An editorial at the excellent U.K. webzine twohundredpercent analyzes an article in last Saturday’s Guardian by comedian David Mitchell. Although Mitchell’s anti-soccer piece displayed a typical lack of understanding of the game, it ought to strike chord with soccer fans who are sick of the year-round blanket media coverage that no longer even allows us a short summer break.
“During my childhood,” says the writer, “newspapers would simply not mention football during the summer months, choosing to write expansive articles on the county cricket championship and Wimbledon. Then, at the start of August, the game would start to creak back to life. It was a laborious process, and early-season matches would carry an air about them of it still being the summer holidays. The season proper didn’t really start until the nights were drawing in and matches finished under floodlighting.”
This saturation is in contrast to the actual game on the field, where soccer’s curious popularity results from its unpredictable balance of tension and minimal scoring. “Goals in football have a rarity value that is unparalleled elsewhere and the viewer, at the start of a match, has no idea of whether a match will feature eight or nine of them, or none whatsoever.” It’s ironic that the column by Mitchell, a self-professed soccer hater, should highlight the fact that many fans “are tired of the global domination of the game and of the 24 hour news culture that requires a constant stream of information being disseminated towards us, regardless of the quality of that information or whether it’s even true or not.”