Some 20 years have passed since the sports writer Julie Welch was sent to
interview an international footballer. Lunch was ordered and small talk was
exchanged, then the player came to the point. “I was wondering about the
fee,” he said. “Fee?” said Julie. “That’s right,” he said. “I thought, maybe
£250?” Julie shook her head. “Out of the question,” she said. “I couldn’t
possibly accept it.” He stared at her, confused. She smiled at him,
indulgently. There was a brief silence, and the interview proceeded without
further mention of money.
It couldn’t happen today, of course. The money would have been agreed weeks earlier, along with lines of questioning, duration of interview, status of restaurant and numbers of flattering references to a forthcoming book/video/television series. And Ms Welch would not be left alone with the player. Instead, they would be attended by his agent, a representative of the publisher, and a small flock of personal assistants to ensure that all these conditions were fulfilled and that nothing potentially damaging or remotely interesting was discussed. Finally, and if the footballer were of sufficient celebrity, his guardians might also insist upon the right to approve the article before publication. As one agent has observed: “Our ultimate goal is the riskfree interview.”
That view is easily understood. After all, the agent is there to present his client in the best possible light, because money settles more easily upon an unblemished image. The idea that some of us might not share that ambition does not cross the agent’s mind. In his world, the football writer is a part of the publicity machine. And if the writer should refuse to play that part, then the interview will be cancelled and the client swept off to a television studio, where they begin their questions with: “How pleased were you ... ?”
The younger writers tend to shrug it off; after all, they are dealing with footballers, and footballers are a law unto themselves. The older ones become angry. “How dare they! Who the hell do they think they are?” Eyes narrow and heads nod slowly: “Never mind. There’ll be a reckoning. One day, these arrogant bastards will need a favour. Well, just don’t let them call me.” And the old ones are almost certainly mistaken, for the age of the favour has retreated into rose-tinted memory. Long ago, when I worked for a local newspaper, the centre-half of our Third Division football club was convicted of “stealing the Postmaster-General’s electricity” (he had persuaded a public telephone box to accept Bulgarian currency). The player asked if the court report could be suppressed. I took him to see the editor, who extracted a promise of repentance and a Cup Final ticket for his football-loving nephew. The report never appeared. Months later, when the footballer demanded a transfer, we were the first to know.
At heart, the modern players may be just as venal as that resourceful centre-half, but their status is quite different. Those near the top of their profession are as famous as film stars and rich beyond reason. Of course, footballers were always infinitely more celebrated than those who described their deeds. Now, crucially, they have become incomparably wealthier. Jimmy Greaves once described an average Saturday night in the days when Tottenham Hotspur were the finest team in the land and he was their shining star. “We’d go in the Bell and Hare after matches,” he said. “Loads of players, few fans, bunch of press lads. All in the back room of the pub. We’d have a good few drinks, knowing the fans’d be no trouble and the press wouldn’t turn us over. Sometimes we’d stay there till gone nine o’clock. We knew how to live, eh?”
At that time, the mid-1960s, Greaves was earning £60 a week and the “press lads” with whom he drank were probably earning only a little less. Although the players would buy their rounds, the reporters would buy more than their share, since they could claim entertainment expenses. Fast forward 40 years and we see that young Steven Gerrard of Liverpool has signed a contract which pays him £55,000 a week, that Sol Campbell of Arsenal earns more than £60,000 a week, and that David Beckham’s wealth is assessed at some £50million. These people could not only buy a round, they could buy the pub, then bid for the brewery. And that makes a difference. In the smoky democracy of the Bell and Hare, distinguished footballers like Jimmy Greaves could tell football writers what had really happened that afternoon; how well they had succeeded or how badly they had failed. Sure, they would say the writers didn’t understand, that they criticised with insufficient knowledge. And they were probably right. But the writers would point out their own difficulties, involving the urgency of deadlines, the paucity of facilities and the need to arrive at swift conclusions. Lobby terms prevailed, experiences were exchanged and, ideally, a kind of mutual enlightenment dawned.
These exchanges are now conducted by staged press conferences or copycontrolled interviews. Players can no longer confide their problems to sympathetic ears, while writers are no longer privy to the stresses of the professional game. And, since they cannot appreciate those problems, they cannot convey them to the reader. In short, everybody loses. Perhaps I simplify the dilemma. It is not quite true that a young football writer could go through an entire career without ever meeting an international footballer in an informal, social surrounding. But it is truer than it used to be.
I once knew a sports editor who believed that familiarity was a danger. “Don’t get too close,” he would say, “because you won’t feel able to criticise.” This notion was peculiar to sports writing, and yet he had a point. Film and theatre critics could lacerate their subjects, then discuss with them the prospects of forthcoming productions. Television critics could be venomously bitter, but they would not feel the need to avoid their victims. And as for Parliamentary sketch writers, they could bombard their targets with mockery, contempt and shuddering derision, then toddle off to swap gin-and-tonics with their victims in the Strangers’ Bar.
It is difficult to say when the tide began to turn – probably when the television companies acquired football, hook, line and sinker. The money came flooding in, and football men who had previously thought in thousands now started to talk in millions. And the more television indulged their vanity, the more the journalist felt obliged to speak his mind. Newspapers could not compete with the immediacy of television coverage, but they could offer strong views, revealing analyses and the occasional groundbreaking story. To read the incomparable David Lacey in The Guardian or Patrick Barclay in The Sunday Telegraph was to understand the glee with which an earlier theatrical generation had acclaimed the critical offerings of Tynan and Hobson.
In truth, there were few who could aspire to such standards, but even the honest scufflers felt curiously liberated in the new climate of candour. The fact that players were less accessible offered the opportunity for more robust criticism; it is far easier to attack a complete stranger than a man you are likely to encounter in the Bell and Hare. Occasionally the players would complain at the treatment, but mostly they spent their time growing richer and more remote. Which left the field open to non-participants.
When I started to write about football, the club chairman was a character stolen from a J B Priestley play. He wore elderly suits, drank to lugubrious excess, had accepted the job as a labour of love and was virtually unknown outside his own boardroom. Yet in recent years, he has become a character, seizing tabloid headlines, booming crass opinions, making oceans of money. He despises football journalists for their comparative poverty and their insubordination, and they despise him right back as an arrogant arriviste. But he serves a useful function; he is anxious to be heard and he is easy copy on a slow news day.
Then there is the manager, the football writer’s most dependable friend. Managers used to stand on the edge of events, offering opinions only when asked. They were people encountered in the car park as the passions of the match were receding. Some were dull and discreet, others were hugely entertaining. I recall Bill Shankly of Liverpool, hat on the back of his head and thumbs hooked into his belt, greeting a dozen football writers by their first names before releasing a wonderfully surrealistic torrent of words. With Shankly, questions were unnecessary; you simply gave the boulder a nudge and watched it bounce blissfully down the hill. Similarly with Bobby Robson at Ipswich, on a cold East Anglian evening with his breath billowing in the frozen air. Somebody would pose the opening question, and then, by prior arrangement, nobody would ask a follow-up. Robson abhorred a vacuum. In he would plunge and on he would go, while pens flashed and gems were gleefully gathered.
The notion of “quotes” grew at a reckless pace. No story was complete without a smattering of quotes and, since few managers were as interesting as Shankly or Robson, many of their mutterings were woefully banal. It was here that the resonant clichés were born: “Sick as a parrot ... early baths... at the end of the day”. No matter – even gibberish was better than silence. In time, whenever major tournaments were staged, one writer would be assigned to the match report, another would be required to provide a colour piece, while a third would be sent across the planet to collect what the trade calls “nanny goats”, or quotes.
Managers became aware that newspapers placed real value on their postmatch musings, so much so that they would ban from their press conferences those reporters who had offended them. At Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson has used this weapon more readily than most. Journalists have been banned, barred and banished in indiscriminate clusters, and for all manner of offences. He once halted a press conference after spotting Shaun Custis of The Sun. “What are you doing here?” he bawled. “I banned you last week.” “That wasn’t me,” said Shaun, “that was my brother, Neil.” “I don’t care!” yelled Ferguson. “You’re banned as well. There’s too many Custises in this bloody world!”
The FA’s decision to award him the job was accompanied by a small eruption of unpleasant xenophobia. Since then, a chorus of misgivings has greeted each trivial stumble. Eriksson simply ignores the froth and nonsense. He has no favourites, no confidants. He treats praise and blame with equal indifference. As a man who earns in excess of £3million a year, he cannot be bought by newspapers with a column to fill and influence to purchase. And as a manager with an almost irreproachable record, he is beyond all but the most demented criticism. Not since those distant days of Sir Alf Ramsey has a national manager treated the press with such indifference, and they can scarcely conceal their fury.
And yet the press has a significant stake in Eriksson’s continued success. If he stays at his post and leads his team to victory in next year’s European Championships, all those pages, all those pictures, all those special supplements devoted to football will suddenly seem worthwhile. A sport which is at once the best-loved and most widely despised will be seen in its brightest colours. And the football writers of England – the most highly paid, most heavily pressurised practitioners of the sports-writing trade – will have their glasses filled and their contracts renewed.
They will never be greatly loved, since the public holds them in mild disdain, while the game at large feels far more strongly than that. As an ancient manager named Tommy Docherty once remarked: “There’s a place for the press in football, but they haven’t dug it yet.” Some would say he had a point. At the end of the day.
Patrick Collins has been chief sports writer of the Mail on Sunday since the paper was
launched in 1982.