why I no longer want to be a sports journalist

on feeling disillusioned

I was naïve.

I thought being a sports journalist meant doing what a journalist does but in sport.

I thought it meant being curious, being critical, exposing injustice and discrimination, challenging the mainstream narrative, and holding our institutions to account.

I thought it meant listening to and promoting unheard and marginalised voices.

Now, after nearly four years in the sports media industry, I can see exactly why we are called the ‘toy department’.

I have become hyperaware of what I am sure has plagued many sports journalists for decades, summed up perfectly by professor of sociology Dan Hilliard in 1984.

“Sports and the media form a symbiotic relationship. Each depends on the other and economic interests govern both. In this view, neither the media nor the athletes are willing to challenge the assumptions upon which their economic success depends” (p. 252).

In other words, expecting newspapers and digital outlets to critique sport’s patriarchal and colonialist roots is like expecting the fox to guard the hen house.

It is the emperor of conflicts of interest. The sports media needs sport just as much as sport needs the sports media to survive.

Of course, criticism of sports governance and policy exists, but there are few publications prepared to even scratch the surface of the harmful ideologies and unequal power relations sport perpetuates.

“You can condemn the fans' homophobic chants, but you can’t discuss the heteronormative assumptions that structure football because we are the rightsholders.”

“You can criticise a team’s style of play, but you can’t draw attention to the club’s misogynistic culture because we could lose our exclusive interview with the manager next week.”

“You can pitch a feature about a Black athlete, but only during Black History Month and you can’t mention sport’s white supremacy or institutional racism because that isn’t impartial.”

These are not actual quotes from editors, but they don’t need to be. They might as well have it written on their email signature strips.

I am tired of begging editors to commission features on underrepresented athletes and issues in sport and hearing either ‘We don’t have the budget for this at this time’ or ‘Pitch again during X awareness month.’

(Sorry, what do you mean you don’t have the budget for women at this time?)

I am tired of the burden always falling on myself and those from minority backgrounds to pitch and produce these stories.

And I am tired of hoping and praying an underpaid, overworked media manager will be allowed to give up their time to source an interview on an underrepresented issue for me.

The reality is profit is the priority and, currently, few things generate more clicks and views than men’s football, misogyny, and transphobia.

I find it sickening how dangerously comfortable publications have become in commissioning features that either speculate, investigate, or ‘explain’ the gender of female athletes.

Everyone knows there are far better uses of a journalist’s time than writing a 2500-word long read explainer on what chromosomes and genitalia a boxing athlete has, but that wouldn’t maximise the website’s bounce rate.

That said, it would not be very journalistic of me not to provide the sports media industry with a right of reply:

‘We commission the stories that audiences want.’ – (an imagined CEO).

To be brutally honest, I am simply bored of hearing this pathetic, downright insulting excuse that wilfully refuses to acknowledge how the media has shaped audiences’ wants and justifies the continuation of white male superiority and domination.

If you feed your audience a diet of white men’s sport your audience will continue to only demand a diet of white men’s sport.

I feel embarrassed. I feel like I’m betraying my own craft and the journalists before me by taking part in this bizarre, normalised collusion between sport and sports media.

If being a sports journalist doesn’t involve asking questions of national governing boards and clubs that run deeper than ‘Why is x on the bench?’ or ‘Why did we lose in the Euros final?’, challenging our inherited conceptions of fairness and justice in sport, or advocating for the liberation of oppressed groups of every age and ability, then you can count me out.