The ‘best’ paper, in terms of value, which is merely the percentage of a paper given over to football
writing divided by the cost, is The Daily Star. The ‘worst’ is The Independent, which, in terms of
value, offers around one seventh of The Daily Star’s. In fact, interestingly, if one ranks the papers by
value, the list looks like this:
Title
The Daily Star
The Sun
The Daily Mirror
The Daily Mail
The Times
The Guardian
The Independent
‘Value’ of football writing
35.7
33
20.6
16
9.2
7.8
5.9
If one considers how the print media are viewed, and one were to compile a list of ‘quality’
newspapers generally available on daily in England, it might read in roughly the same order,
accounting of course for political tastes or a partiality to certain columnists. This is a subject
judgement of course, and what one person looks for in a paper is very different to what another
seeks, but there is, for example, a clear division between the overt ‘tabloids’, which occupy the top
three spots for value, the overt ‘broadsheets’, Berliner formats notwithstanding, which occupy the
bottom three spots for value, and The Daily Mail, which sits between them in both senses.
These newspapers adhere to a set of visual and textual rules that govern their presentation and the
style of their writing, which inheres their quality. Obviously, as anyone who has studied sociology or
anthropology knows, it is important to caveat any ap preciation of this sort of thing with an
awareness of one’s own prejudices and tastes. I hope that none of this reads as a snobbish attack on
‘lower’ forms of media, because it is not: hopefully this much will be clear by the end of the article.
These visual and stylistic rules are clear as soon as one opens a paper. The tabloids favour bursts of
colour, gaudy graphics with floating heads of players or managers superimposed over easy-to-digest
statistics from games, player ratings, often with comical graphics (think the use of the number of
turnips accorded to England managers in a piece by The Sun a number of years ago), and big, shouty
headlines. This is what Neil Postman refers to as media in ‘The Age of Show Business’, where context
and detail is replaced by visual impact, sound bite, and the cult of celebrity, all of which are
perceived as easier to digest and more immediately impactive and thus require less effort on the
part of the consumer. The broadsheets, by contrast, are sparser, use greater amounts of white
space, longer headlines, higher resolution and smaller photographs, and only tend to deploy
‘tabloid’ graphics when doing ‘jokey’ columns such as the brilliant ‘Said & Done’, or as genuine
illustrations when needed, such as Michael Cox’s chalkboard-style graphics that accompany his
tactical analysis.
The subject matter is widely differing too. Tabloids feature many more pieces where the focus is the
individual player, as reflected in headlines like “Torres: I’ll score lots Mour now” or “Giroud: I’ll fit
the bill”. It was noticeable how regularly, on the day I read everything, various pieces rehashed the
same central narrative across three or four articles, in this instance, that Wayne Rooney was great,