This was last week’s edition of the Arsenal Women Weekly Newsletter (which is free to sign up to!). We felt it was worth reprinting here since we get a lot of questions about press conferences and the like. Press conferences tend to have somewhere between five and eight questions, it is unlikely we can cover everything and get every fan’s opinion or bugbear addressed.
What I would say is to stay tuned to the pre-match press conference coverage we provide, which tends to be less widely read, usually the questions people ask for are indeed addressed in the pre-match. Anyway, this was last week’s newsletter.
Occasionally I like to use this newsletter as a bit of an ‘inside baseball’ missive about women’s football media and ‘how it all works’ (usually according to my narrow and specific experience!) Essentially, the lot of a team correspondent is that when the team you report on have bad results, you come into the firing line too and a small number of people will link you tangentially to the team’s failures or else see you as a symptom of wider issues.
And that is fine. This is not a difficult or important job in the universal sense of the word. I have people close to me who deal with people and situations that I could not and that have incredible gravity. I like to think I have things in perspective. Criticism always feels multiplied too and it is easy to overindex one or two people on the internet being a bit mean or pithy.
Nevertheless, I value transparency because- at the risk of self-importance (!) I very much see this role as trying where I can to build a bridge between club and fans and trying to get the information that fans want to know. I also think there aren’t many club correspondents around in women’s football media just yet in England. So I wanted to address some myths and misconceptions that pop up from time to time.
Club Mouthpiece
This is one I get a lot and I understand why. I very visibly support the club that I report on and I entirely understand why that creates suspicion, especially among other fan bases not predisposed to Arsenal. However, one thing I can tell you very firmly is that there is no ‘mouthpiece’ element to this role.
Arsenal are a quiet club that don’t really discuss intimate information (at least not with me!) If they wanted to do that, I am pretty certain they would not use a site like Arseblog as a vehicle. (The name alone makes that less likely!)
I can’t speak as extensively for other WSL clubs but my impression is that it is much the same across the league. Certainly when I have an Arsenal transfer story that involves another WSL club, I will contact that club as a courtesy to let them know I am planning to break a story involving them.
On pretty much every occasion, their approach is similar to Arsenal’s, they don’t comment on or off the record. Different countries and cultures have different approaches too (in France they will deny absolutely everything regardless of how strong your sourcing is!)
Sometimes I might sense check something if I have an idea of what the club thinking might have been on a particular issue or direction. But usually you just have to consider little to no comment as a tacit admission and trust they would correct you if you were way off-beam. When I analyse why Arsenal might have made a particular signing, for example, that never, ever comes from the club.
That usually comes from my own analysis or sometimes there might be some information I have heard from the sources I get the initial story from. I do think people sometimes conflate my own analysis with the club’s position which is why I try to be very careful to label things deliberately as analysis and speculation.
It’s harder to ask hard questions when you’re too close
This is another criticism I get a lot (when results are bad). Which is totally fine and healthy, I guess I am trying to do some kind of public service for Arsenal fans and I am paid to do it and that means the work is there to criticise if fans don’t like it. I wouldn’t be doing my job to dismiss that feedback out of hand. But I think there are a number of defences I usually end up offering.
Firstly, I do not accept that being a fan or having a small rapport with a manager through familiarity makes it harder to ask tough questions. And I am talking a small rapport, I have never, ever spoken to an Arsenal manager outside of an arranged media setting. I don’t have those sort of phone numbers in my contacts. The range of contacts I have developed over many years are purely a symptom of how long I have been doing this for and- I like to think- out of respect for the breadth of coverage we provide and the size of audience we have.
I think, done well, being a fan actually puts you in a very good position to ask hard questions. Firstly, being tuned in with fan conversation makes it simpler to understand what your audience wants to know. Sometimes you have to puff your ego up a little, trust your own analysis and ask questions based on that to see whether you can get a little more detail.
We are at every game and every press conference and that gives us a vantage point we have a duty to share. That is what the words ‘media’ and ‘medium’ specifically refer to. At this point I will share that I studied Literature at university, not journalism. My most relevant training actually harks back to my post uni days working in fraud investigation.
I was trained to ask questions, usually to people who are very reluctant to give you information and that is a hugely transferrable skill. Asking constructive questions that elicit answers is a skill and using any sort of rapport you have with the person you are questioning is hugely valuable. Obviously there is a very fine line between not antagonising a manager so they get overly defensive and soft balling.
But it is why I think there is value in focusing on the technical aspects, where possible (that is not always appropriate, sometimes you do have to go bigger picture or focus on the more external and cerebral aspects). But coaches are technical people, that is their job and that is what gets them talking. Talking in headlines or bullet points is to not speak their language.
Often my questions serve other articles or analysis pieces I might be writing too. So you might not get every single nugget of information or context in one press conference. Sometimes you build it across several conversations, sometimes it is better to ask things in pre-match press conferences, especially if you are there in person. Pre-match conferences are longer and usually find managers more relaxed than the immediate post-match conference.
In short, there are many different routes, sometimes you have to pick your moment, sometimes you have to pick several moments and build a story over time. Patience can be a virtue. The advantage of being in a correspondent role is that you will be in the next press conference and at the next game and you can build a picture over time and hold onto questions.
You also have the advantage of knowing who you are talking to and being able to anticipate when you might get a good response on something. The other thing you have to understand is that fans and players / coaches will always be at cross purposes in bad times. Coaches and players are optimists, they can’t dwell or mope in the way that we do as fans. An elite athlete’s mindset is built on positivity and that often chafes against the mindset of us as fans.
The other thing I think a lot of people don’t entirely appreciate about press conferences, is that they are very structured and you get limited questions. There is no back and forth element, which is also why you have to cute in what you ask and how you ask it. It’s not a conversation with the manager, you get one shot at your question so the idea is to get them to talk as much as possible and that’s why it often (but not always, you have to judge the mood) pays to be specific and focused.
Journalists cannot also just produce your personal opinion- whatever it might be- to the manager. It has to be a question and it has to serve a wide purpose. Champions League press conferences are often even more highly structured and you often have to wait for a translation of your question and of the answer too, which really prevents any sort of flow.
‘Access’ is not dependent on asking soft questions either. That is just not how it has ever worked with Arsenal, at least. The Athletic wrote a big dressing room expose last season and their ‘access’ was totally unimpacted. I think a lot of people imagine this to be a highly politicised environment and it just isn’t whatsoever.
‘WSL journos / media’ consists of a small number of individuals
I see the occasional post about the wider women’s football media ecosystem and I think it is worth pointing out how few people that actually consists of. The number of people gainfully employed to work in women’s football would give you a respectable turnout for a birthday meal. If publications have any staff devoted to women’s football, it is usually one person who has to cover the whole league and the England National Team.
That is a lot to take on so giving every single team and every single story an equal plinth is just not possible. Given the breadth of coverage individuals are responsible for, they cannot know everything intimately. They will also be under editorial pressure just to exist at all, let alone expand, given the size of the audience. It’s why I would love to see more club correspondents popping up across the sport in the UK.
I certainly see my role as adding value underneath the work carried out by generalist women’s football journalism. The concept of a beat reporter or a local reporter covering a sports team is very well established in the UK and certainly in the US (there are some NWSL beat reporters for sure) to supplement existing coverage for more niche audiences. Women’s football media is still an emerging space and I am hopeful it will continue to grow and serve as many different audiences in as many different ways as possible.