Collins Street, 5pm — John Brack

BETWEEN THE NARRATIVE LINES

Realising a new football media

Jamie Hamilton
Aug 31, 2018 · 8 min read

I noticed something strange the other night. It occurred to me as I was watching the Spanish Super Copa between Barcelona and Sevilla.

I often work late, arriving home shortly after midnight when my girlfriend has already retired to bed. I like this time, and although my limbs feel somewhat tired, my mind is still wide awake having not yet had an opportunity to wind down from an evening’s bar-room chatter. If you work from 9–5, imagine trying to go to sleep as soon as you return home, for most it’s a non-starter, a little post-shift pace-change is usually required before one finally yields to the encroaching tiredness.

During these small hours I watch football. I often find myself spending much of the preceding night’s work invoking the spirit of The Likely Lads episode where our heroes spend the entire day trying to avoid the score of England’s vital World Cup qualifier in Eastern Europe, only to at last settle in front of the television highlights to discover that the match had fallen foul of severe weather. I find myself prefacing certain customer interactions with a request, ‘Please don’t tell me the score’, and, thankfully, people respect this appeal, although I can often detect a mischievous glint in their eyes as they inform me that ‘You really don’t want to miss this one’.

There was no necessity for such precautions on this particular Sunday. The game between Barcelona and Sevilla, being played in Tangier, was, I think its fair to say, not at the top of our clientele’s list of topics for discussion. I arrived home then, eager to locate a YouTube upload of the match and settle down to my first glimpse of either team this season. I scrolled through a few of the most watched highlights packages without success, I wanted the entire game, not just some de-contextualized cobbling together of parts. I refined my search to ‘Barcelona v Sevilla full match’, and immediately I was rewarded. I pressed play and the HD quality looked good. I quickly realized that the video was ripped from a Russian TV feed, no problem, the game is what mattered and, at around 12.30am, I had found what I wanted.

I poured myself a glass of wine and began to watch the game. I was unperturbed by the Russian commentary; indeed, I had recently been experimenting with watching televised matches while listening to music with the TV on mute. I enjoyed the experience this DIY sound-tracking created and, as I became more comfortable, I would try to curate the music to compliment or even jar with the styles of play on display. Despite my best efforts, however, any attempt to fuse Leonard Cohen’s baritone march with Liverpool’s high intensity pressing game was yet to yield any fruit.

The most obvious problem with choosing to attach a musical score to a game was not that I was unable to follow the on-field happenings without the sagely narration of television commentators, but that, due to the muting of the crowd, so much of the atmosphere was lost. It was interesting then to consider foreign language commentary as something of a compromise in this regard. As the first half continued, I found the tone and phrasing of the Russian commentary, coupled with the human dynamics emanating forth from the terraces of the African stadium to be strangely hypnotic. It became clear that my desire to experience the game free from English language commentary was not, in fact, a desire to experience the game free from ‘commentary’ per se, but a desire to experience the game free from any discernible ‘narrative’.

This issue of narrative, it seems to me, is the fundamental problem one encounters when consuming football through media. Narrative is everywhere in football coverage. It permeates itself into our most basic understanding of what is unfolding before our very eyes, but, like the slaves of modernity who choose to view Tiger’s swing through the lenses of their devices, we opt to filter our perceptions of football by gleefully donning the special glasses provided to us by our benevolent broadcasters.

This realization became all the more marked when, as the second half of the Super Copa began, the video had switched to an English language feed. I suddenly found myself being informed of ‘how the first half had gone’ and ‘which manager would be most satisfied at this stage’. But I am, just as you are, as we all are, entirely capable of reaching these conclusions on my own. I have eyes, I can see for myself. I am not an infant strapped into a highchair who requires their goopy food to be delivered by way of a plastic spoon masquerading as a propeller-powered aircraft. So often have I found the insights and ‘takes’ being served up to us by our professional journalists and pundits to be the thinnest of gruels, bytesize portions of whatever blandness has been approved by the moneymen as the ‘respective’ corporation’s dish de jour.

The TV rights deals will keep the coverage hostage, pay per view and copyrighted, football’s ‘rights’ being owned by the highest bidder. So, we must adhere to the diktats of this system if we should want to watch the highest quality football, and there appears to be no way round this, but what about the media that has no coverage rights, what of the studio ‘pundits’? What of our newspapers and their online incarnations? Why should we be paying any attention whatsoever to the narratives peddled by these ‘professionals’? What exactly is it that they are offering? It is mere narrative.

Just because the header on their article reads ‘The Guardian’ or ‘The Telegraph’, ‘The Independent’ or ‘The Daily Mail’, this does not automatically infer that the writer’s content is in anyway superior in quality to those pieces that are produced independently, how could it? In fact, I would say that writing beneath the shadow of such corporate banners is now often an indicator that the content is likely to be a damn site more generic, predictable and insipid than that of many of their less esteemed counterparts.

Gone are the days when we required these informational gatekeepers to enlighten us as to the goings on in the football world, we can now get all we need from truly independent sources at the touch of a button. We can crowdfund those projects that we deem valuable through Patreon, we no longer need to provide validation through clicks to publications that are drowning in the rising waters of the new media revolution.

Newspapers are becoming ‘old-hat’ and they know it. Their credibility and sales drop year on year as the public begins to wake to the realization that, as the scramble to ensure their survival heightens, the positions adopted by the fat-cat editors away from football and sport, in relation to national and global affairs, becomes increasingly ideological and partisan. These are the publications that have contributed so heavily to lowering the quality of national discourse to a new, base level that has become barely comprehensible.

Already we are seeing the migration of quality journalism away from these crumbling institutions. James Richardson (whose excellent European Football Show was axed by BT) left The Guardian’s Football Weekly and now heads up Iain Macintosh’s media project with his Totally Football Show magazine pod. Of course, I cannot speak to the motivations of individuals whom I know nothing about, but one wonders how long it will be before other talented writers and presenters decide to sever ties with establishment entities that seem to so obstinately insist on clinging to a model where its content creators are beholden to such stifling corporate constraints, editorial parameters and overriding ideologies.

We (the people) now have the power to mute the background noise. Thankfully, this revolution need not be bloody, the journalistic aristocracy are devouring themselves from within, they seem blissfully unaware that we now go to Breaking The Lines to find out about the latest superstars coming out of Africa, we use StatsBomb for analytic observations and tune into Adin Osmanbasic’s YouTube channel for cutting edge tactical breakdowns. We need not endure the waffling babble of self-congratulatory journos whose Twitter profiles depict their authors as infantile, children posing in the manager’s press-conference chair, jolly burkes grinning like competition winners who are just happy to be there.

Despite the pointedness of some of my phrasing it is not the purpose of this piece to claim that, in my view, quality journalism is not produced by individuals currently employed by traditional media, such a claim would be disingenuous and frankly absurd. I am a great admirer of certain content creators who are affiliated with such publications as I have mentioned, but my sense is that, as the popularity of what Jon Mackenzie describes as the new ‘punk media’ continues to rise, these individuals and their output will be consumed by a dwindling, ageing demographic. The argument is one of relevance and gravitas, as it is relevance and gravitas that these traditional publications are losing as their narratives become ever more hackneyed, outdated and, much worse as we witnessed during England’s World Cup run, worryingly political.

On one level, my observation is simply of an increase in choice. The power is now in the hands of the consumer, not the high-street department store. We simply do not require our footballing content to come from publications that have so many non-football interests. I want to be sure that, as far as possible, the ideas I consume have not been curated by anyone other than the individual who is disseminating them, and I wonder what possible argument there might be against this conviction?

As you will have likely gleaned if you have read this far, my argument too is mere narrative. I have taken some care to paint much of what I have labelled, ‘the traditional media’ as decaying and outdated, lumbering and bureaucratic, lurching Towers of Babel whose bloated fingers are far from being ‘on the pulse’ of Generation Z and the rapidly evolving football environment. I have suggested that many of their stooges may be no more than ‘useful idiots’, oblivious puppets, mice lost in the maze of their employer’s totalitarian desire to coax audiences towards suckling at the teats of conformity and swallowing the mother’s milk of comforting rhetoric without question.

But I have also added a caveat, an escape-hatch through which talented writers are depicted as prisoners trapped inside the hold of a sinking ship. Is this genuine? Or simply a narrative technique employed to pre-emptively deflect any potential accusations of gross generalization or systemic bias?

For it has also been my intention to depict the new online media boom of independent podcasts and blogs as revolutionary and progressive. They are Joe Strummer’s Clash to Rick Wakeman’s Yes, the true voice of the people at a time when we have been betrayed by the ‘fake news’ and partisan propaganda of our previously much-loved institutions. This ‘new wave’ represents the required ‘upgrade’ for a sense-making system that has gone haywire, medicine for a much loved and trusted uncle who has lost his marbles. It takes the power back to the individual and the everyman. It is a movement that uses technology as its foremost weapon, broadcasting from bedrooms and garages rather than townhouses and studios. It favours quality of content over the credentials of the author and gives a voice to those who have hitherto been silenced.

So, that’s the narrative, that’s the story, whether or not it’s one that you believe in, or deem to be in any way true, well, just as whether or not you choose to listen to the commentary next time you watch a televised game, it’s entirely for you to decide.

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