“And Feyenoord are well and truly beaten now” A problem with perception down the road.

 

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By Sir Hardly Anyone

I’m told that TNT Sport’s commentator got a bit excited watching ManC v Feyenoord shouting out at one stage (just under the hour in fact), “And Feyenoord are well and truly beaten now.”   As you may have subsequently heard they well and truly were not.

Or try this one, Forgotten Arsenal star, 27, returns to squad for Sporting clash 477 DAYS after last appearance.   That was in the Sun but forgotten by whom?  Certainly not Arsenal supporters.  Presumably by the people (if they are such) who write for the Sun.

And I think of these things following the House of Lords “Future of News” report which suggests there could be “a realistic possibility” the UK will see the emergence of a “two-tier media environment” within a year or two.   According to the report a minority (in fact an ever smaller percentage of the population) gets fairly decent news in depth, while most people take biased, or at the very least, pretty low-quality free information.

This is undoubtedly true – and with football the fact is that the media generally has no particular insight into what is going on in football clubs, because if the clubs are planning something the last person they are going to tell is a journalist.

But, and this is the worst of it all, football journalists generally have a mission, which is to suggest that they, the journalist and the newspaper or website they serve, have inside information, while the rest of us are ignorant.

Now I say this is the worst, because what the media also do is deliberately make some issues off-limits, so that on those topics there is no discussion on that topic at all.

Thus it is one thing to say on Sky Sports “Reports in Spain have suggested the Gunners boss intends to step down in the summer, with a number of outlets linking him to the Barcelona job,” and then to add a subsequent note that “Mikel Arteta has no plans to leave Arsenal at the end of the season,” but what we don’t know is where the story came from in the first place.

The point here is that the bulk of football stories are about transfers and following that, injuries.   But we know that most transfer tales that appear in the media are placed there by agents seeking to up the profile of their client, knowing that if they can get a move they will get a percentage of the transfer fee.   This is why 97% of the transfers listed each summer never happen.

Meawnwhile the injury stories are exaggerated for no one’s benefit except the media’s.   If we suddenly see that, for example Saka is injured again, we get worried, and then if he appears in the next match with no sign of an injury we think he’s recovered.  What most of us don’t think is that like the transfer stories, the injury was never there in the first place.

At the same time, every minor incident is exaggerated in order to become newsworthy, for the simple reason that the media is based on the concept of having at the very least one new story a day about a club.  And the more alarming that story is the more people will read.

But then tucked into the mix are the stories the media won’t touch – such as stories about the dubious nature of some referees, and how some refs favour home teams and others away teams.   And the reason?  Well, I’m not inside PGMOL so I can’t tell you.  Like you I can only guess.

However if the media would admit that they are prohibited from running referee stories, at least we would know, but the agreement with the PGMOL seems to say they can’t even say that.

Of course, it is not just Arsenal that suffer, although the attacks on the club from the media seem insidious, especially during the recent run of poor results, caused by playing most of the top teams away from home in a short space of time.   Here the media eventually did run the story, after Untold (and quite possibly some other outlets) highlighted the curious feature of the fixtures – coinciding with a bad run of injuries.

Of course it is not only Arsenal that suffers.   The creation of the term “Spursy” was considered recently by the Guardian as a word meaning the club has a “lack of backbone that has been the hallmark of Tottenham teams going back far longer than a decade,” representing an ability to grab defeat from the jaws of victory with defeats to Crystal Palace, Galatassary and Ipswich, before beating ManC.