The tapes are decaying, the rights are contested, and nobody is paid to care. Sport has a memory problem.
The tapes
A broadcaster's archive from the 1980s sits in a warehouse on a format that can be played by eleven machines in the world. Four of them work. The rights to the footage belong to a company that no longer exists and a league that says it does not know.
What is being lost
Not the finals — those were copied. The Tuesday nights. The relegation deciders. The match your grandfather still talks about, which will exist, within a decade, only in the way he tells it.