Gary Neville’s World Cup hypocrisy
It seems an inconsistent pay packet for an already rich man to accept when otherwise presenting himself as holier-than-thou back home.
Martin Amis, a passionate association football enthusiast, wrote that ‘pointy-headed football-lovers are a beleaguered crew, despised by pointy-heads and football-lovers alike’. I am one of that beleaguered crew ‘pining for enlightened discussion of the noble game’ as Amis puts it.
Modern television football analysis attempts to satisfy the elevated needs of studious supporters who crave the detailed untangling of strategy and the insightful deconstruction of how a collection of people move and operate as a single organism. We wish to see football be treated as if it were an academic study with pseudo-intellectual professors such as Gary Neville giving us ‘lectures’, as Brian Clough would call them, about the action we just witnessed. Not to mention the drama and catharsis of the sport itself, and the gratifying gossip that accompanies it. It is easy (and nonsensical) to see how successful practitioners of the game can become objects of worship.
Yet, like many celebrities, perhaps Gary Neville (or Gary Lineker, Matt Le Tissier, and Gareth Southgate) has become too accustomed to being listened to or admired. We begin to be treated to the benefit of their opinions on topics for which they have no specialised knowledge. Opinions which are often lacking in coherence, but not lacking in conceit.
In the case of Neville this has escalated to the point at which he was recently the sandwich filling between Ian Hislop and Paul Merton on the BBC’s enduring satirical panel show, Have I Got News for You. A clip of Neville as the host has been virally transmitted on social media since his appearance in which he is exposed to some tame questioning by Ian Hislop. Neville has accepted a paid role with the Qatari state broadcaster, beIN Sports, as a pundit and commentator for the World Cup. Given the dubious way in which the hosting duties landed with Qatar, the exploitation of workers involved in preparing the infrastructure for the tournament, and the country’s appalling human rights record, it seems an inconsistent pay packet for an already rich man to accept when otherwise presenting himself as holier-than-thou back home. Hislop illuminating that hypocrisy, and Neville’s transparently inadequate response, was empathically enjoyable.
Yet the ownership structures of many Premier League clubs are questionable at best. The second and third placed teams in England are owned directly or indirectly by Middle Eastern states with issues at least comparable to those of Qatar. Football clubs are not the Victorian social institutions they were founded as. The sport is plagued by a great deal of drunken violence, illiberal and intimidating abuse, boastful cheating, and unembarrassed narcissism. Modern football is generally a nihilistic industry.
Whilst it was nice to see Neville learn he must do a bit better than that if he believed simply tweeting platitudes from a broadly liberal perspective would be a means to enter politics, we should notice that much of the grandstanding about Qatar is simply that, grandstanding. The same voices are entirely uninterested in reforming the many other unpleasant aspects of football. A pundit refusing a role with beIN Sports will not solve problems such as these, though I do not claim to have the solutions.
