Once sport, now entertainment: how football became ‘boring’

When Chelsea clinched the title last season, with a no-frills, no-thrills 1-0 win at home to Crystal Palace, the game’s climactic stages were soundtracked by the chants of “Boring, boring Chelsea” emanating from the away end. The previous week, as Jose Mourinho’s two banks of five edged their way to a valuable goalless draw at the Emirates, the entire stadium had reverberated with disgusted howls of the same.

This year, turmoil has replaced tedium as the overriding mood at Stamford Bridge, but the debate hasn’t ended, simply shifted focus. As we creep into December and Manchester United are within a point of the league’s summit, the loudest and longest discussions surrounding Louis van Gaal’s project at Old Trafford are not about the fallen giant of two seasons ago having elbowed its way back into the big time, but whether the football produced by his team is sufficiently pulse-quickening.

This is no manufactured controversy, either. The Old Trafford crowd, with their disgruntled cries of “Attack, attack, attack!” are the driving force behind this debate, not the legion of quote-happy former players chipping in. And while that particular element of internal dissent didn’t apply at Stamford Bridge last year, it certainly did at Anfield five years before that, when Rafa Benitez’s unwillingness to loosen the shackles had Liverpool’s fanbase pretty much split down the middle. Those who set up fort in the more demanding camp were satisfied with a title challenge only if it came with the requisite levels of exuberance, many seeing fit to boo the point that took their club top of the league.

Add all that to the Great Spain Debate of 2012 – the biggest wrangle of the lot – and we have a growing pile of evidence to support the case that the issues of aesthetics and excitement, once treated as secondary to things like wins, points and trophies, have come to assume an increasingly central role within fans’ consciousness.

Supporters’ fury at functional football has always existed, of course (football fans, to misquote Woody Allen, have always divided themselves into the horrible and the miserable) but it certainly feels as though recent years have seen the issue intensify, and to be treated by both fans and the media as something that really matters.

It’s a shift with various causes. The wild escalation of ticket prices, for example, has surely left today’s match-goer rather more inclined to feel short-changed if a scrambled tap-in followed by half an hour’s timewasting is all they’re given in exchange for a 60-quid outlay. And the general flattening of atmospheres, especially across England’s more esteemed stadiums, has left on-pitch spectacle as the attendee’s primary source of satisfaction – there’s no longer the option of a 90-minute singalong to make a miserable match worthwhile.

There may also be an indirect effect brought about by the soaring domestic dominance of Europe’s new elite, the weekly batterings dished out by Spain and Germany’s giants skewing the expectations of England’s leading clubs unfairly upwards.

But perhaps the most significant reason behind the Rise of Boredom lies in the shifting nature of the way the sport is watched – and the way it’s marketed. Whereas once upon a time the match-going itself – along with a weekly viewing of Match of the Day and, occasionally, and the odd televised game – was how most spectators did their spectating, the medium of television now dominates completely.

Follow the Premier League and Champions League alone, and you’re able to watch yourself a good 10 hours of football each week. Throw in the lower divisions, the odd European game and the red button function, and your options become seemingly endless. And just as the viewer’s access to football has exploded, so has football’s access to viewers. The £5.2bn value of the Premier League’s latest TV deal is much publicised, but those pounds translate to people: the league currently claims to command a global television audience of 4.7 billion.

And as standing on the terrace has been supplanted by sitting on the sofa as the fan’s primary means of taking in a game, so football is marketed in accordance with the more traditional conventions of television: drama, storylines and spectacle. Next time you see one of Sky Sports’ adverts for the coming week’s Super Sunday clash, take a moment to notice the background music, protagonists, rivalries, voiceover and taglines, and note how closely it resembles a film trailer. Popcorn is the new Bovril.

So when football is sold as entertainment rather than sport, it shouldn’t be too surprising when an absence of base-level thrills on the pitch leads to jeering from the stands – even if the sporting outcome is favourable to those doing the jeering.

Which isn’t to say that the many outpourings of disapproval towards Van Gaal’s trudging title contenders are necessarily misplaced (as with your opinion on Chelsea, Liverpool or Spain – or the Beatles, or Robocop 3 – it all comes down to taste), simply that it cannot be coincidence how the obsession with excitement has sprung to primacy at precisely the time that the broadcasters, with their bottomless pockets, have come to rule the roost.

And with that dynamic unlikely to change anytime soon, the debate is likely to rumble on, plodding away against its latest subject with no decisive manoeuvre and no conclusion in sight – much like a United attack, in fact. And like a United attack, it’ll all soon become pretty bloody boring.