Soccer journo allegiance and their ways
Yesterday I attended a football lunch where I sat next to a retired sports journalist who is a Fulham fan.
I have no particular allegiance to any club but we rattled off names of journos that do.
They generally come to journalism supporting a club. It can be an asset in building relationships and gathering stories but a liability if you are compromised.
The latter arises especially in the provincial press where some chief soccer writers are little more than Public Relations Officers for the club.
When we retired hacks gather together the talk is of the good old days before social media when daily London newspapers exercised real influence.
Terry Venables was probably the last to have, and to rely upon, the support and friendship of major soccer writers.
They are a curious breed, moving around in packs with often surprisingly strong hard left views.
Sensitive to criticism themselves they can and do dish it out with bile and vitriol as many an England manger will attest.
They are usually well-informed and good company with a fund of stories about fellow writers.
They like a drink and at the Soccer Writers Dinner, normally at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, down it industrially.
When I first started watching football the number of information centres was far less. You had the programme, radio report and local newspaper or – in the case of big teams – the national daily.
Transfers were once staple stories but now these tend to break in social media.
Soccer writers might not just be a curious breed but a dying one. Newspapers are shrinking in circulation and staff. Journos do not tend to find second careers. The days where a writer could live off expenses and leave salary untouched are passed Personally I was grateful to attend so many domestic and international events without paying and in a good seat and could not be as cynical as some of my colleagues
Having no special loyalty I tend to follow the teams of my colleagues on the Rust.
Over the weekend I watched Fulham 1 Bournemouth 1 and rugby’s Leicester 16 Harlequins 14.
I caught Bologna 2 Fiorentina 3 and Nice 0 Strasbourg 3, the latter a very disappointing game.
