So, in summary, a partnership between online newspapers and blogs—for example, an online network linked on a football mainpage with rotating featured posts—comes with both potential advantages and drawbacks.

For bloggers, a network could provide a bigger readership and a closer working relationship with an expert newspaper editorial staff who could pitch story angles or offer general advice. Depending on the advertising model in place, it could also provide potentially higher revenue incentives to keep invest the time and energy necessary to maintain a top quality site, and motivate writers to build blogs worthy of joining one of these networks, improving the current standard above the eyeball-hungry, SEO shlock banner ad approach. For newspapers, a blog network can offer readers a much wider area of coverage, global perspectives, differing opinions, historical analysis than a single newsroom could produce on its own. It could also provide lower-cost content on the web, should news organizations decide to make news content available only through paid Smart Phone or iPad-like apps.

The drawbacks, however, are significant. For newspapers, a network would rob overseers of direct editorial control, leaving the possibility for some major legal department snafus. For bloggers too, the arrangement might cede more control to advertisers and newspapers. As someone who hasn’t put up an ad banner yet in three years going, I completely understand.

But any talk of newspaper/blog coops is just pipe-dreamery if there there’s no money to be made, and for that reason I think it’s important to leave this final part to a discussion about the absolutely woeful state of online advertising, especially with regard to football blogging. Keep in mind, this is going to be a low-tech breakdown; the issue is with philosophy, not mechanics.

Currently, advertising through blogs is fairly low-maintenance. The model is simple, generalized across the board, and easy to start up. If you have a Blogger blog for example, you can sign up for AdSense and watch as the pennies roll in from the rare wayward ad clicks from your reading audience. Or perhaps you want to be connected to advertisers in search of blogs of a particular kind. Well, Ahmed Bilal does a bang-up job helping out soccer bloggers with his Football Media ad network. But even with the narrower focus on content-appropriate advertisers, you’re still stuck with these two options—banner ads, meaning the more “Wayne Rooney is a Fuckhead” stories, the more clicks, the more revenue; or “Social Advertising,” which essentially means astroturfing your posts (the blogging equivalent of this).

This kind of advertising is built on the Necessary Nuisance model. You want to watch the newest episode of your favourite TV show? Go to a newly-released movie? Walk downtown? Watch a popular YouTube vid? Listen to top 40 radio? Read a magazine or a newspaper? You have to deal with ads. Advertisers don’t care as much if you hate them, because the endgame is not necessarily consumption (a common mistake among anti-consumerist lefties, incidentally). The end game is product awareness, which helps consolidate brand loyalty. Ads legitimize brand, which comes in handy for producers when you’re at the grocery store buying one of the several thousand deodorants on sale.

This kind of advertising this is usually expensive to produce and sell. We know the famous line about ads costing more than the shows they appear on than the show itself. And selling print ad space in the analog age, as we know now apres le deluge, was (and still is) the primary source of revenue for both newspapers and magazines. Yet the high costs are justified; while TV shows and magazines are expensive to produce, the networks and media conglomerates share a much larger portion of their respective markets than an individual blogger floating on the interweb, and therefore get a lot of eyeballs by default (e.g. two national papers in Canada, three major networks). And the bigger the content-producers’ chunk of the media consumer pie (measured in ratings, circulation), the more they can charge advertisers for access to said chunk. The system works!

The online incorporation of this model is, on the surface, ingenious. Contrary to other media, banner ads and widgets are often cheap to produce (and cheap looking), and endlessly reproducible. Pretty much anyone can put them up on their site, and because of the miracle PPC and CPM, the onus is on the individual blogger to get in the necessary eyeballs to generate more revenue. No clumsy Nielson ratings, no circulation statistics. You take an hour to post something up, a reader takes thirty seconds to give you a page impression, and five seconds to click on an ad. Clink, penny in a cup. The more eyeballs you get, the more clinks you get.

But there is a major problem: this model works against the essence of what makes the internet the internet. No, it’s not memes or viral videos or any of that HuffPo hooey. To put it simply, it’s diversity. While many of us would be content to visit Slate, Gawker, Boing Boing and the Huffington Post before calling it a day, there are many online readers who prefer something more personalized to their tastes. Some prefer even more specialization within their chosen niche. Even though the bloggers who attract these like-minded readers might get fewer uniques (meaning, under the current model, less penny clinks), they carry a significant level of value for a producer with a niche product geared toward a particular demographic (educated, psychic, Japanese, whatever). Some of these producers don’t have much of an ad budget, and never have.

Some bloggers have already realized this and formed their own ad networks. Yet bloggers aren’t in the ad business, and don’t have the time, resources or energy to pitch to companies that aren’t used to doing much advertising beyond word of mouth at all. Ad companies don’t have the resources (finance and time) either to deal with a myriad of different blogging networks, each focusing on a niche within a niche. Much better to deal with a single ad department at a newspaper, for example. This is obviously where a newspaper blog network could come in handy, but I think the real key difference is the noise filter that newspapers could provide.

There is a reason why Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” is one of the most popular blogs on the internet—it is an incredible filter for the most relevant political and cultural happenings of the moment. But Sullivan’s blog is still a general colloquium featuring this and that interesting article or video; most of the time, a lay reader who wants to get into a particular subject, like football history for example, will have to try using Google to find blogs suited to her tastes. She might click on the top-rated site, which could be great, or, could be crap. Maybe there are also countless other sites she might find interesting, but she’ll have to dedicate a lot of time on the web, carefully looking among blog link lists and compiling her own personal network of top football history blogs. After awhile, she might go extra mile and set up an elaborate system of RSS feeds or bookmarks or saved browser tabs. But at this point, she’ll probably have to be a hardcore football history nerd to keep this effort up.

What if I just want to get an overview of the best sites covering a particular angle on a particular topic? Where do I go to find what I’m looking for? Newspapers would go beyond self-appointed networks in that they provide key editorial oversight, oversight that would likely reflect the readership of the paper (quite a different list of football blogs you’d see on the Sun than on the Guardian). And as these networks attract more online newspaper readers interested in particular subjects, trusting in the editorial judgment and brand behind the selection, the value of these readers for advertisers despite their smaller numbers, increases. And that doesn’t just (or at all) mean the big brand, product legitimacy advertisers—that means advertisers working on behalf of much smaller, niche companies, to get people to directly buy a particular product. And the product ad might not even be a nuisance; depending on the specialization, it may be something these blog readers want to buy. EFW readers might want cheap flights from Gatwick to Barcelona; Run of Play readers might want to buy a copy of the latest Football Manager, or a subscription to WSC.

This is the value I think the web provides, a value that it has yet to take advantage of. I think a partnership between newspapers and blogs, especially in football, could form a group of dedicated, special interest readers. But I think the movement in making this happen has to come from advertisers. Perhaps as more money goes into online advertising, we might see this kind of thing, or perhaps the money will go into making flashier videos that obstruct text and clutter websites. It’s an idea, anyway. Thanks for reading.

Image credit: burtonwood + holmes.

This series came about in part from a post from the not-so-anonymous-anymore blogger, Fake Sigi, which discussed the post rate on Pitch Invasion since the end of the summer, especially in light of the editor’s new column at BigSoccer. FS wrote:

My main concern was that Tom [Dunmore] would start posting more and more at BigSoccer, leaving Pitch Invasion to slowly decompose. From my experience, it’s hard enough to maintain one web writing medium when you’re not a hard core freelancer. And mostly those fears turned out to be unfounded through July when Pitch Invasion posted something on the order of nearly three new articles a day.

And then Tom went on short “week-long” hiatus on August 12, and Pitch Invasion has for all intents and purposes gone dark since then.

From there, FS goes on to say—to use an expression that jumped the shark years ago—PI has jumped the shark. So I spoke to Tom about the drop-off in the rate of posts here, and he put it this way:

It’s really rather simple…I was finishing writing a 400 page soccer book and running the Chicago Fire’s Independent Supporters’ Association…the former took up about 20 hours a week, the latter 40 hours a week, and I blasted out a few BigSoccer pieces for some $ as well, in part for the cash, in part for the interest of reaching a new audience. And I also have a life!

Plus [PI contributors, including yours truly] eased up post-WC on PI too so the site lost its regular momentum.  I guess at the end of the day, it’s not a successful business (nor was it ever meant to earn full-time income for anyone) and it’s not going to run itself when nobody has 30 hours a week to work on it for very little $ reward.  At the end of the day, I’d rather run nothing on it than run low quality crap.

And there you have it: one major pitfall for any successful blog (and blogger) is the lack of any solid financial return on what can be an enormous investment of time and energy (it’s a “hustle,” as Jason Davis wrote). And it’s not as if there is money awaiting the hard-working blogger down the long and windy road, outside of using the blog as a platform for almost invariably better-paying external freelance work. Needless to say, Dunmore, nor anyone (save me on occasion) has anything to apologize for with regard to Pitch Invasion’s contribution to independent football writing. The problem is that for most of us (hi Brooks!) right now, blogging is for the most part its own reward. Which is why so many great blogs, even those loaded with up PPC banners and decent ad deals and a bunch of subscriptions, will eventually start to peter out, oh, say, around the three year mark.

For some, this isn’t actually a problem at all. Blogs are great in part because of the low threshold involved in starting up. Anyone can get a domain on Blogger or WordPress and hang their dirty footballing laundry out to dry for millions to read (or not read). And anyone can just as easily stop posting, often with nobody the wiser. This is in many ways what makes blogs great. They live and die in the moment, they have their time, and then they cease to be relevant. Then someone else fills in the empty space, although never in quite the same way.

Other writers question whether there is any intrinsic financial worth in blogging at all. Local Kings Cross blogger William Perrin, quoted in the Alan Rusbridger lecture I keep banging on about, believes there isn’t anything about independent journalism that “deserves” remuneration:

[The site] costs us about £11 a month in cash, which is about three of four pints of beer … we have a very strong community of people around here who send us stuff. None of the people who work with me are journalists. I’m not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination; it’s an entirely volunteer effort … Some people what I do in my community some people label journalism, it’s a label I actually resist.

Indeed, once you add the expectation of post-rates, editorial control, the concerns of a legal department, and the expectation you will always cover a certain topic in a certain way—all, by the way, possible elements of any network blog/newspaper partnership—well, it’s not blogging anymore, is it?

With some of these questions this in mind, I spoke with a successful blogger who is already branching out into a major media organization with his Guardian Chalkboards feature, Zonal Marking author Michael Cox. I asked him if he thought ZM would continue unaffected even with the prospect of further outside work, and whether he thought there was any incentive for blogs and media orgs to cooperate:

Yes, ZM will continue, really the Guardian stuff is irrelevant from that point of view – not to do it down, it’s great and a privilege to do, but but doesn’t really change the way I operate. I just do a column for them on Monday mornings, and will happily go in for the podcast if I’m invited back, but ZM is still my main task. There hasn’t really been any change in it now that I’m working for a ‘bigger’ publication.

I suppose it depends if the blog can sustain itself on its own financially (through other means than through a link with a mainstream organisation). If not, then the blogger will probably be forced to either accept money from a publication (in which case editorial control might suffer, understandably) or they’ll just work full-time for the newspaper and do the blog as an ‘extra’. But that’s not really the case here – ZM’s got me a chance to write for the Guardian but now that’s me doing it, not Zonal Marking being featured on the Guardian.

Cox, like most football bloggers, considers his blog an end in itself. When I started my own site, A More Splendid Life, I deliberately intended it to be an experimental platform for my own football writing, just to see if I could do it. After a while though, it took on a life of its own. Even when it was in my best interest to stop, I kept going because people kept reading; I didn’t feel it was right to just kill it off. To this day, I have often contemplated chucking it out entirely and starting my own personal site featuring writing on a host of different topics, but I don’t want to wreck AMSL as a soccer-only site.

The sense of your blog as an autonomous creation is a powerful motivation to keep going, but it over the long haul it is no match for sustainable financial incentives. Even if you’re wildly successful at blogging, additional freelance work will sap your energy and resources. A very small percentage of individual bloggers might get bought or “sponsored” by print pubs, able to maintain the creative and editorial control they had before, but the reality is most independent football writers will either hand over the reigns to someone else, cut down on the post rate, or just stop. That might not be necessarily a bad thing, but when readers come to rely on certain sites to provide coverage on a topic badly neglected by mainstream media organizations with finite resources, the loss of an excellent independent blog leaves a marked gap. While most football bloggers have more than a little William Perrin in them, it’s worth considering that establishing a means for providing sustainable financial rewards for bloggers might not necessarily corrupt the spontaneity, freedom and creativity of the medium.

Image Credit: CarbonNYC.

There is a pervasive trend in some big media organizations—especially in my home country Canada, with two national dailies and two major national broadcasters, one public, one private—to become more “relevant” by offering content perceived to be attractive to a wider circle of readers/viewers/listeners. The public Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has for example in recent years moved toward producing ratings-driven drama programs on their main television network (and has been quite successful at it, although one wonders what the underlying reason is for this approach when the other private network broadcaster CTV essentially provides the same programming, and has done for years), and revamped their classical music channel to include more “indie rock,” singer-songwriter content during the work day for the underrepresented urban hipster office set.

Similarly, the national newspaper The Globe and Mail moved to a new print design closely resembling the Guardian, although with what seems like about half the written content, a greatly expanded Style section, and more knee-jerk editorials and graphical tchotchkes masquerading as columns. In both instances, the redesigns seem driven more by zealous MBA graduates more attuned to reacting to data from group studies, telephone surveys, and demographic shifts, the kind of people who obsess over reading the widest possible tastes of media consumers.

The Guardian online meanwhile is still figuring out what to do with a mass of readers from outside their borders, particularly in Canada and the US, who have fled ugly, floating cursor video ads, anti-intuitive layouts, or the multiple page newspaper article redumps on nytimes.com, and found a new home at guardian.co.uk. With a wide variety (emphasis emphasis!) of interesting international stories, blogs and articles tailor-made for internet reading (and a nice, well-spaced font), careful, non-intrusive use of video embedding, the Guardian site seems designed by people who use the internet—again, it’s not just an adjunct to the newspaper, or an over-monetized flash ad animation dumping ground. Once more, it’s worth returning to Alan Rusbridger’s excellent Hugh Cudlipp lecture (although the video links are all broken in a nice bit of irony). If you haven’t already, take the time to read the whole thing. But let’s focus in on this quote:

During the last three months of 2009 the Guardian was being read by 40% more people than during the same period in 2008. That’s right, a mainstream media company – you know, the ones that should admit the game’s up because they are so irrelevant and don’t know what they are doing in this new media landscape – has grown its audience by 40% in a year. More Americans are now reading the Guardian than read the Los Angeles Times. This readership has found us, rather than the other way round. Our total marketing spend in America in the past 10 years has been $34,000.

Nor is all this being bought by tricks or by setting chain-gangs of reporters early in the morning to re-write stories about Lady GaGa or Katie Price. In that same period last year, our biggest growth areas were environment (up 137%), technology (up 125%) and art and design (up 84%). Science was up 81%; politics 39% and Comment is Free 38%.

I think it’s worth having a look again at that figure once more—$34, 000. In addition of course to the growth percentages in areas of the news other online news sites have long neglected (science, design etc.) And if you want to point to the Guardian’s healthy endowment as proof others could not have gone down this online content route, here’s Rusbridger again: “Our first decade of digital growth wasn’t subsidised by the Scott Trust – it was relatively modest and covered by the profits of the paper.”

In other words, the Guardian’s online success is largely built on old fashioned content. But not, importantly, content merely transferred verbatim from print to online. Guardian Football for example works to provide content tailor made for online readers who already share a good deal of knowledge of their subject, and the key features of Guardian Football—the Joy of Six, the Knowledge, the Chalkboard analysis—reflect the reality that most online readers already know what they’re looking for. These readers are in perpetual search for more specialized content in one or more areas—politics, sport, science, whatever. The Guardian is successful because it provides content that assumes a particular level of knowledge on the readers behalf, i.e. it respects that its readers have sought the content out, rather than glanced over it after picking up the paper off a subway seat (this respect is perhaps one of the reasons why it employs few of the patronizing football analysts found in other UK broadsheets—you know who they are).

Therefore, a partnership between the Guardian and the more reliable, independent specialized football bloggers makes a lot of sense. While this relationship has been ongoing at the Guardian, in part through the “Favourite Things” section on the Football main site and through the Observer Premier League fan round-up, during the 2010 World Cup it came to fruition with the “Guardian Fans’ Network“, an attempt to have bloggers fill in content gaps inevitable in covering a thirty-two nation tournament. I asked Guardian Sport editor Sean Ingle for his thoughts on the project:

We had two primary objectives when we launched the Guardian Fans’ Network: first, to tap into the talent and expertise of our readers and second, to build a network of experts in all 32 countries. We have long realised that guardian.co.uk is a global news organisation but it’s only more recently that we have made the logical next step … ie given our finite resources, we can’t cover everything so therefore it makes sense to involve our readers more often. For the World Cup it was always going to be impossible for us to cover the reaction in, say, Honduras if they beat Spain or in Ghana when they reached the quarter-finals.

The fans’ network enabled us to do that – our network of 125 supporters in all 32 countries represented in South Africa tweeted regularly, sent us leads, pitched for paid commissions and even sent us photographs of how the World Cup was celebrated where they were. The whole process wasn’t perfect; some of the blogs were patchy and I wish we had had more time to suggest tweaks and rewrites. Also some of our planned graphically wizardry didn’t come off – we simply ran out of time. But on the whole it was a success.

In other words, the network built on what was already one of the key strengths of the Guardian Online: specialization. But here you can already see some of the drawbacks with this kind of partnership. First, there’s the unavoidable lack of editorial control that comes with ceding online space to outsiders. Second, while I think a successful newspaper/blogger network would have to respect the autonomy of bloggers in choosing what they write about and how they write it (more on that tomorrow), there are legal issues about what gets published, issues that could be insurmountable, especially in the UK with its stringent libel laws. Third, while a blog network on a newspaper site might produce more income for bloggers through a number of different schemes (network sponsorships, or “micro-advertizing,” smaller companies selling niche product directly to readers of highly-specialized blogs), newspaper writers could reasonably argue to their bosses that these kinds of networks erode wages for staff and freelancers.

These drawbacks need to be very carefully looked at, and some could be insurmountable stumbling blocks to any projects of this type. But there is good reason to think this route might be inevitable. Here’s another little bit from Rusbridger’s lecture that Ingle specifically highlighted to me:

We are edging away from the binary sterility of the debate between mainstream media and new forms which were supposed to replace us. We feel as if we are edging towards a new world in which we bring important things to the table – editing; reporting; areas of expertise; access; a title, or brand, that people trust; ethical professional standards and an extremely large community of readers. The members of that community could not hope to aspire to anything like that audience or reach on their own; they bring us a rich diversity, specialist expertise and on the ground reporting that we couldn’t possibly hope to achieve without including them in what we do.

Ingle elaborates a little on this when it comes to Guardian Sport:

There will be always be some difference between papers and bloggers – the latter are unlikely to be able to go to every big game, get off-the-record briefings from managers and club staff etc – but the gap has narrowed considerably over recent years. For instance, Michael Cox from zonalmarking.net does our chalkboards and has appeared on our Football Weekly podcast while the Observer have a fans’ network in which you can read what supporters of Premier League teams made of their team’s latest performance.

The gap has narrowed, the format for a growing partnership already exists. Tomorrow, we’ll hear from Michael Cox of Zonal Marking and discuss some of the advantages and drawbacks from the perspective of bloggers, and Wednesday we’ll conclude the series with a summary and a look at where we go from here.

Image Credit: Mike Bailey-Gates.

So today, the meat and potatoes as it were of this series: what might more cooperation between independent blogs and on-line newspaper football sites actually look like? Before I dive in, I think it’s important to point out that I’m not going to lay out concrete models with specific revenue streams and publishing formats, but rather point out general features that would make a union more desirable than the current situation, where the only mutual connection between newspapers and blogs comes in the form of hyperlinks.

I should also mention that discussion of the obstacles to this kind of union will be examined at length in a future post, but feel free to start shredding in the comments.

It’s about revenue, stupid.

Let’s get down to it: do well-written, exciting, original football blogs carry any inherent monetary value? I’m going to be flashy and controversial and say, in and of themselves, probably not. A writer can build a brilliant football site, gain lots of readers, carry a lot of blog “influence” as measured by one or another social media yardstick. But based on the extraordinarily diffuse nature of blogs, most of the time advertisers doesn’t have much incentive to go beyond a low-cost CPM or CPC banner ad or feed approach that rewards views and views alone and doesn’t much care about quality. And even the most successful soccer blogs will only ever have a limited share of the eyeballs, unless they start churning out the SEO goods like Wayne Rooney stories, Drogba stories, WAGS, you get the idea.

Okay then, maybe your football blog has a good-sized, dedicated readership, and you want to try the donation route, either providing all of the content for free and asking kindly for money from your readers in return, or withholding portions or the entirety of your blog (essentially a partial or whole hog paywall). That won’t work either, in part because of the diffuse nature of football blogs mentioned above, but also because of what Malcolm Gladwell termed the “weak-ties” problem with on-line communities in his controversial New Yorker article, “Small Change.”

While Gladwell specifically targets Twitter and Facebook activism, his remarks regarding the weak ties that bind online communities can be applied to the ties that bind blogs with their readers. I might read your football blog everyday, come to love it, and come to expect a regular post-rate. But if you put your posts up behind a paywall, or offer “exclusive posts” for free, chances are most of your readers won’t pay. A small enough percentage might, but not at too exorbitant a price. This small percentage may match or even exceed the CPM CPC model while not having to depend as much on the number of eyeballs, which is good, but I’d say for most bloggers donations alone are not really financially sustainable (if anyone of you has had great success with the donation model, feel free to call me out).

The power of filters

Typically, the “bajillion blogs” nature of the web has always been regarded as a problem to be solved, not as an opportunity to be taken advantage of, particularly by advertisers. As I laid out yesterday, football is poised to take advantage of the plethora of sites out there, in part because of the demand, at some time or another, for blogs with a specific football focus. Now, the one positive you tend to hear about the “bajillion blogs” problem is that good blogs rise to the surface. It’s not a coincidence that great blogs like Run of Play, Fake Sigi, Zonal Marking, Les Rosbifs, EFW, MFUSA, and a whole whack of others tend to get noticed, linked-to, talked about. But as I wrote yesterday, even as well-regarded as these sites are, they’re still essentially independent, working their way through the online world alone (which is fine, really and truly).

What if some of these sites though decided to go it alone and form a network? It’s my view that a blogging network isn’t much worth it if you’re going to go down the banner ad route. You might get a few more clicks, and some more pennies in a cup, but the added cost of organizing how ad revenues are split, getting your tax information in order, recruiting advertisers, trying to reach consensus won’t really make it worth it. Plus, with banner ads you’re still fundamentally stuck with the quantity over quality approach to generating revenue.

Okay then, if not banner ads, then what?  Well, probably something else entirely, but let’s interrupt for a second and take a look at a quote from Alan Rusbridger’s recent Hugh Cudlipp lecture (sent to me by Guardian sport editor Sean Ingle in relation to this series, who we’ll be hearing from later). This is Sir Martin Sorrell, head of the WPP marketing group.

“I would hope that within five years, so let’s say 2013, or something like that, we would be at least one third in digital. We know that customers are spending 20% of time online. So if clients are spending 12% and consumers are spending 20% – and I’ve seen some evidence to suggest they are spending more than 20% – then there’s a natural gravitational pull to 20% of the budgets being spent online … my guess is that when we get to a third of our business in 2014 we may very well want to up that percentage to 40% or even 50%.”

It’s my guess that as more and more marketing firms dedicate more and more financial resources to the web, the industry leaders will have to go beyond the CPM CPC, widget or banner ad models mentioned above. Those models exist on the old magazine model, where print ads sit next to print articles. Most of the time this is a very clumsy approach. As almost all of you still reading at this point are football bloggers, you’ll know how inept most advertisers are, especially in the aftermath of the 2010 World Cup. A company spending 10% of its money on web ads isn’t going to be able to go much beyond spamming the crap out of a bunch of football bloggers whose work bears no relation to the product, asking for widgets and banners and for ghosted posts or asking you to mention their product in a post as “naturally as possible” for a piddling one time fee. They don’t have the resources or the incentive right now to push beyond that model. But I think that will likely have to change.

Toward a new kind of web advertising

This, oddly enough, is where newspapers come in. Newspapers, despite budget cuts and all the rest, still have ad departments. These departments are dedicated to selling ads for both print and on-line editions. Newspapers also have the advantage of being trusted brands. Particular advertisers go with particular papers because they have a certain readership. The Globe and Mail has ads for mutual funds and Tiffany diamonds, while the Sun has pullout flyers for the Brick discount furniture store.

Right now, online ads don’t go much beyond their print paper equivalents in terms of form and function. It’s still a surface ad, even though when you click it you get taken to a third party site. Advertisers don’t much mind, because what they’re concerned with isn’t whether or not you go out and buy the product based on the ad, but that the general readership is aware the product exists. But what if, as a newspaper, you could offer an advertiser the chance to sponsor a set of blogs with a set of dedicated readers who, because of education, geographical location, are much more likely to purchase a set of particular products than a more general audience of readers? What if, instead of banner ads, you tried a less-intrusive sponsorship deal? Perhaps you could rent out these sponsorships on a rotating basis? What if larger advertising firms set up a means of allowing a traditionally smaller company with a limited ad budget to sponsor with sites that attract readers who are much more likely to buy their specific product? Like a product these readers might actually really like to buy? Like for example, football books?

This could all be completely unfeasible. But there are number of incentives for particular papers to go down this route. For one, there is a reason writers like Jonathan Wilson write for the Guardian and the Independent, and not the Sun. And there is a reason that Wilson’s association with these papers means he is one of the most trusted voices in football (imagine him as an independent blogger, slogging away columns on 4-5-1 on Lobanovsky on some WordPress template somewhere). Papers sell their readers to advertisers. Good independent soccer blogs tend to attract particular kinds of readers in good numbers, and if these bloggers are attached to a major traditional outlet, it puts the power of the paper’s brand behind them. It increases reader trust, strengthens the “weak ties” endemic on the web, and provides a trusted filter for football information which is what on-line papers tend to do anyway (see yesterday’s post).

Moreover, many papers are mulling over switching their hard news content over to paid-for smart phone, or iPad-like apps. If that model becomes the basis for most news providers to secure payment-for-content, their shadow WWW sites aren’t going away—and bloggers could help fill in this content gap. A series of blog networks linked to a newspaper main page with several rotating feature posts awarded to bloggers based on editorial merit. Think of it as a kind of like a much-expanded Guardian Favourite Things, split into blogs of a specific type, with rotating sponsors.

Final caveat

I don’t want want to get into the specifics of what this all might look like, like how much bloggers would earn from this kind of deal, what would a network hub would specifically look like. I just want to establish that there may more possibility and incentive for newspapers and blogs to work together than is publicly acknowledged. I’m not Faith Popcorn, and I’m not a marketing expert. To that end, over the next several posts, I’m going to be examining both the pros and cons for newspapers and bloggers in joining this kind of set-up. I want to establish that there are very real reasons why we might not move substantially past the status quo, but that we shouldn’t necessarily assume that, as Spock might put it, everyone in blogging, in newspapers and in advertising is continuing to perform admirably when it comes to exploiting the nature of their medium.

Image credit: Stuck in Customs.

Image Credit www.flickr.com/photos/marcp_dmoz/

Before I get into what a model partnership between football blogs and on-line newspapers might look like, or whether a such a partnership would be worth the hassle at all, I think it’s important to point out why football journalism in particular could be a leader in fomenting any further on-line cooperation. With that in mind, I think it’s worth discussing why successful online newspaper sports sections in general are starting to look at blogs as a potential partner, rather than an inferior competitor.

Why Sports Journalism?

More than any other section of the newspaper, the actual reported “news” in the sports pullout is probably the most redundant in light of both television and the internet.

Look at any newspaper. The front section of the New York Times reveals in-depth reporting on the “vanishing elderly” in Japan, the result of thousands of unreported deaths due to families attempting to maintain generous state pensions for older citizens. The Life section of the Globe and Mail reports on a new study on the strong connection between adequate sleep and weight-loss. In both instances, even when the content is reprinted verbatim on-line and in the actual print edition, you learn something you didn’t already know. In other words, you’re still the getting “the news” from newspapers.

Meanwhile, the Sports section of the Toronto Star features a box score of the hockey game you watched yesterday, game reports on tennis matches that you watched the highlights for twelve hours ago, and a short AP round-up of the Champions League that you’ve already read about in greater depth across several blogs and on-line overseas papers the day before. In other words, unlike her sister sections, the bulk of primary news reporting for the traditional Sports Page is, in the age of satellite television and access to multiple on-line sports sections and crappy illegal on-line feeds, already available to pretty much anyone anywhere, as it happens. In real time!

Casual sports fans with a newspaper subscription will always appreciate having all the sports happenings from the day before reprinted in one handy section. But the hardcore sports demographic—the kind who love all sports and one or two sports truly madly deeply—tend to rely on a dozen or so online sports sections in between watching Gol (or Golf) TV all day. And these are (or at least should be) the target demographic for sports advertisers.

The online newspaper sports section does however provide these sports fans with three key areas of value: trusted niche commentary, behind-the-scenes in-depth sports reporting, and a trusted filter for relevant information pertaining to news for a particular sport. The first tends to be of value only when it offers an authoritative summary of a particular area of the game uncovered in the same way by anyone else, the second is still the best thing newspapers provide in the sporting world today, and the third provides a filter for sports fans who don’t want to trawl nine-hundred sites to get the news they need, quickly. But all of these strengths could be well complimented with strong independent sports blogs in ways we’ll look at later.

Okay then, why Football Journalism and not Backgammon Journalism?

Because football is a global sport.

To avoid getting all misty-eyed and Geleano-ish, let’s define what that means in negative terms, i.e., what football isn’t, e.g. the NFL, MLB, NBA, NFL etc. These leagues are the single elite-level professional organizations for their respective sports, and they are all situated in the the continental US and southern Canada. That means most of the relevant in-depth news (prospective pros, farm leagues, drafts etc.) is limited to a single geographical area and as such tend to be already well-covered by American (and Canadian) sportswriters who, if they don’t write for any of the surviving American dailies in regional markets or Canadian national papers, scribble for sites and mags like SI, ESPN, the Hockey News, etc. These sports also feature a good-sized compliment of highly-active bloggers, some of whom do interesting things, sometimes extremely interesting things (Free Darko), but the room for sports bloggers to offer sports fans added value is inherently limited. There is, after all, only one NBA.

Football on the other hand has a bajillion professional leagues who are all in constant competition to be called the “best”, and it’s not usual for a handful of leagues to capture widespread interest in a single domestic market (on a given Saturday Toronto offers up MLS, Serie A, La Liga, Primera Division, the Ee Pee El etc.). Football’s biggest tournament features thirty-two nations who qualify in five federations comprising 208 national football associations. Elite players develop in Iceland, New Zealand, Japan, Russia, Argentina, and yes, sometimes even Canada, and go on to play in any number of different leagues, from Bogota, Columbia to Columbus, Ohio. There is also a wide rage of subsidiary areas to cover in football, from on-field tactics, international qualifying groups and formats, fan culture, back-room team politicking, a wide and confusing variety of professional sports laws, multinational team ownership, local football history. Because of the increasing global make-up of the elite leagues, and because of ubiquitous internationals, all of this news is of interest to some football fans, somewhere, at some time or another.

Time and financial resources prevent any single major media organization from covering this massive area of news, but the appetite among international football fans is voracious. That’s why, more and more, it’s the specialized football blogs that are achieving great success, sites like Zonal Marking. But despite their success, these sites are still atomized entities, there to be discovered on the WWW through the laborious process of blog links, Twitter feeds and Facebook updates. The onus is currently on the reader for filtering out the crap, and discovering which sites are relevant and which aren’t. Excellent blogs go undiscovered, then disappear altogether, while crap soccer sites manipulate SEO for “Wayne Rooney Whore” headlines. There also isn’t any quality control. A popular site on French Football can go silent overnight, simply because the writer has other pressing priorities or has picked up freelance work. Sites might be forced to start publishing shorter and more search-engine attractive articles to keep their numbers up for pay-per-click ads.

What all of this means in simple terms is that blogs, particularly football blogs, have something to offer increasingly resource-strapped sports editors (more coverage, more angles, attracting more and more global readers through shared association), and they, in turn have something to offer bloggers—a wider audience, and, hopefully, by way of a number of different possible financial partnership models I’ll be looking at tomorrow, a reason to slog through when it’s not fun anymore (thank god Barry Glendenning didn’t go into blogging).

So, in summary: because sports news is now stratified across several up-to-the-minute media sources, individual newspapers are most important when it comes to primary source reporting on behind the scenes issues, trusted analysis on particular areas of the sport (Jonathan Wilson, Sid Lowe, Rafa Honigstein yada yada yada), and in providing a filter for readers to get the news they want quickly. Independent football blogs meanwhile offer sports desk an advantage in scope of coverage and association with a particular kind of sports writing (something we saw in a limited form with the Guardian’s Fans Network during the last World Cup). It’s possible there is absolutely no value to advertisers, bloggers, and newspapers in seeking this kind of partnership, but I think there is good reason for not dismissing it yet. That’s for tomorrow.

Image Credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/

When I was a precocious thirteen year-old, my favourite part of the morning was grabbing my dad’s Toronto Star on the front stoop, taking it inside and laying it flat out on my kitchen table, and opening it up on the editorial page. There, I would find the Letters to the Editor, featuring rebuttals, corrections, and general complaints about recent articles posted by staff journalists and columnists. I always found the letters more interesting than the carefully prepared screeds they were attacking, and was fascinated that the newspaper would devote an entire page to reader dissent. I even sent a few letters in myself, and some were printed, much to my astonishment.

For the longest time, this is how I followed the news. Not by reading the A1 articles, but rather the opinions of the unwashed who read and reacted to them. I don’t want to call Letters to the Editor page “proto-blogging,” but I think the model is relevant to how contemporary blogging worked for a long time. Once the internet came along, many of the same souls who wrote angry missives on misguided op-eds started to write full-length blog posts with links provided to the offending articles, and early blogging took its cues from this antagonistic relationship. Bloggers were always going on about the corporate-owned Mainstream Media, pointing out the inherent biases in newspaper coverage, ripping X, Y, and Z columnists whilst at the same time trying to prove as they were equal or better. Digital media proponents like Clay Shirky built their careers on the notion that “New Media” and traditional newspapers were in fundamental conflict with only one eventual winner, the “citizen journalist”, because the only thing separating the letter-writer and the print journalist was the printing press which the internet made accessible to everyone.

This antagonism was rampant in sports blogging as well, and football was no exception. You still see elements of it today: the raging diatribes against London bias against northern clubs, or against North American newspapers for not featuring more soccer coverage; the relentless criticism of the dour state of televised football punditry; Henry Winter and his gang of unruly critics. For many football bloggers, old media is and forever will be the enemy.

Yet over a decade of independent blogging later, many of us have taken a deep collective breath and realized a few things. First, that newspapers—in both print and on-line form—still have the resources required to provide up-to-the-minute news, and as such are still the number one source for most bloggers when it comes to sourcing story information (as we’ve seen during the current Wayne Rooney/United saga). Second, that bloggers provide something that newspapers and magazines can’t—geographic reach, intricate tactical breakdowns of several different league matches at once, regional football history, and in North America, comprehensive and frequently-updated coverage of the goings on of various MLS, NASL clubs.  The two might not overlap, or be locked in a death struggle, but might even be able to compliment each other somehow.

It’s certainly possible that blogs are blogs and print pubs are print pubs, and while they might do each other some good, the relationship won’t or shouldn’t go past links and page-views. But my own view is that blogs and print media might be vital for co-survival, and even could thrive together on-line. And I think football journalism, for reasons I’ll be getting into tomorrow, will lead the way in giving us a sense of what an on-line partnership between established journos and independent bloggers might look like.

I know that I and others have covered this topic in the past, and that it is familiar ground to many of you. Nonetheless, I think there are several reasons why now’s the time to take a long look at the future of football blogging. First, I think the phenomenon of burnt out bloggers in football is becoming more of a problem. A recent Fake Sigi post declaring pitchinvasion.net “dead”, and subsequent reaction on Jason Davis’ Match Fit USA raise some interesting questions about the financial pitfalls of independent football writing (something I’ll be looking at in more detail later). There is a sense that the centre will no longer hold in its current form for many un- or low-paid soccer writers.

Second, some of older pay models for on-line writers have definitely failed or are likely to become irrelevant. I think we now know the Rupert Murdoch pay-wall at the Times of London has failed. It fundamentally undercuts the power of the web, which is interconnectivity, open comments from readers, interaction (and other $5 buzzwords!). Equally outdated is the Huffington Post “shlock writing plus a zillion intrusive banner-ads” method (although exactly why this model is dead will be discussed in more details in a future post). I think on-line advertising will have to fundamentally change in form, and I think football journalism/blogging can provide a good model for what that might look like.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll be taking a look at why football (and not, say, water polo) journalism is a prime candidate for traditional media/blogging partnerships, and then we’ll take it from there.

Richard Whittall also writes A More Splendid Life.

You want what we have

Discovered this via Duane Rollins’ 24thminute, a Daily Mail op-ed that magically conflates lukewarm Canadian interest in Manchester United’s visit to Toronto with a pube discovered on a hotel bar of soap. Apparently Canadian media outlets haven’t shown enough deference to a second-string Premier League side visiting for a friendly against Celtic, with tickets prices starting north of $90 CAD:

There was no escape from the 90-degree heat and stifling humidity when Sir Alex Ferguson and his Manchester United players flew into Toronto from Chicago and little sign that the first match of their North American tour against Celtic on Friday night is attracting anything more than a ripple of interest locally.

The Toronto Star ignored the game completely despite giving a sizeable show to the reaction to Thierry Henry’s move to New York Red Bulls and Argentina’s offer of a four-year contract to Diego Maradona, while The Globe and Mail decided it was worthy of a paltry three paragraphs in the soccer round-up of their sports pull-out.

The local sports network preferred to focus on the Toronto Argonauts and their first home game in the Canadian Football League season, while running a particularly tragic feature about one of the Blue Jays baseball players on a seemingly continuous loop. It was poignant first time around but lost some of its dramatic effect when you saw it for the fourth time before breakfast.

The horror, that a Canadian television network would open with the Toronto Argonauts, a 137 year-old Canadian team playing for a Canadian domestic league in Canada, when Manchester United’s half-cocked visit—the Manchester United!—was clearly the bigger story.

To be fair, slagging this kind of piece—which presupposes the globally-accepted superiority of the Premier League in a way made fun of around the world—is like shooting fish in a barrel. But it’s telling that the one major similarity behind these kind of stories on North American soccer is that they omit any mention of MLS or its teams. As Rollins points out, Canadians aren’t stupid; we’re not going to pay hand over fist to see a United shit show when we have a real soccer club in town with indigenous support. That TFC draws 20 000 supporters a game, or even that the club exists, is ignored by the author.

In the end, United’s failure to draw fans for second-string friendly demonstrates how the old “Watch Soccer-Live!” selling point has lost its allure in Toronto over the last three years. If Man U had planned instead to play a friendly against Toronto FC, chances are the South Stand would still be in Toronto red, many of them chanting about the Glazers and “Manure’s plastic fans.”

Combined with the boos of Beckham that confused a gathered global press when he first visited with the Galaxy, plus the wonder at why BMO Field would erupt into cheers after Gabe Gala scored against Real Madrid last summer, United’s potential failure in drawing an affluent fanbase to the Rogers Centre demonstrates the enormity of the change Canadian soccer culture has undergone since TFC’s arrival in 2007.  The traveling circus attitude of some traveling clubs, and their embedded journos, no longer generates slack-jawed awe. If the English Premier League still wants to capture the hearts, minds and dollars of American and Canadian fans, it would do well to pay them a little more respect.

Christopher Morris’ brilliant 1997 news satire progam, Brasseye, features an episode on “Science.”  In it, Morris manages to convince a long list of b-list British celebrities to become spokespersons for the “squashed” people of “Upuveli,” suffering from the effects of “heavy electricity.”  Each washed-up celeb reads out the same ridiculous metaphor for the bogus weather phenomena:  “a ton of invisible lead soup.”

That metaphor seems apt for what is now the archetypal England performance at international tournaments.  A solid qualification campaign under a tactically-adept continental manager convinces the country the lead soup has gone for good, but then comes one of the worst World Cup draws in living memory against Algeria and the Premier League’s “finest” are suddenly covered in it.

The same lead soup drenches the English media.  Devoid of convincing explanations for why England are terrible, journalists are left with two options: snark, or cliche.  If you want some of the former, the Guardian is likely your first stop, although little is said there that hasn’t been expressed more succinctly in pithy tabloid headlines.

For the latter, well, cliche abounds, everywhere.  England’s stars are a needy bunch, unable to deal with the pressure of “wearing the shirt,” they’re overpaid sissy celebrities, the manager is too disciplined, he’s not as disciplined as we first thought, England players aren’t as educated in the rudiments of passing and dribbling as commonly believed (including by Premier League managers), the national program is light-years behind the rest of Western Europe (who, save for the Dutch, are all going through manic World Cup death throes at the moment), they believed their own hype (even though all the over-expectant hype generated prior to this tournament came from one tabloid).

I’m sure there are countless more I’m missing (the opening negative commentary samples from Baddiel and Skinner’s “Three Lions”  is as relevant now as it ever was).  Meanwhile, the rest of the world tweets in “hahahahah!”, or asks, understandably, “who cares”?  Easy enough for them, but others are cursed with an involvement with this team (as I have to now admit), and so have to face the question: is there any escape from the canned wailing from the press box?

Well, as a matter of fact, yes.  After the exhaustion of reading through all the rhetorical questions posed by a bewildered English press, reading Zonal Marking’s succinctly accurate assessment of Friday’s banality put the game into a sort of serene context.  This was one of the few places to read about why England were dreadful without the all-or-nothing extrapolations.  Players drifting irresponsibly out of position, wayward unforced passes, flat movement from the midfield.  Of course, the mind races to fill in the blanks—”England can’t deal with the pressure of international competition!  The Premier League smash-and-grab disguises the many technical flaws of the England players!”—but at least the reader is left on his or her own to fill them.

Sites like Zonal Marking won’t ever tell us where this ton of invisible lead soup is coming from, but at least they let us peer under it to assess the damage.  Their almost banal take on the Spanish “apocalypse” the other day—”for all their possession, Spain didn’t create that many goalscoring opportunities”—was marked by the absence of force-fed speculation that Spain’s World Cup curse has returned, or the old canard about Real players hating Barca players.  In other words, the game itself, and nothing but. That’s all we can essentially know of football teams (outside of the tabloid sideshow), and Zonal Marking succeeds because it sticks to Wittgenstein’s simple formula—”whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

As the World Cup approaches, European dailies are apoplectic in the wake of several high profile player injuries ruling some of football’s most familiar faces out of the big show (apparently Ferdinand’s absence means England’s World Cup chances have dimmed, as if success in international football came down to having the right names in the first team, something that might come as a surprise to say, Germany) .  The usual debate arising from these types of injuries tends to focus on the ever-increasing number of games at the highest level, but there are other factors as well.  The speed and increased physical demands of modern football take their physical toll, although advances in sport medicine and nutrition have likely mitigated their effects somewhat.

But some of these injuries are just common, run-of-the-mill knacks; Didier Drogba’s broken elbow playing Japan was a cruel fluke.  Some have nothing to do with football; Charlie Davies was in a high-profile car accident.  Some players have been nursing injuries long before the World Cup.  It’s also worth noting that these sorts of injuries occur with almost banal regularity throughout the league season; it’s just that hearing that your star player won’t be fit for a month’s time is less devastating in an eight-month season in which clubs play a game a week.

So why the hemming and hawing so close to the World Cup?  Well with this year’s tournament the first in Africa, the absence of several African stars like Essien and Drogba has alarmed several hoping the tournament would be a “showcase” for African football.  In fact, most of the panic surrounding these injuries arises from the notion that the World Cup is a sort of thirty-two national all-star select show, rather than an international football tournament.

Of course, popular perception of the tournament has always been more about stars than nations, certainly more so after 1970, when everyone watched Pele in technicolor for the very first time.  Most of what we remember from past tournaments comes from slow motion film close-ups of various key players: Puskas in ’54, Pele in ’58, Garrincha in ’62, Eusebio in ’66, Pele in ’70, Cruyff in ’74, Rossi in ’82, Maradona in ’86 and so on and so on.

And the reality of player absences doesn’t sit well with some of the World Cup’s biggest advertisers.  Nike pulled out all the stops in a rollicking, four minute ad directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, and now two of five prominently featured stars—Drogba due to injury, and Ronaldinho due to Dunga leaving him out of the Brazil squad—will not feature in South Africa.  Adidas’ bizarre Star Wars-related spot looks brilliant in comparison simply by not featuring any current soccer stars whatsoever (or anyone remotely related to football for the most part, except for David Beckham, and a two second shot of Franz Beckenbauer).

Yet player absences have always played a part, and often a very interesting one, during the World Cup.  Garrincha rose to the fore in Chile in 1962 because Pele was injured early on in a group stage match.  Cesar Menotti controversially left out a young but supremely gifted Maradona from the 1978 squad in Argentina and won the World Cup against a Dutch team in the final defined by the absence of Johan Cruyff.  Absences form an integral part of the narrative arc of a tournament.  They also make room for other players to rise in their stead. This year happens to be worse for star player absences than most, but it is far too early to wail that 2010 is cursed and a write-off.

Ghana’s Michael Essien said it quietly and best the other day, when he remarked of his World Cup ending injury, “I have to admit no one was more disappointed than me but that’s life and I have to move on.”  Almost all the papers said Essien spoke “philosophically,” as if not ranting and raving against cruel Fate or consigning your team’s chances to the dust-bin of history well before the fact because you wouldn’t be there was in and of itself a “philosophy.”  Meanwhile, Messi, Rooney, Ronaldo—they’re all still there, touch wood. There’s still a feast amid all the famine.  If Kent Brockman asks you if this is the time to panic, just say no.

Ye-Ye Legend, Alfredo di Stefano

The obvious big story out of this week was Jose Mourinho’s transfer to Real Madrid immediately following Inter Milan’s Champions League win.  Not one for subtlety, perhaps the most memorable image was that of Mourinho exiting his car to weepily embrace defender Marco Materazzi, presumably on his way to a similarly weepy exit interview with Massimo Moratti.

In the midst of all the tears and poorly-guarded transfer details, the Times‘ Oliver Kay cleverly reminded his followers what Real Madrid general manager Jorge Valdano said about “the Special One’s” managerial approach with Chelsea back in 2007:

Real Madrid’s Valdano “Mourinho/Benitez don’t believe in the talent of players or ability to improvise to win matches” (2007)

Valdano: “If football goes the way Chelsea/LFC are taking it, goodbye to expression of cleverness/talent we’ve enjoyed for 100 yrs” (2007)

Kay intended for Valdano to eat his three year-old words (“I found Valdano’s comments re Mourinho/Benitez disrespectful at the time. Interesting that Real have “sold out” though”), but he inadvertently underlined a massive change in the European footballing landscape.

This past season was supposed to be all about Real Madrid.  While spending millions upon millions of Euros on securing the talents of Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka, and Karim Benzema in the summer of 2009 may have seemed preposterous in light of the success of the last generation of Galacticos, it followed a Madrista script that was written back in the mid 1950s: players are king at Real.

This was the ethos of the Yé-yé team that dominated the European Cup in the early days of the competition in the late 1950s, and it’s summed up best by Francisco Gento on the documentary, the History of Football, speaking of how Madrid beat AC Milan’s defense in the 1958 European Cup in Brussels: “we were Madrid, we broke down all systems.”  No one remembers the names of the managers from that period; all that remains is Santiago Bernebeu’s collection of individual talents who worked together to overcome top-down tactical rigidity.  This approach has marked Real Madrid’s player policy under president Florentino Perez.

It also sparked Valdano’s “shit on a stick” remarks back in 2007, which underlined his belief that talented players are still capable of winning games in the modern European game with cleverness, ingenuity, creativity.  This was the ethos that led to a Madrid first team packed with wildly expensive footballing talent with the skilled but hardly world-beating Manuel Pelligrini at the helm.  And it failed; Real didn’t win La Liga, and they yet again went out of the competition they first made famous, missing out on a Champions League final on their home ground. Real’s decision to acquire Mourinho is an admission of defeat.  Player power is over; Mourinho’s Real Madrid signing caps the Age of the Manager.

Yet Valdano was wrong in 2007 to ascribe blame for the modern lack of individual creativity in football on Mourinho; he is a symbol (a fascinating one at that) how talented soccer players are molded in Europe in the 21st century.  Hoovered up into academies or youth reserve teams at younger and younger ages, promising players aren’t given the space to improvise.  They aren’t given the authority to make on-field decisions that will guide the team as a whole.  They learn one or two on-field positions and are therefore incapable of variation.  They play precisely to the manager’s wishes, or they are shunted off for good.   Mourinho’s father-like embrace of Matrix on his exit from Inter Milan sums up the paternalistic philosophy of the modern manager.

This approach is also reflected in Mourinho’s remarks before the European Cup final last weekend that the Champions League is now bigger than the World Cup.  This is a view increasingly held by journalists and managers alike, who reason that the motley collection of individually talented players thrown together every two years could not possibly be as good as the Europe’s big clubs, precisely because they have much less time playing under the national team manager.

Which is why the team to watch in the World Cup in South Africa will be Diego Maradona’s Argentina.  Here is a manager with no discernible tactical approach but with a squad packed with some of the best players in the world, including Barcelona’s “Playstation player,” Lionel Messi.  Maradona’s sincere belief in the talent of his squad—and his consistent lack of any and all managerial direction or authority—makes perfect sense considering his own individual footballing genius.  Here is man who epitomizes Valdano’s football philosophy, using cleverness and ingenuity to give Argentina the World Cup in 1986.  Their success in 2010 could be Player Power’s last stand.  It will be fascinating to watch in any case.

It’s interesting that many still talk about 1986 as the last great FIFA tournament.  It would too broad to blame the deterioration of the world’s most popular sporting tournament on the rise of the manager and the racehorse-breeding mentality of youth team coaches, but the two are probably not unrelated.  Mourinho might be right: the Champions League could be the better competition, and the managers more than players are now the “Special Ones.”   That other football philosopher, Eduardo Galeano, put it best:

In the old days there was the trainer and nobody paid him much heed.  He died without a word when the game stopped being a game and professional soccer required a technocracy to keep people in line.  Then the manager was born.  His mission: to prevent improvisation, restrict freedom and maximize the productivity of the players, who were now obliged to become disciplined athletes.