If a Premier League manager walked into a press conference, would you expect him to be searingly honest?
What about a politician? Or the CEO of a massive multi-national corporation?
Most would surely expect a bias. Not necessarily a dishonest one, but certainly a bias towards one way of thinking. When you hear a politician speak on TV, the first thing you want to know is which party they belong to and which part of the country they represent. You want a reason to say, ‘well you would say that’. And that’s not necessarily so you can disagree, but because you want a reason to weigh up the validity of that opinion, and decide whether you agree or not. Aren’t we all grown up enough to understand than respectfully disagree with an opinion we don’t like?
So surely it’s the same with football managers. We know this already but it doesn’t seem to stop us from asking the question anyway.
Press conferences are important, but their importance is indirect and insidious, rather than direct and obvious.
Those who follow a manager’s press conferences every week get to know the manager they see so often. They become aware of his moods and his quirks. They get to know what makes him happy and what angers him, which kinds of questions make him crazy, which kinds of performances from the week before put him in a foul mood. Part of the point of a press conference is to get answers and put questions to the manager to make him explain his decisions after a defeat. But in reality, it really should be more about getting to know the character than holding him to account.
The point, surely, is to form a fair and rounded view of the manger in order to create a lens with which to view his successes and failures later in the season.
After all, Premier League managers will often walk into a press conference with an attitude towards swordfighting with the media. The relationship has never been one of complete honesty, and has always involved a certain level of adversarial posturing. But football has become such big business, and social media has made our thirst for a controversial story about players so great, that before answering a question from a reporter, a manager now has to think about how the answer is going to look for the club, and how he can best protect a player from a negative headline.
And so to expect a manager to come out after a game when passions are running high and speak openly and honestly is really just asking to be deceived, or fobbed off with a meaningless quip.
We look out for manager comments after a game, watching Match of the Day wouldn’t be the same without the post-match interviews, nor would any broadcast of a live game – not everyone switches off after the final whistle.
But in the end, we’re only ever going to get anything interesting if a manager is riled up. Managers are even set up: if there’s a red card, he is asked about it, often pointedly. The reporter has to ask, though. If there’s a red card, or a controversial incident, there is no way the reporter can’t ask. It’s his job.
And so we come to a chasm in the middle, a division. The manager on one side, protecting his club and his players, and trying not to get an FA fine. On the other side, the reporter trying his best, but always a slave to two masters: getting answers for fans, the public and interested parties, but also remembering that most people are only interested in what the manager has to say about the major or controversial incidents anyway.
In the end, we get a distraction from the real issues. Because either the manager won’t give us anything interesting, as he succeeds in protecting his club, or we’ll get a meltdown from a manager. Sometimes they can be telling, a sign of building pressure or something not right at the club, but often what we describe as meltdowns aren’t really all that interesting.
Like Pep Guardiola’s reaction post-Burnley: a man who had seen his side labour to a victory thanks to an early red card, and concede a goal that looked like a throwback to the 1950s didn’t look happy when he was interviewed after the game. Shocking.
But the most telling part in all of this is Guardiola’s response when asked about Fernandinho’s red card. He told the media, ‘ask the referee’. And here’s the problem: if we really want a manger to speak his mind, to tell us what he thinks, and to answer the question truthfully, we can’t also fine him for saying it.
Do we really want answers? Or do we want the storylines and the drama? Because we can’t always have both. And we probably don’t even want both.
We like the idea of fairness – that’s why we fine managers for criticising referees too much. We like the idea of truth – that’s why we ask managers for their thoughts after the game. And we like the idea of drama – well, that one’s obvious. But we don’t really seem to want any of those things. In the end, we really just want someone to complain about.
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