What we need is football Journalism 2.0, not football journalism 0.1 which is where we seem to be stuck.

By Tony Attwood

Now I want you to pay particular attention to this page because there will be a test at the end.

My proposition is that it is never going to be possible to lift those people who are stuck in concrete thinking out of that position, without the media moving up a number of gears and offering us intelligent football journalism.   One only has to read some of the commentaries within the upmarket newspapers on non-footballing matters to know that when they want to give us serious analyses they can do it.  But somehow football has eternally been left behind.  We are all treated like idiots.

Yet our world is one in which we need to grapple with climate change, economic collapse, disease, and uprisings of people who seem to believe that their idea is so pure and perfect that anyone who doesn’t share it should be killed.

These are massive issues, but while grappling with them, we also need relaxation, sport, diversions…  These things too are part of being human and for those who are interested need serious consideration alongside the light hearted chit chat.

But because they are diversions, and palpably not as important as climate change etc etc (in the sense that if we don’t solve the problems I listed above my grandchildren won’t have a world to inhabit, whereas if we don’t solve the issue of awful football journalism, my grandchildren simply won’t bother with newspapers) it is an issue for those people who like to debate football matters using logic, deduction, examples and evidence.

Football is a multi-billion pound industry, within which a lot of us have a lot of emotional energy invested.   And some of the people running it behave as if it is.  Others behave as if they are trying to decide where to put their new garden shed – a shed into which I shall never be invited.  Those are the people who need to be held to account.  The people who believe against all the evidence that sacking a manager every 18 months while buying a big money player because transfers are always the answer.  The people who at different times have claimed that Arsenal have the worst injury record of any club or are the dirtiest team in the league.

So we need all the help we can get to understand what is going on, and to try to convince the “me and my shed” owners of football clubs to behave in a more logical and reasoned manner.  This is where journalists could come in, but instead of joining such an honourable cause they sink ever lower into knee jerk reaction commentary with mindless gibberish as a side dish.

Where is their intellectual framework as they try to unravel and explain why club A does well and club B does not?  You only have to look at and listen to the way they are approaching the Euros to realise… there isn’t any.

What is needed is a way of rebooting their brains so they stop thinking, “what did I write yesterday?  OK let’s have more of the same,” and instead, deliver something that starts to explain the puzzle.  They need to stop removing all logical analysis and replacing it with the simple one line answer, and actually think, “where is the evidence?”

They need at least once a week to treat their listeners, viewers and readers as intelligent people, and not old timers in flat caps keeping ferrets in the yard, drinking pints of pale ale and smoking Woodbines.

So the challenge for them is to get rid of their outmoded visions and quick one-line answers and start asking the right questions.  Which means the difficult questions.  They need to make their assumptions clear and keep track of them.  They need to remember that reporting what happened yesterday does not reveal the causation of what happened yesterday.  They need to try their hand at making serious predictions, looking at what they happened, and then seriously examining why they were so wrong.

They need to examine why Chelsea, Man C and Man U, by far the richest teams in the richest league in the world, all struggled to get into the Champions League this year (with only one of them finally making it), and from that they need to start working on what their answers reveal.  They need to base their predictions on what they discover from such an analysis then try to make better predictions for the future.

And they most certainly don’t need to indulge in explanations and notions that are so vague and floppy that they make Freud’s psychoanalyses look like science.

We live in a world in which it is possible to predict gravitational waves and then around 100 years later find them.  And yet football journalists, if ever let loose on science, would probably predict that the sun self-evidently goes around the earth, and that Mr Wenger is delusional because he thinks otherwise.

So as I said before, there will be a test at the end.  We are at the end therefore here is the test.  Clicking the answers with a mouse will not do any good.  It doesn’t work like that guys.

1:  I think therefore I am

 Is a reasonable way to remind ourselves that the way we think is important
England
Wales
 N Ireland

2: The light at the end of the tunnel

 Is the express train travelling in the opposite direction
 Is Arsene Wenger heading the wrong way
 Is Tottenham Hotspur pretending that this is the year they will be able to finish above Arsenal
 Shows just how far we have slipped behind everyone else under Wenger

3:  A plane crashes on the border of Haringey and Islington.  Where are the survivors buried?

Depends on who they support
 Islington
 Haringey
 They aren’t

4.  “Directing anger at the referees is a useful diversion from the real issue – that Kroenke and the board are very happy as long as Arsenal finish 4th”

 I know this – it is concrete
 We didn’t finish fourth
 What evidence is there that the board are happy finishing fourth?
 Why would any board be happy to finish fourth, unless they had previously finished in the sort of positions occupied by Man U, Liverpool, Chelsea and similar teams this last season?

5:  Wenger has not spent the money available to him on players (especially on a world class striker), because he’s under pressure from the board not to. Because it would hit the bottom line for the shareholders, and the only thing that matters to them is that Arsenal qualify for the Champions League so that they get their money.

 This assertion is false as there is no evidence that the shareholders take any money out of the club other than the £3m a year to Kronke for consultancy which in the context of the cost of players and player wages is not a huge amount.
 We didn’t finish fourth
 There is no evidence that Mr Wenger is under pressure.
 Why would any board be happy to finish fourth, unless they had previously finished in the sort of positions occupied by Man U, Liverpool, Chelsea and similar teams this last season?

6.   The board is also very happy as long as the fans spend their time moaning about refereeing decisions when they should be directing their ire at Kroenke and the rest of the board.

  There is no evidence that Arsenal fans attacking the board would have any impact
  This argument assumes that either there is nothing wrong with refereeing in the PL or that even if there is there is nothing we can do about it.
   Why then would season ticket renewals be at an all time high this summer
   The light at the end of the tunnel is the express train travelling in the opposite direction.

7.  People who complain about referee decisions should get a life.

  You can prove anything with statistics.
  You can prove anything by denying the validity of the question
  You can prove anything by telling the individual raising the point that he/she should get a life

If you have been, thank you for reading.

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And on the Arsenal History site…

• Arsenal in the 1930s – the first eight episodes have been published, more to come…
• The First League Season, including a review of each player who played in that season
• Arsenal in the 1970s – the complete review of every game and every transfer
• Arsenal in the summer – the transfers, the friendlies, year by year
• Arsenal anniversaries – nearly 5000 entries

The full index to all the series is on Arsenal History Society Web Site