What Joey Barton gets wrong – and right – about female football pundits

Joey Barton, the ex-Manchester City, Newcastle and QPR player, is in hot water again – this time over a series of blatantly sexist posts on social media, criticising women commentators and pundits. He posted that ‘women shouldn’t be talking with any kind of authority in the men’s game’, arguing it was the same as him ‘talking about knitting or netball’. Barton added: ‘Any man who listens to Women commentary or co-comms needs their headed testing …’ He refused to back down in a subsequent television interview with Piers Morgan, in which he maintained that ‘it’s not to do with sexism at all’, and instead blamed what he described as a ‘woke agenda’ in football.

Barton is wrong, of course, to single out women pundits per se in the men’s game. Does he really mean to suggest that someone such as Sarina Wiegman, the successful England women’s team manager, has no useful insights worth sharing on the men’s game and football in general? She may not have played in the Premier League but she has certainly been more successful in football management than Barton.

The other problem with Barton’s misguided musing is that he presupposes that, before female commentators arrived on the scene, football fans were being well-served. It is a stretch to make the case that the new generation of female pundits is somehow dragging down the quality of insight and erudite analysis provided by the army of male ex-players who have dominated our television screens for years. The issue here is not one of gender when it comes to football punditry; is is the fact that the punditry circus is teeming with ex-pros and chums who are paid large sums of money for doing little more than stating the obvious in the lamest way possible. Just the fact of being a former footballer doesn’t necessarily guarantee any sophisticated insight about the increasingly tactical nature of football at the highest level. The pundits — male or female — would be coaches or managers if they possessed that level of ability. Simply put, they’re all full of themselves, going from one television show or podcast to the next, saying the same things over and over. The women pundits are merely the latest gatecrashers to the party. 

The predictable furore over Barton’s neanderthal thinking overshadowed some other issues he raised that are perhaps worth more measured discussion. Barton suggested that ‘tokenism’ was behind the growing number of women involved punditry roles  in the men’s game. This is unfair as well as simplistic but it is, however, legitimate to wonder why — after decades of football broadcasts involving no women — the television companies seem to have suddenly discovered that women exist, and that they may have something to contribute when it comes to on-screen analysis. It may not be tokenism but it smacks at the very least of a certain cynical opportunism in the wake of growing interest in the women’s game.

The same opportunism was very much in evidence during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests: suddenly broadcasters like Sky Sports were filling the slots before and after matches with statements in support of antiracism. It only serves to highlight how so much football coverage on television increasingly appears to be about anything and everything but the game itself.

Here too Barton has raised an issue that merits discussion, tweeting: ‘…You cannot watch a game now without hearing the nonsense.’ That is inarguably the case. The sports broadcasters are guilty of ramming endless hours of nonsense down the throat of fans through tedious pre-match and post-match analysis and commentary. It is largely a waste of air time, contributing nothing to the experience of watching the game itself. Fans of the game are not fools. They’re tuning in to watch the game; the rest of it is increasingly a switch-off.