The footballing buffet - too much on the plate
The most profound change in football over my lifetime is how much the viewing experience has changed.
In the late 1980s if you didn't see the match live you had the local news (non-top flight goals), or Match of the Day. If you missed that you had to wait until the following week for the Saint and Greavsie / Football Focus roundup shows. Miss that and you would never see the goals again.
Maradonna, Van Basten, Gullit, Papin and all the other icons of that era were pretty much invisible outside of the major tournaments. You just never got to see them play. I can wax lyrical about the brilliance of Lothar Mattheus, but that is based off the 1990 World Cup. I probably never saw him play before or after. If a player had a bad tournament that was it really, so many multi-time champions are massively underrated because they didn't play well in the televised games. Meanwhile, Toto Schillaci is regarded as a great player by people of my age despite a relatively mixed club career.
What it did mean is that when games were live on TV I watched every single second of them. I can remember the Arsenal title win (live on free to air TV) as one of those iconic moments. Every round of the Everton 1995 FA cup win is embedded in my mind. When Sky TV came in and free to air English league football stopped being shown we instead had Serie A. There was no choice, there was one game which everyone watched and a midweek European game.
So those mid-90s Ajax and Juventus teams are far reminiscent of that era than the domestic teams for me.
Fast forward 25 years and on any given day of the week, I can see goals flood in from all over the world. Go onto /r/soccer and sort by new and I have every goal I could see uploaded before my eyes in real time.
I can watch Messi in a way I never could Maradonna. And if I don't have access to the live game it is forever more available to me in one way or another. If I were desperate to do so I could find footage for pretty much any game anywhere in the world.
In most ways this is great and I certainly wouldn't want to go back to how it was before.
However, and perhaps this is more a reflection of my time of life with young kids and busier weekends, but I just very rarely sit down and get to watch a live 90-minute game uninterrupted. I make a point of doing so for international tournaments but on normal days, even for big games, I end up just flicking between games, catching brief highlights or watching the goals but little else.
It is like a massive footballing buffet and you end up with an odd plateful piled high with roast beef, paella, and curry. It all looks good, is individually tasty, but you don't experience a proper meal.
You also end up with a distorted impression of a game. Watching Match of the Day highlights from yesterday's Merseyside derby was very different to watching the live game. You can only really show goalmouth incident and all those chances that just break down, which can often be the majority of opportunities, don't get shown.
It also distorts your impression of football players. How many players who I have strong opinions on have I actually watched properly for 90-minute games? Very few.
In the same way, you can't actually judge someone's life by their curated highlights on social media I wonder how many of us judge players by their Youtube showreel and how highly other people rate them?
So much of what makes a footballer good is the work they do off the ball. One beautiful move a game can make a brilliant highlight package. And if I am consuming football mainly via video clips I'm not seeing the other 97% of game time. Are they showing for the ball, making good runs, keeping the defensive shape?
It probably also biases us to individualistic attacking players too. Nobody is going to watch a highlights video of "the 10 best offside traps of all time", or "man marking the regista 2019" yet this is often the type of thing that wins games.
Then again I'm not sure this matters at all for most people. We watch football for entertainment, we all want the spectacular goals. We reminisce about Matt Le Tissier, not Carlton Palmer.
A diet of only the spectacular, with all the normal bits of a game missed out, probably isn't the best from a point of view about learning about football. But it is also true that most people aren't particularly interested in learning about football.
However, I also think we value far more the goal we see in real time, in the context of the match, so much more. That Maxi Rodriguez volley in Argentina vs Mexico was all the better as the game before had been so turgid. Just viewing the goals in isolation is like watching the final scene of a horror movie. Without the tension build up the scary bits aren't scary. And without the near misses, the chance that finally goes in isn't as good.
In the late 1980s if you didn't see the match live you had the local news (non-top flight goals), or Match of the Day. If you missed that you had to wait until the following week for the Saint and Greavsie / Football Focus roundup shows. Miss that and you would never see the goals again.
Maradonna, Van Basten, Gullit, Papin and all the other icons of that era were pretty much invisible outside of the major tournaments. You just never got to see them play. I can wax lyrical about the brilliance of Lothar Mattheus, but that is based off the 1990 World Cup. I probably never saw him play before or after. If a player had a bad tournament that was it really, so many multi-time champions are massively underrated because they didn't play well in the televised games. Meanwhile, Toto Schillaci is regarded as a great player by people of my age despite a relatively mixed club career.
What it did mean is that when games were live on TV I watched every single second of them. I can remember the Arsenal title win (live on free to air TV) as one of those iconic moments. Every round of the Everton 1995 FA cup win is embedded in my mind. When Sky TV came in and free to air English league football stopped being shown we instead had Serie A. There was no choice, there was one game which everyone watched and a midweek European game.
So those mid-90s Ajax and Juventus teams are far reminiscent of that era than the domestic teams for me.
Fast forward 25 years and on any given day of the week, I can see goals flood in from all over the world. Go onto /r/soccer and sort by new and I have every goal I could see uploaded before my eyes in real time.
I can watch Messi in a way I never could Maradonna. And if I don't have access to the live game it is forever more available to me in one way or another. If I were desperate to do so I could find footage for pretty much any game anywhere in the world.
In most ways this is great and I certainly wouldn't want to go back to how it was before.
However, and perhaps this is more a reflection of my time of life with young kids and busier weekends, but I just very rarely sit down and get to watch a live 90-minute game uninterrupted. I make a point of doing so for international tournaments but on normal days, even for big games, I end up just flicking between games, catching brief highlights or watching the goals but little else.
It is like a massive footballing buffet and you end up with an odd plateful piled high with roast beef, paella, and curry. It all looks good, is individually tasty, but you don't experience a proper meal.
You also end up with a distorted impression of a game. Watching Match of the Day highlights from yesterday's Merseyside derby was very different to watching the live game. You can only really show goalmouth incident and all those chances that just break down, which can often be the majority of opportunities, don't get shown.
It also distorts your impression of football players. How many players who I have strong opinions on have I actually watched properly for 90-minute games? Very few.
In the same way, you can't actually judge someone's life by their curated highlights on social media I wonder how many of us judge players by their Youtube showreel and how highly other people rate them?
So much of what makes a footballer good is the work they do off the ball. One beautiful move a game can make a brilliant highlight package. And if I am consuming football mainly via video clips I'm not seeing the other 97% of game time. Are they showing for the ball, making good runs, keeping the defensive shape?
It probably also biases us to individualistic attacking players too. Nobody is going to watch a highlights video of "the 10 best offside traps of all time", or "man marking the regista 2019" yet this is often the type of thing that wins games.
Then again I'm not sure this matters at all for most people. We watch football for entertainment, we all want the spectacular goals. We reminisce about Matt Le Tissier, not Carlton Palmer.
A diet of only the spectacular, with all the normal bits of a game missed out, probably isn't the best from a point of view about learning about football. But it is also true that most people aren't particularly interested in learning about football.
However, I also think we value far more the goal we see in real time, in the context of the match, so much more. That Maxi Rodriguez volley in Argentina vs Mexico was all the better as the game before had been so turgid. Just viewing the goals in isolation is like watching the final scene of a horror movie. Without the tension build up the scary bits aren't scary. And without the near misses, the chance that finally goes in isn't as good.
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