It was also shown a lot earlier wasn’t it? I’m sure it first aired early evening and then there was a bit of a backlash and got moved to the more traditional later night slot.
Plus everyone remembers Andy Townsend’s tactics truck. Think there’s an uncomfortable interview with Ugo Eghiogu as they analyse his red card in full detail. 
I never understood the backlash about it. Because it’s not like the 10:30pm slot was gone. You had two choices.
It was a genius move. One of the reasons football isn’t usually shown on a Saturday night is because people are out. And is why MOTD has the morning replay.
You either had a choice. Catch up on the football at 7pm, then go out. Or if you went out early evening, you could be back in time for 10:30pm. Plus the Sunday morning showing too.
ITV granted, the lack of actual football, as well as dreadful punditry, made the show awful to a lot of people. But they weren’t afraid to take risks.
I think what happened was
1. The bad PR as a result of their poor execution
2. The sheer blasphemy of taking away the rights from the BBC
…Led to them accepting defeat. By Christmas 2001, the public perception was already against them, because of those two factors. And they only had themselves to blame.
I think they accepted the game was up by the end of 2001, and just kept doing things the same way into the end of the contract for the next 3 years, while raking in the advertising money.
Add to that, with ITV Digital collapsing there wasn’t much of a hunger to put The Premiership right. They were knocking it out of the park with their Champions League coverage, and just doubled down on that, rather than fix The Premiership, and just waited until the contract ran out and never speak of it again.
In a way I feel for them, because when you take something as sacred to the nation as MOTD away, you have a very thin tightrope to get it right. They had to be almost perfect. But because they executed it so badly, by Christmas 2001 4 months in, it was like the public perception was set in stone. And they just lost motivation to put it right.
If they got the rights again, and even if they tried to recapture the nostalgia by using the U2 theme, and actually put on a decent show with proper punditry and extensive highlights, as well as capture the “defund the bbc” crowd who are glad to see them lose MOTD, who knows maybe it could work. But that’s only because it’s been 20 years since, and enough time has passed.
But if they tried before that, it would of been hard to get the public on side. In 2014, there was rumours ITV were putting together a bid, and there was Twitter meltdowns with people sharing pictures of Andy Townsends tactics. 2014 was 10 years on since 2004, so it was still relatively fresh compared to 2024 when the next rights are up (a whole generation).
In summary, they dared to take risks, but once the public perception was against them, they gave up. Which is a shame as they still had 3 years to run. But it was always going to be hard convincing the public they could be better than MOTD. It was a thin tightrope, but their poor execution made that tightrope thinner.
