Do we know how far we’ve come? Are we sure?
On Friday Joey Barton was convicted of six counts of sending grossly offensive media posts about the broadcaster Jeremy Vine and two football analysts, Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko. A jury in Liverpool Crown Court found Barton had “crossed the line between free speech and a crime”.
After Ward and Aluko had appeared on television coverage of a FA Cup match between Crystal Palace and Everton last season, Barton wrote in a tweet that they were the “Fred and Rose West of football commentary”. As Ward reminded the jury in her testimony last week, Fred and Rose West had tortured, sexually abused and killed children.
In his testimony a day later Barton described his tweet as “dark humour”. He also said he was attempting to be “provocative” and ignite a serious national debate about women broadcasting on the men’s game.
Imagine.
Ward has worked in broadcasting for 20 years. In court she described comments from Barton on social media as “continuous harassment”.
“You don’t know who is out there and how they’re going to react, especially in this day and age,” Ward said in court. “I got a little scared, physically scared really. I felt vulnerable going to games.”
In many ways Barton is an outlier in this arena. Very few former professional footballers and managers would have his history of violence and criminal behaviour or his back catalogue of poisonous opinions designed for public consumption.
But it would be delusional and sadly ridiculous to believe that Barton’s views don’t have a constituency. He has 2.6 million followers on X, and if some of them are rubberneckers, then many are looking for a celebrity echo chamber for their own views.
Barton’s contemptible behaviour is part of a bigger picture. As the presence of woman presenters and analysts in sports broadcasting has grown exponentially over the last 15 or 20 years, so the criticism and abuse from some quarters have become entrenched.
In this, there has been a litany of sufferers. Karen Carney – one of the pioneers in this field – felt compelled to delete her social media accounts after enduring a pile-on at the end of 2020.
Alex Scott, Carney’s former England team-mate, encountered online abuse as soon as she stood in front of a microphone. By 2019, two years into her broadcasting career, she said it arrived “every single day now. Constantly”.
Carney won 144 caps for England; Scott made 140 international appearances. In way did people not think they were qualified to analyse a football match?
It is only 18 years since Jacqui Oatley became the first woman to commentate on a game for Match of the Day. The fuss it caused at the time in 2007 should be hard to countenance now, but it’s not. Women in high-profile positions in sports broadcasting are still dealing with the prejudice and misogyny that greeted Oatley’s promotion.
On the week leading up to her first broadcast, BBC’s Radio Five Live did a vox pop on the street, asking members of the public if it should be allowed. The Daily Mail devoted a page to the same debate.
One of the Mail’s sportswriters, Steve Curry, wrote that it was an insult to the “controlled commentaries of John Motson, Mike Ingham and Alan Green” – even before Oatley uttered a word into the microphone. Dave Bassett, the former Premiership manager, said everybody he knew in football was “totally against it”.
Oatley told the New York Times earlier this year how “reporters were trying to dig into my home life to see if there was any juiciness” – specifically whether Oatley was gay.
“And I remember thinking, ‘How would that even be a story if that was the case?’,” she said. “But they’re also thinking, you like football, so you must ... it just shows, doesn’t it, the kind of attachments that people made to women who loved football at the time.”
Oatley’s debut gig on Fulham versus Blackburn from Craven Cottage was widely applauded and she is established now in the commentary box, a line of work that is still overwhelmingly male dominated.
Much greater strides towards gender equality have been made in the roles of analyst and studio anchor, although it is still a contested space. Earlier this year Aluko flew into a row with Ian Wright, the pundit and former footballer, over remarks she made on BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour.
In a conversation about the challenges facing woman broadcasters, the host Clare McDonnell asked Aluko about “high-profile men taking up space that could be a female appointment” and mentioned Wright in that context.
In response, Aluko praised the contribution that Wright had made to the women’s game, but also said that “I think he’s aware of just how much he’s doing in the women’s game. I think he should be aware of that”.
The interview created a social media explosion. Aluko issued an apology that Wright refused to accept, and ITV – which had engaged the services of Wright and Aluko in its football coverage – came out with a statement in support of Wright.
That furore could only have happened in this febrile space.
The case that came to court last week was the second time that Aluko had the courage to stand up to social-media bullying: in April she won the first stage of a High Court libel claim in the UK against Barton for remarks he had tweeted last year accusing her, among other things, of “playing the race card”.
“I can’t feel anxious every time I get on TV that my race and my gender are going to be attacked,” Aluko said after the judgment in April. “There’s a double standard held for me, sometimes a triple standard held for me as a black woman, if I say anything. This is bigger than me … it’s part of a wider culture towards women in broadcasting.”
In an interview with the i Paper over the weekend Aluko said her work on TV had dried up during the 18 months it took for the latest case against Barton to wash through the judicial system. She said she didn’t feel supported or protected and was now looking for work overseas.
TV pundits and presenters always generate a response of some kind. It is an occupational hazard and it is germane to the gig. Nobody likes everybody or all their opinions.
But male pundits and presenters are never abused for being men.
