Key Findings

• 57% of married Brits say the club football season does more damage to their relationship than a summer tournament does.
• Of that group, 72% say the difference is that a tournament ends and the league season does not.
• Female sign-ups on a Saturday afternoon run 29% higher on a fixture weekend than on an international-break weekend, peaking between five and six.
• The results come from a poll of 2,400 married members by IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s leading extramarital dating site.

One of the busiest hours of the week for women looking for an affair is five to six on a Saturday afternoon. That is full time for a three o’clock kick-off. The football is back, and this year it does not stop. There is no international break until 26 September, and the league season runs to May.

IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s leading extramarital dating site, polled 2,400 married members about the return of the league season. 57% say the club season does more damage to their relationship than a summer tournament does. Women said so more often than men, at 64% against 50%.

Hours are not really the issue. Of the 57%, 72% put it down to the open end of the thing: a tournament finishes in July, while the league season runs through to May, with thirty-three match weekends in it and five midweek rounds on top.

48% say plans are now built around the fixture list, weddings and birthdays included, and 43% say football has taken midweek as well now that cup ties and European nights sit alongside the Saturday routine. 22% of all those polled have already argued about football in the two weekends since the season started.

38% say the other half of it is that nobody treats the league season as an occasion. A tournament is something the whole country knows is on, and being sidelined by it at least comes with a bit of sympathy attached. Nobody is sympathetic about a wet Saturday against Coventry, and nobody thinks to ask how she is getting on with it either.

The site’s own figures point the same way. Female sign-ups on a Saturday afternoon, between three and six, run 29% higher on a fixture weekend than on an international-break weekend, which are the only weekends inside a season that carry no club football.

The effect is strongest in cities where a fixture takes up the middle of a Sunday. This weekend Everton play Manchester United at two o’clock and Arsenal play Chelsea at half four, so Manchester, Liverpool and north London all lose the same afternoon. The Manchester derby falls inside the same run on 13 September, and with the September and October international breaks merged into one, five match weekends now follow each other from the opening day.

Rachel*, 41, from Nottingham, joined in the second week of the season. “In the summer I kept telling myself it was four weeks and then we’d get back to normal. We never got back to normal. It just turned into Saturdays instead. Same thing, except now there’s no date in the diary where it stops. That’s when I started messaging someone. I just wanted somebody to talk to on a Saturday afternoon.”

Jessica Leoni, sex and relationships expert for IllicitEncounters.com, said: “Every summer tournament I’ve worked through here, and there’ve been a lot of them now, we get a spike and then it settles down in July. That’s the bit people forget. The league season never settles down. It starts in August, it’s still going in May, and nobody hands you a date when it finishes.”

She added: “The women contacting us this week are describing an ordinary Saturday rather than a crisis. He’s in front of the football from lunchtime, the phone’s going with the group chat, and by the time the results are in nobody’s asked them a single question all afternoon. The fixture list gives them nothing back this year either. There’s no break until the end of September, so that’s five weekends of it in a row. That’s long enough to make anybody open an app.”

Results

What makes the club season harder than a tournament (of the 57% who say it does more damage; respondents could choose more than one)

What partners say the problem is	% who name it
A tournament ends. This one runs until May	72%
Plans have to be built around the fixture list	48%
It is midweek as well now, not just Saturdays	43%
Nobody treats it as an occasion, so there is no sympathy for it	38%
The club results matter to him more than England’s did	33%
His mood after a club defeat is worse than after an England one	30%
The cost of the subscriptions	16%

*Name has been changed.

About Illicit Encounters

IllicitEncounters.com is the UK’s largest and longest-running extramarital dating site, established in 2004. The site has over one million UK members and publishes regular research on modern infidelity and relationships in Britain, with expert commentary from sex and relationships expert Jessica Leoni.

Press contact: [email protected]