The night of September 29 in Osaka: football, video games and the battle for attention

Three in the morning on September 30, a small bar tucked in an alley near Namba station still had its lights on. I sat in my usual corner, my ears still ringing with the final whistle from the match on the big screen. Right beside me, a group of Japanese students hunched over a laptop, staring at a line of numbers ticking upward every minute. That line crossed 120,975 concurrent players on Steam, the launch-night record for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered. I had just been through ninety minutes of football. They had just been through the opening of a virtual world. One room, one evening, two crowds. I realised what I had sensed for months: football now has to share the table with games, with films, with everything else that competes for people's late-night hours. And that contest plays out more quietly than anyone thinks, right in bars like this one. To understand why I stayed until three in the morning, two facts need to sit side by side. In the early hours of September 30, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered set a record of 120,975 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB. The previous record was 103,329, set in 2026, right after Netflix's The Witcher series premiered. The remaster was announced by CD Projekt Red at Gamescom, released free for existing owners, while the Nintendo Switch 2 version has to be bought again. Reading those two lines, anyone in entertainment sees a pattern at once: a media event outside the game itself, here the Netflix series, can pull people back to the game. That is cross-media resonance, something football is also learning to exploit: a star's documentary, a kit launch, a buzz-generating friendly. But there is a detail that is easy to miss. The record announcement states clearly that the Steam figures do not include other platforms. A careful writer leaves that note in; a careless one turns it into a "global record". The gap between those two ways of writing is sometimes the gap between trustworthy journalism and a pile of empty headlines. I am telling this story to talk about football. Because that night, in one room, I saw the future of the football audience. Football once had a privilege: immediacy. You cannot rewind a goal without knowing the result, cannot replay the feeling of the ball settling in the net. Ninety minutes happen once, then vanish. That privilege was the fortress of this sport against every form of recorded entertainment. That fortress is being squeezed from two sides. The first is technology. A game launch now carries immediacy too: hundreds of thousands of people logging in on the same night, waiting, thrilling, sharing on social media. That crowd is not in the stands, but it is still a crowd, with all the emotions of a crowd. The record of 120,975 concurrent players carries a communal moment, rather than stopping at a technical figure. The second side is time. How many free hours does a working person in Osaka have in an evening? Three, four, not counting sleep. In that span they must choose: watch their team's match, grind a new game, or finish the season of the show they left unfinished. Three options, one budget of time. The real contest happens inside the fan's clock, not on the pitch. I once thought football always wins that contest, because it is the number one team sport on the planet. I was half wrong. Football wins when the match is an event: a derby, a final, a day the national team takes the field. Football loses on ordinary nights, when a mid-season round is just procedure, when your team plays its fourth match in ten days and everyone can predict the result. This is what I learned from my own trade. I follow the team through every round of the annual season, sitting in the press area, recording that the team's rhythm is not in the players' legs but in the shared pulse of the whole city. On nights the city's pulse races, the stands are full. On nights the city's pulse slows, I hear the plastic seats knocking together as people get up to leave early. Competing with games and films does not directly weaken football. It exposes an old truth: football is only strong when it creates the feel of an event. When it becomes a habit rather than a ritual, people will easily switch channels to something fresher, flashier, and most importantly, something that does not ask them to be patient for ninety minutes. There was one night I counted. After the match, I stayed at the bar two more hours, recording the fans' stories. In those two hours, the bar's television switched across four channels: a recorded Premier League match, a streamer's live broadcast, a long episode of a series, then football again. Nobody in the bar changed seats, but their eyes changed channels constantly. A fan's loyalty today lies not in sticking with one channel, but in which channel they return to most in a week. I think of domestic leagues, where the competition is fiercer still because resources are limited. A match with no stars, no table drama, will struggle to hold viewers against hundreds of other entertainment options. Leagues that want to survive must learn to turn each round into a story, not just a result. For Vietnamese people in Osaka, that competition is harsher still. We watch football on small screens, in rented rooms, after night shifts. When the national team takes the field, the whole neighbourhood goes quiet, the national anthem rings out from phone speakers, and names like Nguyen Quang Hai or Nguyen Tien Linh make people cry. But those nights can be counted on one hand in a year. The other three hundred days, people need something to fill the gap, and games, films and social media are always ready. I do not blame them. I only record it. Because people do not remember the score, they remember why they did not leave the bar. If football no longer holds the reason for people to stay, then the rival does not need to be strong; football only needs to make itself bland. The shout from that night still rings in me, long after Osaka had gone to sleep. The easiest misunderstanding, and also the most dangerous, is the conclusion that games are stealing football's audience. I do not believe it, and I have reason not to. Look at The Witcher 3's record and you see something quite different: it was set on launch night, then will slide over the following weeks. A sharp peak, not a plateau. Annual football works the opposite way: it needs a stable baseline across nine months, not a dazzling spike. Football's real enemy is its own regularity, when regularity turns into tedium. There is one detail in this very story that made me stop. The analysis I read to write this piece labelled a purely gaming event as "football". No teams, no players, no tactics, only a concurrent-player record. If an automated data system can mislabel like that, then a tired editor can repeat the error, and a fan will read a sports report that contains no football at all. That is the silent risk of the era of mixed content: the boundaries between forms blur, and with them, trust blurs. A sports outlet lives on readers believing that when they open the sports page, they will find sport. When that trust erodes, what is lost is not a single article, but a whole habit. At my age, people do not count trophies; they count the nights when the whole city stayed awake together. I still believe football has enough material to create such nights, more than any game, because it belongs to everyone, outdoors, under real lights. But that belief must be paid for with daily work: making even a mid-season round worth staying at the bar until late, and keeping the sports page clean of what does not belong to it. The question I took home that night, when Osaka was asleep: does football still deserve the fans' late hours, or is it living off a habit it no longer builds?