Match of the Day: The Culture Wars

People are already getting themselves angry over the very possibility of Alex Scott hosting Match of the Day. Now, why could that possibly be?

There was something almost too on-the-nose about the announcement that Gary Lineker would be leaving Match of the Day coming in the week between Remembrance Sunday and an international match between England and Ireland. After all, Lineker has become—whether he wanted to or not—a frontline fighter in the Great Culture Wars of the 2020s. But any celebration over his departure from those who celebrate that sort of thing felt somewhat tempered by an instant dread of what the woke, lefty BBC might do next.

So, rather than dwelling on what we may reasonably describe as The End of an Era, social media discussion swung quickly to an apocalyptic view of the future, and the upshot of all this is that Alex Scott is trending on what’s left of Twitter this morning. For those who spend their lives in some sort of splenetic rage over this sort of thing, Scott hits a trifecta of being neither male, white nor heterosexual. That call of “HOUSE!” that you just heard may have come from the offices of the Daily Mail.

But a quick reminder. Alex Scott played for Arsenal, Birmingham City and England, winning the Women’s Premier League five times, the WSLe and Champions League once each and the FA Cup seven times. She made 140 appearances for England and played in the final of a European Championship and the semi-final of a World Cup. She had a career for which 99.999% of professional players would readily give their high teeth.

During that World Cup she completed her degree in Professional Sports Writing and Broadcasting at Staffordshire University. In 2018, she became the first female pundit on Sky Sports, and has co-hosted Goals on Sunday for them, as well as guest-presenting The One Show on BBC1. The idea that she would not be qualified to present Match of the Day is fundamentally absurd.

It’s worth remembering that broadcasting is difficult. Too few of us seem to remember that broadcasting is far, far harder than those at the top of the game make it look, and those who are being hired for considerable amounts of money, I can absolutely assure you, are at the top of this game. It takes years of experience for even the very best to sound truly relaxed while doing their job, all the more so when it’s live and there is literally no room for mistakes.

But of course, we all know that this isn’t based on her ability or qualifications, really, don’t we? I don’t want to get all hectoring about anything, but this is what intersectional discrimination looks like. Alex’s career in football would come up against some degree of resistance solely on the basis of her gender. That she is not white only makes that challenge all the greater. Relatively speaking her non-straightness is less of an issue because it’s not immediately, visibly obvious, but that’s likely a result of those who get so angry about it being less aware of it than anything else.

The fact of the matter is that the only thing that previous Match of the Day presenters have had in common is that they’ve been straight, white men. You don’t have to have been a player to have done it. Kenneth Wolstenholme wasn’t one, while football wasn’t even David Coleman’s favourite sport. You don’t have to be British - Des Lynam was born in County Clare, Ireland - and you don’t have to be middle-class or Oxbridge-educated any more. Gary Lineker’s dad was famously a market stall holder.

From an entirely personal perspective, I don’t… mind who presents Match of the Day. It just doesn’t really matter to me. If I’m tuning in, I’m doing so to watch the football. If I’m watching it on catch-up, I’m as likely as not to scroll through the match analysis, and for live matches I tend to keep the sound off until the broadcast switches to the players in the tunnel. I consider good commentators to be ten times as important as good hosts, because you’ll be spending at least ninety minutes with the commentator, and substantially less time with the host.

Alex Scott would be a perfectly acceptable host of Match of the Day to me, as would Mark Chapman. They’re both very good broadcasters. But the very fact that Alex’s name is trending while Mark’s isn’t this (Thursday) morning does tell a story in itself. This rage never seems to ever dissipate, and it’s already blowing up over the very thought of an idea which would make perfect sense but which is nowhere near having even been made yet. It’s the madness of the period in which we live writ large.

There have in the past been periods when Match of the Day effectively wasn’t there. From 1988 to 1992 it was reduced to the FA Cup only, and between 2001 and 2004 it was absent on Saturday evenings after exclusive rights were again lost to ITV. And to a point, it’s something of a miracle that it has survived. The nature of football coverage on the television has changed beyond recognition in the 60 years since it started. The goals from Premier League matches are available on YouTube well before MOTD goes to air on a Saturday evening.

Yet it remains on the schedules and it retains a degree of popularity. Certainly nothing like it once had, but that’s the same for all television shows in the multimedia age. And the key to its enduring popularity has been changing with the times. There will always be those who don’t like change. We’re all guilty of that, sometimes. But there are also some who only don’t like certain types of change, and those people have been in the ascendency rather, of late. The perpetual anger of certain people and organisations is something that the BBC should be plenty used to by now. Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t, as ever.