By Tony Attwood
Prior to the Fulham game, Athletic Weekly’s correspondent wrote, “I’m going to be at the Emirates Stadium for this one on Saturday evening, and I’m expecting it to be another gruelling slog for Arsenal and their fans.”
This was an interesting expectation – and of course it was 100% false both as a prediction of what the game was like, and of the result. But I suspect it did set expectations, which were based on false premises.
Arsenal’s home form from 18 league games shows they have won 14, drawn two, and lost two. 40 goals have been scored at home, and 11 conceded. There is nothing gruelling in that. Even the last five home league games, when it could be argued our form has been dodgy, consist of four wins.
But if we have a look at Fulham’s away form, it now reads won, drawn, lost, drawn, lost.
Now there is nothing unusual in someone publishing a preview of a match and getting the outcome completely wrong; indeed, it was one of the reasons Untold was set up – to counter these false predictions. And I started to ponder this issue again recently, and the more I pondered, the more I wondered.
My starting point was the work that we did on this site, in which we took the issues of players who were said by magazines, blogs and newspapers to be about to be transferred to Arsenal, and found that only 3% of the players mentioned each summer were actually transferred as predicted, even though the vast majority were mentioned by several media outlets. Which raised the question, if each year, one is publishing stories in a newspaper or on a blog, of which 97% are just plain wrong, why would one carry on doing that year after year?
By which I mean, if you were running a blog or a publication and you predicted events which were 97% false, would you then really say, “Hey, this was fun, let’s do it again next year”?
Indeed, we can add this to the issue of predictions of the outcomes of matches, both in terms of the results and in terms of the style of the game, and here again, we find journalists getting predictions 100% wrong. And again, what is noticeable is that there is no commentary on either the error itself or the number of errors. It is as if the predictions were never made!
In effect, this means that journalists can write anything they like, without any reference to the accuracy of what they say. And so I wondered if this happens in any other line of business.
I know that as a writer of advertisements for businesses, I had to produce adverts that would get a certain level of sales, and if I wrote an advert that failed to reach that target, or resulted in a number of buyers then returning the product as “not as advertised,” we (not the manufacturer) were in trouble. But with football journalism, there is no comeback. Predictions are made, things don’t turn out that way, and no one ever says a word about the journalists’ faulty predictions.
So I wonder: why does the media keep publishing predictions which are most commonly wrong, and why do people keep reading them?
The most obvious answer is that most people are not affected by the fact that 97% of what the newspaper says or predicts about football is wrong. That is what they expect.
But there is more to it than this, for even after getting their predictions wrong, the newspapers come out with their report on what each player has achieved. And here I think the media adjust its reports on player performances to fit in with their predictions (rather than what happened on the pitch). So Goal.com, having suggested that for Arsenal, “it’s still difficult to see where many goals are going to come from,” then covers up their totally inaccurate prediction for the match by giving Ben White a score of 5/10 and Eberechi Eze 6/10 for their performances. That makes us focus on the suggested notion that, despite two hopeless players, Arsenal won 3-0, without raising the issue of what Arsenal might have achieved with 11 decent players on the pitch!
This is a bit like me suggesting that the moon is made of cheese, finding that it isn’t and then leaving that prediction aside and suggesting that the astronauts simply din’t look hard enough. It’s nonsense.
Which is a concern because the people who write these previews write them week after week, knocking Arsenal and ignoring ManC’s past crimes. This approach has become mainstream, thus ensuring many publications are running the same sort of “Arsenal cheating at corners, playing boring football, missing out on obvious players” stories as a way of covering up the fact that nothing has been done about the 110+ charges against ManC.
Obviously, the media won’t report the idea that ManC are only second because the media themselves refuse to mention the 110+ guilty verdicts against them, which have still never been punished. As a result of that, people start writing and saying, “Why are you still going on and on about the 110+ guilty verdicts – focus on your own team,” forgetting that the ManC financial doping scandal affects all other clubs since it bought them players who delivered extra points. But that’s ok, because the media no longer touch the issue, so it isn’t really there any more.
Which is, of course, why we mention it, since this is “Untold” Arsenal.
