The Football League Show

The Football League Show is a BBC One football television show hosted by Manish Bhasin, featuring highlights from the Championship, League One and League Two. It began on 8 August 2009, at 11.45pm and immediately follows Match of the Day on Saturdays. Similar to other BBC Sport studio shows, UK-based users of the BBC website can watch a live simulcast of the programme. The programme is recorded in Studio C at IMG studios (IMG Media) .

Format

The programme has a similar format to ITV's Championship Goals, with a featured match receiving full highlights and all the goals from the other games. There can also be extensive highlights of any games covered live by Sky Sports or the BBC itself. The programme is studio based.

The first ever episode featured Steve Claridge alongside Crystal Palace manager Ian Holloway but from the second episode onwards only featured Claridge as pundit or on some occasions former Torquay United and Brentford manager Leroy Rosenior, occasionally both Claridge and Rosenior have appeared on the same programme offering analysis of games.

When there are only Championship or League one and Two games played, the show is pre recorded from the stadium of the featured match, rather than being live from the studio. These shows are often shorter than the regular ones. On 23 March 2013 the show was only 20 minutes long, this being the shortest show so far in the series and the first not to have a feature game.

Presenter, commentators and reporters

The presenter of the show is Manish Bhasin having left Football Focus to present. Whenever Manish is unavailable it is Mark Chapman, Mark Clemmit, Damian Johnson or Jason Mohammad who hosts.

These are current BBC employees but as TWI handles production on behalf of the BBC, a number of freelance journalists who work for TWI regularly voice goal round-ups. These include Channel 5's UEFA Europa League commentator Dave Beckett, Nick Halling who is best known as Sky Sports' American Football expert, ESPN and talkSPORT's Jim Proudfoot, and Peter Brackley who also works on ITV.

Freelance commentators primarily working with the BBC such as John Roder, Jonathan Legard and Alistair Mann also appear, commentating both on round-ups and featured games. Tony Jones and John Helm have also commentated on the show. Other commentators include Kevin Keatings, Jon Champion, Peter Drury, Jonathan Pearce, Guy Mowbray & Steve Wilson.

BBC Radio 5 Live's Mark Clemmit is the roving reporter, who visits a ground to spend the day with a team each week. This is similar in style to the work that has been done by Kevin Day on Match of the Day 2.

Interactive

There was also an interactive e-mail segment where fans can express their points of view. These e-mails were read out by one of the BBC's sports news presenters, mainly Jacqui Oatley or Lizzie Greenwood-Hughes. This feature was dropped from the start of the 2011–12 football season.

Other programmes

The BBC's rights deal with the Football League also includes the Football League Cup, where the programme is rebranded as The League Cup Show. Highlights of the Football League Trophy final are also shown on the BBC, where the show is simply branded as the Football League Trophy Final.^[1] Rather than being broadcast live from a studio, it is recorded pitchside from Wembley Stadium, the venue of the final. Highlights from the prior rounds were available on the BBC Sport website up until the 2011–12 season.

A regional spin-off programme, Late Kick Off, launched on Monday 18 January 2010 which broadcasts on a weekly basis from every January until the end of the season.

See also

• The Championship
• Football League Extra

References

External links

• The Football League Show at BBC Programmes