The infantilisation of football content has to stop

There's a time and a place for YouTubers. It's on YouTube.

When I was young, I used to read Shoot magazine. The glossy, short-form, whimsical format was directly targeted at me, a 12-year-old obsessed with football at all levels, one with a sticker book and with FIFA 96 on the Playstation.

It was a perfect gateway product, and I loved it. In fact in many ways my son’s tastes aren’t largely all that different; he games, he collects stickers, he loves the top players and he doesn’t know the first thing about the game at any level whatsoever.

Because - and this is it - eventually you need to stop reading Shoot, because your knowledge and sophistication develops. It’s called being an adult.

And yet, in the modern internet and digital publishing era, that process seems deliberately upended by the belief that all content needs to be marketed towards children, and we’re reaching a tipping point.

Kids are, generally, tasteless. my aforementioned son consumes some real nonsense alongside his stickers and games. But that’s fine because he’s not demanding that I sit and watch it, too. Not so, UK broadcasters, however.

Sky Sports, in an intense race to appear relevant, regularly gather YouTube influencers in a show called ‘Saturday Social’. It really has to be seen to be believed.

Noughties darling Soccer AM was not a perfect show, by any stretch, but in comparison to this it’s like an episode of The Wire. BBC, TNT, and others flood our channels with these ingrates, whose entire MO is to say something controversial in order to further their own brand or the algorithm.

But the broken feedback loop means these stupid comments end up dominating any and all discourse.

Where are the adults in the room?

Horncastle,and the revelation of knowledge

This week there’s been debate around James Horncastle’s discussion around Atalanta on TNT following their defeat of Liverpool, and how insightful it was, in comparison to the slop served up by the Rio Ferdinand class of pundit.

The irony is that even Horncastle himself would probably tell you very little of what he said about Atalanta’s coach, Gasperini, is new, or different to anything he has been saying on other media he frequents. But the fact this is heralded as genre-defining tells you how far down the rabbit hole we’ve fallen.

Do not get me wrong; football publishing in the traditional guise has been broken for a long time. The archaic newspaper model of paying client journalists six-figures to really not say much of anything is disappearing into the distant past, not least with the news that Henry Winter will be departing the Times.

But it’s a combination. Ex-players with decent agents have been surfacing totally unlikeable ‘talent’ onto our screens for years now, and people have just had enough of it. Ferdinand has never, and will never, say anything remotely interesting. He’s the worst kind of this insidious punditry, one that thinks he’s way smarter than he is.

So we’ve had a close-knit journalistic pack - one that, from my time turning Goal into the biggest single-sport website in the world, am well versed in knowing how antagonistic they were towards digital entrants to their predominantly print space, and how their inability to evolve ultimately killed them off.

But at the very least, digital content in that incarnation tried to do things properly; report news, garner exclusives, have an editorial standard. What we get now is an IShowSpeed run to the very bottom rung of acceptable human interaction.

I’ve also seen enough disastrous footballer investment schemes to know that some of them shouldn’t be given a gift card to spend, let alone have millions inserted into their banks for kicking around a football. Quite a lot are skint, which is why they hover around Sky Sports News on a Tuesday morning.

The footballers aren’t bad actors though, in the main. They’re just given a platform that they can’t believe they’re being paid for. The YouTubers and influencers however, they are another story entirely.

They don’t want to contribute to the game, rather they seek to suck as much possible from it for their own personal gain. And they’re not the first to do so, by any stretch. But it is the search purely for something that only a child would enjoy - or be offended by - which is killing our industry.

Why does the industry do it?

We as publishers remain in a total state of flux. As I’ve covered before:

• Google is broken by AI, perhaps beyond repair

• Facebook is not interested in giving football publishers ANY traffic

• The industry at large is being decimated by Private Equity

But it does feel that running with these bad actors is totally counter-productive.

There is a whole audience out there that simply don’t want this. They don’t want tekkers, or ‘bros’, or fabricated anecdotes that absolutely didn’t happen.

What media publishers need to realise is that these podcasts - no-one is listening. Despite being well-funded their actual episode listens are dreadful. In fact, the only time you’ll see these idiots is when their social media manager has chopped up the only good clip for Twitter. It’s a race to the bottom, and as far as content, revenue, and personality are concerned, they are bottoming out.

And good content - something worth engaging with - doesn’t need to be behind an Athletic subscription or part of a pseudo-intellectual tactical conversation, either. We have to believe that there’s an audience out there, of online-literate 30 and 40-somethings who really desire something better.

And here’s the headline - kids have absolutely no value. Firstly, they are notoriously fickle. My aforementioned 8-year-old has not only switched up his favourite channels multiple times, he changes up what football teams he likes, too. And he, like the rest of us, now knows that Prime is a complete bust and wouldn’t be seen dead with a bottle of it.

Secondly, they have no money and no influence. They aren’t going to dictate who gets taken to the game, they aren’t going to pay the Sky or TNT subscription that runs the entire league, and they won’t buy the merch or the fucking sticker books. So, you’d think, it would be in their interests to court the bill-payers a bit more often.

So what do we do about it?

But it’s where are now. Publishers are being leaned on in every direction to meet traffic targets, to boost revenue, to have a site that has ‘resonance’.

So the situation is ultra complicated. And maybe the future for that content lies off-website, either in considered audio, or even in substack, like this one right here.

But we’ve currently decided that things like Twitter discourse - where a bunch of children set up their avatar as their favourite player then tweet all day long about that team - should have any say whatsoever on the broad content offering that’s out there. It’s absolutely nuts to me that it should ever be this way.

But change has to be reflected in the places where most of us see it - in the broadcasts. And they are letting everyone down - especially the kids.