As one season ends and loins are girded for a new one, the tectonic plates of football broadcasting are moving.
If revolutions happen slowly and then very quickly, we are now in the quick phase.
The occupying of the previously male TV real estate by women continues apace. With female ex-players now regular pundits, at last the old stale male walls are tumbling down. At last, football is no longer painting with only half of life’s rainbow.
The day when football broadcasting was the exclusive domain of men sitting on uncomfortable sofas and chairs, their expensive shirts and trousers always a little too tight, is coming to a welcome end.
One of the women at the forefront of this progressive change is Alex Scott, recently announced as Dan Walker’s replacement as host of BBC’s Football Focus and who has been wowing people as a pundit for a couple of seasons now by the simple principle of doing some research, being articulate, and knowing what she’s talking about, rather than just relying on the fact you once played the game to invest your ill-considered blartings with enough credibility for them to pass for the rigours of tactical analysis.
Alex is Football Focus’ first female presenter. The fact she is also black with Irish and Jamaican parents (a racist’s worst nightmare), will set off the bigoted right-wing Brexit-powered alarms in the Daily Torygraph offices, who see a conspiracy against white men at every turn and will inevitably call this appointment little more than a box-ticking exercise. But Alex got there before them, knowing that this is how these nasty people see anything which threatens their own primacy.
“I know the first thing people will be saying — a lot of it because it is already happening — it’s because I’m ticking a box. I did a media degree in 2013 — I spent two years doing that for this same reason, so that no one could ever say that I was just ticking a box.”
Though they do not have ears that listen, this is properly bossing her critics. This is also a woman who was a teacher for two years, teaching sport science studies to 16–18-year-old students. She also has certificates in personal training and sports massage therapy. This certainly isn’t someone with just one string to her bow who has been gifted a top job.
And while there will always be a few Neanderthals, they can’t run Alex down with any degree of credibility because she’s just obviously too good.
Her sharp mind has already made some of her male counterparts look like they’ve had some sort of aneurysm as they struggle to articulate a sentence, then mangle a cliche, all the while avoiding the use of adverbs (a grammatical peculiarity which football punditry excels in).
She’s warm, has the brightest of minds, sparky eyes, a million-dollar smile and more importantly, seems genuinely happy to be present in the moment.
This should not be underestimated as an asset in football broadcasting. It punctures the too serious attitude of some, suggesting she is actually enjoying herself and that in turn makes her accessible to the viewer. Who doesn’t want to see someone having a good time? This is football, after all, it’s supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be entertaining. We’re not talking about solving the Middle East crisis here. To take football seriously, you have to be prepared to laugh at it.
Despite only retiring from the game in 2017 as England’s second most capped with 140 appearances, numerous honours under her belt and picking up an MBE for services to football, she’s already covered a lot of TV ground, co-hosting Match of the Day Kickabout, then working on the 2018 World Cup for the BBC, the first woman to do so. At the start of the 2018-19 season, she became the first female pundit on Sky Sports, joining the Super Sunday team.
Then there was more BBC work on the 2019 Fifa Women’s World Cup and also in 2019 she began co-hosting Goals On Sunday with Chris Kamara. She’s been on Strictly Come Dancing and done other presenting gigs, such as the 2020 BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards.
It seems like when previously reactionary TV executives wake up and become vaguely sentient to the fact that they’ve not employed any or enough women and this might look bad if anyone asks them why not, Alex’s number is at the top of the list of who they’re going to call.
As I doubt that the people who make broadcaster employment decisions are a different cast of characters to those who were in position three or four years ago, their volte face on employing women in the male football arena does inevitably look like they’re all following each other, so as to not look out-of-date, outmoded, and old-fashioned, rather than out of any genuine commitment to fairness and equality.
It’s worth remembering that, until relatively recently, football coverage of the men’s game excluded women quite deliberately. This wasn’t an accident. The views of noisy sexists predominated, as anyone who remembers the appalling response to Jacqui Oatley’s debut on Match Of The Day in 2007 can testify to.
However, a puncher’s chance was all Alex needed to knock open previously closed doors and own the territory. There’s no stopping her now. However your chance comes, you grab it and she’s done that perfectly. In straddling the presenter and pundit’s stools for the BBC and Sky, she is pretty much unique.
They tend to be separate roles for different people and require quite different skills. In essence the first is to listen and respond, the second to respond and listen. There are not many in football’s punditocracy that you can imagine being a presenter. Not many can be a talent enabler, or can embrace the live broadcasting discipline of listening to a director’s voice in your ear, while simultaneously listening to someone in the studio making a point.
Born in Poplar in the East End of London, the aesthetics of how she speaks are an important asset in her broadcasting armory.
An articulate working class voice is broadcasting’s most powerful, in that it combines down-to-earth street smarts with articulate intelligence.
It lacks the innate smugness that is most middle-class people’s inheritance, a smugness that inevitably distances and alienates those who do not share it.
Societally, the subtext to her work as pundit and presenter is ‘if you can see, you can be it’ and as such inspiring people from similar backgrounds. This isn’t trivial. The boxing off of careers because of your background, upbringing, race or gender has long held down too many of talent in Britain; the cultural and economic imperialism of the white male middle-class is an ongoing oppression that needs kicking against.
That she, quite disgracefully, suffers sexist and racist abuse on social media every single day shows just how important she actually is and how she’s undermining what used to be the status quo.
TV channels have long since employed boring, inarticulate men who speak in cliches about football, so maybe we’ll only know we have true equality when they let equally terrible women do likewise. It always seems the women have to be the absolute best to get the gig but men rarely do; ironically, the exact opposite of the situation sexist box-ticking critics assert.
After all, if you make a mistake and you’re female, the evisceration at the hands of some of the worse people (mostly men) the internet has to offer, will be pitiless, often shamelessly egged on by the club concerned. Just ask Karen Carney, Lianne Sanderson, Eni Aluko, Rachel Brown-Finnis, Faye White, Sue Smith or any other female football worker. Little wonder Clare Balding won’t present football because of the abuse that always follows.
When BT Sport celebrated International Women’s Day by having an all-female panel and presenter, the sexist machine went into overdrive, seeing ‘woke’ enemies all around. Even though it’s a sure sign the power is slipping away, their protests are little more than death throes, this is what Alex has had to deal with and overcome.
At just 36 years old, Alex Scott is the smiling spearhead of a long overdue revolution.
If you don’t agree, don’t like her work, or feel it hasn’t been hard earned, by all means turn off.
But you won’t be watching television for a long time, because she’s one of the best and you better believe she’s here to stay.
And thank the Lord for that.
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