Sign of the times: Sky and BT Sport have stopped selecting Chelsea matches for TV coverage

Sky Sports and BT Sport have gone through and picked their games for broadcast for the rest of the 2015-16 Barclays Premier League season (except the final weekend).  While our match-ups against Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur, and Liverpool had already been selected and selected for coverage on Sky, none of our other remaining matches were chosen in the final round of the TV draft for this season (no schedule changes are good news for the match-going fans, obviously, less so for the ones watching at home).  Mired in mid-table, this is hardly surprising.

Last season, our title run-in was fully televised, eleven games in a row from mid-March to the end of the season.  Of our 38 league games overall, 25 were on either Sky Sports or BT. This season we will end with 22 (or perhaps 23) games televised, but the vast majority of those happened at the start of the season.  The demise of Mourinho made for good entertainment, after all.  Only 4 of our last 12 matches of the season are currently set for domestic broadcast (including a near two-month gap between the 5-1 win over Newcastle and the 4-0 win last weekend), with a 5th possibly added on the final day when we take on Leicester City.

Of course, this only applies to England.  In almost all other areas of the world, all Premier League matches are available for paying customers to watch, either live on television or live via legal and official streaming services, plus usually on-demand for replay at any time, even.  England's archaic rules regarding football broadcasting have left most UK-based Chelsea fans in the dark lately.