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Football journalism in England is irretrievably broken
My argument in this piece is in the title – and the consequence is that we are not only being very badly served by football journalism but we are also being misled by football journalism
My view is that the footballing media tend to copy each other. In one sense one could argue that this is inevitable – after all they are dealing with factual affairs… a particular game, a particular player, a particular transfer. And yet in other areas of reporting the press are very much offering different lines, whether it is in terms of film or play reviews, or commenting on political matters. Only in football do the pundits in the media collide.
I like to go to the movies, and it is commonplace for me to see a film get four or five stars in one paper and one or two in another. That’s how it goes, and that is to be welcomed. But in football…
Let’s take one example: Arsène Wenger’s terrible red card record. If you were reading the British press, or listening on the radio or TV you would have heard this story repeatedly almost daily during the first four or five years of Wenger’s reign. “This is the 30th red card during Wenger’s time at Arsenal,” they would shout (or in their own strange lingo, “crow”).
What is interesting is that not one of them ever compared the period of time they were quoting with what happened in other clubs. It would have been so easy to say, “There are been 25 red cards at Arsenal during the past five seasons, compared with x at Manchester United and y at Liverpool.” But no one did.
I want to make this point quite clear. I am not saying, “The Mail is anti-Arsenal because they just quoted Wenger’s red card record and didn’t give any other club’s record, so that we could measure the enormity of his crime.” Rather, my point is that no one gave the contrast. I heard that story 100 times over a period of a couple of years, and not one journalist said, “The score is Wenger 25, Ferguson 19″ or whatever.
And yet that would have been a great story for a reporter. Everyone else misses the point, and doesn’t give the comparative results – so one journo does the work, and gets a scoop. Great. But it didn’t happen.
And my question is, why was that? Why did every media outlet run the story in the same way? It would never happen in any other area of journalism where each media outlet likes to be seen as different.
We can see this same problem in smaller, everyday stories. Bendtner is a useless forward who can’t score. Bendtner has scored six goals in his five games since coming back from a very serious injury.
You could almost see the journalists moving together as if pulled by some invisible force, from one approach to the other, before and after Porto. After the Hull game, following the new official journalist line, Match of the Day even went so far as to point out how Bendtner got his goal by doing what the good forwards do in every game, follow up on the possibility. Bendtner saw the shot, and ran on just in case the keeper made a slip. They praised him for that. That’s the new official line. Bendtner good.
Let’s try another approach. You need an English spine to a team to win the league. No analysis, no statistics, no nothing. Just a statement repeated endlessly from one paper to another.
Or refereeing. The criticism of refs and linesmen on is continual – which looking at the way in which the offside for the Hull penalty was missed may seem like a good idea. But the issue of why these mistakes are made is hardly touched. Are the refs badly trained? Is it impossible to get these things right because of the speed of the game? Are the refs influenced in an Italian style approach with “favours done”? Are any totally bought by gambling syndicates?
The point is, there is no debate one way or another.
There is in fact an absolute agreement not to follow certain leads. For example, Portsmouth are bust, as we all know. Huge amounts of money have been earned by the club in transfers of players out, and yet they are still utterly broke. How could this be? We don’t know, and no one seems to want to get their hands dirty finding out. Meanwhile three people who worked in very senior jobs at Portsmouth are all separately about to go to court on tax evasion charges (Storrie, Redknapp, Manderic). Is there any connection?
I am not saying that there is, or that any of these three has done anything wrong. Of course not – I don’t know, because I am just a regular guy who writes blogs.
But with the resources of a major national daily, or the BBC, or Sky Sports News, or ITV behind me, I think I would be able to get a sniff of what is going on.
Yet no one does.
So why not?
One reason is that the journalists are lazy. Finding out stories like this is hard work, and it is easier to sit in the pub and make up rumours. (By the way, a new Untold Rumours section starts today on the home page. There’s only one rumour at this moment, but I think we can make it build).
Another reason is that no one wants to rock the boat. Start asking nasty questions and you can get banned from the ground, or get your cosy chats with managers on their mobiles stopped. Your sources of tasty easy stories goes, and that’s that.
Panorama on BBC TV has tried, and did expose the dirty doings of various people like Sam Allerdyce’s son, and Harry Redknapp and co at Portsmouth. After the screening of the show, everyone implicated threatened to sue the BBC. As far as I know no one did. But then, the BBC didn’t follow up either. Maybe they did a deal – “we won’t go further, but please don’t stop talking to us”.
Let me end with an award winning column – Said and Done – in the Observer. Each week this points out some of the silly things said and done in the world of football. A typical entry involves a player saying, “I love this club, I will never leave” on monday, and then putting in a transfer request on Wednesday. There’s the odd comment on the doings of Fifa’s financial committees, and a few silly lines about the lovers of various footballers. So its at that level. Not exactly high powered journalism, but a bit of a jolly read on a sunday.
Except that it stops at that point. It makes fun of footballers’ saying, but never of journalists’ sayings. Daily Mail says, “Cesc is desperate to go to Spain because he is convinced Arsenal will never win anything, and will leave this summer” and then Cesc signs another 27 year extension to his contract the next day. It’s as worthy of coverage in their sort of column, as footballers’ lovers, but they won’t touch it. It’s the football journalists’ cosy club. Don’t knock each other. It doesn’t happen elsewhere (remember the Mirror’s headline: “the Sun caught lying again”? Don’t get that in football.
So that’s the problem. A cosy club with everyone following the same line. By and large football journalism in the UK is broken, and looks to me to be beyond repair.
(c) Tony Attwood 2010
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