To be clear, there's nothing wrong with having ex-footballers as pundits but it's wrong to let them saturate the conversation to the extent that it poisons the national understanding of the game. If you're Wilson, Bandini or Cox the best you can do is start a podcast or hope to be brought on to Sky Sports news to talk transfers. Things are gradually changing but there's still a deep unease with letting anyone who wasn't a footballer have an opinion about football. So in a 'jobs for the boys' (and now increasingly girls) insiders only atmosphere like MOTD or Sky or ITV etc there's a tacit pushback against data analytics or the idea progressive tactical philosophies. It's one of the few industries where someone from a working class background can make themselves very wealthy without being privately educated. I think there's also underlying issues of class within football in the UK. Suffice to say Mark Lawrenson makes Alan Shearer sound like Johan fucking Cruijff. Football fans of my generation (I'm late 30's) were sick of pundits like Lawrenson, Hansen and co, who's reign seemed endemic. That's why the Guardian's Football Weekly took off in the mid 2000's. But the reason you see people like Jonathan Wilson or Michael Cox today is because there was a deep dissatisfaction in England about the way football had been talked about in the mainstream and they filled that gap. From what I understand, yes folks from the U.S do and have had access to more tactical information about their sports. Well it's a bit more complicated than that. Seems like people in my country are very happy with simple Alan Shearer type showing you clips of what you had already seen but with circles round their feet and Shearer simply saying bad defending on every single goal ever lol Americans in general love their tactics far more than British people.
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