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Editorial March 2011
Soccerphile Editorial - March 2011
The Football press is not doing its job
Liverpool, for years the icon of English football, fleetingly rolled back the years with a 3-1 win over Premier League leaders Manchester United at Anfield this month.
The footballing press relished second helpings of the North-West feast, but one ingredient was missing: Manchester United had called a press ban before the game so there were no after-match comments from the Red Devils' camp: Nothing from the players, no thoughts from Alex Ferguson and not a dicky-bird from his assistant manager Mike Phelan.
And yet the dish did not taste any worse as a result. Indeed, try to recall any post-match comment from a player and you will probably be stumped... A combination of inarticulate footballers, too knackered straight after a match to reflect lucidly anyway, plus the interviewers' need for sound bites, renders the post-game chat a formulaic waste of time.
Managers are less culpable, often revealing hitherto unknown facts about their team, and they have usually far more engaging personalities than their players. Think Jose Mourinho, Giovanni Trapattoni or Ian Holloway from today's game, or Jack Charlton, Bill Shankly or Brian Clough from yesteryear.
Fergie, the grand master of current football managers with 24 years and counting at Old Trafford, has not spoken to the BBC since 2004 after they accused his son of being an unscrupulous agent, but has even that loss damaged the coverage irreparably?
Yet reporters have more to answer for. I have attended Fergie's press conferences and there is a collective genuflection at the court of King Alex, with no-one daring to raise their head above the parapet and interrogate the untouchable emperor. Fergie has failed to address the concerns of his fans about the clubs' owners, and constantly side-steps those about his own management of players and treatment of match officials. As a survival strategy, his 'no comment' policy works as the hacks' knives have been well and truly blunted.
Scribes have only themselves to blame for spurning such golden opportunities to air the public's feelings. This was the point Andrew Jennings, that scourge of FIFA who authored the book Foul! about its rank corruption, was making when he recently claimed British football journalism was "probably the worst in the world" because it did not ask enough difficult questions.
"Our editors are so obsessed with the culture of celebrity," Jennings told the Press Gazette, "they forget to give their writers the time and guidance to do proper reporting...They won't check, they won't research and they won't cultivate the sources that you need to get the documents that reveal what is really going on."
Hear, hear. Having reported on Premier League matches myself from the press box, I have a lot of sympathy for Jennings, who was of course roundly denounced from the four corners of Fleet Street for his diatribe.
Premier League press conferences are a bi-weekly tradition as functionally useless to fans as Prime Ministers' Question Time has become to the needs of the electorate.
They seem pre-scripted by the Fleet Street cabal, who all exchange quotes as if they worked for the same publication. Their questions dominate proceedings and afterwards those same reporters agree what to focus on together. Should an independent hack break their narrative flow with an unrelated, yet perfectly reasonable point, the pack of dogs descend and forcibly remind him they are working to a plan. When the national press men have exhausted their dull shopping list, the club's press officer calls an abrupt halt and the session is over.
Access to players themselves is restricted to this same closed shop, leaving the rest of the press room clutching at straws and wondering why they bothered coming. Compare this to Europe where a mixed zone post-game allows all the journalists to speak to all of the players, or the USA where hacks even have access to the dressing-rooms.
Enslaved to an editorial agenda that entails getting into bed with clubs and staying there, mainstream British football journalism has wasted its exclusivity by extinguishing all pretence at objectivity or creativity, with a few exceptional lights amid the gloom. Oh for a hundred Jennings or at least another David Conn, who spotlights the financial reality of the British game. As a Fleet Street journalist said to me, in a moment of self-revelation, "The tabloids don't help."
Jennings on his own is doing the sort of work Fleet Street could and should be doing on a daily basis, but he looks as old as Rip Van Winkle, and nobody else from England has shown signs of wanting to take up his baton, although the Sunday Times did nail two bent members of the FIFA Executive Committee last year. For British tabloids, who specialise in finding exposés by fair means or foul, investigating football instead means revealing sexual preferences of the game's personalities, not questioning the corruption taking place off-field.
Last year, I was disgusted at my fellow countrymen who took the opportunity of a session with UEFA President Michel Platini at the Euro 2012 draw to ask him about his wife cheating on him with a teammate in 1982, as a parallel to the John Terry-Wayne Bridge non-story. Platini understandably was infuriated and the chance for football-related questions was lost. At the same shindig in Warsaw, a British tabloid hack similarly irritated Fabio Capello with questions about Terry's sex-life, forcing the England coach to leave his press conference prematurely, while the hack received pats on the back from fellow gutter-scribes. No other European country's journalists had come to Poland with a gossip rag agenda.
British journalism supposedly lost England the 2018 World Cup hosting, if bid chief Andy Anson and some FIFA Executive Committee members, including Sepp Blatter, are to be believed. But if a wrong exists it must be righted. The fall-out from the contentious World Cup hosting announcements thus signal a challenge for journalists worldwide - probe more deeply into FIFA to weed out the buyable members, or let this untouchable boys' club keep running our sport forever.
Journalism surely has a duty to seek the truth and shine a light on the darkness in football as well as eulogising an already multi-billion pound revenue-generator. It would sell more papers if it were taking vested interests on with a detective's zeal instead of agreeing not to rock the boat in return for some bland quotes and information on contracts now and then.
In his stunning exposé of the industry, Flat Earth News, Nick Davies pinpointed the profit motive as the ultimate killer of proper reporting. The work of a football writer involves late nights and early starts; a whirl of phone calls and emails with no real time to tail a quarry for months like Jennings does with Jack Warner. Quantity has trumped quality. It is rather like the difference between ficitonalised cops who spend a whole novel solving one crime and real policemen who work with tight deadlines and multiple targets.
Against the backdrop of 24-hour rolling news it is hard to see where investigative reporting can find a niche in football again. Until it does we will have to make do with Jennings' one-man crusade.
The British invented football reporting just as they invented football, but as with playing the game, they appear to have forgotten how best to do it.
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