The crowd you hear on television is a mix desk decision

Stadium atmosphere reaches viewers through a set of faders, and where those faders sit quietly changes how a match is remembered.

Somebody chooses how loud the crowd is. That is the part most viewers never think about. There are microphones on the halfway line, microphones behind the goals, microphones on the touchline picking up boots and shouts, and a person in a truck deciding the balance between all of them and the commentary. The atmosphere you experience is an edit.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a craft, and mostly a good one. But it has consequences. Push the effects microphones up and a scrappy goalless draw feels tense and febrile. Pull them down under the commentary and the same match feels flat and the pundits sound like they are talking in a library. The football did not change. Your memory of it did.

The place it matters most is refereeing controversy. A stadium roars at a challenge, the mix carries the roar, and the viewer at home absorbs the crowd's verdict before the replay has even started. By the time the slow motion arrives, the emotional judgement is already made, and slow motion has its own well known problem of making every contact look worse than it was. Sound plus slow motion is a machine for manufacturing outrage about a foul that was, in real time, quite ordinary.

I am not arguing for silent broadcasts. Sound is most of what makes football watchable at home, and the effects microphones near the touchline, the ones that pick up the thud of a clearance and a defender screaming for a step up, are the best thing in the whole production. They are also the most honest, because they are close and unmixed and they capture the game rather than the reaction to it.

What I would like is a bit less shame about the quiet ones. Not every fixture on a wet Tuesday is a cauldron. When the mix insists otherwise, it flattens the difference between a real occasion and a routine one, and that difference is worth preserving, because a sport where everything sounds enormous eventually has nothing left to sound enormous about.

Turn the commentary off sometime and listen to the crowd alone. It is a different match. Slower, colder, and in some ways more accurate than the one you were sold.