Why can I not watch this?

Broadcast rights are sold country by country. A competition does not have one worldwide broadcaster; it has a different one in each market, and sometimes several splitting the fixtures between them. If nobody in your country bought a particular match, it is not shown there — while the same match is on television normally somewhere else.

The second cause is a scheduling rule rather than a rights gap. Britain blocks live football between roughly 2.45pm and 5.15pm on Saturdays under UEFA Article 48, which England and Scotland are the only associations in Europe still using. Those fixtures are played, and broadcast in most other countries, and cannot be shown live in the country hosting them.

So a missing broadcast is a statement about your location, not about the match. If we hold no listing for your country, we say so rather than naming a channel that will not carry it.

Within one country, a competition's rights are rarely sold whole. They are broken into packages, split by kick-off slot, by pick order, or by platform, and different buyers take different packages. That is why following one league can require more than one subscription, and why the answer changes fixture by fixture rather than season by season.

It is also why a competition guide that names a single broadcaster is usually wrong for some of its matches. We list the broadcaster per competition and per country, and where a competition is split we name each holder we have confirmed.

Where we hold nothing for your country, we show nothing. A named broadcaster you cannot actually watch on is worse than an admitted gap — it costs you the kick-off.

Almost every fixture list is published in the local time of the country hosting the match, or of the publisher — and those are often not the same. A time without a named zone beside it cannot be converted reliably.

The trap is that countries change their clocks on different dates. The United States switches in mid-March and early November; the European Union switches at the end of March and end of October. For about three weeks each spring and one week each autumn, the offset most people carry in their head is wrong by an hour, in the direction that makes them miss kick-off.

We render kick-off times in your own timezone, taken from your device, with the zone generated rather than hard-coded — a fixed label like "BST" is wrong for five months of the year even in Britain.

A streaming service does not license a film once for the world. It licenses it per territory, and often cannot license it at all where a local broadcaster already holds an exclusive deal. The result is that the same service, with the same branding and the same subscription, carries a different catalogue in each country it operates in.

Cost drives this as much as exclusivity. The same title can be worth very different amounts in different markets, so a service may buy it in one country and decline it in another.

Licences also expire on their own schedule per territory. A title vanishing from your country while remaining in another is normal and is not an error on the service's part.

Broadcast rights are sold on multi-year cycles that expire at different times in different markets. A competition can change hands in one country in a year when nothing changes anywhere else, and streaming licences lapse per territory on their own timetable.

So treat any listing — ours or anyone's — as a strong starting point rather than a guarantee for a given week. For anything you would be disappointed to miss, the broadcaster's own schedule is the last word.

If you find one that has gone stale, telling us is genuinely useful — it gets corrected.

This is one of the most-searched versions of the availability question, so it deserves a straight answer rather than silence.

Geographic restrictions exist because rights are sold territory by territory. Working around one generally breaches the service's own terms of use, and it is not something we will walk you through — a site that lists where things are legally shown cannot also be a guide to getting around the licence. It would put us back among the products this one was deliberately built away from.

What we can tell you is what is genuinely available where you are, including whether something is free to air rather than behind a subscription. Where the answer is that nothing carries it in your country, we say that plainly instead of implying a workaround.

Our sports listings are compiled from rights holders' own published schedules rather than inferred from elsewhere. That keeps them narrow: we cover the competitions and countries we have data for, and nothing beyond them.

So an empty answer means we have not reached your country, not that the competition is unavailable there. It almost certainly has a broadcaster; we simply have not confirmed which, and would rather leave a gap than fill it with something plausible.

Film and television availability works differently: it comes from a metadata provider covering 139 countries, so the coverage is far wider. It is what the provider currently lists for your country, and it changes as licences move between services.