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Undisputed Media Leadership

Football: the Perfect Metaphor of Our Time

Text Antonio Franco Journalist. Former sports editor, assistant director of El País and founder director of El Periódico de Catalunya

© Pere Puntí / Mundo Deportivo

© Nic Bothma / EPA / Corbis

Games have always had a natural extension in the fact that people discuss events with others who have seen them and those who have not. Press, radio, and television have all found football to be a gold mine for their subsistence.

On 20 October 1974, a boxing match for the world heavyweight championship was held in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, between the title holder, George Foreman, and the challenger, Muhammad Ali, the former Cassius Clay. Ali brought his opponent down in the eighth round, thus recovering the title he had lost years earlier when he refused to fight in Vietnam.

       Many analysts see it as the greatest boxing match of all time, but apart from that they are unanimous in saying that it was the definitive take-off for the total globalisation of sports entertainment. Two North-Americans fought out the most eagerly awaited event in history a long way from their country and before only 60,000 spectators, but the millions of fellow-countrymen who wanted to see it and audiences in more than a hundred countries were able to follow it live on television. There had never been anything like it before. In those days there were no reliable records and uncertainty in the numbers has made it impossible to establish audience figures, but they were higher than for the moon landing, which until then held the absolute record.

       Sport showed its potential as a media power in Zaire. Mobutu, the country's president, wanted to make a big splash to wipe out the poor image of the civil war that had followed independence in the former Belgian Congo. He had pondered holding a celebration like the one for the thousandth anniversary of the Persian Empire, a world conference on peace or a special Miss Universe contest. He hit the mark with his decision to appropriate the fight between Foreman and Ali, even though he had to pay all the expenses: a previously agreed purse of $50 million each for the two contenders, the prize for the winner and the cost of getting all the complex television infrastructure there. For that price Mobutu was able to make the black dream come true and have the entire planet look to Africa as the stage for a fight in which two coloured men disputed the crown for the world's strongest man. Muhammad Ali won, but Mobutu took an equal share of the glory.

       With the help of television, football has come to dominate sport as mass entertainment and as a global phenomenon thanks to the nature of the game and its visual appeal. If Mobutu didn't opt for buying the organisation of a final phase of the World Football Championship it was probably because, geographically speaking, the United States was (and still is) a black hole in the planetary fever over this sport. But that very fact, that association football has more followers and spectators in the world than basketball, baseball, golf and so-called American football, despite its failure to catch on in the land of show business, makes its hegemony even more meritorious.

Sportsmen, spectators, reporters

There has been a demonstrable 'sport / spectators / reporters' combination since ancient times. Sport is a universal language because it can be directly and almost instantaneously understood by anyone and from the very first day it had its practitioners and people who wanted to watch it. But it adds something else: behind the game there has always been a natural extension in the fact that people discuss events with others who have seen them and with those who were not present.

       All of this has evolved in the course of history and led to specialisation amongst sportsmen, the presence of paying spectators and the emergence of the job (and subsequently the business) of reporting and giving an opinion on the action. A collateral use of sport for other ends has also developed, from the panem et circenses of the Romans (entertaining citizens so as to keep their mind off other more important matters) to the modern practice of placing it at the service of ideas or using it as an advertising medium.

       In football, star players (who are now rich and famous and dictate fashions) play the same social role as the heroes and great warriors of the past. The spectators, who at first were a handful of friends or companions, are now millions of people whose only contact with the footballers is through television and the other media. As for the reporters, they have gone from commenting on matches to recreating them. By describing events to all the spectators in the global community, they have internationalised the takings and the millions paid out to the actors. And they themselves also do business, as football is a key element in the balance sheets of the mass media and match broadcasting rights are one part of international big business.

       With the help of the press, football has become the mass show business industry with most power for attracting followers and unleashing passions. Footballers provide entertainment, they let supporters share in their personal triumph and give them a chance to let off steam. In return, they expect to be paid, loved and cheered by them and to see their rivals buckle under the pressure of the fans in the stadium.

       For children it is very easy to kick the ball about and play with it. Later, as adults, when they become mere spectators, the fact they used to play makes it easy to identify with the real stars. This is one of the secrets of football: in their imagination, the crowds slip effortlessly into the role of top-level players.

       At the end of each match, there are always a few events and a final result (even though it may be questionable) thanks to which the entertainment can be continued in conversations, reporting or discussions. Being so simple and so attractive, millions of people turn up at the football grounds and hundreds of millions get hooked on television broadcasts. A lot of people claim that it is better to watch football on television than at the stadium. This is the merit of the commentators, the replays, the on-screen statistics and the real-time statements by the protagonists at the ground.

       Press, radio, and television, have all found football to be a gold mine for their subsistence. It is simple to describe, lends itself to glorification, anyone can make subjective technical or sociological assessments... Techniques have been developed for narrating it by mixing play and spectators' reactions in the same shot, making each match like a popular modern drama. By transcendentalising it, the mass media also raise it to the level of a mass religion. Internationalisation of football has been one of the opening shots of general globalisation, and since at heart it is a ritual confrontation entered into on the basis of partisan identification with one side or the other (at local, national or group level), fully aspiring to peaceful coexistence, it has been easy for the media to turn it into a pretend war.

The surge in the sporting press

The basic, grass-roots sporting press began life in Europe when football became popular after its struggle with rugby for hegemony in public favour swung in its direction in Britain, where the game was given its official structure. Until then there had only been a generalist press and radio that paid very little attention to sport. At the beginning of the twentieth century the only specialities that were given anything like regular coverage in these media were cycling, motor racing, tennis, athletics and boxing.

       When the press began to specialise, some weekly or monthly publications became sports magazines. In the 1920s football began to make itself popular and gain ground in magazines and soon widely followed live radio broadcasts began.

       It is worth remembering that football took shape over a long period of time. In 1848 the first rules were drawn up at Trinity College, Cambridge, but there was no professional British championship until 1885. It was businessmen and employees in British industrial and commercial firms abroad who gradually exported the game all over the world. In countries like Italy, Spain, Germany and France it caught on quickly and soon drew the attention of the press. The first football pages in Spain appeared in 1899 in the magazine Los Deportes, which covered mainly athletics, boxing and cycling. It reported that the Swiss citizen Hans Gamper, the future founder of Barça, was looking for 'companions to play foot-ball in Barcelona'.

       At the beginning of the twentieth century the Spanish general press began to include football, but Italy already had the world's first real sporting newspaper in 1896: Milan's La Gazzetta dello Sport. Spain's turn came in 1906 with Barcelona's El Mundo Deportivo, but it was not until 1919 that Kicker, the first specialist football paper, hit the streets in Germany. Britain, the mother of association football, went its own way, as newspaper publishers made a lot of money with tabloids devoted to a mixture of news and sports. This closed the way for papers specialising only in football. The back pages of historic generalist papers like The Sun and the Daily Mirror, that were invariably taken up by sport, reflect this newspaper culture.

       The link between football and the media saw another landmark with the founding of the FIFA. Significantly, also, it was a journalist, Robert Guerin, of the French daily Matin, who in 1904 founded an international federation to direct and promote this sport.

The television empire

The printed press and radio were the great allies of football's growth until the arrival of television. A new era in communications began when the BBC made its first televised broadcast of a match on 16 September 1937. It was a one-off event, in black and white, of course. Televised matches did not proliferate until the 1950s, amongst other things because only a limited number of homes had televisions and the technology for the necessary connections was rudimentary and expensive. In the 1950s and 1960s televised matches were seen all over Europe, especially in bars and pubs. In the second half of the 1970s colour arrived, bringing with it a great leap in quality towards television's absolute communicative supremacy in football. The first great global exhibition of football was the 1990 World Cup in Italy. More than 150 countries bought the RAI's images for broadcasting to their respective audiences.

       There were broadcast matches, but football's assimilation into mainstream small screen viewing was slow in making itself felt. For several years it had only a symbolic presence on television newscasts. At that time television still had certain pretensions of grandeur, and as in the case of publications claiming to be cultivated, its managers felt that sport was a minor subject matter. Fans had to wait until the nineties for regular slots featuring sports news in its own sections within general news programmes. Then football-centred debates and entertainment programmes also proliferated amongst the other programmes.

Football journalism after the Spanish Civil War

In the 1930s, professional developments in journalism led to the appearance in almost all countries of 'football journalists', a specialist field which was later to achieve notoriety in Spain. Immediately after the Spanish Civil War, newspaper offices were flooded by the arrival of former Francoist soldiers. These newcomers took over the jobs of professionals who had supported the Republic and were banned from returning to their posts in the media. The most that Republican journalists could hope for from the victors was to be allowed to correct the grammatical errors in the articles written by the frequently illiterate soldiers who had taken their place.

       In the newspaper offices, those ex-combatants who had a minimal cultural preparation and journalistic ability and were unconditionally loyal to Franco were assigned to general and political news. Those arriving with no other baggage than their war record, though, very often ended up in the sports department or on specialist papers like Marca, which belonged to the 'Prensa del Movimiento', the press under the control of the Franco regime.

       As Francisco Franco was himself a keen follower of football, his government kept a close watch on what was said on the matter. Because of that, the sports reports and commentaries that issued from the pens of the ex-combatants had a certain imperialist leaning and contained a fair sprinkling of national-syndicalist dressing. The best-known name in Francoist encroachment in these media was Marca, the great national daily (or nazional, as its friends and enemies called it) founded in 1938, which became home to the notorious Fernández-Cuesta family of Falange members.

       The ideological aftermath of the war involved curiosities on the field of play like the Fascist salute by players when they lined up at the beginning of the match. The press boxes were also affected: in Catalonia, where although the general feeling amongst spectators and supporters was in favour of Barcelona, most of the sports journalists who wrote up or radioed matches were incomprehensibly fervent supporters of Español and Real Madrid.

       In the years before the conflict and the ones that followed it there were sports journalists in Catalonia who were quite popular. In the wake of historic names like those of Narcís Masferrer (La Vanguardia), Daniel Carbó (La Veu de Catalunya), Josep Torrens (El Mundo Deportivo), and the illustrator Valentí Castanys (who worked for the popular satirical publication Xut! between 1922 and 1936 and resurfaced after the war with El Once), others also stand out. Let me mention José Luis Lasplazas; Albert Maluquer, who promoted the illustrated weekly Vida Deportiva (1943), and José Zubeldía, the name behind the Monday magazine Barcelona Deportiva (1944). Later, the generational renewal brought with it Julián Mir, with the magazine Lean (for the pre-match warm-up), who in 1952 went on to father and direct the almost exclusively football daily Dicen, a super-popular paper born to compete with the veteran El Mundo Deportivo, which gave in-depth coverage of minority sports until under Juan José Castillo it adapted to the demand for more football.

       The rigid censorship left little room for anything of interest in the generalist newspapers and as fundamentalist vigilance of habits and language barred the way for the yellow journalism of sex and sensationalism that prospered in the rest of Europe after the Second World War, the only popular press that developed here in the 1940s, 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s was the sports press. That is why Barcelona came to hold the world record of simultaneously housing four sports newspapers (El Mundo Deportivo, Dicen, the more modern Sport and the short-lived ABB). Furthermore, these local papers competed with two more in Madrid (Marca and As, the latter more profusely illustrated and less ideologised) that arrived on the Catalan news-stands every day to sing the praises of the Spanish capital's teams.

       Sports photography flourished during those years. Amongst those who particularly deserve to be remembered are Joan Rovira, founder of the graphic agency Sport, Ramón Dimas, a versatile professional especially skilled in capturing movement, and the Pérez de Rozas father and brothers, who regularly took up position on either side of the goals and who stood out for the quality and quantity of their work.

       The press archives are a reminder that in those days football was also an opportunity for a splendid generation of illustrators and cartoonists to shine. The forerunners were Bofarull, Benigami, Junceda and Castanys, already mentioned; then came Muntañola, Peñarroya, Escobar, Sabatés and Cifré, moonlighters in the sports sphere after their day jobs on the illustrated comics issuing from the Bruguera factory. As in their cartoon strips on everyday life, these illustrators took an approach that was more sociologically critical and rebellious than most of their colleagues in the press.

       At the same time, after the war, radio, which being free and warm went down well with football fans, brought fame to several broadcasters who used to comment on matches. One figure that stood out in Spain was Matías Prats, the prime advocate of 'national-footballism', who was scoffed at for his habit of combining messages oozing with pomp and rhetoric with boring trivia about the players. He created the myth of the 'racial fury' of Spanish footballers. Another important name is Carrusel Deportivo, the programme that best catered for eager fans thanks to its connections with reporters located at each playing ground. It dominated Sunday afternoons until television became popular. The Catalans' private memories of that time still ring with the echoes of the voices and the classic reporting of Miguel Ángel Valdivieso, José Félix Pons and the Fernández brothers, masters of the realistic description of the game's technical aspects.

Partisanship: from consent to encouragement

The sports reporting of those years was simple and schematic. It set out to offer up-to-the-minute information, sometimes with an admixture of ideology according to each professional's opinion or the instructions they received. But it strengthened spectators' allegiance to their club and fans' devotion to their idols, and above all it stoked spectators' partisanship. The moment reporters and broadcasters realised they had the power to turn supporters into machines for powering their respective teams, putting pressure on the referee and intimidating rivals was the dawn of a golden age for them. They left the ethics of neutrality at the stadium entrance because fans did not just consent to the media taking sides; they demanded it.

       It was at this point that the press began to make use openly of different measuring sticks for violence by the home team and by the visiting team, in the same way that grandstand vulgarity was acceptable or not according to who it came from. The whole of Europe was steeped in this 'exception' that contrasted with the objectivity or neutrality that was normally expected from journalism. And it was with football that reporters first rehearsed techniques for expressing the idea that 'we are moving forward' referring to their readers' or audiences' favourite team.

       That was when the leap took place from being theoretically indifferent journalists to being the clubs' regular armed information wings, a forerunner of what the political journalists covering diplomatic summits or financial reporters writing about imports and exports have later done with the consent of society. In these later cases, partisanship almost always hinges on nationalism. The same happens with football matches between national teams and competitions between teams from different countries or regions. But when two teams from the same geographical area meet, journalists still make use of partisan side-taking for the sake of fans who do not appreciate objectivity or to serve the specific financial interests of their papers or stations.

       In line with the post-war unconscious, all over Europe but especially in Spain the football press quite unashamedly adopted the language of war to underline the confrontational aspect matches have always had. In this way it connected with people’s darkest feelings. Hence the use of expressions like 'attack', 'defend', 'crush', 'resist', 'shot at goal', 'canon ball', 'defensive shield', 'counterstrike', 'all-out offensive', 'defensive wall' or 'dominate' is not innocent and these expressions have become established for all time as the ones that best describe the subliminal content of this game.

       At the end of the 1960s the editorial boards of general newspapers still felt that the more slow-witted, ingenuous and unskilled journalists should be made to work in the sports section, but things began to change and not just because of gradual improvements in the technical understanding of the trade.

       In Spain, as the Ministry of Information and Tourism kept tight control over the political and social content of the press, in practice there was greater permissiveness towards writers on football than towards writers on other subjects. Perhaps because of that, in these apparently minor sections of the newspapers and in some sports publications articles began to appear in which, along with the updates and results of matches, innuendos about institutions and figures in the world of football crept in and so, gradually, did more wide-ranging sociological judgements and digressions. It was a gentle shift away from the ideological standpoint of the ex-combatants who wrote about sport and in a way it was a foretaste of the combative tone of the Spanish political press during the transition.

       In that line of work professional profiles began to appear that were an alternative to those the readers were familiar with. In Madrid, the reverse of what Manuel Alcántara and Jesús Fragoso del Toro had embodied during the hardest years of the Franco regime was, for example, the audacity of Julián García Candau's critical reflections in El País. And in his wake various young writers began to stir who later became prominent modern journalists. Alfredo Relaño and Santiago Segurola began in this way.

       The Spanish capital was also where another key figure in sports journalism was born and bred and grew up: José María García, Butanito, the king of early morning radio. García was a populist who first showed the ability to use an unusually insulting critical tone with which he rounded off the merit of getting better information than anyone else. Later, though, as his influence increased, he became dictatorial and manipulated the whole of Spanish sport with his microphone. With the airs of a moralising preacher, he had coaches laid off, made club chairmen resign and harassed many a federation official whom he labelled as inept or corrupt, while at the same time taking the liberty of combining the exercise of journalism with personal economic interests, organising sports events or taking part in the advertising business surrounding sport. Listening to him was a favourite night-time vice for millions of fans, but his loss of audience was greeted with general relief.

The Catalan model of demythologising sport

Catalonia underwent an even more profound mutation in sports reporting and in the 1970s readers realised that football was beginning to be treated with new intentions. A report signed by Martin Girard in El Noticiero Universal about, for example, what Barça supporters in the Rambla were doing and saying when they met there after matches bore no relation to the stilted comments that could be read on the news-stands until then (Martin Girard was the pseudonym the film-maker Gonzálo Suárez used in his younger days, when he was engaged in this sort of work).

       There are other examples. The analogies put about by Alex J. Botines in the Diario de Barcelona when he compared the excessive violence of some defenders with the police intervention in trade union protests were also unheard of until then. In the intellectually unrelieved context of the sports paper Dicen, Santiago Codina published some subtle interviews in which footballers said the goalposts also played but they also spoke of the hardships they had suffered in the outlying districts where they had learned to kick a ball. And whenever Morera Falcó, in his section in El Correo Catalán, 'Bajo la piel del estadio' (Under the skin of the stadium), described what happened on Sunday afternoon at the Camp Nou, the reader found hints at how the average Catalan thought and acted...

       In other places a similar sort of thing was called 'new journalism'. There they were just modest but cutting attempts to give people honest pointers to their country, and this flourished in the rest of the pages of the papers until the transition began. Football journalism came out of the Second Division thanks also to the arrival of articles by writers and sociologists who, like Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, rather than speculating as to whether or not the result was fair, asked if the refereeing, the reactions in the grandstand and the behaviour of the people sitting in the executive box were fair or not and why.

       In the final stages of the Franco regime this was underlined by the dynamite that began to be hurled by Barrabás, a satirical sports weekly that specialised in spotlighting the internal contradictions in Spanish sport and everything surrounding it. It was a task in symmetry with what other humorous publications (remember Hermano Lobo, El Papus, Por Favor and the survivor El Jueves) did with more general subjects. At the same time as they gathered disciplinary actions, paid fines, suffered temporary closure by the courts and put up with threats from the far right, these magazines were a great boost to the recovery of freedom of expression in Spain. Barrabás revealed the financial and political wheeling and dealing going on in football out of sight of the spectators. Three long-lived illustrators were the mainstay of this publication: Ivà, Oscar and Gin.

       To make matters more complicated for supporters of a continuation of the Franco regime, the other side of Madrid's Butanito coin appeared in Barcelona, once more on the radio. A young man by the name of Joaquim Maria Puyal began broadcasting football matches in Catalan on Radio Barcelona using a civilised approach. Backed by his professional integrity and his skill as a communicator, Puyal did more for Catalonia's linguistic normalisation in a few years than all the country's writers and poets and all the contributors to the culture sections had managed to do in several decades.

       Along with this partisan trend, another type of sports journalism began to spread from Barcelona, this time one that was characterised by its normality, its solidity and its lack of complexes, the same type that could be found in European countries without historical emergencies. It was long-lasting and amongst its main figures it is worth mentioning Josep Maria Casanovas, Miguel Rico, Enric Bañeres, Santi Nolla, Emilio Pérez de Rozas, Josep Maria Artells, Quim Regás and Ramon Besa. Thanks to them, football in the print media was able to benefit from the boom years, the 1980s and 1990s, when circulation figures and the profitability of newspapers were growing. Subsequently, a decline in reading, coupled with technical improvements in television as 'information-entertainment-showbiz', shifted the centre of gravity of sports coverage towards this audiovisual medium.

Overdependence

The arrival of the twenty-first century caught newspapers and magazines as a whole sunk in a crisis of faith in the future due to the systematic loss of readers and of doubt as to their very purpose in society as a profession. There was a decline in professionalism and a clear predominance of journalistic considerations aimed solely at making money by any means so as to ensure survival of the medium.

       This led to the proliferation of so-called 'promotions' for selling copies. Instead of investing in raising the level of the content, newspapers gave away attractive products that had nothing to do with journalism or offered them at reduced prices. First it was books, records and travel guides or guides to eating out; in other words, items with a certain cultural value. Then came anything from lottery tickets of all types to kitchen pots and pans, trinkets or electrical appliances. In the sporting press, these practices have eventually done away with the little that remained of their independence from the clubs. As football supporters' preferred complements are their teams' merchandising products, the clubs who own the licenses tend to let the newspapers use them or not on the basis of their subservience.

       The present financial weakness of the press and its excessive dependence has caused a crisis in investigative journalism that also affects sport. In most cases, this line of work is only pursued to favour friends or prejudice enemies. Real Madrid recently suffered intensely unsettling open warfare over the chairmanship. In the end, Ramón Calderón was forced to resign because of an article in Marca showing that at an assembly of members of Real Madrid his board of directors let a number of people vote who were not eligible to do so. But connivance between the newspapers and the people involved in this affair made many readers think that this sort of irregularity only surfaces when it suits someone. The crisis in media credibility, aggravated by constant announcements of signings that never took place, or by headlines that are blown out of proportion with what the article describes, is doing a lot of damage to this press.

Madrid and Barcelona

The key to the war over the Real Madrid chairmanship was that the capital's papers wanted Florentino Pérez to come back and take the reins of the club as they felt confident he would get it out of the depression caused by Barcelona's triumphal run. It is worth pointing out that when Real Madrid does badly sales of sports newspapers in the Spanish capital fall off. To put it another way, a coup against a losing chairman is rewarded with increased income for the newspapers.

       Having mentioned this incident, we could look at the differences between the notorious partisanship of Madrid's sporting press towards Real Madrid and that of the Catalan sporting press towards Barça. Barcelona journalists feel that for historical and political reasons Barça belongs to all Catalans, including them. As a result, they have always vied with the club's directors to impose their vision of what Barça ought to be. In the long and agitated chairmanship of the Basque building contractor José Luis Núñez, seen by the Catalan press as an upstart who should never have been elected to the post by the members, the tension took the form of a resistance movement which could be summed up in the slogan 'Barça yes, Núñez no'. The partisanship of the Catalan press was totally in favour of the brand name of the team and players, while keeping its distance with the institution's elected representatives.

       In Madrid, on the other hand, the capital of the realm, the press as a whole has more expertise in supporting and at the same time being supported by power, so that sports journalists are traditionally pragmatic and are almost always on good terms with the influential directors of Real Madrid and play along with them. They submit to them and at most, just for the benefit of the public, criticise the team's playing or the quality or character of the coach or the players.

       As regards bilateral relations between Madrid and Barcelona, the sporting press on either side has traditionally engaged in double-talk to try and cover up the fact that the rivalry between the two flagship teams has a mainly political basis going back a very long way: the split between 'uniform Spanish unity' and 'plurality with respect for differences'. This reserve is consistent with the official line that politics and sport should be kept separate, closing one's eyes to the fact that the two have always been inseparable. Consistent but useless. Most followers of Barça and Real Madrid fully agree that what comes between them is the political basis. Anti-Madrid essentially means anti-centralist, and anti-Barcelona feeling is another form of anti-Catalanism. But for a long time, whenever the press looked at it this way it was frowned on.

       This type of antagonism is not unique in the world. In Northern Ireland followers of Celtic and of Glasgow Rangers engage in a very similar dialectic according to their respective Catholic and Protestant roots. And in the years of Maradona's Naples the resentment and scorn coming out of Rome and Milan against this team's hegemony were more a result of Italy's traditional animosity between the working-class, industrial north and the rural south with its reputation for laziness, rather than of doubts over the quality of Naples's playing.

       In fact, football today is a summary and a reflection of a lot of complex things. It has already been pointed out that it keeps alive the spirit of confrontation in a society with a pacifist vocation, that the teams have become the preferred flags of nationalism now that globalisation is obviously irreversible, that it is a living demonstration of the bond between politics and sport when political correctness proclaims the two must always be separate, that what was once a simple game for personal amusement involving physical effort has been made the great universal mass spectacle...

       In view of all this, the world of communications, which also suffers its own complexities, has found in this sport one of the keys to its possible survival. But the condition is that it agrees to bow its head and renounce the way it had formerly understood some of its professional principles, forego its essential neutrality, forego the need for journalists to keep their distance from the object of their work, renounce the need for a clear separation between information and publicity and forego the exercise of its professional work untainted by financial interest.

       The mass media have elevated football to unfathomable heights, but in the end the business of global sports reporting we saw starting life with the boxing match between Foreman and Muhammad Ali has altered the universe of the mass media. We sometimes see strikingly spectacular, transcendent goals, which have the unusual characteristic of being scored in our own goal.



Spring (April - June 2010)