In defense of bad punditry or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Roy Keane

Roy Keane has been criticized for his bad punditry, but does he (and others like him) deserve the scorn?

Outside of the usual reaction to the weekend’s games, much of last Monday morning’s football media chatter focused on a piece written by Ken Early in the Irish Times, analyzing how much the game has changed tactically over the past couple of decades and lamenting how little certain high-profile television pundits have done the same.

Trying to infer consensus from whatever the winds of Twitter blow across your timeline is a fraught activity, but I think I’m on solid ground in saying a significant number of people — including writers from both major newspapers and smaller digital outlets — felt Early’s analysis was spot-on, or at least that he was looking in the right general direction.

If you intend to read this piece, you should read Early’s one first, but the basic outline is as follows: Early, citing various tactical developments in the Premier League (more pressing, more controlled possession, the changing role of the full-back) outlines how football has become a more “collective” activity over (roughly) the past 20 years.

He goes on to criticize the failure of some TV pundits (Roy Keane, in particular) to account for these changes in their analysis, and finishes by wondering whether (hoping that) they and the “rest of the culture” might soon come to adopt the more enlightened views of standout modern managers like Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp.

Like all Early’s writing, the piece is informative, well-written, thought-provoking — in short, very good. I also think it is, in several important respects, confused, and I’d like to push back against a few of the ideas that are contained in it (though not necessarily endorsed by Early himself), and that were so widely shared on social media.

I’m going to talk about four ideas in particular: (1) the idea bad punditry is a generational issue,
(2) the idea we can meaningfully distinguish between collective and individual activity on a football pitch, (3) the idea Keane is representative of the state of contemporary football analysis in general and (4) the idea we should care he’s bad at his job.

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"The game is more collective than ever, yet the players are still judged and criticised as individuals. Look at Sky’s coverage of the Manchester derby last week. The senior analysts were Roy Keane, who was the best midfielder in the league 20 years ago, and Graeme Souness, who was the best midfielder in the league 20 years before that."

I’m not sure whether Early highlights the eras in which Keane and Souness played to suggest that is the specific reason for their bad analysis, or simply to provide context for his own analysis (which compares the game in their day to what it is now). In either case, the implication is that their having played a long time ago is, at very least, not helping.

This suggestion (again, I’m not sure Early intends to suggest this, but it’s easy to read him that way) is quickly undermined when you realize Keane is a year younger than Guardiola, and three years younger than Klopp. As much as it seems like they come from different footballing millennia, they are contemporaries.

Souness is older (65), but a member of the same generation as, to name only a few, Arsene Wenger (69), Carlo Ancelotti (59), Jupp Heynckes (73) and Marcelo Bielsa (63), all of whom are generally well-respected analysts or managers with recent (mostly successful) experience at the highest levels of the game.

Keane and Souness may be bad at analyzing football, but if they are it’s not because they played the game 20 or 40 years ago. It’s because they’re stubborn, unwilling to listen to people they disagree with and, frankly, not particularly good at forming coherent English sentences on live television (which is, in their defense, a lot harder than it looks).

This is only a small point, and one I’m not even sure Early would disagree with himself. But the dismissal of certain opinions on the grounds the person who holds them doesn’t fit a particular mold, doesn’t hold the requisite enlightenment credentials, is something that seeps into a lot of the wider criticism of people like Keane and Souness.

I am reminded here of a piece Jonathan Liew wrote about the Bielsa Spygate “scandal” earlier this season. To steal one of his most memorable lines, “The point is so obvious it should barely require stating, but Pep Guardiola has far, far more in common with someone like Roy Keane than some tactics blogger from East Sussex.”

The advent of social media has made it easier than ever to draw sweeping conclusions about very large groups of people based on the behavior of very small groups of people. On football Twitter, this has helped produce a fault line of sorts: Some people are tactically and statistically woke, and some are not, and certain opinions (even less, certain ways of being) doom you to life on one side or the other forever.

It’s easy to interpret this fault line as primarily generational, or perhaps national. I think we should avoid doing this, even implicitly. What’s at issue is not old vs. new or foreign vs. domestic, though these disagreements are often presented through those lenses. What’s at issue is thoughtfulness vs. thoughtlessness, open-mindedness vs. closed-mindedness.

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"The level of tactical organisation required to pull this off is phenomenal. It underlines the reality that football is less and less a battle between individuals, and more and more a contest of systems. At some point maybe the ex-pros who analyse the game on television will realise this and stop judging players by the standards of a sport that no longer exists."

The second idea I wish to discuss is the distinction Early draws between collective and individual activity. One of the examples Early uses to help illustrate this distinction is Keane’s analysis of Bernardo Silva’s opening goal against Manchester United in the Manchester derby two weeks ago.

Keane criticizes Luke Shaw for not closing Silva down. When Gary Neville points out that if Shaw had closed Silva down, he would have left other City players open, Keane simply dismisses him: “There’s only one ball, close it down!” This is, basically, the sum total of his analysis.

Early is right to say Keane is ignoring a lot of important details here, but I’m not sure how acknowledging these details would lead you to conclude the game is “more collective” than ever. Successful football teams are, as they always have been, well-structured units in which 11 individuals work together to add up to something more than the sum of their parts.

Read, for example, Sir Alex Ferguson’s thoughts on what makes a great team, in reference to side’s Keane played for 20 years ago. In the very same paragraph he says “men [i.e., not tactics] win football matches,” he tells us “the best teams stand out because they are teams,” because the “them functions as a single unit.” Where does the individual end and the collective begin?

Or consider a contrasting example: Zinedine Zidane’s Real Madrid side that won three Champions Leagues in a row despite being routinely criticized for their lack of a coherent tactical identity. Even now, the perception of Zidane is that he’s a “player’s manager” first, a tactician second. If the individuals are good enough, it seems, the system doesn’t matter.

This view is supported by compelling recent research that shows a strong correlation between the wages of a team’s players and their performance, and comparatively weak correlation between the identity of a team’s manager (the person responsible for implementing the systems Early describes) and their performance.

There are, to be sure, limits to the value of these studies. Guardiola, for example, doesn’t score particularly well on value-added metrics because, in part, he has always had massive financial resources to work with. But if other managers could have won the titles he has won, how many could have won them the way he has? That the answer is “none” is exactly why you hire him.

Even if we ignore these examples, however, there’s an obvious difficulty in deciding what qualifies as “collective” activity on a football pitch and what qualifies as “individual.” Teams work as units, as systems, but individual actions are performed by individual players. More often than not, the collective fails only when one of its individual members makes a mistake.

Consider Sebastian Chapuis’ recent analysis of Jorginho’s defending leading up to Mohamed Salah’s goal against Chelsea last month. It is, in a lot of ways, the very opposite of Keane-style punditry: It’s presented in a tweet thread, it has nothing to say about mentality or desire, it’s extremely granular and it’s done by someone who has never played professionally.

The collective takes center stage throughout: Good defending demands that every individual player is paying attention to whatever their teammates are doing. Jorginho’s error is individual, but it exists in the context of the collective. How, then, do we distinguish between collective and individual here? They seem to be two sides of the same coin.

I suspect there’s a way to restate Early’s point so that it avoids this problem: The game now is less about individual matchups — that is, dominating your opposite number, which was much more important when everyone played a 4-4-2 and matched up across the pitch — but that’s not quite the same as saying it’s less individual (or any more collective) per se than it ever was.

Early begins to make something approaching this point in the quote at the top of this section — “football is less and less a battle between individuals, and more and more a contest of systems” — but he doesn’t really elaborate on it, and it mostly gets lost as he focuses on explaining various tactical developments that he contends have made the game “more collective.”

Maybe I’m being overly nitpicky here, but it seems to me that if we’re going to criticize other analysts for the lack of precision and clarity in their analysis, we should hold ourselves to an equally high standard. The distinction Early draws is persuasive because he draws it so sharply, but this is a blurred line, and that’s worth acknowledging whatever side of it you’re on.

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"Or it could be that they know what they have in common is more important than what divides them. In one sense Pep is Klopp’s biggest rival. But in another, he’s a kindred spirit — one of a small group of people in English football who fully understands what he’s trying to do. One day the rest of the culture might catch up with the pair of them."

The third idea I want to discuss is contained in Early’s conclusion, the idea that “the rest of the culture” could learn a thing or two from managers like Guardiola and Klopp, whose open-mindedness seems to present such a stark contrast to pundits like Keane. In particular, I want to know what, or who, Early is referring to here by “the rest of the culture.”

Early himself, along with many of the prominent football writers in the English-speaking media who shared his article, is presumably part of that culture, as is Neville, with whom Keane lost patience for his reluctance to blame individual United defenders, as are analysts like Chapuis, who has a relatively small but engaged following on Twitter.

This is the strangest blind spot in Early’s piece. He explains in great detail how football tactics have changed over the past 20 years, and at the same time ignores the seismic changes to the football media landscape that have occurred over the same period. In Early’s analysis, the internet and social media are the runners to Keane’s Shaw.

Of course Keane has a much more high-profile position than most of those who criticize him, but one consequence of the changes to the media landscape Early ignores is that TV pundits have never been less influential than they are right now. This isn’t to say no one should criticize Keane, but I’m just not convinced he’s a useful representative of the wider culture.

Indeed, Keane might not even be representative of Sky’s football coverage. This is a channel, after all, which produces probably the best long-form football analysis show in England; Neville and Jamie Carragher’s Monday Night Football is packed with exactly the sort of context-heavy analysis Early offers in his piece.

Sky also produces a show, Sunday Supplement, in which a rotating cast of journalists discuss the biggest football stories of the week, a program on which some of the writers who shared Early’s article regularly appear and can, presumably, talk about modern tactics to their heart’s content.

I don’t wish to present Keane as an anomaly. There is a whole class of so-called footballing dinosaurs who were presumably nodding along furiously as they watched him rail against the laziness of the modern player. This mindset might still be (though I guess it’s impossible to say for sure) the dominant mode of thinking among football fans in general.

But to cite one Sky pundit’s bad analysis as evidence “the rest of the culture” needs to catch up to the likes of Guardiola and Klopp, without acknowledging that large swathes of the football media (both mainstream and not) have been trying to do exactly that for quite some time, is to present, at best, an incomplete picture of the state of contemporary football analysis.

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"Keane’s scorn is always intensely watchable and the clip of this exchange has since had more than a million views on YouTube. And you might find yourself nodding along — why didn’t Shaw make a challenge, why couldn’t Darmian get a bit closer to Leroy Sane? Why won’t these young men tackle and put their bodies on the line, like they did in the good old days?"

Finally, and at the risk of contradicting everything I’ve said until now, I’d like to push back on the idea Keane is, in fact, bad at his job. Or if he is, the idea we should care. If the impulse to criticize bad pundits is borne of a desire to improve our analysis, it seems to me worthwhile spending a little more time thinking seriously about what the value of improved analysis actually is.

The first thing to say here, as I suspect everyone who criticizes Keane knows, is that he keeps appearing on television because (1) he was a great player and (2) he is, as Early says, “intensely watchable.” Shocking as this might be to some of those bloggers from East Sussex, but nuanced, in-depth tactical analysis doesn’t always make for good TV.

And so the question — a question I don’t know the answer to, a question to which there is probably not one single answer, but that I think anyone invested in producing opinions about football should spend some time thinking about — the question is whether it matters if our analysis of football is good.

My first instinct is to say that it doesn’t. I don’t mean to suggest that no one should aspire to produce good analysis, or that good analysis doesn’t enrich many people’s enjoyment of the game; just that if it turned out everything we currently claim to know about football is wrong, the time we spent discussing and elaborating that “knowledge” wouldn’t have been for nothing.

It seems fair to say the average fan knows much more about the game than they did 20 years ago, and that 20 years ago they knew much more than they did 20 years before that. But do people enjoy the game any more now than they did in the ‘90s or ‘70s or ‘50s? There’s no reason to think they do. Ignorance is bliss, I guess, is what I’m driving at.

What are the stakes, then, when we criticize people like Keane for their regressive tactical analysis? Are we just jealous that he gets to appear on television and we don’t? Are we thinking that most writerly of thoughts: His success deserves to be mine? Or are their meaningful consequences to our willingness to give such prominent platforms to such bad analysts?

There was a time you could make a compelling case that bad punditry was a legitimate obstacle to the success of English football. The emphasis on some horribly outdated Corinthian ideal — propagated by TV pundits like Keane — actively helped produce generations of tactically illiterate players, all lunging tackles and flying elbows and barely two consecutive passes in sight.

That case is much harder to make in 2019. The globalization of the game, of the world in general, the influx of some of the sport’s most tactically sophisticated managers to the Premier League, the increasing willingness of English players to play overseas — this has all helped to erode the old, insular modes of thinking, at least among the decision-makers that matter (although not, appropriately enough, those at Old Trafford).

I suppose the question, then, is to what extent this shift has occurred because a lot of fans started to demand better analysis, and to what extent it has occurred because the teams and governing bodies themselves realized that if they wanted to be successful in the long-term they would have to open their minds, to look forward and out rather than backward and in.

In other words, would the game’s internal incentives — trophies, money — enough to propel the sport forward even if every fan thought the team that wins is always the team that wants it the most? I don’t know the answer to that question. Since that isn’t the case, maybe the answer to that question doesn’t matter.

What I know is that while I feel strongly that it is far better to be open-minded, curious, thoughtful about the things we care about than it is to not be, I also feel strongly that a world in which our football analysis was devoid of the Keanes and Sounesses among us would be a lot worse than the one we live in. One day, with a bit of luck, I might catch up with myself.