Crazy for “Football”
Evening Standard delivery, Oxford Circus, London. Picture by Chris Beckett
https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisjohnbeckett/11423503224
To fully understand the nature of football in the England, one must immerse himself in the culture where the games take place. I have had the privilege of studying in London for the semester, which has been the experience of a lifetime. While I did not make it in person to a football match (prices for the Chelsea versus Paris Saint Germain Champions League match hovered around $500 U.S. dollars), reading the newspapers daily and living amongst the people who live, eat and bleed football allowed me to understand the game’s culture in England. No helmets, no pads, no field goals and no quarterbacks, with games more often than once a week. The sport called “football” in England translates to “soccer” in the United States. Don’t let the name fool you. While “soccer” and “football” refer to the same sport, football in England is an entirely different game.
There are two free daily newspapers given out on the London Underground (also known as the Tube) every time you ride: the Metro (in the morning) and London Evening Standard. With a budget to consider, I stuck to reading the free papers to get a sense of what the sports coverage is like in London and how it compares to coverage in the U.S.
After a few weeks of reading the sports sections of both papers, I was quite impressed. If you’re searching for coverage of the English Premier League or the Champions League, look no further. Both the Metro and London Evening Standard provide pages on pages of columns, news stories, graphics and photos detailing every transaction made, every match won and lost and every quote one could pick out from José Mourinho’s (and other managers’) press conferences.
The papers I read put the sports sections on the last few pages of the paper. This makes it easy for readers just looking for sports news. The sports section usually takes up about 10 pages of a 100-page paper, and I still can’t understand how these publications manage to print so much sports content every day.
A photo of Arsenal’s Stadium. Photo by Oliver Macklin.
As for the coverage, almost all news in the sports section deals with football. A large majority of that portion includes news about the English Premier League and Champions League football, but the Football League, another league in England, gets some coverage as well. The Football League consists of three levels: League One, League Two and Championship. None of the three levels receive much attention from the papers, but the Championship clubs usually get a page per day.
The Premier League dominates the papers, especially late in its season. Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester City finished all within four points of one another in May. The point system works as follows: a three-point reward for the winning team, one point for a draw, and no points for a loss. With the Premier League title on the line, news concerning Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester City dominated.
That’s not to say there isn’t other sports coverage in the Metro and London Evening Standard. You can find in each about a page per day highlighting the latest news of the Six Nations Rugby Union and cricket leagues across England. Readers will also find an occasional golf story, though most of the articles have been about whether or not Rory McIlroy will return to form.
The McIlroy coverage confused me, considering he is Irish, not English. But he seems to be a pretty popular figure.
If English readers seek coverage for U.S. sports, they are sure to be disappointed, however. Very little basketball coverage, no baseball coverage and minimal American football coverage appears. You don’t see cricket or rugby news in the New York Times, though, so why should you expect to see NBA basketball in England?
Anyway, the English were too caught up in the race for the Premier League title to worry about whether the Washington Wizards were going to beat the Chicago Bulls. The three articles I noticed related to sports in the U.S. were all about Super Bowl XLVIII. Two were recaps of the lopsided game, which I stayed up until 4 in the morning to watch, and one was a pre-game question and answer session with NFL Network analyst Darren Sharper.
When closely inspecting the quality of the reporting in the Metro and London Evening Standard, I found that these papers do not care much for AP style. Headlines are large, even for a simple Liverpool victory or quote from Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger. You will also see managers and players referred to by first name more often than by last name.
The page layouts are also different in the sports sections even compared to the rest of the paper. Page designers will frequently place text on top of enlarged background photos, which sometimes makes the articles hard to read and distracting. The rest of the paper looks like any other print publication one can find in the U.S. There also are more columns on a page than news stories because everyone has an opinion.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the newspapers in London, it’s that most everyone reads them. The London Evening Standard notes on its front page: “read by 1.7 million people every day.” From what I saw, all the commuters read the paper. Londoners can’t live without their free newspapers. And I’m not sure I can, either.
Oliver Macklin is a senior in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
