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In the past few days, there have been rumours that Google and Apple are both considering a bid for the broadcasting rights to the Premier League when they come up for renewal later this year. They remain just that – rumours – and it seems likely that Apple won’t bid, while there is nothing to indicate yet that Google may consider making a sizeable investment in English football broadcast rights. But with both companies expected to move further into the TV and broadcasting industry, it does show other leagues and sports that it may be worth thinking outside the traditional broadcasting methods. Indeed, for some, it may be the only way to grow and survive.

Under the current broadcast rights deal, Sky is paying around £1.6bn to show 115 live Premier League games per season, with ESPN broadcasting the final package of games. Under a deal with the European Commission, the Premier League had to ensure that the six packages were divided between more than one broadcaster. That deal has now expired, although the Premier League is unlikely to risk another legal battle by awarding all games to Sky (or, more unlikely, another broadcaster).

The amounts of money involved are quite staggering and few broadcasters can afford them. Even lower down the English league pyramid structure, where rights are nowhere near as expensive, the cost of producing live games or even highlight shows are still high enough to be questionable in terms of cost-effectiveness. Due to budget cuts, the BBC opted not to show Football League highlights during the recent festive period, despite a full set of fixtures, while in non-League Premier Sports opted to pull out of screening Darlington versus Barrow last season rather than risk sending a crew to a game that stood a possibility of being called off.

And yet with the growth of the internet and the willingness over the past few seasons for broadcasters to snap up as many sport and football rights as possible, fans have been treated to a proliferation of football across a range of platforms to the extent that it’s almost expected that non-Premier League games and highlights will be if not free, then at least readily available. Never mind that football has had its fingers burnt twice in the past with the collapse of both ITV Digital and Setanta, the expectation is there.

This, however, overlooks the fact that if non-Premier League football was thought to be profitable for broadcasters, they would be rushing to show more of it. Ratings for ESPN’s foreign league coverage are low in the UK, while the expense involved for lower league games is high. That none of the commercial broadcasters other than Sky have made a serious play for these live matches in recent years tells its own story. Only the BBC, with its public service commitments, could make a sensible argument for broadcasting lower league football, and with their proposed Delivering Quality First cuts – especially around local radio commentaries – even Auntie appears to be scaling back lower league coverage.

This, then, is the state of football broadcasting in the UK at the moment. Rights for live Premier League games are so expensive to bid for that only a small handful of broadcasters – Sky, ESPN and, given their recent acquisitions of French rights, probably al-Jazeera – are able to offer the vast sums required, while the lower leagues are too expensive to produce to make a serious challenge to Sky for the rights (or, in the case of Premier Sports and their deal to broadcast non-League football, hardly enriching for the clubs involved).

Which is why looking outside of the traditional mediums could be seen as a good thing. For the Premier League, should Apple and Google, two companies with the financial clout to challenge Sky, decide to bid then it could herald the much-needed shake-up of the current near-monopoly on top flight rights. For lower leagues, exploring non-linear options are, quite simply, a must if they are to at least stand a chance of reaching existing fans and new audiences. A new generation of internet connected app-friendly televisions are on the way powered by familiar OS and Android platforms. While it may be a tad hyperbolic to proclaim these will change the way you watch TV forever, we’re already seeing the current generation of IPTVs having a slight shift on the way we consume our television. The world of streaming, tablets, phones and TV is amalgamating as one.

Of the realistic options, Apple appear to be the most curious of those rumoured. The tech company already has a deal in place with Sky to show archive footage through iTunes, while Sky’s successful Sky Go mobile and tablet apps currently offer a slick Premier League broadcasting experience on the iPhone and iPad.

Bidding for expensive UK Premier League rights would also represent something of a risk for Apple, given football’s standing in the US, although globally, given the Premier League’s appeal, it could prove to be a sound piece of business, especially in the long term if it secures the US rights to the competition given the growing appeal of the “EPL” on that side of the Atlantic. But any movement on this, if it were to materialise, would as likely depend on the offerings of Apple TV, how it develops and whether it becomes a mass-market product.

The search giant Google, however, would seem to be much more of a natural fit for broadcasting rights. They already own YouTube, which signed a two year deal to broadcast the Indian Premier League cricket. Under YouTube’s stewardship, the channel racked up a cool 50 million views. In comparison, current rights holder Times India’s channel, which is produced in conjunction with Google, has just under 15 millions views. The appetite and familiarity with well known sporting brands is, it appears, present online and is not discouraged by a non-traditional media company owning the rights.

For Google, the infrastructure (including Android), not to mention the money, is in place, although one complication may be the ongoing copyright dispute between the Premier League and YouTube. Google have also recently shed many extra projects as they get behind their core offerings (while continuing to innovate), and the video Hangouts on Google+ raise an interesting possibility of shared viewing experiences between friends or fans of clubs through special individual channels. There are so many possibilities for sports broadcasting on Google – be it TV, apps, online or social network – it would be easy to spend a whole article speculating on what these may be, but suffice to say the barriers offered by traditional broadcasters would be broken down should the leagues be willing to do so – itself a big sticking point.

It is also worth, briefly, considering Facebook. The social behemoth may not have been mentioned thus far but they have already shown that, on a smaller scale, they can very competently handle sports broadcasting. Budweiser and the FA’s streaming of the Extra Preliminary FA Cup Qualifying tie between Ascot United and Wembley FC may have been a one-off novelty but was a smooth, entertaining and enjoyable experience. Liking Budweiser’s page was a small price to pay for a professional broadcast and the online viewing figures of 27,000 were more than even ITV4 gets for some Europa League matches.

Facebook’s goal of being at the heart of everybody’s lives would fit with acquiring sports rights (especially as the majority of work making it broadcast-ready would probably be done by the partners). It is not hard to envisage live streaming of games through the social network or via the Facebook app on your TV. Again, the restrictions here are unlikely to be on Facebook’s part but from the Premier League or any other body selling their live broadcast rights.

For the Premier League, they have the luxury of picking and choosing, such is the strength and popularity of the product they are selling. Whether they’d be willing to relinquish their grip and allow any sort of fragmentation from the new media companies potentially interested in their rights is another question. For the lower leagues, it is up to them to seize the initiative.

What would the Football League be worth if the rights were sold to Facebook or Google? Would more people be inclined to subscribe or sign-up to an app on a new generation IPTV? Could revenue be raised through pay-per-view subscriptions as well as longer subscriptions? Would lower league or non-League games attract higher audiences if they were streamed via the official page on Facebook or via YouTube? And if these games were readily available to the casual lower league fan, what impact would this have on attendances? None of these questions are easy or even possible to answer, but need to be asked or considered, at the very least.

Or could we yet see a situation where it is not the league who negotiate the deal for the rights, but an enterprising club? Think of the individual rights that are negotiated by La Liga clubs in Spain, but then fragmented and offered to a range of platforms and tech or social companies, not the traditional broadcasters.

Already the individual leagues risk being left far behind when it comes to mobile or TV app development, if they have even considered it. Broadcasters and other companies know that mobile viewing – be it on a phone or tablet – will provide a significant market in the future. Whether the leagues are following suit is debatable.

We could potentially reach a point where an enterprising club with an abnormal fan base for the division they are in – say Luton or Bradford, for example – decide to cut out the middle man and go direct to Google and stream through the official Luton Town YouTube channel and offer special Luton Town viewing hangouts with post-match viewer-engaged content via Hangouts on Google+. Or perhaps the game will be streamed via the official Bradford City Facebook page and IPTV app, with all the social benefits that this brings, not to mention the marketing advantages such a channel offers to the club.

And if these lower league clubs are successful, the bigger clubs will almost certainly want their slice of the action. Perhaps we may face a future where you purchase the Facebook app but opt to watch through the dedicated Manchester City channel rather than the main broadcast, or a host of other fragmented options, while chatting to other fans of the same persuasion during the match. Fanciful? Perhaps. But you can already see the foundations of virtual stadiums just through this method, and this probably only discusses a small part of what could be achieved.

But this does get ahead of what would currently be required. For both Football League and Premier League clubs, there would need to be a majority vote to abandon the collective agreement on income from these football rights. To do so would be hugely controversial and go against the very fabric of the game in Britain. Yet with governing bodies often some way behind clubs and technology in both adoption and thinking, the question is how prepared clubs would be to miss out if a new route makes them more money.

Certainly the aforementioned Manchester City are already leading the way, digitally. Their website is rightly lauded as one of the best in the country and their YouTube channel is both slick and engaging. Should opportunities open up for exploiting online viewing, it is clubs such as City who are likely to be at the forefront. The infrastructure and planning is in place, it is just the league itself that prevents them from maximising their online potential in terms of use of live broadcasts and highlights.

Given football broadcast rights are complicated enough as it is, perhaps we may see another layer added for tablet or TV apps rather than channels accessed through a browser. Perhaps it is these clubs may look to exploit separately rather than collectively. Could online prove an exception and break the collective agreement? Technologically, there are many attractive and exciting reasons for doing so. Legally it may prove more different, and morally it does not sit comfortably with the idea of keeping the game competitive (and would, as likely, provoke a similar reaction to Liverpool’s executive Ian Ayre raising the notion of clubs individually negotiating their international broadcast rights).

Whether these changes in technology and broadcast viewing habits would improve top flight football, or simply serve to make it more tribal and take it further away from its roots is an another question, although one you feel the clubs and league won’t worry to much about if it proves successful, even if they are unable to negotiate individual rights. In an online medium very much concerned with openness and equality, any success in this area could serve to make the bigger clubs even richer. For the Premier League it’s a welcome addition to have on the table. For the smaller clubs, it may become a necessity.

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.

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.

Yet if you ask most Americans about this victory, even some seasoned footy fans, they will likely shrug at you in indifference. The reason might have something to do with ESPN’s coverage of the 2002 World Cup.

ESPN Drops the Ball

As many football purists are loathe to admit, the popular perception of a soccer match is often shaped by its representation on television. While 60,000 fans look on in the stadium, many millions more are at the mercy of two voices naming names from an isolated box hovering over the pitch, while camera crews provide intimately detailed angles of the on-field action revealing what live onlookers can only imagine. We might naively believe that the football beamed in to our homes is unsullied by its mode of presentation on TV, but to paraphrase fellow Canadian Marshall McCluhan “the medium is the football.”

USA 3, Portugal 2 should be proudly remembered in America, but instead, ESPN’s inept, uninformed and jingoistic coverage of the event alienated seasoned soccer fans even as it confused newcomers to the game. Ice hockey references were unnaturally grafted onto the action by Jack Edwards, current play-by-play announcer for the Boston Bruins, who shouted, “he shoots, SCORES!” when O’Brien knocked in the opening goal. By the time Brian McBride bagged USA’s third, Edwards, with no hint of irony, remarked in full voice, “Mine eyes have seen the glory!”

This unnatural, flag-waving attempt to Americanize a game that already had a distinct national history (including a healthy, St. Louis-based league interest prior to 1930 and the Miracle on Grass in 1950) did nothing to preserve its autonomy or capture its unique American flavor. Viewers new to soccer were left with the image of a very slow hockey game played on a big grass rink, while Edward’s unrelenting patriotic exhortations underlined that the match was worth watching only to witness the USA beat the rest of the world at their own game.

Certainly the political climate, one year after 9/11 and in the midst of the early build-up to the second Iraq war, may have played a role in EPSN’s patriotic approach. America was on the path to increasing isolation from her international neighbours; a bit of jingoism at the world’s most followed sporting tournament was in keeping in the spirit of the moment, even as it countered ESPN’s stated goal to popularize the game itself.

Getting it Right

Flash-forward six years to ESPN’s coverage of Euro 2008. Instead of Jack Edwards, we had two seasoned British commentators, Adrian Healey and Derek Rae, in addition to colour commentator Andy Gray, a voice familiar to viewers of Sky Sports. ESPN also offered live, uninterrupted coverage of every game from start to finish. No ads for Ford suddenly covering half the screen during the attacking build-up play, no giant banners appearing from nowhere to advertise some horrific sitcom to air later that night, no tape delay, and no presenter trying to serve as interpreter for an audience presumed not to know or care about the sport.

Many have remarked on the significance of this change from previous years, singling out ESPN’s radical decision to dedicate daily, live coverage to an all-European tournament. The Globe and Mail’s John Doyle called it nothing less than ‘revolutionary,’ and Robert Weintraub’s excellent summary forcefully concluded that ESPN’s coverage will be the first step in “…clearing out the morons who feel it necessary to rip what they don’t understand by exposing them to what is great about the sport.” But could network television coverage alone be enough to move the sport from the perceived left-wing elitist fringe and into the American mainstream? The answer might lie just north of the border.

Back in April 2007, much ballyhoo was made by liberal media outlets of Toronto FC’s perceived popularity among the city’s many first and second-generation immigrants. While this had a nice ring to it in Toronto’s multicultural capital, it had no basis in fact. In truth, the twenty and thirty-somethings that filled the stands at BMO Field had been brought up on a local diet of live English, Italian, German and Spanish league football available on Canadian basic cable via European feeds. Stations like Sportsnet, TSN and Telelatino broadcast live matches every Saturday and Sunday in the days before the Sports Channel Packages would force the viewer to make a conscious decision to add soccer to his or her dial. Additionally, no attempt was made to ‘package’ the games for a North American audience; it was understood the matchers were being watched by old-Europe ex-pats longing for a taste of ‘back home.’ Little did they know, younger viewers were busy discovering the unadorned European game for themselves.

If ESPN 1 were to pick up more regular European and South American league matches to show live on weekends, available without commercial interruption and presented by knowledgeable veterans of the game in the same vein as their coverage of Euro 2008, it might do more for the game in America than the NASL, the MLS, and the USA’s success in the next World Cup ever could. Attendances at Major League Soccer games might grow once idle channel flippers new to the game get a taste of the spectacle of club football on mainstream American television (ignoring for now its many flaws, commercial or otherwise).

Or not. We’ve heard this talk before, and it’s possible the spectre of the ‘American exception’ may always hang over the global game, but Americans already in love with soccer should at least thank John Skipper’s ESPN for finally giving it the television coverage it deserves.