Media

The media in Britain often represent a bandwagon – someone creates a story, and everyone else jumps on it.  You can always tell the papers that have just followed the lead of others because they are the ones that run little reprints of their past stories, under headlines such as

How The Times broke the story of…

Yes, they broke the story to their own readers, but invariably they are just running a story that has been widely reported elsewhere.

Towards the end of 2007 Sir Alex Ferguson started just such a story, complaining that he had suffered abuse from the Arsenal supporters behind him in the Arsenal / Man U league game. He said that he had sent a dossier to Arsenal so that they could deal with the fans who had abused him.

Within a week Harry Redknapp, who had recently been arrested by the police and then released on police bail, was also complaining (this time at Villa) about what people in the crowd were saying about him, and straight after that Sol Campbell joined in with an ill-defined complaint.

The papers and radio stations took this up as a big debating point, with several making the point that if anyone had suffered in this way it was Arsene Wenger who had been the subject to the most awful abuse every single match from Manchester Utd fans with several other clubs’ fans copying their songs.

Most papers said that it had all gone too far, but none had any idea of how the situation could be changed.  However Barney Ronay in the Guardian did pick up on Campbell’s comment to Radio 4 that this was a human rights situation.  As he said, Campbell has used football to amass a fortune of £20 million – which is something in itself.  But much more to the point, how do we stop it.   Suppose you stop Tottenham fans singing “Yid-Army” on the ground that “Yid” is an offence word even if used about yourselves – would you stop the fans also saying “Salami” to the same melody and rhythm?   Would you stop Man U fans singing the anti-Wenger song without the words – or maybe with just some of the words?

This story shows the stupidity of the story – no one has any idea what can be done to stop this.  The one amusing aspect is how it rebounded on Man U.   The Ferguson character who started it all off probably doesn’t know that the fans of his club sing that abusive anti-Wenger song all the time (his English isn’t that good after all).  But he has certainly been told now – you want Arsenal to take action, then you sort out your fans.

But, the Guardian really did get this right, in their “What won’t happen” column.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith proposes a package of measures to stop fans abusing players…  This has coincided with the game being priced out of the reach of ordinary people and foot ball stadiums being overrun by what my informants classify as a load of middle class tossers…”