Release clauses activated, transfer boosts received, true colours shown and volumes spoken leaves Mediawatch in little doubt. The football season is over, long live the transfer season.
As you like it
Regular Mediawatchers will know we’ve become entirely obsessed over the last couple of years with just how overpowered the humble ‘as’ has become in making enticing and intoxicating and most importantly click-hoovering headlines out of two entirely unrelated items of tish or indeed fipsy.
Your headline writers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. And now here we are in a world where this simple tiny conjunction dominates the online content landscape.
We keep thinking the ‘as’ headline has reached its final form but then we keep seeing even better/worse ones (delete according to preference), so we’re going to stop saying that they’ve peaked/rock-bottomed (delete according to preference) and just point out when we see one that is particularly magnificent/despicable (delete according to preference).
Here are the two pieces of information you need to know for this one from the Daily Star.
Piece of information number one: Viktor Gyokeres will not be joining Man United, because dur, of course he won’t.
Piece of information number two: Barcelona have reportedly triggered the £25m release clause for Espanyol goalkeeper Joan Garcia.
Can you put your Reach hat on and write the correct headline from these two nuggets?
Go on, have a go. Fun little challenge.
We’ll give you five seconds.
Five, four, three, two one… Done?
Here’s the gold the Star have managed to spin from these seemingly tiny and unconnected crumbs.
Arsenal transfer news: Gunners handed Viktor Gyokores boost as star’s release clause is ‘triggered’
Definitely not the only thing that’s ‘triggered’ here. Anyway, how close did you get?
Money talks
Mediawatch is not about to stop anyone from chuckling away at the sight of 17th-placed Spurs being in the Champions League next season. It is very funny, it has boiled vatloads of piss, and should be celebrated for the wonderful absurdity it is.
We do still require some basic grounding in the world of facts, though. Let’s face it, those facts are funny enough to require no gilding of any lily(white).
The Sun aren’t having that, though.
How Tottenham will get MORE money than Arsenal for being in the Champions League next season
It’s a headline that leaves zero room for equivocation. Tottenham will get more – sorry, MORE – money.
Yet by the intro, we’re already at:
TOTTENHAM could earn more money than Arsenal in Europe next season after winning the Europa League.
Shouldn’t really need saying, but ‘will’ and ‘could’ are absolutely not synonyms, guys.
And when you actually look at the numbers, the differences are – in the grand Premier-League-team-in-Champions-League terms – unbelievably small and twatty.
Both Spurs and Arsenal will receive around £48m for being in the Champions League, and which one of the two receives about £100k more than the other depends entirely on whether or not Benfica qualify for the League Phase.
We’re really not at all sure that this is actually, as The Sun’s crack team of punners insist, ‘GUNNER HURT’.
Loud colours
Unprecedented scenes at the weekend following Chelsea’s Champions League-securing win at Nottingham Forest on the final day. We go over to football.london for more…
Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali show their true colours as Chelsea gesture speaks volumes
Colours and volumes? This is huge. It absolutely definitely couldn’t just be anything as humdrum as them congratulating Enzo Maresca on the pitch afterwards, could it? It definitely couldn’t be anything like that, where the opposite would be far more colour-showing and volume-speaking? Could it? COULD IT?
Summer loving
Over at the Manchester Evening News they are understandably braced for an even bigger summer of Man United transfer guff and nonsense than usual, but this headline gave us pause.
Summer transfers will give Manchester United something they need
That is the general idea of transfers, yes. More specifically the ‘something they need’ – and this applies even to all clubs, really – is ‘good footballers in positions they need to strengthen’.
That’s not what the MEN are saying here, though, is it. No, this is instead a bold and copium-addled attempt to spin the absence of European football and the inconvenient fact that the entire football club is a basket case in a goldfish bowl as a positive, actually.
As disappointing and as damaging as it is that United will not compete in Europe next season, one thing that could work to their advantage is that players who are drafted in will be joining the club because they want to play for United.
Top players aspire to play in Europe, particularly the Champions League, meaning any player who joins United this summer will be doing so because they want to experience the thrill and pressure of playing for one of the world’s most famous clubs.
United need to recruit players who will roll up their sleeves, fight and give their all, regardless of what competitions United may or may not be competing in.
Who wants Viktor Gyokeres when you can sign players that want to experience the thrill and pressure of playing for one of the world’s most famous clubs instead?
Can we just not?
Impossible not to mention the Liverpool parade crash today, and in general the coverage has been… pretty decent and sensitive and respectful.
Most of the big titles had someone on the scene at the parade, of course, and they’ve done generally sterling work in an awful situation. If Mediawatch were to single out one piece from those it would be Dominic King’s in the Mail. It’s got everything this kind of appalling incident requires, conveying the genuine shock and horror and upset and visceral emotion while also delivering facts and an absence of speculation. Journalism done right, essentially.
Not the case universally across the board, though, because while yes it’s obviously a tragedy and it’s terrible and it’s awful there are clicks to be had and that remains the real quiz.
And so to the Express:
Liverpool parade victim’s two harrowing words after being struck by car
And Reach stablemates at the Daily Star:
Liverpool parade crash victim’s two words after being hit by car in victory crowd
Seriously and earnestly: can we really just not? Can we all just for one second pause and decide whether absolutely everything needs a ‘curiosity gap’ headline?
The two words were ‘absolute agony’ by the way, which still wasn’t apparently enough to give those headline writers any thoughts that they might want to consider what, exactly, they were doing with their lives.
They are the words of Liverpool fan Jack Trotter, in what was very obviously not a ‘two-word statement’ as the Star grimly go on to describe it, like it’s a cryptic transfer hint on f***ing Instagram, but the answer to a question put to him by BBC Northern Ireland while he was in hospital along with 26 other victims.
