By: Richard Whittall
Hello. Some of you may know me from blogs like A More Splendid Life, which started off as a jamboree of all things random in football, including snippets on the Premier League and rambling commentaries on the state of Major League Soccer, and has recently morphed into a blog about developments in football media. My “claim to fame” (so to speak) though in Canadian circles has been my very small part in highlighting the history of soccer in this country.
It was this interest in history that led me to focus exclusively on soccer media, in part because the vast majority of what we know about the development of soccer in Canada comes by way of archived newspaper articles, sometimes dating back to the 1870s. The story of Canadian soccer isn’t told by the matches, or the players, or even the fans (for whom seasonal amnesia is often the only way to renew interest in their club on a yearly-basis anyway), but by the media, whether print, radio, television or digital. And soccer cannot thrive unless the media tells that story often and well.
Many soccer fans don’t see it that way. Football is our beloved game, and football media is the sometimes-annoying-but-necessary brat that follows it around providing live coverage, match reports, league tables and tactical analysis. In other words, football “happens” and the media reports on it. Under this view, sports and sports media as two separate institutions, whose relationship is primarily casual.
The reality is, of course more complicated, and the line between soccer and soccer media increasingly blurred. Nowadays, agents deliberately “leak” trade rumours to manipulate transfer negotiations, important matches are moved to different times and days to maximize viewing numbers, players are disciplined for Tweeting about refs after journalists RT them to death, and money from television rights’ deals fuel the enormous wage inflation in the big European leagues. Football media is no longer football’s message (if it ever was); they are one and the same institution, pace Marshall McLuhan.
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While this sort of thing is great fodder for the “Against Modern Football” cynics, it’s crucial to note there is a positive side to this complex relationship as well. Long-time readers of the writers on this site should be well-versed in the on-going struggle to reform the Canadian Soccer Association. Reformers often point to Australia’s 2003 Crawford Report as a model for change, but it’s important to note that the report didn’t arise out of grassroots organization and pressure on government alone. It was the enormous controversy generated by the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Four Corners program on the incompetence of the Australian FA that provided the major impetus for parliament to act.
It’s hard to imagine an investigative magazine like the CBC’s the Fifth Estate really taking it to the CSA in an hour long broadcast. In this country and in the US, soccer has long struggled in the battle for TV time and newspaper column space amid all the other, highly-popular traditionally North American sports. That battle, as demoralizing as it can often be, still has to be fought every day by the backers of professional soccer in North America. As the history of collapsed pro leagues in Canada and the U.S. demonstrates, media attention can mean the difference between success and failure of pro soccer over the long-term.
As Major League Soccer prepares to welcome both Vancouver and Montreal into the fold, we could see the beginning of a slow change in the sports media culture in this country. I say “could” because the hockey and baseball old guard still calls the shots, despite football’s clear popularity in Canada, both as a pastime and a professional sport. It’s my hope to provide in this space on Canadian Soccer News an overview of that attention, to criticize it when it fails to tell the whole story (or any of it), and to praise it when it succeeds. In doing so I hope to demonstrate the power and importance of media interest in ensuring the long-term health of the game in Canada.
I’d also like to show that in the digital age we don’t always have to wait for the mainstream sports media to get its act together, as Canadian Soccer News ably demonstrates on a daily basis. Football media is no longer a faceless corporate entity from which the average sports fan is alienated. Soccer fans, whether bloggers or Tweeters or forum commenters are very much part of the picture and deserve their fare share of praise/criticism as well. In all, if this little column provides a bit of a nudge forward in improving the way the game is covered in Canada, then mission accomplished. See you soon.
Richard Whittall writes on football from his hovel in Toronto, Canada. In addition to A More Splendid Life, he also writes the Canadian Soccer history blog, The Spirit of Forsyth. He is the associate editor of Tom Dunmore's award-winning Pitch Invasion. And his writing has appeared in Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and he was a contributor for Brooks Peck's Yahoo! blog Dirty Tackle for the 2010 World Cup. His columns on media and football will appear weekly on Canadian Soccer News. Follow him on Twitter @RWhittall