One of the many many things to talk about with Ipswich Town’s recent 3-2 defeat to Manchester United was the difference between the two strikers. Neither got a goal, but the one who cost £20 million looked a lot better than the one who cost £72 million. Liam Delap, leading the line for Ipswich, put in an incredible amount of work. He pressed United’s notoriously error-prone keeper Amadou Onana and ran up and down the pitch to make crucial tackles and create space for teammates – something crucial to Jaden Philogene’s second goal. Meanwhile, United’s Rasmus Hojlund looked completely irrelevant, effortlessly dealt with by a back-3 with scant topflight experience and making limited efforts to ever press an Ipswich team that itself is very error-prone.
All of this explains why Delap has had so much attention in the media this season. He sits on 10 goals in a side that sits 5 points adrift in 18th and has only scored 26 goals combined. Nevertheless, Ipswich have clearly got a lot more going on than one good player, something almost entirely ignored by the media and pundits. In that United game, Jaden Philogene got a brace. Jens-Lys Cajuste has been impressive in midfield. Lief Davis has got among the most assists in English football in both of the previous two seasons, all from left-back.
Even when others impress, Delap gets most of the credit. Take Ipswich’s 2-0 win against Chelsea, for example. Delap got a goal and an assist – certainly impressive. But Omari Hutchinson scored a goal as well while the whole team put in an impressive performance to hold off intense pressure from the opposition. Similarly, in their 1-1 draw with Aston Villa there was a lot of focus on Delap’s goal. This is despite a resoundingly impressive defensive performance where the team clung onto a point despite being down to 10 men.
What’s the point of all this? Well, for one thing I’m an Ipswich fan and it annoys me to hear such reductive talk about the side I support. But if it was just that, I’d save it for annoying my mates. The real point is that coverage of Delap shows everything wrong with modern punditry, and I’m sure many fans of other clubs – particularly those outside of the traditional ‘big six’ – can relate. The basic format of TV punditry about Ipswich this season has been very simple: we’ll get a sentence about the team to trick us into thinking they know anything about tactics and then a minute talking about Liam Delap. There are lots of reasons for this, but at it’s core it’s very simple: football media cares a lot more about being entertaining than informing. With a team such as Ipswich that, whilst very well supported in this country yet lacking a big profile worldwide, there is not that much effort put into an in-depth analysis because most people just won’t find that fun.
Instead, what we’re given is narratives. Liam Delap being a very easy one. A young English player bursts onto the scene in a weak side and looks to be the next Harry Kane, winning himself a move to a big club and us, as a nation, a world cup in a few years. The question of what went on in the game before he had the ball is basically thrown out the window. Clad all that in some basic stats and a former player whose fairly good at talking and you’ve got something fun for people to follow even if they don’t care at all about the team itself.
This also shows the general way that the football media tries to extrapolate as much as possible from individual games or very short periods of time. This is another thing to make everything more entertaining at the expense of actually being informative. The truth is, you can learn very little from one game in a long-term sense. It can sort of tell you how a team looks, especially if put within a wider context, but good teams or players have bad games and bad teams or players have good games. This just isn’t interesting enough, though. So, instead of talking about Liam Delap as an in-form striker who looks like an exciting prospect he’s called things like the ‘English number 9 of the future’ (per the Guardian). If you follow enough football, it can become almost comical. You’ll hear the same person within the span of maybe two or three weeks go from calling something incredible to completely useless.
All of this would kind of be annoying, but basically okay – most other media is also simply driven by money, we shouldn’t expect football coverage to be any different – if it didn’t have problematic real-world effects. The media’s overestimation of the skill of players can have lots of negative consequences, driving unrealistic expectations among fans that causes players to get undue hate for failing to live up to. There’s also the flip side: the media drives way too much focus on players going through bad runs of form, greatly increasing the hate that they get from fans. Take the routine stats you’ll hear about how long it’s been since a striker last scored a goal or a team last won – even small issues become exaggerated into crises.
This also changes how fans think about football. We become encouraged to mirror the erratic coverage we see in the media. There’s a constant sense of precarity as to whether players are good or bad, a disastrous signing or a bit of genius. I’m encouraged to focus on Delap’s form because I’m rarely well informed about how others have played, especially given I can’t watch about half of Ipswich’s games.
The core of the issue is this: football media are not good at covering the sport, as evident with Ipswich and Delap. This is because of a focus on entertainment over informativeness, particularly when appealing to an audience that is increasingly global and thus less and less tied to the teams themselves. As a consequence, players are hurt and fans are short-changed.
