When I thought about the row over covering football matches, the first thing that came to mind was Sir Alex Ferguson’s famous quote after the 1999 Champions League final.
‘Football, bloody hell’, said Sir Alex Ferguson as Manchester United won the Champions League in dramatic fashion in 1999, thanks to a late goal.
And it was this quote that swirled around my head as I watched from the touchline as a debate raged over whether you have to be at a football match to cover it?
In brief, a journalist was worried that at a recent Brentford game, there wasn’t a local reporter covering the match at the ground, but more of that later.
So, for a few weeks, I have thought long and hard about this debate on whether you have to be at a match?
A couple of points came to my mind, firstly, if there’s no online audience, can you afford to pay for a journalist to sit in the press box at a game?
This idea of whether to send a reporter to a game depending on whether it is cost effective is an alien concept to many journalists, but a fact of life for many 21st century reporters.
Let’s face it, if no-one bought the newspaper, you would have to shut, so really there’s nothing new here.
Secondly, do we need match reports at all? This week, I suffered the fate of having to watch Manchester United in action against Valencia, it was a far cry from that night in 1999.
So, dealing with the second point, the following day after the Valencia game, I decided to put together a lecture based around the coverage of that match.
I nipped onto the Mail Online, which to be fair, is obsessed with United, much to the disgust of other fans.
But as we all know, this obsession is due to the fact that Man U gets the biggest audience.
This is not necessarily down to their own fans eager to read about the latest spat, but because so many opposition fans love having their say on the team they hate.
However, the point of the coverage was not that the Mail loves United stories, but the variety of the stories.
It was hard to actually find the match report buried in so many of the other things going on.
In the end, with TV and social media, do we really need a blow by blow account of what’s happening?
Most journalism students are taught how to Tweet from a game anyway and if you are a football fan, you know the result and what were the major incidents without picking up a match report.
Do we really want to know about a pass, a header, a goal when we already know the result and probably seen video clips of the key moments?
And I’m led to believe that match reports don’t get the same audience as so many of the other stories surrounding a team.
So as I pored over the Mail Online after the United game to prep for a lecture, I was slightly bemused, not only about the amount of stories coming out of the game, but how far they were removed from the match report.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved match reports. Was there anything better than sinking a pint in your local as you read a Green ‘Un or Sporting Argus printed just 45 minutes after the final whistle?
I, like so many other football fans, would greedily read the match reports and picture the moments of glory or despair.
But that was a different time. Today, football fans don’t need that kind of detail, there are so many more interesting stories to tell.
The 11, yes 11 online stories about the Man U and Valencia game were at the time I clicked on the website:
- Paul Scholes speaking on BT sport saying that Jose Mourinho and his mouth are out of control;
- Mourinho refusing to discuss what Paul Scholes said;
- Mourinho waving his little finger at the camera for no apparent reason;
- The United team bus being late due to traffic;
- Rio Ferdinand, on BT Sport, being critical of United striker Lukaku;
- A comment piece on United being boring;
- Another comment piece on why the fans booed the team;
- Player ratings;
- A poll on whether Mourinho should be sacked;
- The team’s captain Antonio Valencia liking an Instagram post saying Mourinho should be sacked;
- Another Paul Scholes piece on why he was surprised that Mourinho wasn’t sacked after the defeat against West Ham the previous weekend.
Of course, one of the reasons for all these type of stories is that football clubs are too keen to control the message.
Add the restrictions of the footballing authorities and TV stations and it’s hard for football journalists to get a decent story, away from the bland nonsense quotes often served up.
It’s a far cry from the time when you could ring a manager or player up for a chat.
There is a benefit of doing a match report of a Man U game, if you can find it, due to the size of the possible audience compared with Brentford.
But the reality is that the audience is after so much more these days, they are likely to have watched the game and seen what is all over social media.
So the fans want something different, something to debate and interact with so the job of today’s modern football writer is to look far beyond what they see in front of them.
So are match reports a thing of the past? If this is the case, do you have to attend the game to cover it?
The reason for this blog is that Jim Levack, formerly of the Birmingham Mail and Coventry Telegraph, attacked Reach plc (formerly Trinity Mirror) in an article for Beesotted, a fanzine for supporters of Brentford FC.
In his piece, Jim claimed there had been no local media representation at Brentford’s Griffin Park stadium, for the first time in the club’s professional league existence.
But Reach came back at Jim and said that it was now bringing its coverage of the club to “a bigger audience than ever before”.
David Higgerson, Reach’s Digital Editorial Strategy Director, entered the debate.
He set the cat among the pigeons by daring to suggest that you don’t have to be at a match to produce credible coverage.
Bringing in my first point at the start of the blog about making journalism pay for itself, David argued that the audience was not big enough to cover the costs of sending a reporter to the game.
He didn’t say Reach wouldn’t cover Brentford, but they would cover them in other ways, which is what has happened.
Of course, other journalists were a bit steamed up by David’s stance.
In defence of David, he clearly states that he is not against reporters being at games, far from it. However, big decisions have to be made when considering whether a match/event should be covered.
Simply, because something has always been done it doesn’t mean it has to continue this way.
Journalism has to find a way of financing itself. Today, I know some of you won’t like this, but it is through gaining the best audience possible.
If there is no audience, then you are leaking money to send a reporter to a game. Would Tesco sell a product no-one wanted?
OK, it’s not what most journalists want to hear, but for the first-time ever journalists can help the company they work for by providing the right content which brings with it the vital cash to pay for the work.
It makes economic sense, even if it is a little unsavoury to some.
What some, dare I say older journalists, also forget is that technology does allow coverage of games without actually being at the ground. Many organisations already watch games in the office before producing content.
This may be unpalatable to some, but this is the way of the new world.
General news reporters often don’t have the time to cover stories by going out, but can use other tools to get the story, such as social media.
The worry for journalists is that stories which hold authority to account will not be covered, because they maybe deemed not cost-effective.
But this leads us full circle. The stories that get an audience and therefore ad revenue should help pay for journalism which is not necessarily audience grabbing, but important.
I’m not saying this is easy, but in principle, it could work.
I want journalism to survive, but it can’t on a wing and a prayer. There has to be some sense of realism and expectation that reporters understand that what they do brings in money.
There also has to be an understanding that a business has to make money and if it doesn’t, it has to move to the place where cash can be made.
It doesn’t mean that journalists have to prostitute themselves to turn a coin, just produce top-notch quality journalism which has an impact on the lives of the communities in which they serve and it is read by a large audience.
It all sounds so simple…
P.S This isn’t the first time I have written about the outrage over football coverage, here’s another story which stirred up emotions, click here
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