Between “ref cams”, digital touchpads, and ragebaiting Roy Keane, football broadcasters are used to throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the screen in a bid for fresh content. But what about an actual kitchen sink? ITV might as well have done that last night, when it plonked esteemed World Cup pundit Emma Hayes in front of a set that resembled something you might find at a Harvey Jones showroom.
Hayes, the current US women’s team manager whose seven league wins at Chelsea made her one of the most decorated tacticians in world football, was tasked with delivering analysis during England’s Wednesday night fixture against Croatia. Her observations were detailed, interesting, and well-communicated. The kitchenesque backdrop, though – a chalkboard affixed to a brick column, surrounded by cupboards and drawers that look like they might slide open and reveal a cutlery tray, turned her segments into pure, uncut meme fodder. The trio of male pundits fronting the rest of the coverage – Keane, Gary Neville, and Ian Wright – were sat, as you might imagine, around a more conventional presenting table that didn’t resemble a food-preparation station even a little bit.
The memes are one thing – mostly, this was people doling out a worthy ridiculing of ITV’s production choices. (One person compared the chalkboard to the BBC’s famous “test card”, sans creepy child’s doll.) But there was a darker side: the inherently sexist optics of having the programme’s female analyst presenting from an almost-kitchen played into the hands of misogynist trolls, who leapt at the chance to make predictable jokes and photo edits. Presumably they would have found fault with Hayes’ involvement wherever she was stood, but this only made her an easier target.
A charitable reading might suggest that the whole debacle was simply a matter of obliviousness. There are, I’m sure, myriad practical considerations when it comes to designing a TV set in the middle of Brooklyn, that has to work outside and overlook the cityscape. It’s not like the footballing world has ever really settled on a “good” aesthetic when it comes to punditry anyway – from the garishly coloured, CGI-burnished sets of Match of the Day, to those sort of awkward pitchside pop-ups into which passing players are dragged for stiffly posed chit-chat. Even The Overlap, Neville’s ponderous, chummy and frequently viral podcast, is filmed on a set that vaguely resembles an opulent kitchen bar, with a hint of CEO’s-man-cave. Hayes was simply placed in one bad set of many – it’s just that unfortunately, this one happened to evoke some insidious stereotypes.
It’s particularly egregious because Hayes was offering a class of punditry that football sorely needs; too often, programming is bereft of real tactical insight, and analysis boils down to vague and materially irrelevant platitudes. Even the better male pundits now suffer from over-exposure – you often know what they’re going to say before they say it. Roy Keane thinks the problem is mentality. Gary Neville’s praising the full-backs again. (It’s the shortest game of bingo you’ll ever play.) It’s not just that Hayes is able to articulate precise and revealing insights into the game of football – she’s able to do it unencumbered by the deadening repetition of punditry as a day job.
There is also a sense of missed opportunity, with World Cup television rights divided between ITV and the BBC. The Beeb has based its coverage in the less glamorous backdrop of Salford, and Gary Lineker, previously the broadcaster’s talesman in the competition, has migrated to Netflix, where he presents the Rest is Football video podcast. ITV, filming on location and with some of the biggest names in punditry signed on, were completely poised to emerge as the winners of this broadcasting tete-a-tete. Instead, it’s been quite the own goal.
Football, still decades behind civilised society on issues like LGBT+ visibility, is nonetheless inching towards something in the realm of gender parity: a decade ago, Hayes would never have been given the chance to do something like this. There has, over the last few years, been a holistic shift in the types of pundits who are given opportunities, and the overall standard of punditry has blossomed as a result. (This is axiomatic: the sort of tactical concepts that regular TV viewers are now expected to understand – “box midfields”; “counterpressing” – is a world away from what was being discussed even a few years ago.) Former England internationals Jill Scott and Ellen White are informative voices on the BBC, while ITV’s roster also includes shrewd, ex-Lioness Karen Carney. There’s a generation of women’s footballers coming up who are able to look at punditry as a viable career path – a privilege men have had for decades. As long as ITV doesn’t put them in a kitchen, that is.
