Nineteen Eighty Four Four Two: The Very Average State of Football Journalism

Sometimes, you will read a really interesting article. An article that unashamedly grabs your attention, tells you things you didn’t know, and is written with genuine panache. Then, when you turn your newspaper to the back page, or scroll down to the opinion page of the website you’re browsing, invariably you are presented with a generic football piece which is obvious, bland and boring. Too much of journalism on football, England’s national and most cherished sport, falls into this latter category.

Part of the problem, I believe, is that there is too much being written on football. I concede that yes, football journalism is a significant part the game – a massive, global billion dollar business, but do the maths: when you get so many journalists reporting on the same things that happen it is nigh on impossible not to suffocate originality. The net result is a lot of people saying the same thing, and this gets boring.

Another problem is that too much of football journalism has become obvious. On Jamie Carragher announcing his retirement for the end of this season, BBC’s chief sports ‘writer’ Phil McNulty (a man paid not to have an opinion) could not wait to knock out a standard issue, rudimentary piece on how Carragher is a ‘legend’. Well I never! In other news – there’s a lad who plays for Barcelona sometimes called Lionel Messi, he’s not a bad player– why don’t you do a piece on him?

If you’re after genuinely incisive and educative opinion writing then steer well clear of anything emblazoned with ‘BBC’ – look in the newspapers or their websites. In the tabloids like the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and even the radio station TalkSport you will find deliberately inflammatory opinion as this is what sells, yet take this with a pinch of salt and at worst you are still left with something to get hold of and discuss – can mates in a pub really have a good exchange about whether Jamie Carragher is a legend?

As much that is made of the rather cosy relationship between Twitter and football, I believe this is another part of the problem. The ‘trend’ and the ‘hash tag’ are wonderful things but think about it – something only ‘trends’ when it is typed enough times, i.e. is been spoken about a lot. And so because everyone ends up talking about the same things there is a vacuum of original thought. When Romelu Lukaku came on and scored against Liverpool two weeks ago, Twitter went into overdrive calling him a ‘beast’. Now I’m not disagreeing with this statement, what I am saying is that a Twitter feed full of professional journalists and armchair pundits alike all trotting out the same clichéd phrase soon becomes very stale.

This is not to say, however, that there are not really good quality journalists who rise above the mire to produce thorough and well-written pieces. Times correspondent George Caulkin recently wrote a fantastic piece on Paul Gascoine for The Times, a piece which had everything you wanted – style, class and passion. As for Twitter, as far as I’m concerned Henry Winter sets the bar very high – in 140 characters he concisely and accurately says what needs to be said and nothing more. Guillem Balague is as knowledgeable as they come when it comes to European football and recently chaired a fascinating debate on who is the better player: Zinidene Zidane or Andreas Iniesta (Zidane for me – had more to his game).

Lastly, Gary Neville has to be mentioned – he goes above and beyond the M&S shirt brigade; propping up the Match of the Day sofas and churning out the most basic analysis of how Titus Bramble and John O’Shea were too far apart when that ball was played. Neville pays his audience more respect by actually engaging them in the finer details that affect a game of football – his analysis on diving in football is fast going down in history. There’s nothing historic about Match of the Day’s analysis.

And so to wrap up, I steer the hordes of cannon fodder football writers and Tweeters in the direction of George Orwell. In his famous piece on the English language he says this: “never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print; never use a long word where a short one will do, if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out; never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Basically – don’t use clichés and be original.