Little can beat the thrill of settling down on the sofa to watch live sport, although over the years I have had TV sets that have done their absolute best to scupper it.
The first telly I remember from childhood was a sort of corrugated wooden box that my family didn’t even own – it was rented. This might make me sound as if I’m in my 90s, or grew up behind the iron curtain. But no, this was 1980s Birmingham, where my formative memory of both TV and sports was Poland’s 3-0 thrashing by England in the 1986 World Cup, requiring my dad to tell me what was happening because to a five-year-old it wasn’t especially obvious from said small wooden box what was actually going on.
By the turn of the 90s we had very much moved into the age of TV ownership: a series of chunky glass and plastic sets with a weight that belied the fact that the screens themselves were not particularly big. As a teenager I even had a TV in my bedroom, and attempted to pretend I was physically at Euro 96 and the 98 World Cup by sitting as close as physically possible to the screen.
It looked and sounded terrible but, at the time, the idea of a home TV experience being anything like as good as seeing sports live in person was unimaginable. The first true flatscreen TV came on the market in 1997, and while revolutionary in a way, it also cost nearly £10,000, a sum so stratospheric as to render laughable the idea that I or anyone I knew would possibly get one. In fact, as I hit adulthood, affordable home sports watching essentially hit a technological impasse and I pretty much opted to watch every single sports fixture down the pub, which is fine when you’re in your 20s and drinking pints at weird times of the morning during the 2002 Japan South Korea World Cup, but it does have its limits.
I think it was during the 2012 London Olympics that I realised we were finally in a new era. The Olympics tend to be more of a home watch than a pub one anyway, but it was while flitting around friends’ flat-screened houses on Super Saturday that I realised how easy it was to follow these sports, which I’d largely never watched before in my life, and that bigger screen size was surely a factor.
Things have come on so far since then that save for a select few occasions when it would seem like heresy not to go to the pub, I much prefer to watch sports at home (not least due to my dogged support of Birmingham City, whose games tend not to feature in any pubs near me these days).
Where once home-watching was a distant second in terms of quality, today’s bigger TVs with sharper screens and vastly better sound quality have completely turned the tide. Aside from the magic of a crowd, sitting at home is generally a more pleasant way to watch sports than being in the nosebleed seats at Wembley, especially with the greatly improved technical quality of sports coverage.
Sky Glass is a smart TV made for sports lovers. It’s an awesome piece of equipment, with cinema quality sound thanks to its six speakers and massive subwoofer all built in, as well as a 4K HDR screen capable of displaying a billion colours. So sports look great, plus there’s a whole heap more that folk in 1997 could never have dreamed of. The manufacture is certified as “CarbonNeutral” as rated by the CarbonNeutral Protocol.
The TV responds to voice commands – just say “Man City”, for example, and it will take you to the channel playing the game. You can buy Sky Glass in five different colours, because why not? A Sky Live camera, exclusive to Sky Glass, can sit on top of your TV – its Watch Together feature means you can watch sport with your friends even if they’re not in your house. Another plus of the TV is that it automatically updates when it’s in standby mode. It’s also affordable: coming in three sizes (43in, 55in and 65in), you can pay all at once or you can subscribe to a zero-interest monthly payments scheme that’s cheaper than most phones.
Basically, if you own a TV from five or 10 years ago you’re probably not aware how far they’ve come – and with an exciting winter of sport ahead, now’s the perfect time to find out. Any sports fan knows Sky Sports carries some of the world’s greatest sport, from the Premier League to Formula One.
Formula One
With Sky Glass’s six inbuilt speakers and 360-degree Dolby Atmos sound, you can enjoy every rev and screech of the Formula One practice sessions, qualifiers and races in vivid, visceral detail: still to come this year is an epic finale in Abu Dhabi. The 2024 season starts its engine at the tail end of February with testing in Bahrain.
The Premier League
The world’s greatest football league is the jewel in the Sky Sports crown. It probably doesn’t actually need any introduction, but Sky Sports is the place where you can watch the weekend’s biggest fixtures, live – that’s more than 100 games in UHD. On a proper modern TV, such as Sky Glass, you can soak up the full atmosphere, clearly work out who has the ball, and feel the full in-the-moment agony of questionable VAR decisions.
The Championship
The Championship is just as much a part of the lifeblood of league football in this country. Probably more so. And Sky Sports is the only place to see it – there’s lots of festive football to look forward to. I, personally, will be morbidly fascinated to see how new manager Wayne Rooney affects the fortunes of Birmingham City this season, and I won’t be the only one.
Women’s Super League
There’s plenty of action still to catch in the 2023/24 Women’s Super League – keep an eye on reigning champions Chelsea and see if they can win a fifth title in a row. Watch every round on Sky Sports.
The PDC World Darts Championship
From mid-December to early January, the world’s best darts players will be battling it out at Alexandra Palace. Catch every arrow and double top on Sky Glass.
The Super Bowl
If you’re a fan of American football, you don’t need me to tell you that Sky Sports is the place in the UK to watch NFL games. Obviously a lot of us are totally baffled by it as a sport, but we’re all at least a touch curious about the gloriously excessive spectacle of the season-closing Super Bowl, which now takes place on the second Sunday of February. You really need an excellent TV to fully appreciate its pomp.
If you’re in the market for a new smarter than smart TV to watch sport on, check out Sky Glass here
