The last train decides when a match can finish

Egress capacity and public transport timetables constrain kick-off times far more than most supporters realise.

Getting people in is a two-hour problem. Getting them out is a twenty-minute one, and everything difficult about crowd movement lives in that asymmetry.

Arrivals spread themselves naturally. People turn up when they like, some early for a drink, some sprinting at five to three, and the entry system only has to cope with a peak rather than a wall. Departures do not spread. The whistle blows and effectively the entire ground stands up inside sixty seconds, and from that moment the constraint is not the concourse, not the gates, but whatever is waiting outside: a station with a platform capacity, a road network with signal timings, a bus fleet with a finite number of vehicles.

This is why kick-off times are negotiated with transport operators rather than simply chosen, and why local authorities can effectively veto a slot. A match finishing at quarter past ten in a city whose last useful services depart twenty-five minutes later means a station attempting to absorb thirty thousand people in that window, which it cannot, so either the operator holds extra services or the safety advisory group says no.

The clubs are not usually the villains here. Broadcasters want the slot, the league sells the slot, and the club is left explaining to supporters why they will be getting home at two in the morning from a fixture they had no say in scheduling.

What I find genuinely poor is the pretence that this is unpredictable. Engineering work on the railway is planned months ahead and published. Fixtures are moved weeks ahead. The number of occasions where a televised kick-off is announced for a date on which the line into that city is closed is not small, and it is not a scheduling accident. It is one party optimising for its own calendar and pushing the cost onto twenty thousand people with jobs on Monday.

The measurable version of egress that stadium operators actually use is clearance time to a place of comparative safety, and it is a hard engineering number.

The number nobody computes is clearance time to a bed. If somebody published that for every away fixture in a season, the argument about kick-off times would change shape within a week, because the outrage would finally have units.