Butterfly Season

The Re-imagining of Football Post-Match Shows Could Be The Next Stage In Football Media’s Metamorphosis

Jamie Hamilton
Sep 7, 2018 · 7 min read

It’s sometime in the near future, say five years from now, Facebook has declared itself bankrupt, restaurants no longer serve ‘main’ courses, and Dion Dublin is settling into his new role as an unexpected, but, as yet, surprisingly competent Prime-minister.

Its Sunday afternoon and Sky Sport’s featured game on this ‘Super Sunday’ between Manchester United and Liverpool has just ended. As the final whistle blows, Sir Martin Tyler assures the audience that they’ll ‘be right back’ with ‘reaction and analysis from the guys in the studio’. First though, it’s time for the seven-minute-long commercial break. Ads for sex toys, non-alcoholic whisky and a new gambling app which enables punters to place bets just by blinking flash up on the screen of your 74”, 5K HDoubleD ‘Super Smart’ i-TV.

As the broadcast returns we are transported back to Sky’s new Post Match Analysis Hub. It’s an odd-looking set-up with host, Gary Lineker, positioned stage-left, is standing at a presidential style lectern adorned with a long, vertically hanging grey banner sporting a circular SKY logo. To Lineker’s right, each behind their own, thinner metallic props, stand the familiar acrylic-suited figures of Graeme Souness and Jamie Redknapp. The studio itself, decked out with a garishly shiny silver veneer, a swarm of exposed purple tinted filament lightbulbs and a pair of giant blue HTripleD video screens, has the feel of a city-centre wine bar appropriated by Mercedes for their employee’s tri-annual get-together.

Lineker, ever the safe pair of hands when it comes to live broadcasting, smoothly segways back from the break by addressing the camera with effortless ease before bringing up the game’s ‘big talking point’.

‘Well, I suppose we should just get right into it, should it have been a penalty, Graeme?’.

‘Not for me, Gary. If that’s a penalty I don’t even know what a foul is anymore’.

‘Jamie?’

‘I hear what Graeme’s saying, Gary, I really do, but, for me, the defender’s brushed him there, just a little clumsy, I think he’s given Lingard an excuse to go down’.

Back in the present, the football consuming public are just beginning to realise that it doesn’t have to be this way. Why do we continue to subject ourselves to this drivel? Are we really this masochistic? The ratings we are complicit in buttressing merely serve to reinforce the corporation’s confirmation bias that what they are producing is meeting the demands of the consumer. Have we developed some kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome whereby we have become subservient to the edicts of telecasting Gods? Are we now fully converted and fully fledged, dipped in the water by Rupert The Baptist, devout SKY worshippers who would rather self-flagellate than anger these deities of the mainstream?

Perhaps, and I know this a novel idea so bear with me here, perhaps we should stop moaning about the dearth of quality real-time football analysis and actually do something about it. Crazy I know, why get off our backsides and take the initiative when we can spend our time slagging off Michael Owen on Twitter?

Regardless of the temptation to do nothing, it seems like the time for action is now. Like a body politic of Jonjo Shelvies, we have all the tools. All we need is a microphone, a camera, a laptop and a broadband connection. For those who see it, there is a gap opening up in the market and soon there will be a gold-rush to fill it. Whoever can be first to produce a real-time alternative to network half-time and post-match analysis shows will reap the rewards of their foresight and conviction.

Already we are seeing this format in its embryonic form. Spielverlagerung coach, analyst and blogger, Adin Osmanbasic has become the first of his ilk to make the switch from written word to video format. His venture is a new one and his content so far is unsurprisingly lo-fi, but the volume and quality of information he has already disseminated should be enough to make anyone interested in this domain sit-up and take notice.

Videos detailing ideas such as ‘Positional Play’, ‘Guardiola’s Barcelona Philosophy’, ‘Gegen Pressing’ and ‘Pressing Traps’ are all delivered with the aid of a tactics board as Osmanbasic expertly walks us through the finer points of contemporary tactical theory. The soundtrack is of a breezy Casey Neistat-esque vlog nature that keeps things ticking along nicely, the editing is slick enough and Osmanbasic’s style is warm and engaging.

Osmanbasic’s venture is likely to be the first in a slew of in-depth tactical YouTubers. Of course, just like in any aspect of human endeavor, the majority will fail, unable, for whatever reason, to scale the heights leaving the spoils to be shared between a small number of top content creators. This kind of Pareto distribution seems all but impossible to counteract, but the point is that the barriers to entry have been all but broken down, the playing field has been levelled and the shift towards a bottom-up model of information transfer is quickly taking shape.

The truth is, as it also happens to be for many of our political systems and structures, entities like SKY were designed to meet the needs of a society that did not have the powers of communication that we enjoy today. In this regard, the almost entirely pre-internet society of the early 90s bares so little resemblance to the smart phone wielding social media addicts of today that one wonders how these structures are still standing. What seems to be certain is that they are starting to shake, their foundations likely to be too rigid to adapt to the ever-increasing fluidity and complexity of the snaking fault lines that are encircling them, like creaking skyscrapers straining to maintain stability as the ground beneath them turns to sludge.

Of course, a good post-match show shouldn’t just be about tactics. Sure, informed tactical analysis can — and perhaps even should — play a leading role, but we football fans are also renowned for our refined sense of humour. It doesn’t have to be all lines and arrows, the game is so much more than that, presenters will still have to embody the ancient art of the ‘host’. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that an archetype of this hosting genre, Kermit The Frog, takes the amphibian form that he does. Throughout mythology the frog is symbolic of that which exists between worlds, it is of both land and sea, in the entertainment world he acts as an intermediary between the imagination of the production team and the reality of the watching crowd. He is the great mediator. You can see this ‘doubleness’ in the puns of James Richardson, double meanings and suggestive eyebrow lifts create innuendo and metaphor, they serve to lighten the mood and remind us of the sheer absurdness of it all.

And all this is possible now. All you have to do is hit the YouTube app on your Smart TV when the final whistle blows and tune into whichever post-match show template fits your desire. There will be a gloriously diverse range to choose from, tactics led, banter heavy, a bit of both. Each club will likely produce their own unabashedly biased shows which poke fun at the opposition and glorify their own, and what’s wrong with that? A healthy dose of good ol ’fashioned tribalism makes the word go round, reminds you that you’re human. There will be shows hosted by players and coaches, Spanish focused shows, German themed shows and dedicated women’s football shows will all sit side by side. There will be room for all shapes and sizes in this new realm of punk football media. Onward then comrades, to Utopia!

As with any evolutionary transition, there’s a danger of throwing the baby out with the bath-water. It is not a case that all that has gone before is crass and outdated, on the contrary, we couldn’t have got to where we are without the great shows of the past, but we are at a point in time where the good from one epoch must be integrated with our vision for the next. At times like these it can be tempting to reach for the berets and shine up the guillotine, but the optimal transition, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, is metamorphosis rather than revolution.

What seems to be a fundamental truism here, if such a thing exists, is that the general population, the working class and the football watching community at large, are way smarter than anyone would have previously has us believe. We see it in the explosion of blogs, podcasts and independent publications. And we shouldn’t be surprised by this, after all, football is high culture. It is a frame through which billions — literally billions — of people perceive the world. Maybe its time the planet’s Ted Talk intellectuals and Chianti quaffing art-sets started taking football a little more seriously. If you leave out music, you could make a decent case for football being the most powerful uniting force we have, I don’t have the stats, but the number of people who watch football every week must surely rival that of any other cultural phenomenon.

So, it seems to be a mere question of time until we are able to reclaim the right to create our own coverage, its been bubbling away for decades and is now approaching boiling point. The media elites at the pinnacle of the top-down infrastructures are shifting uncomfortably in their seats as fans migrate to various forms of new media. I am excited by the prospect of these new media forms, post-match broadcasts and who knows what else, of being able to curate my football content to my personal taste, and unlike the feeling I get when my monthly SKY payment exits my account, I’ll be happy to support them with whatever financial means I can spare.

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