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Premier League won't screen 3 p.m. Saturday matches - Scudamore

Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore has told the BBC that games will not be broadcast at 3 p.m. on Saturdays "as a solidarity issue."

Scudamore -- who said the Premier League would continue to crackdown on illegal streams of matches -- added that broadcasting top-flight matches at Saturday's traditional kick-off time would have too much impact on the rest of the game.

Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live's "Breakfast" programme, he said: "The game is best served by not broadcasting on Saturday at 3 p.m. for grassroots reasons.

"The amount of football that's played on Saturday afternoon is still a huge percentage -- by far the vast majority of adult 11-a-side football is played on a Saturday afternoon.

"You have all the Football League games. They can't all be displaced, and we think that if we were broadcasting all of ours we would be impacting upon that.

"So really it is a sort of solidarity issue for us in terms of the rest of football, and I think that the Saturday 3 p.m. window will remain protected."

Scudamore added that the Premier League would "have a season-long streaming 'superblock'" which will mean it will be "blocking an awful lot of illegal streams."

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