This kind of in-depth sports writing has become more necessary as daily sports journalism has got harder. After the early 1990s, when satellite TV channels began showing endless sport, newspapers and websites expanded their sports coverage. Many men devour it. To quote Andrew Card, chief of staff of former US president George W Bush: “He does not dwell on the newspaper, but he reads the sports page every day.” Noam Chomsky, the celebrated American political thinker, argues that any “serious media critique” needs to look at sport and soap operas: “These are the types of things which occupy most of the media – most of it isn’t shaping the news about El Salvador for politically articulate people, it’s diverting the general population from things that really matter.”
However, as sports clubs grew richer on the new TV money, they became more media-savvy. Now they control and limit sports journalism. Players get “media training”, press officers censor interviews and sports journalists are corralled into the manufactured pseudo-events that are press conferences.
