On the coverage of SKY, the broadcaster with exclusive rights to the German Bundesliga, the Champions League and the Euroleague:
They once acquired the mining rights for a gold well. They made a find. In fact, they found heaps of gold! Now they thought about what to do with the gold? After a lot of thinking, they found a solution: First, they shaped the gold nuggets into eggs. Then they painted the gold nuggets like eggs. Then they took the eggs to a market. Then they looked for some objective representatives. You put these representatives behind the goods. And then you let them talk. And they started mumbling. They mumbled to themselves. They muttered the following or similar words incessantly: “Rotten eggs. Very bad merchandise. Don’t shop here. Please go on. It’s not even worth looking. It’s not worth listening to me either. Quality 3 C. Small and rotten eggs. Nothing for you. Guaranteed.” Ad infinitum…
And what did they find? A few people stopped anyway. And when they could not be dissuaded from wanting to look at the goods, to feel them, they were given a good kick up the backside. The few who couldn’t be dissuaded from buying the eggs cut their teeth on them at home after cooking them and sued the vendor for damages. The plaintiffs got justice. But the judge, plagued by self-doubt and doubts about humanity, retired immediately afterwards.
Today they are broke. And they are still puzzling over why….
That’s about how football is handled in Germany, from a rapporteur’s point of view. It IS a gold mine. But surely there must be a way to market the gold they have found, other than selling it as rotten eggs?
You see the best football in the whole world. The Bundesliga is still one of the top leagues and the Champions League is guaranteed to be the icing on the cake. On top of that, you even have – “thanks” to the bankruptcy of Premiere before – the rights to English football included for free. After all, Sky comes from England and could only afford the Bundesliga because they do well domestically. English football has been at the top for many decades – remember: the motherland of football – anyway. Something could be made of that, too.
But the fact is that with a monotonous and disdainful standard blah blah blah, every successful scene in a game is made to look bad. The range of slogans is not even worthy or necessary of being quoted here, but there are only a series of platitudes, delivered in a soporific tone, and the only “humour” there is room for is malice.
The subscription figures speak their own language. And they continue to grope in the dark, not realising that football has more to offer than just fault-finding, with the reporter who states them probably permanently patting himself on the back for having the right to criticise these ball wizards – and making good use of it. “Man, I’m good. I even recognised Messi’s mistake when he held the ball too long.” Embarrassing. Embarrassing. But the receipt has already arrived in the form of the dismissal…
