Bigger is better when it comes to football presentation

Matt Stead

Football is all about impression. No matter how beautifully done, no written description or video montage can come close to the visceral sense of power that comes from imagining the original Ronaldo, or the feeling of spacious serenity that comes from remembering Dennis Bergkamp at his best. Trying to explain the players of my childhood to my wife, who is a recent convert to football, is as futile as if she tried to explain to me why Nighthawks is such an incredible painting by sketching it on a napkin.

The problem with impression is that it works on us in ways we aren’t aware of. You didn’t used to have to hype up the big derby at the weekend, or the upcoming FA Cup final; people treated it as though it was big, and that was enough, as anyone who’s ever been insecure about the size of their penis can tell you.

Things have changed. The price we pay for having endless choice in our entertainment is that it disproportionately rewards the shallow and bombastic to such an extent that living in the internet age often feels like living in the aftermath of an ironically-backfiring monkey’s paw wish: ‘You want access to everything, at all times, right in your pocket? OK, but all of it is going to pretend it’s the most important thing ever so you’re never going to be able to actually tell what’s worth paying attention to. Enjoy’.

Understandably, this creates a yearning for a simpler age. For example, there was a nugget of trivia doing the round a few years ago that Match of the Day was commissioned in 1964 chiefly so that English camera operators and directors could start getting regular practice and learn how best to shoot football in time for the 1966 World Cup.

I cannot find a source to back this up, so perhaps it was just a rumour, but what is certainly true is that the BBC had to convince the FA that showing football on TV was not going to immediately cannibalise live crowds. As then-BBC2 controller David Attenborough told a BBC documentary in 2014: “BBC2 managed to persuade the FA to let it do it, on the basis that nobody watched BBC2, which was more or less true. BBC2 was only visible in a small part of the country – London and Birmingham – and it had a tiny number of viewers.”

The idea that the FA were once so reluctant to let football be shown on TV at all seems almost adorable now that bringing in the highest possible bids for broadcast rights often seems like the only thing the sport’s governing bodies care about. Never mind that the most broadcast-friendly kick-off times are often the worst possible times for travelling fans. As the old white men of the FA board are so fond of saying, ‘we gotta get that sweet TV dollar yo’.

Being so nakedly treated as a consumer has left us jaded, and as a result there is nothing we love more than to pick up on some questionable piece of punditry, or sneer at the endless dissection of refereeing decisions. There are few things more tedious than when a commentator or presenter is clearly trying to tee themselves up for a particular player breaking a goalscoring record, or pretending that a dreary nil-nil dead-rubber is worth sticking with to keep their dear sweet precious revenue-driving viewers until the next ad break; even the very best orators can come across as forced and disingenuous from time to time. Meanwhile, the WWE-style player graphics Sky Sports currently uses before each Premier League game look especially laughable when they appear to pass off the line-ups for Stoke v West Brom as though they are as intimidating as the great Brazil side of 1970.

Mockingly finding fault in something we’ve paid for is human nature: Tuesday night saw referee-turned-analyst Chris Foy saying “the goal should have stood”, then attempting to correct it and actually just ending up repeating it, and that is one of my favourite sporting moments of the decade. But it is easy to forget just how much work and preparation goes into putting together the best possible TV show, from camera work to direction to on-screen graphics to stats to presenters to commentators. By and large, the television coverage and presentation we get is largely so good that we’ve become spoiled and overly-critical.

John Nicholson goes a long way to providing some balance to this with his Friday love letters to the on-screen personalities, but every broadcast is an incredibly difficult collaboration between dozens of people whose names we don’t even know, who somehow manage to pull together something so seamless that the viewer is not even consciously aware it’s happening. Like referees, if you don’t notice them, they’re doing a spectacular job.

This inevitably creates a certain tension in an age where every game is presented as the biggest and most important event to take place on a Sunday since the resurrection of Christ. We mock World Cup opening ceremonies and Uefa’s increasingly ridiculous pre-final light shows and theatrics, but they exist to build a sense of occasion and prestige; the actual content doesn’t matter so much as the impression it leaves. There are some moments in football so big, so dramatic, that the only way to convey its significance is to become ridiculously big and grandiose.

But when it works…oh god, when it works, all that pomp, all that ceremony, all that hyperbole, all that hype suddenly seems so perfect, so apt, so clearly the best and only way to capture a moment of pure drama. It takes those moments to realise that although it so often seems so ridiculous, going big really is the best way – the only way – to convey that impression of pure sporting joy.

I’ll let Peter Drury take it from here.

Steven Chicken