When did Journalists turn into Fans?
Although educated to be impartial, a journalist often get carried away by emotions. For a journalist is just a human. Where there are emotions, there also exists bias. It is, therefore, fairly expected for a journalist to lose their shit and scream when their team scores an equalising goal in stoppage time. While journalists have always supported their national football teams, today, due to the specific environment they work in, they almost have no choice but to be fans. Truth is no longer the aim.
Hear me out!
The Holy Trinity of European football consists of the following:
· UEFA (Union of European Football Associations)
· Media
· Companies
To cut a long story short, UEFA sells the TV rights to the media, the media sells advertising space to companies and companies sell products to fans. That is the procedure. Fans, often deluded and unaware, are running the whole show without taking any credit for it. For UEFA, they are fans. For the media, they are visitors. And for companies, they are customers.
During the European Championship, companies often build their brands’ campaigns on nationalism. What differentiates the most famous brands is the idea that customers attach to a brand. Most countries have a brand of beer or some other drink that evokes a feeling of national pride, success or heartiness in customers. Football fans choose a particular beer brand not because of its taste but because it gives them a sense of belonging. It is not about the beer. It is about loyalty. A brand ignites emotions in its customers. People buy with emotions, not with logic. In a time of rising nationalism, beer companies undoubtedly make significant profits.
Companies—let’s unravel it—advertise in the media. It’s usually at halftime in a match when we see on TV those beer advertisements that encourage fans to lift their flags high and sing their anthems loudly. At the same time, advertisers—as a general rule—manipulate the truth. They make fans believe their product is the best for them. They don’t say, “We sell crap beer, but it is cheap, and you are a cheap cunt, so you might like it.” Instead, they use stupid but effective slogans such as, “Beer that is made for you.”
In a perfect world, a TV commentator reporting on a match or a journalist covering a press conference shouldn’t be affected by the business connections between the media they work for and the companies that advertise their products in their media. However, once a media outlet and a company strike a deal, a journalist often loses their ability to stay impartial. A company that pays big money for a minute of advertising space in a certain media outlet can no longer be open to a journalist’s scrutiny because the media outlet and the company are now partners. Journalism is a victim of the media business. And the crime usually happens as subtly as possible. A journalist gets so exposed to the influx of company information about the brand that they stop questioning it altogether. A company is always full of praise for their brand. Companies use various tools to shower journalists with candies, such as press releases, press conferences, press trips, etc. A journalist, through appropriate ‘education’ about the brand, is inclined to believe that the brand really is top-notch. The final step the company wants to achieve is not creating product awareness but changing the whole environment. Beer and other ‘football’ brands thrive on an intense nationalistic atmosphere, and journalists become part of the uplifting machinery. They become fans because staying impartial means no emotion.
Fans buy with emotion, not logic. After an initial three-nil loss against Spain, Zlatko Dalić of Croatia said that all the euphoria should have been silenced before the game, but at the same time—as he said—he was aware the euphoria couldn’t have been muted. If he only knew how right he was. If the whole atmosphere was created by lifting the national charge through beer advertising, and the better the atmosphere, the higher the profit, then coaches can’t really demand calm before games. They operate in a doomed system (don’t we all?).
UEFA—the one which sells TV rights to the media, also plays a role in lifting the atmosphere. They gave national FAs strict rules regarding media obligations in Germany, telling them that the teams must have cooperated with the media to their fullest extent. That included a mandatory press conference at the match stadium on the day before the match, a press conference after the game and daily media activities at base camps. The President of UEFA, Aleksander Čeferin, opened his message to the accredited journalists with: “Your role at Euro 2024 will be instrumental in bringing the unparalleled excitement of the tournament to audiences across the globe.”
Why then, did Arlind Sadiku, a journalist from Kosovo, get his accreditation cancelled after acting as a fan? Arlind—who I met in Doha, Qatar, in 2016 when Kosovo became a member of the International Sports Press Association—at the group stage match between Serbia and England looked towards the Serbian fans and made the ‘eagle’ gesture, a symbol that represents the double-headed eagle on Albania’s flag. UEFA axed his accreditation.
Arlind told me: “I was provoked the whole time with Serbian known political chants, ‘Kosovo je srce Srbije’ (Kosovo is the heart of Serbia), and during a live report, in effect, I did an eagle sign, which is an official symbol of Albania at Euro 2024.”
Arlind’s situation was undoubtedly coloured by the bloody history of two nations, Serbia and Albania, as well as by personal trauma caused by the war in Kosovo. But didn’t his gesture create “unparalleled excitement” among Albanian fans? And wasn’t that precisely what Čeferin wanted from journalists?
If a journalist plays the role of the one who brings excitement, then the journalist is a fan. When journalists become fans, they identify with the national teams they support and don’t see them as the ‘Albanian team’ or ‘Croatian team’, but simply as ‘us’. They say things such as, “Our team scored the goal,” or “We are playing well.” Once identified with a team and country, a journalist can no longer see a situation clearly and remain impartial. When there is a ‘we’, there is also the notion of ‘them’. Just remember how footballers fight over a referee’s decision—one set of players are convinced they are right, and the others are also convinced they are right. They are all ready to go all the way to prove their point. The same blindness affects TV commentators or reporters once they become part of a team.
At the same time, as the tournament was advancing, the England team believed they were getting too much criticism from the media. After their draw against Denmark, Declan Rice, in an interview, asked the media for love. Now, you will hardly ever hear an English commentator—even on the national BBC—saying ‘we’. It is ‘England’ for them. They are not fans. Such professionalism might be why the England national team always come up short in major tournaments—there is no unity between the players, the media and the fans. But there is impartiality instead. I guess we need to ask ourselves what we want to achieve as a species—do we seek truth, or do we seek excitement?
And so I went to Cologne to an England press conference a day before their final group stage match against Slovenia. Declan Rice was there to speak out, so I told him: “Declan, I’ve heard recently that you were asking for love from the media so the team could perform better. Which makes sense. I’ve been to quite a few press conferences from different national teams. And in fact, journalists in some countries do act like fans rather than journalists and they give love unconditionally to players. You, however, perform in quite a different media environment where journalists are more like journalists. I would like to ask you how you would like to see that balance. Would you like to have full support, or would you like to be criticised? How do you see the situation?
Rice answered: “As a player, you read stuff. Naturally, for a young player, stuff can play on your mind, and it’s probably better to read stuff that is way more positive than negative. For me, even as a player when I was a captain at West Ham, and even now at Arsenal, I like to encourage and tell people they can be the best player on the pitch and that their qualities can change games. The more you feel that, as a player, within yourself, the more confident you are going to be, stepping up on the pitch.” d)
