Why Sky's 'In The Box' added nothing but tedium to the experience of watching Arsenal v Spursplaceholder image
Why Sky's 'In The Box' added nothing but tedium to the experience of watching Arsenal v Spurs | Getty Images
In The Box was Sky Sports’ latest attempt to spice up live football - and further proof that it should be left well alone.
It was, as Gary Lineker so perfectly summarised it, “a horrible way to watch football” – this was Sky Sports’ latest attempt to ‘enliven’ the way in which we enjoy a match, a YouTube show entitled In The Box, which saw them lock eight celebrities away in a sealed room to very specifically not watch Arsenal v Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday. Witty banter, it was presumably hoped, would flow. It did not.
What we wound up with was not a brave new direction for football entertainment but a reminder that the code for live football broadcasting was solved decades ago, and that further embellishment is not required. And what this columnist took away from it was that he had just lost 17 minutes of his life that he will never be able get back.
What is ‘In The Box’ - and why it’s truly dire
The premise of In The Box was pretty dicey from the outset. Four Arsenal fans and four Spurs fans – or, as it turned out, two Spurs fans and two former players in the form of Lineker and Ossie Ardiles – were cut off from the outside world and made to ‘watch’ the north London derby solely via occasional stills from the game (and, on one especially tedious occasion, the possession stats) and invited to guess what the outcome had been.
The score and the outcome of any of these moments was not given away until the very end, when they were told the score and the fact that Eberechi Eze had scored a hat-trick. They didn’t even show them the highlights. That might have given the wits in the room something to riff on, at least.
Given that the celebrities in question had absolutely nothing to go off, it was inevitable that little insight or entertainment would ensure. Arsenal’s representatives in this painful endeavour were four social media personalities, who gamely tried their best to overreact to an unmoving and entirely uninteresting image of Declan Rice taking a shot on, for example. It wasn’t exactly a gold mine of material for them.
In the white half of the room, meanwhile, Michael McIntyre was forced to try to muster up some wisecracks from a still picture of David Seaman sat in the stands. Whatever your opinion on his comedy, it had to be acknowledged that he was given some pretty poor feeder lines from this enterprise.
Improvisational comedy usually starts with something slightly stronger than a former goalkeeper chatting to someone else on the terraces. You couldn’t exactly blame Ardiles for plonking himself down on a sofa and checking out for the duration. Most of those watching will have done the same thing.
McIntyre, to his credit, actually guessed that the director picking Seaman out of the crowd might mean that one of the goalkeepers had just been lobbed from distance in the style of Ronaldinho against England in the 2002 World Cup, but that was the sharpest slice of insight any of those involved were able to manage. The thought, presumably, would be that putting eight rival fans with substantial personalities and sizeable mouths would lead to mirth and wit aplenty, but it turns out that it’s hard to be funny or interesting when faced with a possession statistic and a mildly awkward social situation.
Another gimmick destined for the Sky Sports scrapheap
Perhaps In The Box was just the enforced brainchild of some unfortunate Sky Sports producer who has been instructed to find new ways to switch up a broadcasting paradigm which already works, and which has resisted countless attempts to improve it over the years - most of them from Sky themselves.
That would certainly tally with some of my experiences of sports broadcasting behind the scenes. There are quite a few people in positions of influence who seem resistant to the notion that live sport is something we already know how to do, and which the audience doesn’t really want to be done differently. Too many people out there try to justify their salaries by reinventing the wheel or finding fresh methods of slicing bread.
In The Box seems likely to suffer the same fate as FanZone, or cameras which followed a single player without showing anything else that was happening in the match, or 2023’s wildly pointless Game Mode – another ‘innovation’ that made its debut at the Emirates – which put a camera on a fixed rail down the side of the stadium to allow supporters to watch a game from a slightly worse and mildly nausea-inducing angle.
None of which, in fairness, were as grand of a folly as Sky Sports 3D, which probably cost a fortune in 3D glasses distributed to pubs in the vain hope that punters would like the players to be grainier, harder to see, and fractionally closer to them in a way that absolutely failed to mimic the experience of actually being in the stands. Sky pushed that concept very hard for a few months before giving up in the face of inevitable mass indifference.
At least In The Box was probably a little cheaper than that particular mistake, not that Ardiles wouldn’t have been paid quite handsomely to sit quietly and slightly grumpily in a corner. We all wish we could earn so much by doing so little. Full credit to the Argentine for living another of our collective dreams after already winning a World Cup.
By this point, broadcasters really shouldn’t need another lesson in the fact that football is theatre enough without the addition of a YouTuber shouting across a plain white room after learning the news that Spurs had enjoyed 67% of the ball for the last 10 minutes of a game he wasn’t even able to see.
Let us simply watch football the way that nature intended - from the same camera angle we’ve had for generations, with a commentator who hasn’t learned how to pronounce the players’ names properly, a couple of pundits offering dubious opinions, and precisely no further bells or whistles. Some things just work.
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