One of the traditions which Britons rightly pride themselves on is the free press. Britain boasts arguably the world's most vibrant print media, with high-brow broadsheets on sale alongside downmarket tabloids. The tradition of absolute media freedom is only limited by libel and incitement to hatred laws, anything else is printable.
This tradition, however, is not without its drawbacks. Britain's privacy laws are among the world's weakest, and in any case the phone-hacking scandal has demonstrated that the media aren't too worried about the legalities of a situation. Tabloids, desperate for easy material, make celebrities of anyone they can, and those in the public eye are hounded relentlessly by the paparazzi.
In the case of professional footballers, the media are particularly intrusive. Sporting prowess is easy celebrity, and given how competitive England's tabloid press is (The Sun, The Mirror, The Daily Express and The Daily Mail all compete for roughly similar audiences. In Germany, by contrast, there is only one mass-market tabloid), anything that can be used as media fodder gets printed. Britain's celebrity pantheon encompasses hundreds of people, and footballers are not an exception.
The problem with this is that the sporting media are the primary instigator of the excuse culture I referred to last week. Three of the tabloids (The Sun, The Daily Expressand The Daily Mail) have rightwing populist editorial positions. Each has their own bugbears (The Sun tends to have higher amounts of celebrity gossip, The Daily Mail is notorious for claiming that Product X causes cancer, or alternatively cures it, while The Daily Express bemoans the EU, complains of price hikes in everything, and continues to propagate the asinine assumption that Princess Diana's death was anything other than an accident), but all three share a distaste for foreigners bordering on the xenophobic, and a strong sense of British exceptionalism. Their nationalist leanings tend to assume that England is in fact a major footballing power, and these were the publications most miffed by England's poor showing in their World Cup bid, which they attributed to pernicious foreigners.
If anything, the press's capacity for vengefulness against English mistakes outweighs their xenophobia. Take David Seaman's 2002 mistake against Brazil that ejected England from the World Cup. Never mind the fact that they went out to the eventual winners, never mind the fact that being off his line can give a keeper an advantage, never mind the fact that, at 6'3", Seaman was not an easy man to lob, never mind the fact that over the previous decade he had been a sterling goalkeeper for England, and never mind the fact that Brazil dominated the game, one free-kick from the greatest player in the world put all that aside. Seaman had cocked up, and thus England were on their way home. Memories of Nayim's freak goal against Arsenal were dragged into the mix, just to further embarrass a man who had landed more caps than any England keeper bar Peter Shilton.
A further problem derives from the English media's sheer intrusiveness. There is no doubt that, among the four thousand or so names whose voicemails were hacked, several hundred will have been professional footballers, including the whole England squad. Footballers are celebrities, and in England, celebrities can kiss their privacy goodbye. The crime of being a top English footballer is punishable by having your darkest secrets revealed, and every peccadillo trumpeted in front of the media. Whereas many European countries' media ignore spousal infidelity, and others (notably France) accept it as part of normal life, in England a cheating spouse is fair game for a media that notionally subscribes to Victorian mores while displaying topless teenagers on the third page.
Remember Rebecca Loos? The nanny-cum-celebrity-cum-glamour model who allegedly slept with David Beckham was merely the first in a string of stories that the media gleefully reported, all the while trying to maintain an air of offence at the whole business. Then it was the Wayne Rooney's taste for prostitutes and grannies, possibly both. Then it was John Terry's supposed efforts to score the entire WAG cohort of the English team, based on the fact that he had succeeded with the wife of Wayne Bridge. Best of all from the point of view of the glossies and red tops was Chelsea and England defender Ashley Cole's tempestuous romance with Geordie bubblegum popstar Cheryl Tweedy. Once the Beckhams decamped to Madrid and subsequently Los Angeles, the Coles (Cheryl sensibly realising that keeping the surname Tweedy was unlikely to be a good career move) were England's hottest celebrity couple. A few revelations of Ashley's cheating later, and the media had an even better story, as they documented the collapse of the couple, followed by allegations of a reunion, at which the media, presumably seeking to stir the pot a little more, spilled a few more beans about Ashley.
Peter Crouch was once asked what he'd be if he wasn't a professional footballer. With the wit and honesty that he, rare among top players, has come to epitomise, he replied; "probably a virgin." His current relationship with model Abby Clancy is at least a stable one (for now), but it's another example of footballers in England being perfect celebrity fodder. The fact is that the red tops (which cater to a primarily male audience) and the glossies (overwhelmingly female) find a useful commonality with each other in the personal lives of professional sportsmen, footballers in particular, and the English team most of all. While all top players are grist to the churnalist mill, England's team is free from the parochial prejudices that deter national papers from overly covering regional clubs, for fear of offending others.
Earlier, I referred to the Express's attempts to stoke a controversy about Princess Diana's death. This is a further aspect of the corrosive effect of England's media on the team, namely, it's attempts to manufacture controversy where none previously existed. Remember Glenn Hoddle's comments that disabled people are paying for sins committed in a past life and the resulting uproar. This ignored the fact that, actually, this belief is widespread among Buddhists, of which Hoddle was one. Unpleasant as it sounds, from the Buddhist perspective, or indeed from the perspective of anyone who might tease out the logicalities of reincarnation, it is no worse than suggesting that one could be reincarnated as an animal, as most Buddhists believe. The fact is that, in a multiculturalist society, there will be plenty of people who have odd beliefs, and the search for accommodation will inevitably result in contradiction. Remember, the media the hounded Hoddle would equally have hounded a Muslim manager who decried training in Ramadan, or a manager who dropped players who couldn't train during Ramadan, not on the merits of the case, but rather on the desire to stoke a controversy.
Sven Goran-Eriksson (as it might be obvious) is a Swede. When he chose to stir things up with fellow Swede Ulrika Johnsson, the media chose to stir things up too. Two Swedes, neither of whom were in serious relationships, having a night of casual sex, would be par for the course in Scandanavia. The problem was that the English media decided to dig up Sven's old flame Nancy Dell'Olio, as this suited the notion of Sven as Lothario, a serial womaniser. When, several years later, Sven was caught again with FA staffer Fariah Alam, it sealed both his reputation as a womaniser and his fate as a manager. Outraged, the English media demanded his head.
For media to sell, it has to give the public what they want. The English public want scandal. The English football team is a useful source of this. The English media exists to facilitate a demand. In this respect, its old-style prudishness makes sense. Footballers' infidelities and controversies are perfect for an industry that seeks to combine moralism with shock value and prudishness with bawdiness. Contrast the various affairs of English players, the scandal of which dragged on for months, with the ten-minute issue of Frank Ribery's visits to brothels in the French media. Unfortunately for England's game, the English media expects their players to be "role models" (the meaning of which can be interpreted according to the whims of said media) rather than what they really are, young men who earn five times in a week what the average person earns in a year, and should be expected to behave accordingly. The sad fact is that England's patriotic media achieves the opposite of its stated aim, and the team suffers accordingly. At the end of the day, players are human too.
Greg Bowler's expertise on the sex lives of Scandanavians is based entirely on Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy. Caution is advised
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