Football Writing and the English Language
"A (now former) colleague of mine suggested that it was unreasonable to expect readers to care about the quality of our writing if we, the writers, didn’t care about it either."
In this piece, Jake Walerius scrutinises football writing, finds it bad and asks why we are willing to put up with this?
In the days when it was still my work, I spent a good deal of my working day bemoaning what I considered to be the general idiocy of the reading public or at least that portion of the reading public who had Twitter accounts. The only thing these clowns are interested in is opinions, I would cry! They could care less about the actual writing, I would howl! Won’t somebody please think of the prose, I would wail! This sort of thing went on for some time before a (now former) colleague of mine suggested that it was unreasonable to expect readers to care about the quality of our writing if we, the writers, didn’t care about it either. And I thought: fuck. And here we now are. Football writing is bad writing, I submit, and no one seems to care.
When I was still an editor, aspiring writers would occasionally ask me for advice about how to make it as a football journalist. Notwithstanding that I never considered myself a journalist in the first place, and that insofar as I made it at all, I made it mostly by happening to quit a completely unrelated job and to start browsing Craigslist at a fortunate time of the year, I would usually give these writers three pieces of advice. The first two were fairly run-of-the-mill (though still, I believe, good), and the third was maybe in hindsight just a way for me to vent about the fundamental stupidity and pointlessness of the football writing industry in general (though also, I believe, good).
The third piece of advice was this: think seriously about why you want to be a football writer. That is, as opposed to a football podcaster, or a football commentator, or a football coach, or a football player, or a football referee, or a football administrator, or a physio for a football team, or a producer on a football TV show, or an organizer for a football charity, or any of the many other jobs you could get that allow you to be involved in the sport. What I wanted, I suppose, was for the world not to contain even one more would-be football writer who had nothing to say and no interesting words to say it in than was absolutely necessary.
My suspicion was then, and remains now, that the vast majority of people who aspire to be football writers, and presumably also many of those who succeed, do so in the first place because they love football, and after that only because writing about football, especially now the internet exists, seems easier than doing any of the other things listed above (except podcasting, obviously, which is sort of like writing but without any of either the challenges or the rewards). I suppose being a football writer has some unique advantages, too, if you can get one of the few jobs that allow you to enjoy them: going to matches, interviewing players, travelling the world, etc. In any case, if this is right, what it means is that most of the people who want to write about football for a living do so for reasons that have more or less nothing to do with writing at all. So maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that so much football writing is so bad. But I must say nonetheless that I am immensely pissed off by this state of affairs, and so here I am, throwing a tantrum.
I used to think about doing a George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”-type thing, but for football writing. I think that’s a lovely piece of writing, the Orwell. In the very first paragraph he talks about “the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.” I find it funny that he says this in an essay devoted to criticizing what he considers to be a general lack of precision in written English. I find it funny because of course language is a natural growth, arguably the natural growth par excellence, in fact, the product of millions of years of evolution. So right out of the gate poor old George was breaking his own rules. Aren’t we all! But he was right in spirit, if not in letter. The fact language is a natural growth is no more reason to stop caring about how we use it than the fact the brain is a natural growth is reason to stop thinking.
I always shied away from writing the piece because I feared it would come across as basically mean-spirited and unnecessary (several-hundred words in, this fear has not dissipated). But my resolve has been strengthened by a book I am currently reading, about two aspiring piano virtuosos whose lives and musical careers are more or less ruined on account of their having spent several months living and training with Glenn Gould, who is not merely a piano virtuoso, but a bona fide piano genius. The narrator is very angry about almost everything, but he seems quite pleased with his decision to quit the piano. If I am not going to do this as well as it can possibly be done, seems to be his idea, what’s the point of doing it at all? This strikes me, as it seems to have struck Neymar some time around the summer of 2017, as a very good question. Anyway, as I say, I only bring this up because it has empowered me, in its way, to start calling all this bad writing what it really is. And the truth is I find it frankly ridiculous and embarrassing that as an industry we could allow our standards to be so low.
Sturgeon’s Law says: ninety percent of everything is crap. Maybe that’s a little high, but I think it’s got to be in the ballpark. It’s definitely well over fifty. If you’re still reading this, I hope you are also now wondering, or at least beginning to feel the tickle of a wondering somewhere around the top of your spine, whether you, too, are a member of the ninety percent. The answer, I regret to inform you, is yes. Yes, you are.
But one of the things I want to stress, maybe the most important thing I want to stress, is that you should not regard this as an insult—not a bad insult, at any rate. All writers produce shit, even the very best. Maybe not Nabokov. (A hopefully more cheerful, Nabokov-related tangent: I thought when I started writing this paragraph that I would use a sentence or two of Nabokov’s as an example, on account of the universally revered beauty of his prose, so I picked up a copy of Lolita and began searching for a bad sentence, even a mediocre sentence, that might prove my point. Ten minutes later, I had found not a single one. The man was a demon, goddammit!) So maybe Nabokov didn’t produce any shit. But he’s the exception.
Toni Morrison, for example, a Nobel laureate and for my money as good a writer as any who has ever lived, once wrote, “He believed if he didn’t get something to eat that instant he would pass out.” I hate that sentence. I think it is the phrase “that instant” that bothers me. Something trite, or childish about it, something unbecoming of a writer as great as Morrison, a genius, really. I guess it is a reminder never to evaluate the quality of a sentence in isolation, but only in the context of an entire piece.
A lot of people hate Hemingway, is another example. I might be one of them, for all I know, if I ever bothered to read him again. Of course, a lot of people revere him, too—for his concision, I am led to believe, for the clarity of his prose. Then again, he once wrote the word “now” forty-two times in the same paragraph and it was described (by at least one person on the internet) as arguably the best sex scene ever put to page. Would that all of our sex was so concise. Tolstoy thought Shakespeare was shit, too, apparently, and Tolstoy’s masterwork contains two hundred pages of uninteresting, irrelevant nonsense about the philosophy of history. It’s hard to write well, is the point, and maybe impossible to write well all the time.
But we write what we can, says Zadie Smith. We write what we can. We struggle and we struggle and maybe eventually we produce a sentence or two that don’t make us flinch, and we hope this is enough. I guess the minimum I ask for is that everyone who wants to do this still flinches most of the time. But I’ve become distracted. I was talking about football writing and the English language.
A couple of weeks ago I was reading Rory Smith’s profile of Christian Streich, Freiburg’s manager and apparently also a very mediocre armchair philosopher, when my editorial instincts lurched into motion at the sight of this line: “All the best philosophers have a paradox.” What does it mean to have a paradox, I wonder? Is it more like having a cold or having a car, or maybe more like having a tendency to write ambiguous sentences? Do philosophers have paradoxes in the way John Lennon has an airport, or in the way John Lennon has a song-writing credit on “Let It Be”? I know what Smith is getting at, obviously. I understand what he’s saying. I suppose I just would have preferred it if what he was saying had a slightly more intimate relationship to what his words were meaning. We needn’t always be so literal, of course. Literalness can only take us so far. But here I think a little clarification would go a long way, because in the absence of any further clue as to what it means to have a paradox, I fear the only thing left to say about this sentence is that it’s false. Or it is if you would like to include, to pluck just one example off the top of my head, Plato on your list of the best philosophers, which I would advise you do, on pain of making a mockery of your own list. Kant doesn’t have a paradox either, as far as I know, fond as he was of antinomies, nor does Descartes, or Hume, or Marx, or Frege, or—well, you get the idea.
The situation hardly improved when Smith started describing the paradox itself. He called it the paradox of the squeezed lemon, a cute little name which as far as I could gather referred to Streich’s observation that football (as a commercial entity) is bad, and that the sport’s all-consuming profit-motive risks alienating the very people who enabled it to become so profitable in the first place. Of course, the first thing to say about this paradox is that it isn’t a paradox (though as we’ve now seen, and happily for Streich, this puts him in good philosophical company).
I actually had to look up the word “paradox” in the dictionary, I am somewhat embarrassed to confess, to check whether there was an informal use of it with which I was unfamiliar. But even in its non-technical sense (which anyway we should probably not be using in a discussion of philosophical paradoxes), a paradox is “a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement.” And I’m afraid I just don’t see the absurdity or contradiction in Streich’s observation, such as it is. He seems at most to have described a troubling historical development, and at least merely to have acknowledged (commendably, I would like to add) how little the people in charge of football clubs care about the people who support them.
But to frame this as a paradox is I think simply to miss the crucial point, which is that the real genius (if such wickedness can be called genius) of football’s business strategy has been to swap the sort of fans that might some day feel compelled to renounce the sport on the grounds of its shameless commercialization (i.e., local, match-going fans) for fans whose love of the sport is only possible because of that commercialization (i.e., fans almost literally everywhere in the world outside of Europe). The sport is not destroying itself at all; it is replacing its clientele.
I think Rory Smith is very good at his job, by the way, one of the best football writers around (I even subscribe to his newsletter!), but if I’m being honest I’ve got to say he really shat the bed on this one. The rhetorical fiasco of the squeezed lemon. All the best writers have a rhetorical fiasco. But this is a first-world problem, so to speak, as far as bad football writing goes. Far more often the problems run much deeper, or much shallower, I suppose, depending on how you look at them. Bad grammar, incoherent prose, dying metaphors (to borrow a category from Orwell).
Consider this, from Miguel Delaney: “Jose Mourinho may fairly quibble that’s the role the absent Tanguy N’Dombele is meant to have, but even then the Portuguese has never been too intent on playing in midfield unless it’s getting the ball through there as quickly as possible on the counter-attack.” At first glance, the second clause of this sentence appears to say that the Portuguese (i.e., Jose Mourinho) has never been too intent on playing in midfield, that is, playing in midfield himself. Only when you read the sentence again does it become clear Delaney means that the Portuguese has never been too intent on his teams playing in midfield, not unless they are getting the ball through there as quickly as possible.
Fair enough, then. So “playing in midfield” is to be read as a gerund phrase, as in “the Portuguese hates managing Tottenham” or “the Portuguese enjoys insulting his own players in public.” But this means we must read the “it’s” that follows this gerund phrase as referring to the entire gerund phrase itself, rendering the whole clause an abbreviated version of the following, “the Portuguese has never been too intent on playing in midfield unless playing in midfield is getting the ball through there as quickly as possible on the counter-attack.” But the “is” here, the verb on which the entire clause turns, is surely wrong: it should be a “means” or an “is to be interpreted as,” but certainly not a mere “is.” And so finally we see that in the absence of an appropriate antecedent, the original “it’s” simply loiters confusingly in the middle of the sentence, demanding our attention but not quite managing to do its job, a grammatical Scott McTominay.
Even if we resolve these difficulties, the sentence doesn’t quite make sense. “Playing in midfield” means here, as established in the preceding few paragraphs of the piece, dominating possession and dictating play through the middle of the pitch, as Toni Kroos and Luka Modric have done so well for Real Madrid over the years, and as Delaney (reasonably) thinks Paul Pogba and Bruno Fernandes could do for Manchester United in the years to come. But if this is what “playing in midfield” means, “getting the ball through there as quickly as possible on the counter-attack” does not qualify, by the article’s own standards, as a kind of “playing in midfield” at all, and so the “unless,” like the “it’s” next to it, is rendered meaningless, a grammatical Fred, if you will (and if you will forgive me for stealing my own joke). See how high the seas of language can rise!
This is only a single sentence, of course, but I find it to be representative. It displays all the carelessness of thought and shoddiness of language characteristic of so much modern football writing. The basic gist of what it is trying to communicate is clear enough but placed under even a gentle amount of scrutiny it simply unravels, a spool of incoherence. String enough sentences like it together, and while they may succeed in conveying some rough version of the thoughts the author is trying to express, they do so only at the expense of any real clarity or nuance or insight. They are empty vessels of opinion. There is, in fact, no need for the stories composed of sentences like these to be written at all, at least not at this length, in this format. They may just as well have been tweeted, or listed in a series of bullet points (which is, not surprisingly, how certain tabloids that shall not be named have taken to formatting some of their articles in recent years), or barked down the phone live on Talksport.
Writing on deadline doesn’t help, to be fair. I wonder about this, the point of it, especially now. It’s like gathering the best one hundred meter runners in the world (or, you know, any arbitrary collection of people with legs) on the same track, and asking them to put on ankle weights before firing the starting pistol. Good writing takes time, and writing on deadline deprives you of it. But these mistakes are too widespread, too fundamental, to be explained entirely by the pressures of a deadline. And these are not young, aspiring writers learning their trade. These are some of the most highly regarded journalists in the business (they even go on TV sometimes!).
I guess the question at this point is whether I am just being obnoxious or whether there is actually a problem here. Well, I think it is simply a fact that in general football writing is bad writing. What I think is a problem is that we have no way of addressing this fact. The Rory Smiths and Miguel Delaneys of this world receive a frankly shocking amount of abuse online, and somehow the more of it they are receiving at any given moment the more you can be sure they deserve none of it. I see these social media militants, these Roy Keanes of the Twitter replies, and I think to myself: but you have so much fodder! There are so many things you could say! And instead, you accuse them of being Fenway Sports Group employees or Manchester United fans or indentured servants of the Abu Dhabi royal family or whatever. I mean, honestly, what the living shit is going on here? I think it has to be a kind of sickness that we have no way to seriously criticize one another, do not even possess the language to begin the conversation. Permit me to try, is all I ask.
In the interest of my own fraying sanity, instead of looking at more examples the sort of sentence-level failures exemplified by the passage above (I guess you will just have to take my word for it that they exist), I am going to talk about what I consider to be some more general problems with modern football writing. These are not universal problems, but I find them to be particularly widespread.
The first is a tendency toward the kind of pseudo-intellectualism lately evidenced by the rhetorical fiasco of the squeezed lemon. I suspect this may have something to do with the outdated, though still prevalent (especially England, I would think), view that football is an activity for the unsophisticated, a kind of insane asylum for society’s under-class. This pseudo-intellectualism is thus a species of overcompensation. At some point we all read Eduardo Galeano and were empowered to start writing about football the same way people have been writing about every other kind of art for centuries. We developed a heightened sense of writer-consciousness, as it were. Unfortunately this wasn’t accompanied by a heightened sense of whether our writing was any good.
The problem is not that writers incorporate references to philosophy or literature or even pop culture into their work, but the fact that those references seem to exist for no other reason than to indicate that the author has read some books that aren’t about football. They show us only the tip of the iceberg and hope we will infer from this the great hulking mass of intellect beneath the surface. Usually, I must admit, I fail to make the inference. But go the whole hog, I say! Pursue the idea, chase it down, wrestle it into submission! Or don’t. But please, I beg you, don’t give me any more of this half-assed bullshit. Think your ideas through or save them for your podcast.
I am as guilty as anyone, on this last count. I was, dare I say, one of the most prolific (if not, regrettably, the most widely read) practitioners of the genre. I once wrote, for example, this sentence: “Call it soccer’s Anna Karenina principle: All dominant teams are alike; each flawed team is flawed in its own way.” I’m still sort of sick about this. I recall the sentence at random hours of the day and night. Like a ghost, it haunts me. It’s not the only one. My new policy on references like these is either to call no attention to them whatsoever or to put them into a cannon and fire them into the outer reaches of the universe, whence they can torment me no longer. Anything else is just embarrassing.
A second problem, closely related to the first, is an excess of seriousness. A mood of solemnity hangs over the whole football writing enterprise. We write overly earnest stories about the great lemon squeezer’s of German football and then we go on Twitter and make however many self-deflating comments we need to make in order to feel a little less ridiculous about how seriously we take ourselves (‘wrote a thing ... ’, ‘did a piece ... ’, fuck off). Here’s an example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, from Sid Lowe.
“Sometimes there’s so much brilliance you don’t even know where to begin, let alone which words to use. Stendhal Syndrome, they call it, which is a disappointingly functional phrase to define those moments when you feel overwhelmed by beauty, and Karim Benzema expressed it better. On the pitch most of all, but off it too. Not when he said pfff—because what else was he supposed to say—but when he smiled, shrugged a little and said: ‘that’s football.’ The afternoon before, Fyodor Smolov said it too without uttering a word. Instead, he took the ball in his arms and kissed it.”
One of Lowe’s tics as a writer is the use of what I suppose you would call a kind of deliberate indefiniteness. His writing is often a torrent of ambiguous terms: Sometimes there’s so much brilliance ... (when, what are we talking about?); Stendhal Syndrome, they call it ... (who’s they?); Benzema expressed it better ... (expressed what, exactly, and better than whom?); not when he said pfff ... (said it where, to whom, when?); Smolov said it too (again, said what, where, in what context?). The effect of all this, I find (I don’t know if this is what Lowe is going for), is to intimate the importance of what it is that’s being written about—the beauty of it, the drama of it—while at the same time acknowledging that its importance exists on a scale that we can never hope to capture. Not in words, anyway. The tone reminds me of a joke my father likes to make whenever he enters a museum: sshh, he says, art.
Lowe is good enough to get away with this sort of thing most of the time. In particular his writing contains enough interesting detail, often well-reported detail, to avoid being undermined by his most persistent rhetorical crutch (we all have our crutches). But I think his style, the melodrama it occasionally traffics in, its proliferation of little non-mysteries, has rubbed off on a lot of lesser writers, to the detriment of football writing in general.
Maybe this is because it appears so easy. Take any old ho-hum sentence—James Milner scored a penalty—strip it of any identifying nouns—the 34-year-old scored a penalty—pretend the reader doesn’t already know what happened (which of course they do)—the 34-year-old placed the ball on the spot—and if you’re feeling adventurous maybe add a (questionably sourced) detail or two—the 34-year-old took a deep breath as he placed the ball on the spot—and there you have it: tension, drama, mystery, seemingly all for free. Appears so easy. But this is a cheap trick, imitation without understanding. It is like beginning a story with a quote, a way to save the writer from the hard work of having to hook the reader on their own, the hard work, that is, of writing well. And of course, it is all so serious. It has to be, I think. Comedy can’t be manufactured like this. It wouldn’t sell.
The extent to which this style has pervaded football writing is particularly evident at outlets like These Football Times, a magazine ostensibly devoted to good football writing but the content and tone of whose work mostly displays the stylistic range and creative scope of a Hemingway sex scene. A quick glance at a few of their headlines gives you an idea of what to expect. George Best and the six-goal haul that summed up his talent. Andriy Arshavin and the four goals at Anfield that had Arsenal fans purring. David Beckham and the one-man show that took England to the 2002 World Cup. Francis Jeffers and the prisoner of Azkaban. James Rodriguez and the giant peach. Dion Dublin and the plagiarized Wikipedia page. These pieces are rarely more than recitations of information gathered by other writers—which only makes more ridiculous the pretense the reader doesn’t already know how they end—concealed under several thick layers of nostalgia. (They were well prepared for the shutdown, I suppose).
I admire what These Football Times is trying to do. But it is easy to present yourself as a champion of good writing, as an outlet that will tell stories others won’t, stories with the sort of depth and nuance that are increasingly hard for many outlets to justify in today’s broken media economy. It is much harder to actually care about those things. My view is that if you really value good writing, and don’t merely want to pretend you do, you shouldn’t fawn over an article simply because it reminded you of the time some player you haven’t thought about since 2001 joined a second division Turkish team and learned how to love again.
The purpose of good writing is not to remind people of things; we have phones for that now. If this is the standard—if a piece will not only be published, but widely praised simply because it is several thousand words long and about an obscure topic, or for that matter a well-known one most people have simply forgotten about—the standard is too low. If you really care about good writing, you must be willing to criticize bad writing. Not only to say that it is bad, or that the author is wrong but to look under the hood of the prose and to figure out where the problems lie.
Again, I suspect the prevalence of this style of writing has to do at least in part with a kind of insecurity about the importance of football in general. We are constantly reminding ourselves how little football matters (this has been especially true during the pandemic), as if to absolve ourselves for the sin of spending all our time writing about it, talking about it, thinking about it. I hate when people say this, that football doesn’t matter. If you got rid of all the things that don’t matter in the same way football is said not to matter, all you’d have left is death, politics, and your family, and at that point, you’d probably be better off getting rid of politics and your family, too (or otherwise risk having to spend all your time talking about politics with your family).
Finally, maybe most significantly, there is a profound staleness at the level of the idea. This was especially obvious during the three months football was shut down due to the pandemic. Freed from the relentless schedule of the global football calendar, with time at last to think for themselves, football writers big and small chose to write exactly the same stories they were already writing, but about matches that happened ten or twenty years ago instead of last night. With three months to think about how to cover Liverpool’s first top-flight title in thirty years, won under truly strange, historical circumstances both on and off the pitch, all they managed to come up with was a series of articles about how they actually really did in fact deserve to win a league they currently lead by twenty-three points, having recently gifted three points back to their closest rivals by getting drunk every day for a week before playing them (I refer, of course, to the great asterisk debate of 2020). There are few clearer indications of how subordinate football writing now is to whatever non-debate happens to be animating Twitter on a given afternoon.
This last problem, I think, is the hardest to solve. Most writers are significantly constrained by the economics of the industry—which are, in a word, fucked. In more than a word, they are fucked in such a way that even those writers who are conscious of the various ways they are incentivized to produce shit must behave as if their shit is worthwhile, must pretend as if they are not writing themselves into an intellectual stupor, because there is no other financially viable way for them to write. I think the reality is that even if it were possible to cut in half the number of articles about football written on any given day, it still wouldn’t be enough. Not even close. I don’t have a solution to these problems. In fact, I suspect the entire industry will have destroyed itself, and something new will have taken its place, before they are solved. But I find there is some solace in recognizing the sheer absurdity of what is going on here. An insane asylum, indeed.
What I will say is that improving the quality of football writing, thinking of interesting new ways to write about the game, to challenge the received wisdom, to discuss issues other than those that have been imposed on us by our overexposure to the sheer quantity of morons on the internet—none of this will be achieved by being uncritical, by sharing our friend’s or colleague’s stories just because they were written by our friends or colleagues. None of this will be achieved by thinking less. I really feel the biggest compliment you can give a writer is to take their work seriously, to try to think about it as much as I hope they thought about it themselves (though I fear they didn’t), not at the level of opinion, but at the level of mood, of voice, at the level of the sentence—and to do all this even if it means having to tell them how badly they got it wrong.
You can follow Jake Walerius on Twitter @JakeWalerius.
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