24/09/2023 and las 06:00 CEST
There will not be another football without new ways of reporting on what happens on the field, the stadium and the box
It is one of the laws of football: What happens on the field stays on the field. This principle serves to encapsulate, within the world of football, insults, attacks, unsportsmanlike attitudes… What happens on the field stays on the field means that these behaviors are understood and justified (the heart rate at 100, the competitive tension… .) and are treated according to the laws of football. Off the field you don’t understand what happens on the field, so Those outside should not judge or sanction what happens on the pitch.
By extension, what happens in the stadium must also stay in the stadium. It is not expected of those attending a football field uplifting attitudes, but the opposite: that there will be insulting chants and shouts (racist, sexist, homophobic…) and violent acts is taken for granted. Ultra groups mix with fans who outside the stadium are civilized people but who inside they act like energúmenos. Luckily, tolerance for this type of attitude has been reduced (the veto of ultras, Vinicius and racism), but it has not disappeared, and it survives daily in hundreds of fields. where kids from children’s categories play who endure and witness unpresentable attitudes all too often from their own parents. It should make you think that this toxic environment does not exist in other sports.
Governance laws
What happens in the box also tends to stay there and in the meeting rooms. The football governance laws are opaque, sometimes clientelistic, caudillist, with serious suspicions (and sometimes certainties) of corruption. Football is governed by its rules, and shields itself as much as it can from outside influence, to the point that one of the worst sins that can be committed is to resort to ordinary justice. The list of successful professionals in other fields who try to make the jump to football and abandon it after a few months is significantly long.
Under the protection of football, it has developed a certain type of sports journalism symbiotic with the world it reports on, faithful to this premise that what happens in football stays in football. A type of journalism that reinforces, encourages and justifies football exceptionalism and feeds back on it. So many years of opacity would not have been possible without journalism that has known, wanted and been able to play with these rules. We could say that what happens in this type of sports journalism stays in sports journalism, it cannot be extrapolated or influenced by other ways of understanding the profession or by public opinion.
The kick
The women’s soccer team has kicked this black box. What happened in the box (Luis Rubiales’ celebration), on the field (the non-consensual kiss to Jenni Hermoso) and in the meeting (the disastrous assembly) did not stop there and, seen through the glasses of the rest of society , treated with the same standard as other areas, has been seen as grotesque. Everyone saw the football king naked and deformed. So much so that even his own image in the mirror disgusted him, it is too early to say whether sincerely or out of survival instinct.
As a result, reflections abound on the need to put an end to this opaque governance of football, to put an end to the regime of lords with all that this implies. The women’s team not only has a labor conflict or has become a symbol of equality, but is also considered the battering ram to change football. There has been a lot of talk about how the game in women’s football itself is different, cleaner and less rogue in the bad sense of the word, and also about how its pulse in the Federation aims to end obsolete structures.
Aid
But less is said about the fact that change needs help, that it is necessary open the windows of that certain type of journalism as stale as Rubiales’ celebrations without which the world of football would not be as we know it. Passionate but not fanatic, analytical, modern, supervisory, transparent, egalitarian, sporting in every sense of the term, with no room for scourges (testosterone overdose, irrational hooliganism, racism, machismo…) of which society wants to turn the page. There will not be a new football without new ways of informing and explaining what happens on the field, the stadium and the box, and of entertaining with it.
2023-09-24 04:28:17
#womens #team #sports #journalism
