flb
Well-Known Member
This is an intelligent post mate, and as you're involved in the industry, you clearly have more knowledge on the subject than the majority of us on here.
But to be clear, I wasn't just suggesting in the OP to just start banning journalists willy nilly (although David McDonnell at the Mirror shouldn't be allowed within 50 yards of the stadium). I was pointing out that our strategy of staying silent - not engaging with the press - isn't working.
I've made the point many times before that Sorriano and Txiki having no involvement with the press whatsoever is a disastrous policy. We have no club legends employed by the club who are wheeled out when the media need a quote like Bayern and the Shite do so regularly. We've got a head coach who's besn here 5 minutes and is obsessed with football, it's not in his remit to defend the club at press conferences. And our players are pretty much off limits to press.
So we're left mute, voiceless. There is no executive, no management, no player that comes out and defends the club, defends the fans. The narrative is completely dictated by journalists who are under pressure to write copy that gets click through.
Fergurson was the master at dealing with the press. Not just banning and intimidating people, but he knew how the press worked. You could slag them off, call their mother a whore, but if you give them a snappy soubdbite, a headline, they'll run with it.
All the press want is something to write about. A story. We've got no one giving them one. We just give them silence and then invite them down to the opening of our latest infrastructure development or charity initiative and hope they give us a load of fawning press about being good for the community. It doesn't work like that though. It's a 24 hour news cycle now, the press need new stories every minute of the day. Not just one every couple of years.
As I said in the OP, the issue for me is the strategy. Playing silent with the UK press is never going to work. I don't know how it works in Spain or the Middle East, but in the UK the press have got a hard on for themselves. They think they're as important as a sovereign parliament and an independent judiciary. An independent press is one of the "pillars of our democracy" to them. Give them nothing to write about, ignore them, it gets their back up. It wounds their ego and so they'll end up just writing negative shite after negative shite.
If only Mike Summerbee was 20 years younger and a bit more diplomatic, he'd be perfect. We need some kind of figurehead like that who helps set the narrative. Who defends the fans and the club and has a connection back to when City was a lovable club, everyone's second team. That should be the image we should create, really that's our true "identity". But we've tried to turn it in to something else and it hasn't worked.
I love Guardiola and think he's going to end up being the best thing that's ever happened to the club. But when he says things like "we need the fans" and "we need them to stay to the end" and he looks pissed off trying to gee us up, it all plays in to the press' hands. That fits their agenda perfectly. Shit, plastic fans who are silent, if they bother to even turn up to the "Emptyhad".
How the fuck can that be the narrative of a club who broke records for attendances in the 3rd division and got 30k every week? A club that was averaging 45k BEFORE the takeover. The club with the highest ever attendance in a domestic home game. The club with the 2nd or 3rd highest average attendance in the entire country over the last 7 or 8 years. How have we allowed the narrative to be "Emptyhad" plastic, shit fans? It's a fucking dereliction of duty by the PR team to let it get so out of hand. Who at the club actually comes out and defends the fans? Essentially we ARE the club and no one bothers to come out and fight our corner.
What I'd like to hear from Pep is "I'm so happy to hear the fans sing my name, I've never had this at any other club". The same as Yaya did, it makes a big difference. I don't think he's doing these things because he doesn't like us as fans, he's just naive as to how the British press works. If he said some things in defence of us fans, stuck up for us, I guarantee he'd see a positive impact.
I don't want to get in to another Mancini and Cook debate, but that's why they were so popular with fans. They always stuck up for us and the club in the press. Since they've left we've had absolutely no voice in the media at all. It's actually understandable why the press are so harsh to us - give them nothing to write about and the knives come out!
Superb post , sums my feeling up to a tee.