There's a moment every Saturday afternoon at about 2:55pm when something happens that has no equivalent anywhere else in modern life. Millions of people, simultaneously, stop what they're doing. They sit down. They turn on a screen, or they walk through a turnstile, or they stand in a pub with their eyes fixed on a television. The clock hits 3pm and twenty-two footballers kick off, and for the next ninety minutes, those millions of people experience the same thing at the same time.
No algorithm chose this for them. No recommendation engine suggested it. No personalised feed delivered it at a time optimised for their individual engagement patterns. It's 3pm because it's 3pm. And everyone watches.
This is the last monoculture. And I think it matters more than most people realise.
What we lost
Music used to do this. There was a time when an album release was a national event. Everyone heard the same songs in the same week. Top of the Pops on Thursday night was appointment viewing — the whole country watching the same performances, arguing about the same chart positions, humming the same songs on Friday morning. That shared experience created shared reference points. You could talk to a stranger about music because you'd both heard the same things.
Television used to do this too. Thirty million people watching the same episode of the same show on the same night. The water-cooler conversation wasn't a metaphor — it literally happened. Monday morning, everyone had seen the same thing. The shared experience was the point.
Even the internet used to do this. Peak Twitter during a live event — an election, an awards show, a breaking news story — created a collective experience that felt genuinely communal. Everyone reacting in real time. Everyone seeing the same jokes, the same takes, the same moments of shock or celebration. It was messy and chaotic and often stupid, and it was also one of the most exciting things the internet ever produced.
All of it fragmented. Spotify personalised music into individual bubbles. Netflix let everyone watch different things at different times. Twitter's algorithm killed the chronological timeline and with it the sense of shared real-time experience. Everything that used to be collective became individual. Everything that used to be appointment became on-demand.
Why football survived
Football resisted the fragmentation because of three qualities that are nearly impossible to replicate in any other form of culture: it's live, it's unpredictable, and it's communal.
Live means it can't be time-shifted. You can't watch a football match on Tuesday and have it mean the same thing. The result will have leaked. The conversations will have happened without you. The collective groan, the collective celebration — those are real-time events. They only exist in the moment.
Unpredictable means it can't be spoiled by an algorithm. No recommendation engine can tell you what's going to happen in a football match, because nobody knows. That uncertainty is the entire product. It's what makes millions of people sit down at the same time and pay attention with a focus that no scripted content can match.
Communal means it only works with other people. Watching football alone is fine, but it's not the full experience. The full experience is the pub, the stadium, the group chat, the living room full of people who care about the same thing for the same ninety minutes. Football is a social technology. It requires an audience, and that audience has to be synchronised.
What it means to me
I've supported Nottingham Forest since I was old enough to understand what supporting a football club means. That's thirty-odd years of Saturdays. Thirty years of hope, disappointment, rage, ecstasy, boredom, and the specific, untranslatable feeling of watching your team score a goal that matters.
It's not content. I want to be really clear about that. When people talk about football as "content" — as something to be consumed, optimised, clipped into highlights, discussed in podcasts — they're missing the point entirely. Football is an experience. It happens in time and it happens communally and it can't be reduced to its components without losing everything that makes it matter.
The feeling when Forest score isn't the goal itself. It's the combination of the goal, the moment, the context, the people around you, the collective release of tension, and the knowledge that thousands of other people are feeling the exact same thing at the exact same second. That's monoculture. That's shared experience. And it's increasingly the only place you can find it.
The stranger test
Here's a test for cultural health: can you talk to a stranger about something you both experienced? Not something you both have opinions about — that's different. Something you both lived through, in real time, together.
Forty years ago, you could do this with music, television, radio, sport, and half a dozen other things. Everyone had seen the same film. Everyone had heard the same song. Everyone had watched the same show. The shared experience was so common it was invisible.
Today, try it. Walk up to a stranger and ask what they watched last night. The answer will almost certainly be different from what you watched. Ask what they're listening to. Different again. Ask what they read online. Completely different. The personalised internet has given everyone their own private culture, and the cost is that we have nothing in common.
Except football. Walk into any pub in England on a Saturday afternoon and you can talk to anyone. You share a reference point. You share an experience. You share, for ninety minutes at least, the same reality. That's not a small thing. In a world where shared experience is dying, it might be the most important thing.
Why this matters beyond sport
I think about monoculture a lot when I'm building things. Every product I make is, in some small way, an attempt to create shared experience. CultureTerminal aggregates what's happening across culture — an attempt to give people a common feed in a world of personalised ones. The pub guide is fundamentally about places where people gather. Even Modern Retro creates a shared aesthetic language — a visual joke that only works if you get the reference.
Shared reference points are the infrastructure of community. Without them, we're all just individuals consuming personalised content in parallel. We're in the same room but having different experiences. We're online at the same time but seeing different feeds. We're alive in the same era but living in different realities.
Football pushes back against all of that. It insists on simultaneity. It demands collective attention. It creates shared memory. And it does this every single week, reliably, without an algorithm or a recommendation engine or a personalised anything.
3pm Saturday. Everyone watching. The last monoculture, holding on. Long may it continue.
