Sky and TNT should sack off former footballers in another Rio Ferdinand lament
Rio Ferdinand catches another hiding from Johnny Nic, who is left uninspired by the selection of football programmes and documentaries on Sky Sports and TNT.
While football matches, their programmes, pundits and presenters occupy us most of the time, there also exists football-themed programmes and documentaries too. Sadly, TNT’s seem addicted to the presence of Rio Ferdinand and clearly doesn’t take any notice of the widespread and detailed criticism of his inadequacies and infuriating attitudes, as we described here earlier this week. They clearly don’t share a common view.
But despite this, he’s everywhere even on Sign Up, a programme for deaf people, ironically enough. For the sake of clarity, they were deaf before Rio started speaking. It’s an admirable broadcast that is signed for the deaf. Nice that they are at least being seen and forced to endure the same unthinking punditry as those of us who have hearing. The full 45-minute show happens weekly each Friday. Obviously our man says he’d be surprised if Arsenal beats Real Madrid. You can’t buy that sort of insight, eh. Brilliant.
Am I being unfair? I don’t think so. When something is low quality we have to point it out. We do pay, after all. It’s impossible for everyone to be as good as each other. It’s not like he’s new to it. He’s had plenty of time to raise his game.
However, things aren’t all bad. Rio isn’t on every programme doing his unusual monologues that veer from senseless word salads to bland obviousness based around expressions he clearly thought were really original – currently this is “super power” which is just a pointless way to say something someone is good at something. “Elanga’s pace is his super power,” he said after he’d run the length of the pitch and scored, like he’s writing for a comic, or “Villa’s super power is Unai Emery”. They lost, obviously.
I hope it drives producers to distraction though I suspect it doesn’t, because it’s not a new thing and has happened many times over many years. All the nonsense only exists because few listen or watch pre-shows, so it all passes them by. Critics are only those students of the game who think saying running fast is a special power is insulting.
Reshmin Chowhury discussed the week’s upcoming European football on The Breakdown, a discussion show with their regulars – unfortunately he who must be employed is also there. There’s some top Joe Harting which sets most of it into the shade, though Joleon Lescott and Owen Hargreaves make a good effort. It is a show that lives and dies by the quality of insight and thought. Which would be fine but had you got half a dozen people who know anything about football together in a room, they’d not make any less sense than this mob. The makers seem to think we’re more fascinated by what players who retired 10 or 20 years ago think about anything. We’re not celebrity-obsessed kids and would prefer experts please. There’s plenty.
People do get better at punditry and put work in. If they don’t it’s because it’s not something producers are engaged or proactive with so the individual naturally thinks they’re fine and are just being subjected to unreasonable criticism, which is everywhere in football.
TNT also has some excellent documentaries stored on their app including one about football’s homosexuality issue (I thought being presented by Rylan’s teeth was the kiss of death but I was wrong), the health of the grassroots game (inevitably fronted by everyone’s laundry liquid baron, Crouchy), the sicko corruption of the politics behind the awarding of the Qatar World Cup, plus what global warming means for football and what it can do. All very accessible and thoughtful stuff which is all wholly ignored as soon as a match comes around. Abuse is just ignored, the grassroots plight is also ignored in favour of drooling over transfer fees and praising the league that has done more than any other to break football’s ecosystem, the issues around middle-eastern autocracies just aren’t mentioned and anything environmental is totally absent except for ads not to throw old shirts into landfills, but nothing about the politics, price, production, cost and labour conditions. Ever. It’s a bad look because they have enough awareness to commission the documentaries but not enough courage to do anything else. In other words, tokenism.
Sky, meanwhile, go for the nostalgia button with David Ginola and Gary Neville looking back on their encounters. All it does is show you football was much more enjoyable then than it is now. And there’s a few shows that do that inadvertently. A fact underlined by the usually unexceptional Sticker Book Challenge. The one with Cole Palmer, like being in the headmaster’s office with a 4th former caught smoking.
There’s something called the Saturday Social, presented by eager lads, like it’s Magpie (ask yer grandad) for kids in their 20s which needn’t trouble you much, though at least Rio isn’t flapping his gums on it. Yet.
Their documentaries are a bit patchy. One on the decline of English managers was OK but didn’t go as deep as needed. Others are simply hagiographical affairs which are predictable: Newcastle were fun in the mid ’90s and weren’t Man City good? I was disappointed by them mostly. Nothing political or a serious look at the cultural tides. But then, somewhat inescapably, that would lift the curtain on the dirty undercarriage of their precious asset. And as soon as you venture into football politics and cultures, it quickly becomes very ugly with football stained by murderous, exploitative vampires. They’d rather keep us in the dark and spending on subscriptions. Not seeming to realise that if they were more socially aware and engaged, it would only benefit them.
Outside of the highlights shows, the BBC only occasionally has anything interesting in terms of football. I enjoyed Mark Walters on racism in football in Scotland and the Sir Alex Ferguson doco, though a straightforward enough plough through his timeline is nonetheless fascinating, as long as you fast forward through the less insightful interviews. Icons of Football does what you’d imagine about great Scottish players but is never not entertaining, in part because Scotland’s best players played 40 and 50 years ago. Past better than modern again.
I doubt any of these programmes, especially the ones on subscription channels, get very many watching and the truth is, none are in any way essential. Channels consistently make the mistake of asking footballers to talk about football when any informed, educated people could do a better job. It’s been proven time and again but they can’t seem to divorce themselves from those who say someone has to have played at a high level to qualify their opinion as more valid which, as we have seen time and again, is a useless qualification and has been tested to destruction. There’s no journalist discussion shows I can find, though I’m sure Sunday Supplement is somewhere, forever trapped in Jimmy Hill’s kitchen with Brian Woolnough, probably, if he was still alive.
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Not football exclusively or even a TV show primarily is The Sports Agents, a podcast that’s filmed with clips appearing on YouTube. It tackles issues in sport today and is the sort of informed and intelligent discussion programme that TV typically steers away from, with Gabby Logan and Mark Chapman. It doesn’t treat people like they’re catatonic until they hear a catchphrase from an ex-footballer of limited vocabulary. Shouldn’t be as unusual as it is.
Considering its cultural heft, football is unrepresented in programmes of import about the many issues around the game. Shockingly so, considering the hours of tedious live football and the plethora of important issues that need airing. The intellectual standard rarely rises above a basic level except by accident and producers don’t seem to recognise who’s good and who is blatantly not up to it. 3/10 at best. Must do better.