Football punditry in the age of social media
Football is a 24-hour job nowadays, especially on the media side of things. The internet and social media have made it an endless news cycle, where the race is always on for the newest ‘hot take’ and to grab as many ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ and ‘retweets’ before the next thing comes along and it all starts over again. In this age of reduced attention spans and instant gratification, the way football presenters and pundits approach their job has also changed.
One of the biggest examples of the way in which football reporting and media has changed is Arsenal Fan TV. AFTV has reached a point where there are suspicions that it was beginning to affect the dressing room towards the last days of Unai Emery’s tenure. While there are obvious benefits in having the fans’ opinions heard, the potential drawbacks are also massive, especially when rabidly negative opinions start affecting the players’ morale. In such an environment, it is even more important for football pundits today to be well-researched and knowledgeable, and not just peddle old tropes.
This Betway video shows how pundits today absolutely must know what they are saying. Viewers and listeners have access to information and data from all over the world at their fingertips; a wrong statistic or an incorrect claim can be caught and proved in minutes, with the accompanying ridicule and loss of credibility on social media swift to follow. Thus, while there is still a need to be entertaining, the primary focus for pundits has to be knowledge of the topic that is being discussed. It is then the producer’s job to mix up the guests on the panel to have enough ‘entertainment’, and that all the guests are different in their approach from each other so that it does not come across as too uniform and boring. There needs to be enough difference of opinion to create a debate or discussion; there is nothing to be gained in having all the guests agreeing with each other all the time. At the same time though, there is the danger of creating too much controversy and ‘sensationalising’ topics in order to trend on social media, which is basically what Arsenal Fan TV does. While theirs is a fan-driven operation, it is at a point now where you just know what the videos will be like when Arsenal lose a game. Fans of other clubs as well flock to AFTV videos to have a laugh at the meltdowns and the screaming, but because it is entertaining, not because they are learning something new. In fact, AFTV may even be coloring the perception of Arsenal fans in general, even though they represent a minority of the match-going fans, and this shows the need to be balanced and perceptive while covering football. Nobody is suggesting that the likes of Sky and BT are going the way of AFTV, but it paints a cautionary tale for them – stick to being informative and well-researched if you want to be taken seriously. Buyshares.co.uk says that maintaining credibility through balanced and accurate reporting is essential for any media outlet aiming to build and retain a loyal audience.
