So.
What an unmitigated omnishambles. I don't know if there's ever been a Eurovision Song Contest so full of self-inflicted unforced errors at literally every level. Not the time they wanted to Celebrate Diversity by making three white dudes the hosts, or the time Latvia forgot to record half the postcards, or the entirety of the Toto Cotugno Experience (allora). Never has Eurovision been so broken. And as this year's winner Nemo said, maybe Eurovision needs a little bit of fixing. So what can be done to fix it? Shockingly I, a person on the internet, have ideas. We'll start with the obvious one.
1. New Leadership at the EBU
At every single possible opportunity (and several seemingly impossible opportunities) in the leadup to the Grand Final, the European Broadcasting Union failed to act with the welfare of its most important figures, the contestants themselves, as their utmost priority. We are constantly hearing that this is the biggest live music event in the world, and yet, over the past decade it has been turned into a big budget version of a sadistic 2000s reality TV spectacle.
That is not the fault of a single person or a single broadcaster (indeed, the single person many in the contest fandom have blamed for most of these gradual changes in the past, Swedish producer Christer Bjorkman, was likely the very person who saved Eurovision with a running order this year that was atypical in the places it needed to be); however, it is symptomatic of a rot within the union that has seeped into every aspect of the production. The positions of all of the people in positions of oversight at the EBU is now completely untenable. However, there are three in particular who need singling out due to the nature of their roles.
First and most obviously is the Executive Supervisor of the contest, Martin Österdahl. Whatever failings were on display during the contest – and there were too many to list here, to the point it was not implausible to suggest that at minimum half of the nations competing would be completely logical withdrawals next year, even before the annual quibbles from less well-off countries about affording the entry fees – they all rest at his feet. He is the public face of the contest, and it is abundantly clear that the public have no faith in him after this mess. There is no way for the contest to recover while is in any way involved with it. (Also, the next Executive Supervisor needs to care a hell of a lot less about building up their own personal legend to the point of approving a musical number about how sexy they are, and more about doing the job competently. Thanks in advance.)
Second, EBU Director General Noel Curran. It may be harder for Noel to vanish entirely, being married to 1996 winner Eimear Quinn, but he was never an incredibly public face as it was. However, during the leadup to the final this year he was interviewed by host broadcaster SVT about the myriad ongoing complaints with this year's Israeli delegation and claimed the EBU “saw that Israel's TV company had not broken any of the EBU's rules regarding the competition”. This is indefensible. The only two ways to read this statement are that either he and the EBU were too ignorant to see the repeated and brazen flouting of the contest's publicly available rules that the Israeli delegation was taking part in, in which case they are unfit for their jobs, or the EBU knew that Israel was breaking the rules without abandon and actively did nothing, putting the other contestants and delegations at repeated risk, in which case they are unfit for their jobs. The additional concerns about the contest's main sponsor being an Israeli company who may have been pressuring them behind the scenes are irrelevant. Under his watch, the people he had a duty of care were repeatedly endangered. He must go.
But it's not just the in person care that's an issue. A huge part of why the particular situation with this year's Dutch entrant, Joost Klein, was so catastrophic was the complete and utter silence from the EBU throughout as the story was developing. With the heightened emotions of this year's contest, more than ever the communication needed to be clear, concise, and clarifying. We got none of that, allowing social media to run rampant with speculation ranging from fanciful to outright defamatory; instead, we got a breathless Twitter post about the latest reunion of 2000s pop group Alcazar for one of the intervals (more on the intervals later). It would be bad enough in the hands of a career social media manager. But a few years ago, the social media presence of one of the world's biggest events was taken over by British journalist Rob Holley, a man whose relevant expertise appears to have largely been “got a terminally online fandom to rewatch things at a time when nobody could leave their house”. (Yes, this is as stupid as it sounds.) To put it bluntly, the EBU was wholly unprepared to have to do crisis control for an event where skills for crisis control are an essential part of the job. It's time for a new approach led by new people.
2. Ban Israel from the Contest
Once the EBU has new management, the first thing that must be done is the single thing that could have been done months ago to prevent the contest bringing itself into disrepute in the first place: banning Israel from entering while it is committing a genocide (as implicated by the International Court of Justice and visible to anyone with even a passing awareness of the news). The usual lies and excuses that the Israeli broadcaster doesn't represent Israel as a whole are just that, lies and excuses. The graphics show national flags, not broadcaster logos. Greece has never given twelve points to the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation. Belgium doesn't get two entries every year because it has two broadcasters. It is a blatant and unconscionable attempt at gaslighting the audience because the EBU is too lazy, incompetent, compromised, or all three to take any meaningful action.
Even if you were to come up with a heretofore unseen logic that makes the “but broadcasters are not countries!” schtick explanation palatable to the vast majority of the viewing public (in which case why haven't you done it by now), the fact remains that the members of the Israeli delegation this year broke so many of the contest's fundamental rules so frequently and so blatantly and so unafraid of consequences that it is clear they are likely to do so again if given another opportunity. We also have what appears to be strong evidence of attempts to rig the televote from the same country. They have proven they cannot be trusted to behave in the contest setting, and it has happened several times over recent years. It's time for the EBU to admit it's too much hassle. Get rid.
3. Reference Group Composition
The priority when staging Eurovision must be making the event as safe as possible for the delegations involved. Currently, the EBU Reference Group that handles the decision making processes with the Executive Supervisor is made entirely of television producers. That's fine in moderation, but one of the key priorities must be ensuring the welfare of acts and their delegations, rather than solely producing a television program at the expense of those required to make the program happen, as has clearly been the case in this and other recent years. The way to fix this is simple: add an extra one or two people to the reference group each year who were former Eurovision contestants and know what needs to be done to handle those sorts of issues. The group meets only a handful of times a year. Having an extra person sit in on a Zoom call every couple of months is not going to be prohibitively expensive. There are certainly other issues as well – the current members of the Reference Group skew overwhelmingly towards western Europe, for example – but those are standard, workable issues rather than important changes needing to be made for Eurovision's continued presence.
4. Give the Dutch a Guaranteed Place in the Grand Final
This year, the Dutch won the right to compete in the Grand Final – quite handily, finishing a runaway second in its Semi Final – however, as a result of the investigation into Joost Klein were unable to compete in it. They obviously can't enter the same song again next year, and even if the police investigation is fruitless Joost himself may not want to return after this traumatic and entirely avoidable experience at the incompetent hands of the EBU, but they have earned a place in the finale that they haven't used. There's no reason the EBU couldn't just make the Netherlands an automatic qualifier in 2025 as a way of atoning for the (hopefully) previous management's turducken of negligence.
That's really the bare minimum though. Frankly, given everything the Netherlands have done for the Eurovision Song Contest over the years – missing only four contests in the event's history (two due to it being held on the Dutch version of Armistice Day, two in the relegation era), establishing the 'winner hosts the next contest' format, saving the contest's entire existence after the 1969 tie, introducing postcards, hosting at short notice and with no budget in 1980, creating the special Covid broadcast in 2020 of their own volition after the contest was cancelled, then hosting for real in 2021 when nobody would have begrudged them for refusing, being the only country to compete at every Junior Eurovision (and in several years being just about the only western country there at all), hosting the biggest preparty concert every year, and buying huuuuuuge numbers of tickets to the contest every year – it really is time to expand the Big 5 into a Big 6 and give them a permanent grand final berth. They already put the most money in after the Big 5. Switzerland might be the birthplace of Eurovision, and Italy might be its parent, but the Netherlands is Eurovision's home. They've well and truly earned it.
5. Finally Learn the Difference Between Apolitical and Amoral
It's wonderful for Eurovision to try and be apolitical. It would be better if it was even possible. Politics are everywhere at Eurovision, from Bambie Thug repeatedly quoting Harry Potter in their song while ensuring its author (a known fan of the contest in past years and a known idol of transphobes now) couldn't celebrate it by dressing as the trans pride flag, to jokes about how voting for your neighbours is a sure way to get your song disgraced but when Sweden gets twelve points from Norway that's clearly just good taste, to Australia's ongoing and commendable commitment to ethnically diverse acts because of the remit of the channel it airs on. It's never going to stop, and the EBU has to stop (1) pretending it can control it and (2) thinking that taking no action is not, in fact, taking the side of the oppressor for political purposes. The heavy handed nature of the censorship this year as a result of current events is moderately understandable in context, but there was an easy way to avoid it and, as we've already established, the European Broadcasting Union under Martin Österdahl has never met a dangerously stupid decision it wasn't willing to go out of its way to make.
There are a couple of possible, imperfect solutions, but the one that stands out as the most likely to be successful is just making it part of the rules for each delegation to take full responsibility for the consequences of anything their act and delegation does (both on stage and during the rehearsal period), with the EBU and host broadcaster responsible for any other issues like stage invaders and so forth. It sounds so obvious when you see it that it's kind of difficult to work out why it wasn't already the setup.
6. Revert to the Old Combined Scoring System (in Both the Semis and the Grand Final)
I mentioned earlier that the contest in its current form appears to be being produced with the mindset of a reality show. Nowhere is that more evident than the changes made over the last decade with regards to the voting system, with a system that worked well for four decades being destroyed simply because the EBU – after making a tweak a couple of years earlier that meant a winner was announced as soon as it was mathematically impossible for anyone to outscore them rather than after the final vote – decided to split the jury and televote scores into two distinct score sets, revealing jury votes with the traditional Tour of Drunk European TV Presenters and then combining all of Europe's televotes together and having hosts rattle them off in a segment that at best will be either an anticlimax or a deus ex machina and at worst is actively humiliating to those who receive low televote scores and those who finish near the bottom of the scoreboard and have to watch the final ten or so minutes of the show without any chance of a surprise twelve points from a country that seems to be trolling everyone.
In addition, the last two contests have changed the rules for the semi finals to remove the juries, making the choice of who qualifies for the Grand Final dependent entirely on televotes. On paper, this sounds great, in that it will stop acts riding to the semi final without public support, limiting the potential of anyone experiencing the famed nul points result. In practice, it makes no difference in the bit it was supposed to fix (since the countries that usually end up in that situation are automatic qualifiers that don't need the semi finals), and makes the juries too powerful in the finale (as the televote fractures while jurors tend to vote relatively uniformly on alleged merit). A scoring system that actively fails to accomplish the one thing it sets out to do is not a system that can be kept.
7. Return to a Randomised Running Order
For the first nearly six decades of the contest's history, the order in which countries perform has been chosen by a random draw. In 2013, however, this started to be chosen mostly by producers, with host countries selecting their slot randomly and everyone else randomly selecting whether producers had to stick them in the first or second half upon qualifying. In 2024, this format was changed again, with only half of the qualifier draws marked and the rest giving producers the power to slot them anywhere. This has made the contest predictable. The logic used to justify it is that it prevents songs that are too similar from being next to each other and cancelling themselves out (which is a problem with the songs, not the draw; if you can't stand out from one other song you don't deserve to win in a field of 26). In practice, it has allowed regular contest producer Christer Bjorkman too much control over who wins, with about half of the positions in the final running order complete writeoffs before the final even begins. While it's true that before the rules changed the first time there had been a long run where every winner had been near the end of the running order: it's a random draw. You get anomalies sometimes.
However, of the eleven winners since Bjorkman started assigning the running orders, six have performed within the very narrow range between 9th and 12th, with the other five all being between 18th and 24th. Runners-up are even worse: the two drawn to perform in the first half were both in Slot #13, while all nine of the others have been between Slots #20 and #25. It becomes less visible if you also consider third-, fourth-, and fifth- placers, but there's still a clear benefit to those limited ranges of slots. If half the countries can tell they have no chance just from where they've been positioned in the show, why are they bothering? And if casual viewers can tell half the countries have no chance just from where they've been positioned in the show, why are they bothering to watch the first few songs at all, or to stay in the room while songs 14-17 are on? There's no benefit to anyone from Bjorkman trying to split the perceived 'favourites' (based on WHAT, Christer?) and putting them in the same slots all the time. There's also no benefit to having countries like Albania send songs that suit their own culture every year only to repeatedly get dumped into the #2 deathslot as sacrificial lambs. The power for producers to put their finger on the scales and affect results needs to end.
(For the record, the non-randomised slots given to Bjorkman's home country of Sweden under his control: 13, 10, 24, 20, 9, 25, 20, 9.)
8. Ditch the 'United by Music' Slogan
It's clearly a lie. Just look at this year.
To be more specific, United by Music was an absolutely perfect slogan for 2023, a contest that had to be held outside the country that won the right to host for safety reasons. It is not a slogan that works as a generic branding phrase that can be kept every year instead of making a new one for each contest. Each year, the contest's slogan – usually some sort of vapid 'why can't we all get along?' platitude like 'Come Together' or 'Building Bridges' is used to develop the contest's visual identity, making it feel unique and tailored to its home country. This year, when that option was not available to Sweden, we got the most bland contest in decades, both visually and in terms of everything going on.
It's true that a lot of this year's problems were probably due to production's first choices not wanting to be associated with Israel (for more on how the gormless corporate scuzzballs at the EBU could have done literally anything to fix the situation, please refer to Point #2), but... in 2021 we got a unique version of the typical 'past acts sing a medley' interval that was perfect for what they were able to do under Covid restrictions at a time. In 2022, we had peak Italian content with one of the hosts singing some of the country's greatest musical hits and another singing some of his own. In 2023, the BBC had the unenviable task of trying to do something celebrating two countries in very different circumstances on opposite sides of the continent, while also showing they'd finally learned what modern Eurovision was, and nailed it by having six past acts with very different styles return to cover iconic songs from the host city of Liverpool, ending with all of the interval performers, the hosts, backup dancers, a group of locals with former winner Ruslana in Kyiv, and a packed stadium singing the city's unofficial anthem You'll Never Walk Alone in solidarity with Ukraine. It was always going to be tough to top that, but when you've been saddled with a slogan that doesn't fit what you're trying to do, a production that's utterly devoid of character, and an EBU that was actively and repeatedly undermining even the little positive impact that slogan could have had, having a brief appearance from Alcazar and constant appearances throughout the week from 1999 winner Charlotte Perrelli and sketch character Lynda Woodruff just do not cut it. It was atrocious, and we expect far better from any country hosting Eurovision, let alone one like Sweden that loves Eurovision so much they did a parody song during one of the semi finals titled We Just Love Eurovision Too Much.
If the EBU does still insist on an overarching slogan, though, I have a suggestion:
Music Speaks.
Maybe it's time for them to start listening.
