Anyone who peeks behind the game’s curtain discovers there is no magic there
Much worse than the football is that vast critical apparatus attached to it. The 24-hour humourless hype is exhausting. Every comment by Alex Ferguson about a referee is treated as world news – bigger than, say, a massacre in Mali. Last June about 500 of us journalists crammed into one of the England team’s meaningless press conferences in Donetsk, Ukraine. Meanwhile, the media lack resources to cover actual news.
