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Ockley Books - Roger Domeneghetti

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253 pages

English

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"The media dominates our lives. Sport dominates the media. Football dominates the sports media." If we're not watching the beautiful game on television, then we're listening to it on the radio. If we're not reading about it, then we're tweeting about it. If we're not betting in-play, then we're pretending to be football managers. We can access goals from every corner of the globe whenever and wherever we want, yet by comparison few of us watch a match live. From the Back Page to the Front Room explains how football and the media have become indistinguishable, fundamentally altering fans' relationship with the game in the process. Starting in the days of folk football, Roger Domeneghetti traces the sport's journey through early newspapers, radio, newsreels, the growth of televised football and on into the internet age. Along the way he explores the impact this powerful partnership has had on our culture and society. Based on exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with key figures including Greg Dyke, Henry Winter, Jacqui Oatley, Jonathan Wilson and Hope Powell, From the Back Page to the Front Room is a fascinating account of how football and the media helped each other dominate modern life. It is also a window into a world where we can now watch on our phones what once barely merited a few lines in the Press.

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Publié par	Ockley Books
Date de parution	27 novembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783015580
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Published by Ockley Books Ltd
First published November 2014
All text copyright of the author.
The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted. All chapters written by Roger Domeneghetti. All chapters edited by David Hartrick.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior permission in writing from the author and publisher Ockley Books.
ISBN 978-0-9571410-56
eBook ISBN 978-1-7830155-80
Front cover design by Michael Kinlan
Printed bound by:
Riley Dunn Wilson Ltd.
Red Doles Lane
Huddersfield
West Yorkshire
HD2 1YE

The Author
Roger Domeneghetti is a freelance writer and the Morning Star s North East football correspondent. A journalist for nearly 20 years, he has worked for a range of titles including sportinglife.com and the Daily Star Sunday . He has also lectured in journalism and the sociology of sport at Teesside and Sunderland universities. He lives in Durham with his family and a tortoise. This is his first book.
For Amy and Lucy.
You will never know how proud you make me or how much I love you.
xx daddy xx
Contents
Preface
In the Beginning There Was Fote-ball
The Rise and Fall of the Sporting Press
Hold the Front Row!
Back to Square One
Taking a Punt on the Beautiful Game
Football Gets Switched On
The Press Takes Aim
Fans are Doing it for Themselves
Reaching for the Sky
Football Writing Reaches Fever Pitch
Holding Out for a Hero
Roy Race Grows Up and Gets Loaded
The Media Gives Women a Red Card
Back of the Net
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Preface
It s Easter Monday, 2012, and there are 17 minutes left of Newcastle United s match with Bolton at St James Park. What had until that point been a fairly dull, goalless affair sparks into life when the Magpies young French star Hatem Ben Arfa receives the ball deep in his own half. Fifteen scintillating seconds later he s scored and the home side are on their way to three points. While the Toon Army celebrates one of the goals of the season, a wave of panic washes through the Press box as those tasked with writing about the game, myself included, aren t quite sure what they d just seen. Had Ben Arfa received the ball from Tim Krul or Yohan Cabaye? Was he in the centre circle or closer to his own goal when he started his run? How many tackles had he ridden? Which Bolton player could have (perhaps should have) brought him down and taken a yellow for the team? We had to wait for the answers. What had caused this panic? Well, due to a power shortage, the TV monitors in the Press box weren t working. Horror of horrors there were no replays. And there you have it: the media prism through which we experience football has become so omnipotent we almost can t consume football without it - even newspaper football writers are reliant on replays.
The media dominates our lives. Sport dominates the media. Football dominates the sports media. Think about it: if we re not watching football on TV from the comfort of our sofa or with our mates in the pub then we re listening to it on the radio; or we re talking about it on the radio; or we re reading about it in newspapers, comics and magazines; or we re blogging about it; or we re gambling on it; or we re collecting football stickers; or we re tweeting about it; or we re watching people who write about football talk about what other people who write about football have written about football.
By comparison it s rare we actually watch the sport live. Even those who do make their way to a ground every Saturday at 3pm (or 12.45pm, or 5.20pm) will most likely then seek an interpretation of what they ve seen from experts in the media. Almost everyone s experiences of the teams they don t support will also be gained vicariously through the media. Such is the power of the media s coverage of football that in 1990 an Italian operatic aria reached number 2 in the UK singles charts simply because it had been used by the BBC as their signature tune for that summer s World Cup. The same tournament provided New Order with their only UK number 1. The 1966 World Cup final is still the country s most watched TV programme. In the regional newspaper industry, which some feel is in slow, terminal decline, football is one of the few areas of content almost guaranteed to provide a huge hike in sales. The Liverpool Echo was up 46% the day after Liverpool lifted the Champions League in 2005 while sales of the city s Daily Post doubled. Incidentally on the same day The Times sold an extra 70,000 copies. Coincidence? I don t think so.
Without the media our perception of football would be totally different. One of the key moments of the reinvention of the game was Paul Gascoigne s tears in the World Cup semi-final in 1990. Yet it wasn t the tears themselves but the coverage of them, both live on the night and subsequently through endless reproduction, that was the real catalyst. Few in the stadium would have realised he was crying, fewer still would have realised the cathartic affect his emotional implosion would have on English football. It was an image that represented a human-interest story that enabled the game, through the media, to draw in new fans and which subsequently became embedded in the game s cultural heritage. It s easy to forget that Stuart Pearce cried too.
Yet popular histories of the game tend to overlook the huge importance of the media, not just since the 1990s but from its earliest days when it became the sport we could call modern football. There might be a small section here or a chapter there but no sense that the pair have always been inextricably linked. Likewise, popular histories of the media tend to overlook the importance of football despite the fact the media has always recognised its value as compelling content that could be used to increase its own popularity, as well as providing a consistent spur for technological innovation. Read Andrew Marr s otherwise excellent history of the Press, My Trade, and you ll find just one mention of sport - when he declares his disinterest in it - and no mention of football at all. He is not alone.
Then there s academia s approach to the subject (or lack thereof). Just before his death in 2012, Nick Trujillo, a professor in sport, culture and the media at California State University wrote that when he started researching sport in the mid-1980s other academics would ask him why he was studying something so frivolous and when he would be returning to serious work. He would respond sarcastically by asking them what could be more important than sport before pointing out that it is a multi-billion dollar business which shapes our culture. He would then ask them why they weren t studying it.
True he was talking about sport but which is the biggest sport of the lot? Actually, scratch that, which is the biggest business of the lot? As Sergio Cragnotti, the former Lazio chief, has said: You tell me another product that is bought off the shelf by three billion consumers. Not even Coca-Cola comes close. Media companies use football to sell their technology - who can forget The Special One rolling around pretending to be James Bond for Samsung? BT are now using live Premier League football as a loss-leader to get people to sign up for their broadband service. ESPN, News Corp, Time Warner, Yahoo and Google have all looked at the English Premier League and considered bidding for the rights to drive customers to their services.
In many ways the history of football media is the history of the media. While the Press helped popularise football, football helped make newspapers a mass-market product. Newsreels brought moving footage of the game to the masses and radio brought live coverage into their homes; football was a key selling point of both. Today, if you listen to most regional radio stations on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon you ll still find their schedules dominated by commentary of the local football team s game. The UK has two talk radio stations, one devoted entirely to sport, the other a mix of news and sport. Football dominates both. In the weeks following the 9/11 attacks, Radio Five Live interrupted a breaking news story about a possible plane hijack for live coverage of a Press conference with England captain David Beckham ahead of a crucial World Cup qualifier with Greece. Now, you might think that demonstrates slightly skewed news values from whoever was making the editorial decisions on the day (and I might be inclined to agree with you) but ask yourself this: when was the last time a football match was interrupted for a breaking news story?
And what of television? In the 1950s it cemented football s place as the nation s favourite sport while the game boosted TV set sales. In the early 1990s with football s reputation in the gutter and Rupert Murdoch s News Corporation on the brink of collapse, English football and the media came together once more to support each other in the quest for global domination. Without the money generated through Sky s coverage of the Premier League, it is highly unlikely that Murdoch would have come to dominate the British media in quite the manner that he has. So here s another question for you: would the Leveson Inquiry have happened if the Premier League had stuck with ITV way back in 1992?
Along the way the media has helped turn football events into national events. It has even underpinned our obsession with celebrity and if you want to understand the switch from analogue to digital broadcasting, there is no better example than the football media. Beyond all that, the football media has played a crucial role in shaping key aspects of English culture including notions of patriotism and the stereotyping of other nationalities. It has reinforced class divisions as well as the definition of masculinity and the related marginalisation of women and tacit homophobia. Yet despite all this we don t fully