries.

Watch a lunchtime fixture and you are watching a market decision made in a boardroom in another country. The players are the last people told.