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By Tony Attwood
There are indeed three separate worlds of football, which exist in England. The same three worlds might also exist in other countries, although I’m sticking with England for the moment.
First, there is the football world created by the media. We all know about that because we see the TV, listen to the radio and read the newspapers. I don’t need to describe that further; it has been covered here regularly. It contains match descriptions and reports of course, but mostly it is concerned with pure speculation, 97% of which is fantasy.
The second is the world of training and preparation that occupies most of the time of most players: the four or five days, which are not just about getting fit and staying fit, but also about understanding the tactics the manager wants the team to use.
No clubs want the media to write about the training sessions and the planning, of course, for part of the point of it all is to surprise the opposition in terms of what the club is doing. We may be used to seeing details of the team that is going to play, displayed on the morning of the game, but in fact, even there, something like 80% of the line-ups have at least one error in them, and that is just in terms of players, not tactics.
Obviously, oppositions prepare themselves by looking at the players they suspect will play in the next game, and generally, they make fairly accurate guesses about the line-up of the team they are playing. But clubs with bigger squads and not too many injuries can seek to spring the occasional surprise. It doesn’t happen often, because most aspects of football are obvious – we all know, for example, where Saka is going to play and how he is going to influence the game.
And for most fans, that is football. The football they see at matches or on TV, and the football they read about and hear about in commentaries. And it is interesting to note just how much the commentators claim to know about what is going wrong and how it can be changed – and yet no one thinks to employ them as managers or at least consultants. Surely, one might think, with all that knowledge, they ought to be involved in football itself, rather than just talking about it, but they are not, simply because most commentary is about being wise after the event.
Now all that is of course known. But behind those two elements of football – the football written about in the press and talked about on radio and TV, and the football they actually see when going to a game, there is a third level of football, and this is one that can be utterly sinister and, for many of us, quite nauseating.
And it is a level of football that is not only not written about or commented upon, but one that if anyone tries to write or talk about it publicly, and with any detail (mentioning for example, individuals or clubs by name) that writer is likely to have his/her credentials removed and be threatened with legal action. In short, the career as a football journalist – and quite possibly a sports journalist – will be over.
This secretive third level is not unique to football, although in many other areas of work it has been exposed and reduced in significance. Football howevre is different, because the number of chances a player has to make it as a professional is very limited.
We have 92 professional football clubs in England, which means maybe around 1600 professional players. That might sound a lot, but compared to the number of young men who want to be professional players and who have been talked up at county level, it is tiny.
So the word goes out – if you want to be a professional footballer, don’t talk out of turn. And most particularly, don’t ever mention the unseen menace of bullying. Bullying leaves no physical scars, but its mental scars can remain for life. And it appears the number of absolute out-and-out bullies that there are in football management and on the training pitches is huge.
Now, I stress I do not work in professional football – but what I have heard is enough to make me think it is real, it is widespread, and many journalists who cover football are totally aware of this, and are colluding with the clubs by never mentioning it – simply to ensure they keep their contacts happy.
But England has a tradition of bullying – many adults will probably recall a few bullies among fellow pupils and on the teaching staff of the schools they attended. And there is little sign that in spite of various campaigns, that number has been significantly reduced.
But progress in football appears to have been much slower (although as ever it is hard to prove a negative). But it is a fact that while schools in England are required to have and implement policies with measures to prevent bullying, there is nothing like this in football clubs. Nor is it clear in most clubs who is in charge of stopping bullying by one player on another or by a trainer or coach.
Likewise, there appears to be no government oversight on the issue of bullying within clubs, either by player on player or by management upon individual players, and there seems to be no legislation that ensures that football clubs are actively taking the matter of bullying seriously.
Indeed, it is more than likely that if the issue were ever to be raised by the media or the FA or any other body about bullying, there would simply be the answer, “Well it might happen in some clubs, but I can assure you it doesn’t happen here.”
And we are simply asked to believe that.
So I would guess that no one mentions bullying within football because not talking about the issue is part of the unwritten contract between clubs and the media. A contract which in essence says, “Don’t mention x y and z, and we’ll be cooperative with interviews. But go into that territory, and suddenly no one will be available.”
Of course, by no means does every club take a relaxed view towards bullying by staff and/or by players. Like schools, they will all tell you that they have a strong anti-bullying policy, but we do begin to wonder.
The problem of course, is that I can’t publish what we are told, simply because any football club I mentioned could tie me up in court forever more with resultant legal costs I could not afford. And yes of course, it is possible that the information I’ve picked up along the way, which is suggestive that bullying is a problem in football, is false.
