Why the way football is reported is both insulting and incredibly dangerous

by Tony Attwood

There was an editorial in the German magazine Der Spiegel a few months back about the leaders of Turkey and the United States, which says, roughly, “Erdogan and Trump are positioning themselves as the only ones capable of truly understanding the people and speaking for them. It’s their view that freedom of the press does not protect democracy and that the press isn’t reverent enough to them and is therefore useless. They believe that the words that come from their mouths as powerful leaders are the truth and that the media, when it strays from them, is telling lies. That’s autocratic thinking — and it is how you sustain a dictatorship.”

I have seen these sentiments echoed elsewhere and by and large I’d go along with them.

But then I got to thinking how this related to football journalism in England.  Certainly not the same way, because the voices of the leaders of the Premier League and Football Association are rarely heard and are even less rarely held to account by the media.  In fact, thinking on this, it seems to me to be almost the reverse situation.

In the absence of any powerful leadership, the journalists have taken over, “positioning themselves as the only ones capable of truly understanding the people and speaking for them.”  Except for “people” just put “the fans”.

So while the Washington Post are pleased to quote Brian Klass of the LSE,  thinking along the same lines as Der Spiegel saying, “Trump is not yet going nearly as far as Erdogan, who jails journalists, but the preliminary logic is the same — an attempt to undermine the credibility of those who hold power to account,” again we have to think: who is standing up for the regular supporters?

Of course occasionally the media try to, by running stories about the cost of going into a game, but even then they normally don’t bother with research and get their “facts” wrong.  And certainly they do nothing at all to consider the bizarre and dangerous behaviour of PGMO who run refereeing for the Premier League.  Worse, for one year we had the Telegraph running what looked very much like PGMO press releases and counting them as news.

And yet, if they wanted to, the media could run a whole series of campaigns lambasting the way football is run in England, and they could be there asking the difficult questions of the authorities, and holding them to account.  But no they absolutely don’t.

As a result, just as the President of the United States is, as the Washington Post put it, “like a rock in a stream; he creates turbulence and is to be avoided, but everything flows on around him,” so the English journalists in both the press and broadcast media, and their imitators in the bloggettas are the same – the real news flows around them.

As I have said many times before, the football media in England creates the agenda (ie it decides what is important and what it not) and then takes up a position on it.  In doing this it makes up any stories it wants, creates an agenda it wants, and basically become a wholesale irrelevance. Except they do have an influence of sorts.

In short they position themselves so that they are the only ones capable of truly understanding football and the people who pay money to go and watch it.  As Der Spiegel said about Trump and Erdogan, “That’s autocratic thinking — and it is how you sustain a dictatorship.”

Indeed a dictatorship is what we now have in football, because all the mass media follow the same line, because they are all involved in buying the rights from the same people, because they won’t ask the important questions like why, still, can we not have decent investment in grass roots football.  After all we do have a crisis of fitness in the country.

And there are other issues which they won’t go into.  Here are a few…

1: Why is PGMO set up with so few referees that some teams get the same ref over and over again.  While the rest of Europe has moved on since the Italian refereeing scandals the PGMO uniquely is set up to run refereeing exactly as it was in Italy at the time of the corruption scandals.  Now why is that?

2: TV edits football – even on live matches – a technique that was used during the Italian match fixing era, so that publicity was not drawn towards dubious refereeing decisions and the things that spoil the image of the game, like time wasting.

3: Fifa is widely recognised as corrupt – as corrupt now as it was a few years ago – and yet public money is still being paid to the organisation, instead of countries calling time on the whole corruption ethos.  Yes we do get some criticism of Fifa in the media occasionally, but it is all put aside and we join in once more.

4: The media has picked up and used Untold’s figures showing that the reason for England’s failure in international tournaments is primarily down to the lack of fully qualified coaches, compared with the ratio in other countries.  But no pressure has ever been brought to bear on the FA over this.  They report the issue as if to say, “look aren’t we clever to have found this” and then fail to make the point that the FA ought to do something about it.

5: In under two years time the UK will (unless the current political regime is overthrown) walk out of the EU, and immigration will be greatly reduced.  No one seems to want to talk about what happens to the Premier League at this point: it is rather like the notion that the EU will back down on trade talks because “they need us more than we need them.”

Given that many EU nationals in other industries are seriously worried about how they will be able to stay in the UK if the EU doesn’t cave in to the demands that the English courts will decide who can stay or not (rather than the European Court of Justice) there is every chance that EU nationals will be forced to leave come Brexit Day if there is no radical change of heart.  And no one says a word.

6: Of course some foreign nationals born outside the EU such as Alexis, are in the UK because they have gained residency rights in the EU through their previous clubs in Spain or Italy.  No one has ever begun talking about how that will be dealt with.

7: If the money paid to the clubs by the media were suddenly to drop (because of drastically declining audience figures, perhaps as a result of many of the foreigners leaving the English game) some of the clubs (who spend all that money on salaries) would be unable to continue and would face liquidation.  Is there a contingency plan?

8: I’ve written so many times about the ineptitude and ludicrous organisation of the FA that you’ll probably know about it off by heart.  And yes occasionally the journalists mention this… but then continue as if nothing is wrong.  The journalists would hardly cover the fact that Sport England took its money back, so awful did they find the FA.

9: In the same way, the Observer runs its “Said and Done” column each week which highlights the corruption of Fifa.  But then continues to report Fifa’s competitions as if they are a good thing.  It’s a bit like denouncing the rallies of the far right on Sunday, but telling us the catering was good and the marchers were all jolly nice people, on Monday.

10: And I have reached point ten and haven’t even started on TV coverage, moving fixtures to times and dates that make it impossible to plan a life properly.  And yes, I love football, and I support Arsenal, but I do have family events I want to be at, I want to plan my holiday, I have other hobbies – but football rides roughshod over every aspect of a normal life, leading us to endless chopping and changing.

And here as in so many other situations, the multiple possible solutions are hardly mentioned.

But instead we get page after page of fake news.  Fake news about transfers, fake news about contracts, fake news about the clubs’ intentions, and tactical analyses that are so inept it rather looks as if the writer wasn’t in the ground at all….   Plus how many times do we need to hear the same stories about Bellerin.  And today, as the news of Arsenal’s signing (allegedly as I write) of Lacazette, we have a list of all the players who are about to leave.

Of course maybe this time they are right, but the fact that the Daily Telegraph has on its front page at 4.40pm on 4 July the headline, “Arsenal return for Alexandre Lacazette but striker faces Champions League dilemma” doesn’t give me much confidence.

Infantino, Trump, Erdogan.  OK Infantino is unlikely to be able to start a world war or overthrow a democracy, but all three need holding to account.  So does the FA.  So does the Premier League.  But instead we get “Aston Villa confirm John Terry signing in the most cringeworthy way possible ”

All we can do is make fun of the endless transfer nonsense, and tot up the numbers as we did last season where we found under 3% of the transfer stories were true.  But for the press, it is cheap, and doesn’t touch difficult subjects, and in the end, for them (although not for some of us) that is all that counts.

• The transfer tale that you’ll never believe, and the only transfer column you can totally trust
• Lacazette: does this statistic show that Arsenal are getting the wrong man?
• Alexis Sanchez was the second worst player in the league for losing the ball last season