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By Tony Attwood
The commentaries on football in the English media concentrate of course on English football. That’s obvious… except that if you regularly read football commentaries in the media in other countries you will as likely as not, find that their articles also often contain coverage of football on a wider level.
And here I don’t just mean football results or match reports, I mean insights into the way football is organised, the issues within the game and so on. As a result people in other countries often know a lot more about English football than we do about their game, and if this is ever debated it is explained by the notion that somehow English football is better than other country’s football (although our lack of international trophies might question this point). But still, we invented it, we have the most competitive league, and so on – that’s what we hear.
As a result of this it is not uncommon for supporters in other countries to know far more about English football than many English people know about football in other countries.
Now it used to be possible to set this lack of knowledge aside with a statement about how in Italy, Germany, Spain or France there are only one or two teams win the league, while in England we never quite know who is going to get to the top. But obviously the last seven seasons have put paid to that notion. In England it’s ManC 6, Liverpool 1 in the last seven years. In Spain it is Real Madrid 3, Barcelona 3, Atletico Madrid 1.
In France we have had PSG 6, Lille 1 In Germany it was Bayern Munich 6, Bayer Leverkusen 1. Although in Italy it has been different: Juventus 3, Inter Milan 2, Milan 1, Napoli 1.
In short the most competitive league in Europe in the last seven years in terms of a variety of winners has been Itlay. The least competitive league in terms of the same team winning over and over has been the Premier League, and the leagues in Germany and France.
But the myth goes on, perpetrated by media goblins who probably couldn’t tell you who the current champions around the word are. As a result when there is a debate in the rest of the world about an issue in football, which the English media suddenly then picks up, it can appear to be so far away from what the English media has chosen to write about and discuss verbally, that it looks weird and few people read it.
This denigration of news from elsewhere leads to people seriously saying other leagues in Europe are not so competitive as in England, which of course is rubbish. And as a result, the chance to join in discussions of what the rest of the world is talking about, (so we might influence that debate), is lost.
As with, a possible football strike in France – ah well, just funny foreigners who don’t understand the game. Besides they only have one winner each season.
Thus the real debates pass us by. Debates about the growing number of matches being international, TV paying ever more to broadcast them, crowds in national leagues declining as people get used to watching international football during the week and so are less to watch national football, the budgets in the leagues below the top division declining dramatically, and indeed even some of the top division clubs now suffering (Ligue 1 is an example), medics who are charged with keeping players fit complaining that they can’t do that with this number of games going on…
What do we hear about this? Maybe, if you read a lot of football news beyond the PL you’ll know that FIFPRO is demanding a limit on the games per player per year, and bans on the ever-longer sequences of international games. demands for time off without training after internationals, during Christmas, and so on.
Against this is Uefa and Fifa with ever more games, are ceaselessly supported by the media who know money-spinners when they find them. The media demands ever more football, because it is cheap and simple to cover, and thus at the same time they won’t give much coverage stories in which players demand fewer games.
As ever, the media is reporting on a subject in which it is intimately involved, and we should never expect it to do so fairly or reasonably, because that simply won’t happen.
