Football journalism is in a funny place. There’s some great content and some filler. But writing about football often creates disdain…
When I tell people I’m a writer, their eyes often light up.
“Oh, yeah? What do you write?” they ask.
Sometimes I say I write crime fiction and have published 17 novels. Everyone loves that and I get asked more questions. It is cool to write novels.
Sometimes I say I write about football. And my God, you can see their enthusiasm wane immediately. It is not cool to write about football.
To write about football makes you something of a pariah in polite society, because people who don’t like football think everything related to it is boring, stupid and crude. And people who do like football hate the football press and they look at you with anything from suspicion to antagonism or contempt.
When I assure them that no, I don’t write for a tabloid newspaper, it seems to thaw people out a little, but their dislike of the football press is often very pronounced.
What do actual football journalists make of this widespread antipathy towards them? Is it fair?
For those writers producing carefully researched and crafted insightful pieces about an important issue, it must be galling to be lumped in with those whose job is to drum up 272 words about a potential transfer to Manchester United that will absolutely never happen but more importantly might get United fans to click on it in the next hour. Nothing more than space filler – cheap mince for a voracious grinding machine, until the algorithm releases it into obscurity.
With access to players tightly controlled by club PR and press teams, with players trained to say words that don’t say a lot and with many players widely and understandably mistrustful of a press with a long history of taking anything they say out of context and building an antagonistic story out of it, football journalism must be a hard business in 2022.
But everyone has to work for a living and even if you went to journalism school and had ambitions to become the next Norman Mailer, when the editor says you’ve got to write 218 words about something someone has tweeted about a footballer’s haircut, you’ve got to do it. It may be shallow and horrible, but that’s not your fault, you didn’t make this world, even if you’re charged with perpetuating it. But has it really got much of a future?
The football press has an insatiable demand for content to generate advertising income via clicks,…
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