Football journalism: the state of play
ALEX STEWART thunders into the meaty topic of football journalism and its cultural
capital, picking apart its various forms and constructs in the process. Strap yourself in.
We live in an age of availability. The profusion of different media facilitates an availability of opinions
and information unparalleled in previous periods. Advances in communication, the availability of
forums for self-publishing, the interactivity of social media, all contribute to a diffuse richness of
messages which compete for our attention. The ‘re-tribalisation’ of media, to borrow Marshall
McLuhan’s phrase, allows people to interact with each other across broad spectrums of geography
and information-richness, and facilitate the formation of communities with shared interests which
can exist without physical proximity, linked online, via forums or social sites, engaging in a ceaseless
chatter about their chosen interest or interests.
The ramifications of this for football journalism (and by journalism, I mean any form of writing about
football, from transfer gossip to more academic pieces on the history of the game or on cultural
intersections between football and other fields) are widespread. Sports historiography and
anthropology have taken off, and the ability of people to blog on varying subjects has allowed for a
‘culturalisation’ of football, opening the sport to attempts to read it alongside other fields of cultural
production; in my opinion, this has elevated the football discourse substantially. Traditional sports
journalism and journalists have intersected with longer form studies of cultural or historical
phenomena within or linked to the game. This is typified by the tactical or geo-cultural histories of
Jonathan Wilson or the advances in the analysis of football using economic or statistical theory such
as Kuper and Szymanski’s Soccernomics or Anderson and Sally’s The Numbers Game. Flippant though
it might seem, you could now divide football fans into those who subscribe to The Blizzard or read In
Bed With Maradona, and those who do not.
In a brief but interesting survey piece in a text which itself was likely unimaginable even ten years
ago, The Cambridge Companion to Football, Rob Steen considers the history of football journalism.
Noting phenomena such as the rise of “the Twittering classes”, the backlash in Liverpool against The
Sun after their horribly biased, ill-informed coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, and sketching out
the luminous antecedents of today’s writers, such as James Catton, Gabriel Hanot, Hugh McIlvanney
and Brian Glanville, Steen paints a vivid picture of the sometimes tortuous relationship between the
sport and those who cover it. Glanville himself, in 1965, wrote two pieces bemoaning the paucity of
good, intelligent writing about football, suggesting that it was perhaps an issue of class, that writing
was generally considered a middle class or upper class pastime, and that sport, in essence, was not;
he did make an exception for cricket which, of course, has a rich history of elegant writing, but is
beloved of exactly the sort of people who might choose to pick up a pen.
But, as I have remarked above, football writing is, increasingly, perceived as becoming ‘intelligent’
and, while there are still no great football novels by English writers in the style of DeLillo’s End Game
or Malamud’s The Natural (I personally do not rate Hornby, and anyway, the book is about a fan, not
a player), the volume of widely accessible writing on football which is elevated above mere
transcriptions of events during a game has increased greatly. This is a greater reflection of the fact
that, as Alan Tomlinson writes in the introduction to the Cambridge Companion, “Football is a form
of culture, made in and by the collective watching of the event, the follow-up argument and analysis,
the folklore that is passed down from generations”. It is the middle element of this triptych that
most interests me, but I will here try to argue that the picture is not as rosy as it often seems.