football weekly, manchester

Went to this talk recently with a friend, done up by the guardian - a live showing of their weekly football podcast.

I haven't listened to the the podcast for a couple of years. The show discussed football in the sort of drawling, righteous, tautological tone you come across whenever you hear people talking about the game who clearly don't know very much about it. The show also said a lot about The Guardian, and how as an online football paper, it is trying to approach and perceive its audience:

1) The show was so obviously scripted. Jokes told by panel members and the subsequent reactions amongst the panel sounded well-rehearsed and discussed, to the point of being, well, not very funny. The slightest hint of the discussion reaching to an important and insightful depth was swiftly snuffed and stamped out by the alarm-bell flash of this irritating joke-card. The audience was overwhelmingly male and white, and the thrust of the evening appeared to be: let's not take things too seriously...who wants to take things seriously, anyway?

2) Following on from the previous point, a quite horrid and utterly distasteful joke emerged early on when one panelist decided to make a quip alluding to Liverpool fans and the Hillsborough disaster. After appealing to tiresome stereotypes of Mancunians and their hatred of Scousers, the other members of panel tried to pass this off as 'just Gary (not his actual name) being Gary', with an almost approving, half-smirking roll of the eye to go with it. What the joke did typify is how utterly nihilistic so much of the corporate media is in its sport reportage. We see this in LadBible, Bet365 and other such outfits, where the marketing strategy is one of approaching football fans as mindless yobs, unable to think for themselves, more hungry for the sugar-rush of a Ronaldinho pirouette or a splash of obscene humour (rape jokes, racist jokes) than for a discussion of how corporate cabals are squeezing the life out of the game, how new types of ownership models could empower fans or why English football is so devoid of tactical intelligence. This sort of humour fits well with The Guardian's shift towards the right of the established media spectrum, presenting itself as an online 'tabloid for the middle-classes', replete with top-ten articles such as "5 things to do in Bombay in a week" or "PLEASE HELP: I think I fancy my Dad".

There's a whole study to be done I'm sure on the Buzzfeed-isation of The Guardian, and how it is increasingly forsaking serious reportage for gossip and laughably bias political commentary. But the evening in Manchester for the Football Weekly show also made me painfully aware of how nihilistic a place England can be. A place where to actively believe in any kind of principle is to be laughed at and chided, a place where an attitude of "fuck it" is repeatedly valued above any sort of out-on-a-limb desire to take a different approach to things, and where an editor of a national newspaper, after 25 years of struggle against corruption and corporate smear, would rather squeeze a human catastrophe for a cheap, rotten laugh, than to carefully discuss its impact and its long-running affects upon football with humility and respect.