Column

Comment

Football

Sport

16 August 2024

6 min read

Is the Premier League too much of a good thing?

A weary look ahead to the new season.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Four footballers stand arms crossed looking expectant and confident.

Premier League.

Well, it’s the time of year again when my emotional well-being is governed by the weekly performance of Liverpool Football Club. Yes: the Premier League is back!

The start of a new season is usually abuzz with the excitement of possibilities. So many questions, so many possible outcomes. What will life look like after Jürgen Klopp? Will we win the league? Will we ever sign a defensive midfielder? This should be an exciting time for any football fan; a time of hope, of daring to believe this really is your year.

So, why does the start of the season fill me with such dread this year?

Normally as the season starts, I know when all the games are; who Liverpool are playing, where, and when. I’ve watched Liverpool’s pre-season friendlies to see if we’ve changed formation or made tactical tweaks. I’m up to date with all the players bought and sold by clubs across the league.

Not this year. This year the season has caught me completely off guard and I’m finding the prospect of yet another year of football hard to process. I was invited to join a work fantasy football league this week and, honestly, the thought of it made me want to cry.

When did the sport I love so much begin to feel like such an obligation? Why does being a football fan feel like such hard work?

I think I’m just tired of football. No, not tired. Fatigued. Exhausted.

Or, more accurately, football itself – the sport – is fatigued. As though it’s been drained of all enjoyment.

As television, rather than sport, football inevitably lives in the aftermath of the ‘HBO effect.’

There are all sorts of reasons for this. To start with one of the more obvious ones, Video Assistant Referees (VAR) have turned football into a glorified science project. It’s now a common occurrence for matches to be stopped for extended periods while three men in a portacabin miles away from the game pull out their CGI rulers. All to determine if an attacker has a toenail offside, so they can gleefully disallow a goal and congratulate themselves on a job well done. The line between ‘being right’ and ‘doing right’ is blurred more than ever as commentators bemoan the increasing gulf between ‘the laws of the game’ and ‘the spirit of the game.’

The standard and nature of refereeing in English football certainly isn’t helping my enjoyment of it. But it’s only part of a wider problem.

But there’s a truth about football that many football broadcasters and organizations don’t want to face.

Football is now primarily a televised commodity - content. Most football fans across the globe engage with the sport primarily through a screen, rather than at a stadium. As television, rather than sport, football inevitably lives in the aftermath of the ‘HBO effect.’

Prestige HBO shows like The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire, Game of Thrones (and countless others besides) have shaped the landscape of TV and, by extension, the culture around us. No longer confined solely to HBO, there seems to be, at any given moment, at least one TV programme you simply have to be watching if you’re going to keep up with the cultural conversation. If you’re not watching, you’re left behind.

This is the context in which football finds itself in 2024. No longer sport, but drama. And drama that begs to be discussed. A series of prompts for those sought-after ‘water-cooler moments’ that dominate conversation throughout the week. “That was never a red card!” “We were robbed!” Competitive sport boiled down and reduced to a series of controversies and talking points.

Because football is more television content than sport now, these controversies are not just discussed in the immediate context of the match in question. No, all week between games, key moments and decisions are slowed down, dissected, viewed from multiple angles, pulled apart.

I watch matches, and then watch people talk about the matches I’ve watched, until there’s another match to watch. There is simply too much football, and too much talking about football. All in service of football as television.

On top of this, the matches themselves are only becoming more frequent. This year, the Champions League will have an extra two games in the group stage.

And then there’s international football. This summer alone, there has been the Euros and the Olympics and, during breaks in the Premier League, players represent their nations in friendlies, World Cup qualifiers, and Nations’ League games (the competition literally no-one asked for).

This is to say nothing of proposals for a 39th Premier League game played abroad and an expanded Club World Cup from 2025 (again, neither of which fans seem to be clamouring for).

And all these matches are taking place within this context of football as television content. There’s not just more football, but there’s more football to talk about, more contentious refereeing decisions, more player mistakes and tactical battles to unpick.

But there’s a truth about football that many football broadcasters and organizations don’t want to face. Loads of it is really boring.

There’s no guarantee anything of actual interest will happen in any given football match. Goals in football are relatively scarce compared to other sports. Liverpool beat Manchester United 7-0 a few years ago and it was heralded as borderline divine intervention. If a rugby match finished 7-0, fans would be asking for a refund.

Authentic mundanity will always be more compelling than manufactured drama.

That’s one of the beautiful things about the beautiful game; it’s authentic. There are no pre-written storylines, and no perfect endings or twists set in stone. It’s real life. Like real life, it can often be mundane.

That should be no surprise, really. At the end of the day, football is a game we humans created to pass time and have fun. Like all sport, football is human flourishing in practice. By this I mean that, through playing sports, we get a glimpse into what it is we’ve been put here to do: to enjoy our existence. It is an expression of communal joy found in delighting in the physicality of our nature as created beings. When we take it too seriously or make too much of it, we obscure that fundamental truth to which it points, even at its most mundane. That we are creatures created to flourish and find joy in our creatureliness.

Authentic mundanity will always be more compelling than manufactured drama. In its endless pursuit to inject drama into the sport so it can compete as television, football has lost the mundanity and authenticity that makes it so compelling.

All of this has been somewhat lost in contemporary football and goes some way to explaining why the thought of yet another season of endless debates, drama, and analysis of the sport I love makes me feel rather exhausted. I just want to watch some people kick a ball.

So, what are my hopes for this Premier League season? It might sound counterintuitive, but if there was less football and less football drama in my life, that would do for me. Failing that, I’ll take a Liverpool treble.

Article

Comment

Film & TV

Truth and Trust

14 November 2025

5 min read

Impartial journalism isn’t possible for the BBC – or anyone else

It’s time to give up the ghost and opt for transparency over impartiality

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

The BBC newsroom.

BBC.

I wrote 3,000 words explaining the differences between a complementarian and egalitarian relationships – loosely these are the two categories that determine a couple’s position on male headship and female submission in a Christian marriage. I have my opinions, sure. But in this piece, I was neutral. I clearly laid out the arguments for and against each, explained the history, context and nuances, all to equip the reader to make their own mind up.

I proudly handed the piece to my editor highlighting the careful tightrope of neutrality I had walked. She hesitated: ‘Well, I guess. But it’s clear what position you take.’ I was crushed, all the delicate phrasing and open-handed descriptions and I was still as transparent as the Shard on window clean day.

No matter how hard we try to present balanced arguments, there is no such thing as unbiased reporting. Even when trying to be ‘fair’ in the way we present a story, we always bring our own perception of ‘fairness’ to the table. And without the wisdom of Solomon (in the cut-the-baby-in-half era), we’re not going to consistently get it right.

I’ve been a journalist for some years but I’ve never worked in an organisation that claims to be impartial, bar a week’s internship at Science in Action on BBC World Service. I have, however, worked for publications that don’t share my political views. And even with the mandate to write in ‘house style’ there are many subtle decisions a journalist can make to skew reporting towards their personal opinion.

Phrasing is everything. Am I saying they ‘protested’ or ‘rioted’? Is it ‘reform’ or a ‘crackdown’? Are they an ‘immigrant’, ‘asylum seeker’, ‘refugee’ or ‘expat’? Did she ‘splash around in her swimsuit’ or ‘flaunt her curves on the beach’? There is no neutral choice of words or phrasing. Every micro-decision a journalist makes is based, consciously or unconsciously, on the perspective that they have and are trying to impart on you.

Then there’s choosing which topics to write about in the first place, selecting sources to quote from and statistics to reference and deciding how to frame the headlines. With the vast body of data available online, you can always find a person or stat to back up your belief. None of this can be done without a hint of your own background, culture, and worldview.

It is through this lens – my belief in the fallacy of impartiality – that I’ve followed the latest fallout at the BBC. After an internal dossier was leaked, it came to light that a Panorama documentary called ‘Trump: A Second Chance?’ that was broadcast not long before 2024’s presidential election, had misleadingly edited a speech he made on January 6 2021. The speech was spliced in such a way as to suggest he had egged on the assault on the Capitol. Shamir Shah, the BBC chairman, acknowledged the fault and said that the editing ‘did give the impression of a direct call for violent action.’

The BBC has always been plagued by allegations that it is not living up to its Royal Charter legally requiring it to be impartial. Interestingly, there are many examples of these complaints coming in from both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The term ‘impartiality’ in this context doesn’t mean stripping all viewpoint from its reporting, as the organisation acknowledges the impossibility of that task, but it does say that it strives for balance, fairness and due weight. This is a standard they fell short of in their reporting of Trump’s address.

In this, it is undeniably at fault. Even the most questionable of news outlets, that do publish quotes out of context, would acknowledge that knowingly editing or adapting quotes and footage to support their own agenda is totally unacceptable. Regardless of a reporter’s own opinion, readers and viewers want to hear a person speak in their own words.

The wider question this raises for me is: why we are still claiming any news outlet is impartial in the first place? There’s a sense of safety with both right- and left-wing media, that openly acknowledges its own agenda. If you pick up the Guardian, you understand that you are reading about the world from a socially liberal political stance while tuning into GB News where they champion British values and challenge ‘woke culture’ will bring you something very different.

I think the BBC as an institution is brilliant, important and necessary but not impartial. When people decry the reporting choices or phrasing of BBC reporting as biased, my response is always ‘what do you expect?’. There are important checks and balances, like rights of reply and offering opposing positions, that help round out a story, but they don’t strip it of opinion. I think it’s time to give up the ghost and opt for transparency over impartiality.

The honest response is to acknowledge that, like every other person who relays a story, the BBC cannot resist the siren call of opinion. To claim it can, when audiences can plainly see the inconsistencies across its platforms, is both disingenuous and outdated. Instead, perhaps they could work to a mission statement along these lines: ‘We are committed to fairness, accuracy, and transparency. We value robust reporting and careful fact checking. We recognise that complete neutrality is impossible, but we strive to reflect the world as truthfully and inclusively as we can.’ This transparency would at least free up 90 per cent of people who write in to BBC’s Point of View to complain about its reporting.

Years ago, I was in conversation with the deputy editor of one of the big tabloids when he said that, while he thought his paper was great, no one should use it as their sole source of news. I appreciate his transparency. I think if any of us only consume news from one outlet, even if that is the BBC, we are selling ourselves short. Our pursuit of and clamouring for ultimate truth is a God-given and spiritual desire, so the wise would vary their sources.

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