The ever-multiplying camera positions, the reaction shots, the slow motion beads of sweat, the meticulously produced highlights reel – sports coverage has been cinematic for a very long time. “We’ve always tried to stir your emotions as well as your mind,” reflected the late Steve Sabol, the hugely influential NFL Films founder and sports broadcasting pioneer. Cinema acknowledged a reciprocal debt. Sam Peckinpah was inspired by Sabol’s Super Bowl II film to create the Wild Bunch as he did – mixing slow-motion violence with fast cuts in a revolutionary type of action editing. “NFL highlight reels had a real impact on how movies get made,” Ron Howard has explained, “particularly montages.’’
Anyway … record scratch; freeze frame. You’re probably wondering how I’m going to get from this to Gary Neville’s Monday Night Football Awards. But bear with me.
For well-rehearsed reasons – from money to geography – football is primarily a television spectacle for most fans today. In his excellent Television: A Biography, the critic David Thomson considers what this has done to the sport. A lifelong Chelsea fan, who has now lived in America for decades, Thomson is interested in how it has affected the players, who “know they are part of a system of close-ups and slow motion”. They are “more fastidious about their appearance”, for instance, and goal celebrations have evolved into things “that would have been regarded as tasteless 50 years ago”. Players in this multi-billion pound television experience “have become stars who endorse other products and dreams”.
Above all, “they know they are being photographed and so their skills have turned into performances”. If you watch old match footage, for all the lack of remotely comparable camera angles, it is difficult to argue that players have not become far more theatrical (both literally and as a euphemism). Footballers are more conscious of themselves as performers, as opposed to simply sportsmen or women.
Has this helped breed a specific type of individualism in stars that team trophies no longer sate? It might partly account for the bonkers proliferation of individual awards ceremonies that attend the game. There are almost more award ceremonies for footballers now than there are for movie actors. The traditional opportunities for meritocratic competition afforded by footballers’ actual jobs – domestic leagues, knockout competitions, internationals, and so on – are supplemented by a growing category of individual awards.
Some of these gong shows are relatively low-key, like Gary Neville’s Monday Night Football Awards, or every newspaper’s end-of-season effort. They’re judged useful bits of content, addressing what we are always given to understand is people’s obsessive need to rank things. Team of the season, player of the season, manager of the season, most improved player of the season – if you like player ratings, you’ll love these. I always wish Neville and the others would give us the likes of Worst Dive, Most Baroque Press Conference Lie, Biggest Shitbird Owner. But by now, we all know that would be to misunderstand the stone tablet nature of such virtual ceremonies. The public is only allowed a little of what it wants.
Other gong nights are rather more … well, rather more of a performance. Consider the Football Writers’ Award, which has been around forever, but should surely have been eradicated by now, like smallpox, or leaving the pitch swiftly when substituted. This year it is to be bestowed upon Mo Salah – would you believe? – just as he won the Professional Footballers’ Association award a fortnight ago. Although, according to itself, the Football Writers’ Award is “the most prestigious”.
But of course. The one thing you often hear people say about journalists is how appealingly little self-regard they have, so any way in which they can reinforce this impression is to be welcomed. As its own website has it, the first-listed aim of the Football Writers’ Association is “to maintain the prestige of football writers”. We all like an achievable target, and I think it’s fair to say the FWA can safeguard the current level without too much trouble.
I was asked to the FWA awards once, and went. It was a big black-tie dinner with a comedian who was apparently much less racist than in previous years, and at the end of the formalities, Cristiano Ronaldo was given a prize for being excellent at football. Like all these things, it seemed the long way round of stating something everyone already knew. But as revenue gathering schemes go, it was quite fun in the bar afterwards.
Last year Fifa inaugurated its annual The Best Awards – a classic Gianni Infantino idea, being a glitzy black-tie ceremony in Zurich at which no sport occurred. The saddest thing I heard about it was that Swiss teenagers outside were asking Fifa president Infantino to autograph their shirts, in that way you grew up idolising corporate lawyers. Inside, Cristiano Ronaldo received an award for being excellent at football.
Arguably the most remarkable thing about the event was that Fifa staged another one a mere nine months later – something even a weapons-grade industry-wank like the Oscars has never tried to pull. Cristiano successfully defended his title, so presumably now has two identical Fifa The Best Player Of The Year statuettes engraved with 2017 in his trophy room.
What does this tell us, in summary? Well, my apologies for having given the impression that all these award ceremonies cater to the progressively starry tendencies of the players. On reflection, they say comparatively little about those eligible to receive them, and more – so, so much more – about those who grandly dole them out.