Two Different Games

How sports media covers football versus how fans actually experience it

In April 2024, I was at the Emirates Stadium sitting in silence as I processed the goal Ollie Watkins had just scored. The referee was about to blow the full-time whistle, confirming Aston Villa’s 2-0 win. My first thought was: we just handed the title to Manchester City. My second thought as we walked out onto Holloway road was: how is the media framing this right now?

Lack of mentality. Villa just wanted it more. Couldn’t handle the pressure.

I knew they’d find a way to work in all three. Reductive, simplistic, aimed at generating engagement. But none of those narratives would ever capture what we experienced that day. Minutes before kickoff, Liverpool had dropped points to Crystal Palace — to an audible cheer inside the Emirates. It felt like a golden opportunity. Arsenal hadn’t lost a league game since the start of the year — but up until a couple of weeks prior, Arsenal had not been at the top of the table all season. Leading up to that Villa match, although unrealistic, we looked unlikely to drop points any time soon. And then, in the 84th minute, Leon Bailey seized on a counter. Three minutes later, Ollie Watkins hit the nail in the coffin.

Perhaps we couldn’t handle the pressure. Perhaps Emery’s return to the Emirates had an effect on the players. Perhaps the Champions League matches against Bayern had left the squad fatigued. We may never know. But what we do know is that the coverage around that single loss was dishonest, lazy, and miles away from how the fans in that ground experienced that game and that season.

That moment has stayed with me — because the pattern hasn’t changed and it likely never will.

Before a ball had been kicked in the 2025/26 season, the story had already been written. Guardiola had reshaped City with a string of new signings and Rodri was back from injury — the narrative felt inevitable. Liverpool, coming off their title win and backed by a record-breaking summer, were installed as the other frontrunner. Arsenal, as usual, were the interesting supporting act. Serious contenders, but their summer business wasn’t convincing enough.

Then the season started, and reality began dismantling the script.

Liverpool opened with five straight wins and the studios buzzed — Slot was a genius, the rebuild was seamless, the defending champions were going to do it again. Then they lost to Brighton, and the tone shifted almost entirely overnight. By December, Liverpool had won just nine of their 26 league games. The same pundits who had declared them title favorites in August were now searching for explanations. Manchester City told a similar story. Haaland’s early output kept them in contention, every win framed as the beginning of one of their trademark charging runs, every dropped point a blip. Until it wasn’t.

It is now early May. Arsenal lost at the Etihad a few weeks ago, with City’s win moving them to within three points of the table-topping Gunners, with a game in hand. The studios erupted. The bottler narrative was retrieved from the archive. History, we were told, was repeating itself. But it’s what Declan Rice said after that defeat that continues to resonate — caught on camera at the final whistle, saying simply, “It’s not done.” And so it would prove. Arsenal beat Newcastle 1-0 and then overpowered Fulham 3-0, with Gyökeres and Saka doing the damage. Then they beat Atlético Madrid to reach their first Champions League final in 20 years. And in the middle of all of it, Manchester City drop points to Everton. The collapse narrative has been quietly shelved, but a new one is already being assembled.

This is how sports media covers a football season. Not as something that unfolds, but as something that confirms. Each week, the story is retrofitted to whatever just happened. A team wins and suddenly their summer signings were inspired. They lose and the cracks that were always there have finally been exposed. The confidence of the delivery matters more than its accuracy. That gap — between how sports media covers football and how fans actually live it — is what this piece is about.

The Media’s Game

There is a format to football coverage, and once you notice it, it’s impossible to ignore.

A match finishes, and within minutes the takes are already being assembled. A manager’s press conference becomes a personality test. A substitution becomes evidence of a tactical philosophy unraveling. A single result becomes a verdict on a team’s mentality, their season, their future. By the time the studio shows begin, the match has been transformed into a chapter in a story that was already being written before kickoff.

Narratives are essential to television. A title race is more compelling when framed as a two-horse battle. A manager is more interesting as either a genius or a failure, not someone operating in the messy middle where most managers actually live. Coverage packages a 38-game season into turning points, collapses, and redemption arcs — all delivered with the confidence of someone who has never been asked to account for last week’s prediction.

The transfer window is the clearest example. When Liverpool spent heavily in the summer, they were deemed unstoppable. By October, those same decisions were being reframed as structural problems.

Digital media has accelerated all of this. A midweek draw becomes a crisis overnight. But by the weekend, the narrative may have already shifted. The previous one isn’t corrected; it’s just archived, ready to be reused at a later date. What gets lost is the slow accumulation of a season — performances that don’t fit a clean headline, the context of difficult fixtures, fatigue, the opponent who has quietly improved. These things don’t produce a confident studio opinion, so they get left out.

The media’s game and the actual game are increasingly different things. And the further the season goes, the wider that gap tends to grow.

The Fan’s Game

Ask an Arsenal fan what this season has felt like, and you will not get a narrative. You will get a series of moments.

The satisfaction of watching the squad depth finally match the ambition of the project. Eze’s hat-trick against Spurs. Six wins and six clean sheets in October. The tension of the Wolves draw — not the media version, about bottling and mentality, but the real version: the group chat going silent, the anger, the slow sick feeling of watching a lead disappear in the final minutes against the worst team in the league. The defeat at the Etihad and the days that followed — the cautious, superstitious belief that despite losing our nine point lead, that we could still turn things around. To then, merely a few weeks later, process the fact that this club is going to a Champions League final.

That is what a football season actually is. Not a narrative arc. An accumulation of feeling, carried week by week, against the backdrop of everything else in your life.

When Aston Villa put together a strong run earlier in the season, the media response was immediate: could they challenge for the title? Pundits ran segments on Emery’s tactical genius. Analysts debated squad depth. But Villa fans were experiencing something else entirely — not delusion, and not false modesty, just an appreciation of what they were actually watching. A club that not long ago was fighting to stay in the Premier League was now beating elite opposition and competing in Europe. For a Villa supporter carrying the memory of those years, that’s the story. Not whether they could catch Arsenal, but the simple pleasure of watching their club perform at a level that would have seemed unimaginable just a few seasons ago. The media needed a title race subplot. Villa fans were already living something worth celebrating on its own terms — and now they have booked their ticket to the Europa League final.

One Arsenal supporter cut through all of it with a single sentence: “It’s been 22 years. Win the league and it’s 100% a successful season.” No asterisks. No caveats. No debate about whether Arteta deserves credit. Just 22 years. That contains more honest football feeling than most studio discussions — and almost none of the qualities that make something usable for broadcast.

Where the Stories Collide

The gap between media coverage and fan experience is usually just an irritant. A pundit says something reductive, fans roll their eyes, life goes on. But there are moments in a season where the two versions of events don’t just diverge — they actively contradict each other, and the consequences of that contradiction start to matter.

The “bottler” narrative around Arsenal is the clearest example. Every time Arsenal drop points, the language is immediate: collapse, mentality, pressure, history repeating itself. A complex season, shaped by squad rotation, the demands of multiple competitions, and injury management, all reduced to a single character flaw.

Fans have watched a team navigate an injury list that would derail most title challenges entirely. They have watched a manager make difficult decisions week after week under scrutiny that rarely lets up. They have seen resilience where the coverage described fragility.

Then there are the stories that don’t get told at all. Sunderland’s season is perhaps the best example. Promoted back to the top flight after an eight-year absence, they assembled one of the more remarkable stories in the Premier League this season. With 27 points from 17 games at the midway point, Sunderland looked a genuine bet to finish in the top half. Their fanbase, one of the most passionate and long-suffering in England, has lived every step of that journey. And yet Sunderland have barely registered in the mainstream conversation. Not because the story isn’t there, but because it doesn’t fit the preferred format: no title race angle and no star name to anchor a segment.

This is the collision that gets talked about least but matters most. Not the narratives that distort, but the ones that never get made. Those fans don’t see themselves reflected anywhere in the coverage of the sport they love — present in every meaningful sense, and largely absent from the version of the game being sold to the world.

Why the Gap is Growing

None of this is new. Sports media has always preferred a clean story to a complicated one. But the gap feels wider now, and there are specific reasons for that.

The most significant is the economics of attention. The Premier League’s global rights deals have transformed who football coverage is actually made for. When a broadcaster pays billions for the rights to show matches in Southeast Asia, North America, or the Middle East, they are not serving the supporter who has been going to games for thirty years. They are reaching people newer to the sport, less invested in its history, who need a simpler, more legible version of the product. Big names. Clear rivalries. Storylines that don’t require years of context. The result is coverage increasingly designed around the casual viewer — and in being designed for them, it moves further from the experience of the devoted one.

Digital media has complicated this further. The promise of the internet was space for nuanced, context-rich football conversation. And to some extent it delivered — podcasts, newsletters, and Substacks now exist with depth that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. But the dominant platforms don’t reward nuance. They reward engagement. And engagement means outrage, controversy, and hot takes delivered with maximum confidence. The medium changed. The incentive didn’t. A narrative that would once have taken weeks to build can now be fully formed within hours of a final whistle, embedded in the public consciousness before anyone has had time to examine whether it’s actually true.

What is left is a version of football that is loud, confident, and perpetually in motion — and a fan experience that is quiet, cumulative, and almost entirely invisible to the machinery that claims to represent it.

Who Gets to Define the Game

The media’s version of football and the fan’s version have always existed in tension. But there is a point at which that tension stops being frustrating and starts being consequential — because the story told loudly enough, for long enough, eventually shapes the thing it claims to be describing.

When coverage consistently frames the Premier League as a competition between five or six clubs, resources follow that framing — the same happens in other leagues too. Sponsorships gravitate toward visibility. Young players factor it into their ambitions. The clubs outside that frame don’t just get less coverage — they get less of everything that coverage unlocks. The narrative becomes self-fulfilling.

The same logic applies to individual clubs. Arsenal have spent the better part of four seasons being described primarily through the language of failure — nearly men, bottlers, a project that promises more than it delivers. That framing doesn’t just reflect reality. It applies pressure to it. Words repeated confidently enough stop being commentary and start being weather.

And at the broadest level, the version of football that media chooses to sell — built around celebrities, controversies, and the same handful of clubs — gradually crowds out the version that most fans actually inhabit. Football is a local and deeply personal sport. It is built on geography, community, and accumulated memory. The globalized media product looks like football. It shares the same rules and results. But the experience at the center of it — the thing that keeps people devoted across decades — is almost entirely absent from the broadcast. That absence has a cost. Not one that shows up in viewing figures yet. But in the slower dismantling of the thing that makes the sport worth covering in the first place.

What Gets Left Behind

There is a version of this season that the cameras will remember.

It will feature Arsenal finally ending their 22-year wait, or City pulling off one of their great title race comebacks. It will have Haaland’s goals and Saka’s assists. It will have Declan Rice at the final whistle at the Etihad, telling anyone who would listen that it wasn’t done — and being proved right. It will be cleanly edited, confidently narrated, and available on demand.

What it will not have is the group chat from the Wolves draw. The Villa fan in the away end who has watched their club for thirty years and felt, for the first time in a long time, like the future was genuinely bright. The Sunderland supporter who drove four hours to an away ground this season and watched their team hold on for a result that barely made the afternoon headlines. The Arsenal fan who has carried 22 years of near-misses and said that winning the league would be enough. Or the same fan, a few days later, quietly processing the fact that their club is going to a Champions League final — something few pundits had predicted in August.

These are not minor details at the margins of the sport. They are the sport. They are the reason people wake up early on a Saturday, the reason results still sting years later, the reason a shirt from a particular season can take you back to exactly who you were when you first wore it.

Sports media doesn’t cover that version of football because it doesn’t know how to package it. It has no dramatic arc, no villain, no verdict. It resists the format. And so it gets left out, season after season, while the version that fits the broadcast gets louder and more confident, and the gap between the two keeps quietly growing.

The game being sold to the world is spectacular. The game being lived by the people who love it most is something richer, more personal, and far more difficult to explain.

That’s the one worth paying attention to.

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