How easy it is to sit in the terraces and watch a team play. It is also a lot easier to watch them at comfort of your on home. With the amount of football that is on TV during the week it is almost impossible for anyone to miss a live match. Plus with commentary from former players and managers talking us through the match and explaining formations and tactics we, the fans, sit and absorb all that we can hear and debate with friends and family what are our opinions on the match and usually we tend to agree with the commentator. That is until the five minute advertising break is over and the cameras go back to the studio where more former players and managers are usually sitting and go through the highlights of the match and show us, the fans, what went right and what went wrong. The pundits show us in great detail how the player’s movements were during the match and how the formation was set and the extent to which the players stuck to the shape of the formation. Thanks to this technology it has made it easier for fans to criticize and rate players, furthermore it has made understanding a football tactics during matches a lot easier.
Today it is common to hear people talk about football in much greater detail as some fans discuss training methods with each other while others tend to discuss team tactics and how they should approach matches. Plus with games like Football Manager and FIFA, where fans get to chose formation’s, set piece takers and deal with transfers of players.
The media today, excluding the USA, show a great deal of interest in football and it no longer produces a weekly match report of the weekends games, today it talks about, in-depth, the build up to the match, what tactics were used in the previous matches, how the team should approach the match, what players should be used, the injury list of the team, etc.
All of the above contribute to my argument, the “Terrace Conundrum“. The terrace conundrum is a coined phrase that I have made up for this situation, as many football followers today believe that they have the capacity to manage a club starting today. Because of the exposure of football games, tabloid news papers, Internet bloggers and TV pundits we are left believing that we have the knowledge and know-how to lead any club to the summit.
The naivety of many fans is that “how hard can it be?” Most football fans today believe that football management is all about going to the club office, write out the team sheet for the players playing in the following match then go up to see the owners and talk about buying a player for £50,000,000 while having a wage budget of £10,000,000 a week.
Fans as many of who believe that they can do a better job easily undermine football managers. This fact cannot be truer than the anger that boiled over here in the UK over the failure of England wining the World Cup in South Africa. Pundits universally from all genres, which rarely happens, have all agreed independently that the main reason why England failed to meet expectations is because Fabio Capello chose a classic 4-4-2 formation, which was the same formation used to ensure qualification to the world cup, instead of the pundits 4-4-1-1 where Capello was to drop Heskey and instead play Gerrard behind Rooney. However, with hindsight the pundits found out that the England players were worn out because of a long season of football, which was followed, by heavy training in high altitude plus the excess number of friendlies that tired players have played in.
The main concern that I have is not that football fans like myself engage in football matters, while still having the fantasy of one day being able to mange the football club of our dreams and lead them to glory, however it is the bloodcurdling and horrendous number of football owners who are around in this day and age where they feel that they know more than the manager on how to win the league and or who the club really needs in either backroom staff or playing staff. The growing trend of incompetent owners are sending shivers down my spine as what we will end up seeing is a direct correlation between heavy spending new owners and number of sacked managers.
The terrace conundrum therefore is here to promote awareness to all the naïve potential owners, as patience is a virtue and “if to speak is Silver, then silence is Gold.”
Ahmed Al-Thani
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