![]() You're completely right that it isn't on the broadcasters themselves (especially during live events), as they are only given so much leeway to present what they might find important. I can't tell if their choices are so conservative because the producers are drearily unimaginative or they're simply terrified of not rinsing maximum value from a license they've paid an astronomical sum for. Every aspect of the broadcast is in service of the brand with absolutely no journalistic inquiry. The only variation is whether you have pundits pitch-side or in a studio. One of the things that really frustrates me about this is that everyone uses the same cut-and-paste format as everyone else. Why not give them some help? Would the format suffer that much if they included a third or even a fourth pundit? Not necessarily all squabbling over the same game but rotated across the spread of the day's fixtures. My main gripe is that for highlights packages (like motd for example) they funnel all their analysis through two ex-pros which means they have to be across five or six games in an afternoon. Though, I don't necessarily blame broadcasters for the time constraints imposed upon them, especially during live games. But they rarely explain what the team/player did to make that happen. they just show a cool highlight during downtime and rewind once or twice so everyone gets to see it. The mainstream broadcasts are improving, but still don't provide much in terms of discussing what is/isn't effective and for what reasons. fall into similar issues as there seem to be for the U.K. So, I think non-baseball sports in the U.S. It is where you need more video breakdown to help make sense of things, but even then it's difficult to say to an audience that doesn't necessarily understand the game that well, "here's how X player off the ball/puck managed to move in such a way that the defense got out of position in a manner that led player Y to have a chance on goal." And if you have to provide that explanation at the level that makes sense for somebody who knows little about the sport each time, it's near impossible to make a tight, punchy program. Other sports with more open play, from soccer/football to basketball or ice hockey, are much more difficult to assign clean numbers to anything. ![]() By the mid-2000s, you had sites like Fangraphs openly and publicly breaking down these stats and trying to improve upon what had existed for a century to capture which players were better, and why. This led to folks with statistical analysis backgrounds looking more into what seemed to be effective and eventually teams bringing these folks in to improve their rosters. It's a much easier sport than most to break down because of the direct pitcher/batter matchup involved in every play. who has always taken more of an interest in the tactical side of sport, I think the strongest driver of this was probably baseball. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with having ex-footballers as pundits but it's wrong to let them saturate the conversation to the extent that it poisons the national understanding of the game. ![]() If you're Wilson, Bandini or Cox the best you can do is start a podcast or hope to be brought on to Sky Sports news to talk transfers. Things are gradually changing but there's still a deep unease with letting anyone who wasn't a footballer have an opinion about football. So in a 'jobs for the boys' (and now increasingly girls) insiders only atmosphere like MOTD or Sky or ITV etc there's a tacit pushback against data analytics or the idea progressive tactical philosophies. It's one of the few industries where someone from a working class background can make themselves very wealthy without being privately educated. I think there's also underlying issues of class within football in the UK. Suffice to say Mark Lawrenson makes Alan Shearer sound like Johan fucking Cruijff. Football fans of my generation (I'm late 30's) were sick of pundits like Lawrenson, Hansen and co, who's reign seemed endemic. That's why the Guardian's Football Weekly took off in the mid 2000's. ![]() But the reason you see people like Jonathan Wilson or Michael Cox today is because there was a deep dissatisfaction in England about the way football had been talked about in the mainstream and they filled that gap. From what I understand, yes folks from the U.S do and have had access to more tactical information about their sports. Well it's a bit more complicated than that. Seems like people in my country are very happy with simple Alan Shearer type showing you clips of what you had already seen but with circles round their feet and Shearer simply saying bad defending on every single goal ever lol Americans in general love their tactics far more than British people.
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