Pass the remote: Football TV punditry has never been worse

The offerings from Sky Sports and TNT on the Premier League and wider football world is an insult to fans and in grave need of overhaul.

There was a moment on Sunday’s live coverage of Liverpool versus Wolves when Diogo Jota, sidestepping to the left of Wolves defender Emmanuel Agbadouin in the player’s own box, takes a quite clear and obvious dive to the floor. Simon Hooper initially points to the penalty spot but VAR, in one of its few better use cases, steps in and orders Hooper over to the screen to take a second look. About 12 replays of the incident later, he comes to the correct conclusion and overturns his decision to award the penalty.

All while this is ongoing, Jamie Carragher was on commentary and was initially steadfast on the penalty decision, but even after the surmounting evidence never truly reverses his decision, or calls Jota out on the blatant and pitiful dive. Straight away I’m wondering if this was any other team would he be as nonchalant about a dive in an effort to trick the referee. It should have been called out for what it was, but Carragher never goes beyond tamely accepting the overruling and getting on with the game.

As Carragher dropped his microphone at Anfield, we had his brother-in-Overlap Gary Neville over at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, ready to pick up his for Spurs’ game against his beloved Manchester United. Just this week on The Overlap, in a discussion about fandom where Roy Keane was arguing his case that he’s not a United “fan” or a supporter of any of his past teams, Neville claims that a United loss would “bug” him and leave him annoyed for the weekend.

Of course, in now all too frequent fashion over the past ten or so years on Sky coverage, the United/Neville framework followed the familiar pattern as he painfully lamented another poor performance from his former side as they slid to a 1-nil defeat to Ange Postecoglu’s side. To add another layer of Overlap lore to the match, James Maddison unsubtly aimed his celebration at Roy Keane who recently claimed on the podcast that no team should be worried about Maddison coming off the bench against them.

Gary Neville’s inclusion on Manchester United commentary was mildly interesting at the start, especially for neutrals or those of us who may have revelled in the club’s downfall. Post-match discussions after yet another United defeat was for a period must-see television, and of course biased commentary and punditry isn’t a new thing in football nor sports coverage across the world. But as problems persisted game after game and year after year at Old Trafford, the messaging has become extremely jaded, and you are beginning to hear that in Neville’s voice. In a recent feature on The Athletic which looked at Neville as he hit 50-years-of-age and focused more on his property portfolio and business interests than his roles in football, he almost seemed despondent when posed with life turning 50.

Telling Steven Bartlett on the Diary of a CEO podcast, Neville said what would make him happy is to be mountain skiing “isolated away from everything, free from having to talk to someone. I’m a little bit tired of hearing my own voice. The next thing I do at the age of 50 has to be something that means that Gary Neville doesn’t speak as much.” With so many irons in the fire and a vast business portfolio and increasing podcast network, continuing to slot him into the gantry to lament Manchester United performances seems unproductive.

“The structure of the team is awful” he cried on Sunday. “You wouldn’t see this in under-nines football. Amorim is really angry. He is going mad at his bench. He is shouting at people. I’m not sure what he is angry about. The biggest problem I can see is how this team are set up.”

The Telegraph asked the very question if there is any value in retaining Neville for United commentary, and indeed there is an increasing frustration from United fans that Neville aims his ire at the coaching staff rather than the board that oversees and has direct input into almost every decision that has left the club in its current state.

Alan Tyers’ piece in the Telegraph hits well on why this continues to be a thing and isn’t likely to change any time soon—content. Clicks, views, engagement. Neville lamenting a lapse in United concentration and calling them under-five players will immediately be shared to Twitter and Tiktok and amass thousands of views and rage-engagement.

And Neville, who oversees and contributes to an ever-expanding podcast network where a week doesn’t go by without a “viral” clip from The Overlap, knows better than most the value of engagement.

Meanwhile, over on TNT Sports, amidst one of the games of the season between Liverpool and Everton in the last ever Merseyside Derby at Goodison Park, as Darren “Fletch” Fletcher pained to remind us every 90 seconds, the three-man booth of himself, Rio Ferdinand and Ally McCoist provided a painfully contrived narrative of the occasion.

Over on his Substack page, Clive Tyldesley wrote about the pitfalls of a commentary trio—they tend to speak to themselves, not the viewer. When there is a three-way conversation, the chat inevitably veers towards painful inside-jokes, nicknames and boorish banter. Where Ally McCoist is occasionally able to break the mould and analyse the natural instincts of a striker or the decision-making that separates a goal from a miss, Rio Ferdinand offers not even soundbites but a mish-mash of repeatable nonsense, like a pull-string toy. Balon d’Or! Balon d’Or! Balon d’Or! That’s great Rio, thanks for your input.

“The ‘3-man booth’ experiment is taking place against a backdrop of growing familiarity with the chattering, jabbering, gossiping sound of football talk on our screens and platforms.” - Clive Tyldesley

Content is king. Clips need to be quick, accessible, framed as controversial or outright idiotic and be posted in such a fashion to demand engagement, whether that’s supportingly or calling for Rio to be immediately removed from our screens.

Beyond the largely unavoidable commentary, the more missable jaded punditry rotation continues to offer little more than a game of who can laugh loudest, whether it’s Micah “Big Meeks” Richards or Carragher when he widens uproariously as Thierry Henry wryly smirks at Kate Abdo.

The CBS Sports team peaked far too early, with some must-see clips from Henry in particular talking about the role of the striker and racism in football, before producers quickly realised that The Overlap style of keeping the cameras rolling at all times provided more click-bait and engagement for their socials. The dumbing down of football must not sleep.

Jamie Redknapp has managed to offer little-to-nothing for the guts of 20 years now. Paul Merson, as likeable and as great as it is to see him doing well and featuring heavily on Sky coverage, offers little by way of focused insight into a particular game. Daniel Sturridge pops up occasionally on big games and although he offers something fresher than the older squadron and has a stronger understanding of the modern-day footballer, is a watered-down version of his true self and is a square peg in a round hole of Sky’s coverage.

TNT had a chance to freshen things up in the welcomed absence of Jake Humphrey but managed to double-down on a format that wasn’t working and too closely copied the manufactured nature of Sky. Granted, I enjoy Peter Crouch on their Saturday morning coverage, he’s a rare example of a light-hearted character who would be a fantastic foil to more intelligent and insightful treatment of the game. Nobody is asking for wall-to-wall tactical analysis, but a point has been reached where broadcasters are treating viewers as bumbling idiots who can only operate the retweet button. We can take and enjoy the fun and the banter without it being forceful engagement baiting, without it being insulting to viewers.

None of this was truer when TNT managed to blow up one of the best new features UK football coverage had in years when James Richardson shared the desk with league experts European-wide. It was intelligent, nuanced, entertaining and, crucially, didn’t bequeath itself to click-bait engagement.

In its replacement we find less experts on television and more ex-referees, who are still terrified to criticise old colleagues or commit too early to a decision for fear of VAR second-guessing them. Their takeover across coverage where not a single person had asked for is just as bad, if not worse, than the advent of VAR on the games themselves.

Is anything going to change? Probably not. People will continue to watch, pay extortionate broadcast fees and engage on social media. Retweets will be shared, replies will rage at a remark from Carragher or Neville, a cutting remark from Roy Keane about players being soft or clueless will go viral, and Rio’s vocabulary will continue to max itself at about 50 words.

It’s the dumbing down of football, the insulting of viewers and the painful, contrived nature of modern football. This is the TikTok generation that has to turn a whole sport and games of 90 minutes or more into digestible 15 second clips—if the game won’t do that often enough for you, we’ll get the pundits to be the engagement guinea pigs.

UK football coverage has never been worse. But content is king.