I'm afraid the days of proper football journalists have now long gone and we are now subject to click bait writers who are clearly working to order. I cannot think of one football writer who is capable of writing a well-researched, balanced, analytical, factual article. The more absurd the claim the higher it goes up on the page/website .It all contributes to the decline of the printed media.
35 years ago, when the likes of
@tolmie's hairdoo were starting out, 35,000 people inside the ground saw the game and a few million saw MOTD. The journalists were there to document and report on it for the other 6 billion people in the world who might be fans but couldn't see the match. These days, every game is streamed with 30 cameras in 4k. Every incident is on social media before a journalist can type a tweet about it. No one needs a factual account of the game, because anyone can look up the game whenever they want.
Similarly, journalists used to be the key source of information behind the scenes, now players, agents and clubs will leak or release loads of that information because they can send it to any journalist in the world with a social media following (that's basically Fabrizio Romano's entire career, he built a huge audience and now anyone who wants to leak something goes to him because it'll reach the most people). So we don't really rely on journalists to uncover stories around a club any more.
Lastly, players used to be mysterious blank slates and your only chance at an insight into their character or personality would be a sit down interview, now most of them are on social media and release that info themselves willingly, and in a smartphone world, anything they do that might be interesting is photographed and recorded and put online by someone. Then there's all the club generated behind-the-scenes content produced to generate views and PR.
So the only thing left to write and sell as a journalist is in-depth technical analysis (turns most fans off and doesn't drive big readership), and opinion pieces. Opinions have to be pretty bold to cut through the chatter of 20 other op-eds in major papers, so it drives people to exaggerate and ham everything up or seek out contrarian positions to get noticed.
