Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
When I tell Americans that I come from Plymouth, I sometimes have to add, No, not the one with the Rock; yes, the one in England that the Rock is named after. Some reply that they know it, only to have actually been thinking of Portsmouth, a city that is similarly named but not especially nearby. Over the summer, though, Plymouth was put on the map worldwide, at least in a sporting sense, after the local soccer club, Plymouth Argyle, named Wayne Rooney, an icon of the global game and one of the finest players in English history, as its new head coach. The appointment immediately put the club at the center of a media storm. I contribute to Argyle Life, an independent fan-led platform with a podcast and YouTube show. Our livestream dissecting Rooney’s arrival was viewed by well over ten thousand people. (For context, the capacity of Argyle’s stadium is only around seventeen thousand.)
Argyle play in the second tier of English soccer, but are one of its smaller sides, at least based on budget and recent history; we were promoted to the level in 2023 after thirteen years away, and had only narrowly avoided relegation back to the third tier when Rooney arrived. (For the uninitiated: think of relegation as being like if a baseball team could be bumped to triple-A due to sheer haplessness, then to double-A if they couldn’t hack it there either, and so on; my editor for this newsletter has bewailed the likely state of the Baltimore Orioles were this the setup stateside.) For all his immense talent as a player, Rooney’s nascent managerial career had not so far been a resounding success: after spells at Derby County and then at DC United in the US (where he had also been a player), he was coming off a brief tenure at Birmingham City in the English second tier that was such a disaster the club was unexpectedly relegated at the end of the season (sparing Argyle that fate, as it happened). Some Argyle supporters were aghast when he was hired but others were excited, by Rooney’s profile if not his record. When the new season kicked off, in August, the team made an undistinguished start—but then things improved, with dramatic wins in three consecutive home matches firing up the fan base and generating further headlines.
Then, in November, supporters learned that the media circus around Rooney would be taken up a notch: it was announced that filming had begun on a behind-the-scenes documentary about his time at the club. The film would be made by Lorton Entertainment, a production company that had made two previous documentaries about Rooney and his family; the question of distribution remained up in the air, but Rooney said there were “big brands looking to take it” and The Guardian later reported that the club hoped to sell the rights to a major streaming platform, like Netflix or Amazon, in a bid to “raise their global profile and secure a windfall.” Supporters were once again divided on the prospect: some feared it would be a distraction from on-field matters; others welcomed the exposure. (Some saw both sides: “It’ll be cringe,” one fan wrote on a popular Argyle forum, “but if it can generate money for the club I’m not opposed.”) Rooney insisted that the project would only have access to Argyle’s players to the extent that they were comfortable with it. “I think for the football club financially, it will help, which is really important,” he said. “But also from a fan’s point of view—if I’m a fan of the football club I’d be really intrigued to watch.”
The commissioning of the documentary was big for Plymouth but not a novel development in general terms: in recent years, a range of English soccer teams have been the subject of fly-on-the-wall programs, from the all-conquering top-tier side Manchester City down to Wrexham, a club that has climbed from the fifth tier to the third since it was improbably acquired by the Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in 2020. (Wrexham is in Wales, but its soccer club plays in the English league.) Indeed, the Rooney documentary mirrored trends in sports media far beyond English soccer, in an era when athlete-centered narratives are ubiquitous and have a material impact on the success not only of different sports teams but whole sports. (My colleague Josh Hersh wrote about this trend last year; around the same time, I wrote about how the Formula 1 documentary Drive to Survive had hugely juiced interest in motor racing, not least in the US.) Not that the boom in this sort of content has been limited to sports: writing for CJR in 2020, Danny Funt noted that whereas “filmmakers used to avoid the label ‘documentary,’” since “audiences considered them about as exciting as homework,” streamers are now stuffed with them, racking up millions of views.
Often, “content” is the operative word here—rather than, say, “journalism.” I wrote last year that while Drive to Survive has reportorial moments, it is more a work of entertainment; Hersh noted how, if athlete-centered narratives are now ubiquitous, they are mostly being crafted by athletes themselves, via documentaries and podcasts that cut out the traditional journalistic middleman. Funt wrote in 2020 that filmmakers desperate for access to celebrities—who, in the modern attention economy, hardly need to cooperate—commonly offer them “incentives that would be scandalous in any other news medium: paying for access, clearing quotes and clips, giving a subject’s business partners a producing credit.”
The Rooney Argyle documentary, to be fair, was never touted as a work of journalism. And it will now be impossible to evaluate it on those or any other terms: two weeks ago, after a disastrous downturn in form, Argyle parted ways with Rooney, and the documentary was scrapped. Trailing in its wake are broader lessons about the limits of such access-driven projects—and reminders that, despite their ubiquity, they are still only one part of a diverse sports-media ecosystem, one that is increasingly dominated by content, but also rises and falls on the age-old appeal of celebrity, the unpredictable currents of social media, and, at least sometimes, the persistent ability of old-school journalism to set the agenda.
Lorton Entertainment’s first major project involving Rooney was a feature-length documentary—titled simply Rooney—that appeared on Amazon Prime in 2022 and traces the arc of his playing career through interviews with Rooney and those close to him, nodding both to its highs (his remarkable ascent to stardom at just sixteen; his move to the soccer giant Manchester United) and its lows (his controversial and occasionally troubling behavior off the field; his petulant, sometimes even violent conduct on it). In 2023, a second project followed, on Disney+. The central subject matter this time didn’t concern Rooney so much as his wife, Coleen, and her centrality to one of the more compelling and curious media stories to come out of the UK in recent times: a much-discussed saga in which she accused another player’s wife of leaking stories about her to Britain’s tabloids (following an elaborate social media sting operation aimed at finding the culprit); got sued for libel; then won the case. The Argyle documentary was to be Lorton’s third Rooney project. Per The Guardian, one of the company’s owners is a shareholder in an agency that has long managed Rooney.
The Argyle project sounded like it would be less similar to its Lorton predecessors than to the litany of other documentaries promising inside access to soccer clubs, a burgeoning genre that often trades in the same visual clichés—footage from the training pitch; footage from the locker room; footage from games, often in dizzying close-up—interspersed with interviews. Some of these shows have achieved iconic, or at least meme-worthy, status. A season of All or Nothing—an Amazon franchise whose other subjects have included the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals and NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs—about the top-tier English soccer club Arsenal helped make a star of its manager, Mikel Arteta, and his unorthodox motivational routines. (In one pre-match speech, he invoked Thomas Edison’s light bulb to stress the importance of connectivity, adding that “it would be fucking dark if this guy wouldn’t have the idea to do that.”) My and many other viewers’ favorite of the genre is Sunderland ’Til I Die, a Netflix show that follows the fortunes of a soccer club fallen on hard times and centers its long-suffering supporters. One memorable montage shows a local vicar praying for the club.
The main reason that that show is so watchable, however, is that it is candid, car-crash television, showing disaster after disaster befalling the club, interspersed with toe-curling footage of top executives testing out stadium hype music (it needs to be “a bit Ibiza”) and panic-buying a player who would subsequently flop. (Even the stirring prayer scene is cut together with footage of an angry supporter screaming at a player to “fuck off.”) The project was not exactly independent: the producers are both fans of Sunderland; one later joined the club’s board. But club executives reportedly had no say over the final cut. And if the show isn’t quite a work of journalism, it is at least bursting with authenticity. It certainly made an unusually wide impression. Prince William reportedly watched it. So, too, did McElhenney, who has said that the show helped inspire him to purchase Wrexham with Reynolds.
Sunderland ’Til I Die is not the norm: indeed, The Athletic has noted that the show pitched itself as “the antithesis” of the largely “polished” All or Nothing franchise. Many fly-on-the-wall soccer documentaries have a samey vibe, trading access for blandness. Writing in The Guardian last week, Aaron Timms excoriated the genre as “viciously uninteresting” and an exercise in “corporate PR.” Timms suggested that players—who must watch what they say at all times as the cameras roll—and fans are growing tired of such projects, but that they keep getting made because the participants want money and streamers want content. The latter’s “sole goal is to stuff their platforms with as much content as possible,” he wrote, “turning them into the technological-cultural equivalent of ducks fattened by gavage.”
As Timms noted, the Rooney Argyle documentary could have broken the mold by itself becoming car-crash TV as the team lapsed into a disgraceful run of heavy defeats. As an Argyle fan, I wouldn’t have enjoyed reliving those myself, but can see the appeal for others; I also view Rooney as a quietly compelling character, one who is far from traditionally charismatic (his voice is often a mumbling monotone) but nonetheless has a certain enigmatic aura around him. Now, of course, we’ll never know. Whispers that the project might never see the light of day circulated in early December, when a “TV insider” suggested to the Sun tabloid that “the whole point of the documentary was to celebrate his move from player to becoming a manager” and that Rooney would not want it to become a “horror show”; later, The Guardian reported that Lorton had been granted access to only two matches before being “told to take a break.” By year’s end, Rooney was gone. Simon Hallett, Argyle’s chairman, confirmed last week that while he had seen the documentary as “consistent with our desire to raise the club’s profile,” Rooney’s exit meant that it, too, would be terminated.
If access-driven content can still raise a sports franchise’s profile, the saturated market for such content makes the extent of the profile-raising hard to predict; the collapse of the Rooney project, meanwhile, proved that access is no guarantee of content in the first place. And Argyle’s Rooney experiment—and its aftermath—also pointed to the importance of other forms of sports content in the modern media age. Rooney’s mere presence at Argyle arguably lifted these other boats already—regardless of the documentary falling through.
Traditional publications remain an important part of this sports-media ecosystem, even if the industry is in palpable decline. The national tabloids that have always had a field day with the Rooneys continued to do so in relation to his time at Argyle; more positively, as his tenure descended into crisis, Chris Errington, an excellent Argyle beat reporter at the local Plymouth Herald and its associated news site, proved his worth, asking dogged questions and giving a voice to angry fans. Smaller content creators also got a Rooney bump—including Argyle Life, the fan-led platform where I’m a contributor. Last year, more than two hundred and fifty thousand people watched us on YouTube—hardly Joe Rogan numbers, but a mind-boggling figure for a project that essentially grew out of a few friends shit-talking at the pub. Thanks to Rooney, our contributors have been asked to appear across the British media.
And the process of replacing Rooney also shined a light on one of the true, persistent joys of the modern soccer information bubble: not the polished documentary, but the chaotic spread of raw gossip on social media, a form downstream of access—or, at least, the illusion thereof—but far from dependent on it. After days of discussing rumors (and evaluating the historical reliability of whatever anonymous X account had shared them), many fans (myself included) convinced themselves on Friday that a beloved former manager was poised to return. But then journalism intervened again: Fabrizio Romano—a leading source of soccer-deals news who is a social media native but essentially an old-school reporter at heart (and who may even be the most famous journalist in the world, as Jem Bartholomew wrote in an illuminating profile for CJR in 2023)—broke the news that Rooney’s replacement would be Miron Muslic, a Bosnian-born Austrian coach who formerly led Cercle Brugge, in Belgium.
Muslic was an obscure figure in England—but he has quickly become recognizable, thanks to social media. Yesterday, Argyle posted a video of Muslic introducing himself to the squad; normally, this would have been unremarkable—one more piece of content forced into the internet’s maw—but it soon went viral due to Muslic’s charismatic delivery and motivational message. Even rival supporters joked that they would “run through a brick wall” for Muslic; soon, news sites picked up the video and reaction to it. On X, the account “argyletweets” quipped that Argyle had hired Rooney for PR reasons “only to realise a random Bosnian fella would instantly give the club more interaction on socials because he speaks like Churchill.”
Publicly, Argyle have always denied that Rooney was hired to raise the club’s profile. But it undoubtedly had that effect—and the effect might be outlasting Rooney. Yesterday, my girlfriend noticed that a man on a train in London (far away from Plymouth) was watching the Muslic video on his phone, and struck up a conversation. He told her that he hadn’t really known anything about Argyle—until the club made Rooney its head coach.
Other notable stories:
- CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan spoke with third-party fact-checking partners of Meta, who learned last week that the company intends to sever ties with them, then quickly had to get to work trying to slow misinformation about the Los Angeles fires as it went viral on Meta’s platforms. Meanwhile, former Meta staffers told The Guardian that the company’s simultaneous pledge to move its content-moderation operations to Texas—in a bid to alleviate “bias” concerns—is “nothing more than a blatant appeal to Donald Trump” since the company already conducts such work in Texas. And CJR’s Meghnad Bose checked in with his former colleagues at The Quint, a news site in India that is a Meta fact-checking partner; Meta’s recent announcements have centered on the US, but Bose found anxiety about it beyond national borders.
- For the New York Times, David Enrich and Katie Robertson report on steps that US newsrooms are taking to prepare for a feared onslaught once Trump takes office. Reporters and editors “are increasing their reliance on encrypted communications to help shield themselves and their sources from potential federal leak investigations and subpoenas,” they write. Multiple newsrooms “are evaluating whether they have enough insurance coverage to absorb a potential wave of libel and other litigation from officials who have already shown an inclination to file such suits. And a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet is preparing for the possibility that the government will investigate issues like whether its use of freelancers complies with labor regulations.”
- The recent exodus from the Washington Post continued yesterday: Jennifer Rubin, a liberal opinion columnist, announced that she is leaving to cofound a publication on Substack and, on her way out, blasted the Post for perceived spinelessness in the face of Trump; meanwhile, Rosalind Helderman, a top investigative journalist, is reportedly joining the Times. Elsewhere, other outlets are shuffling their staffs as Trump 2.0 looms. MSNBC said that Rachel Maddow, currently only a Monday host, will be on air every night for Trump’s first hundred days. And Politico is importing Jack Blanchard from its UK edition to helm its influential DC Playbook newsletter.
- The New Yorker’s Ruth Margalit profiled Yinon Magal, a talk-show host on Israel’s Channel 14 who has aggressively defended Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s right-wing prime minister, while attacking his critics, including judges, journalists, academics, and political opponents. “Magal was once a prime-time newscaster,” but these days, “he is an unapologetic combatant, delivering his version of the news in a hunched-over-the-deck posture that has been described as ‘gorilla pose,’” Margalit writes. “If Channel 14 is Netanyahu’s Fox News, Magal is its Tucker Carlson.”
- And last year, NPR’s Frank Langfitt reported an extraordinary story linking a high-profile exiled Chinese dissident to an “elaborate con” in the Netherlands, reporting that led at least ten news outlets to retract or amend stories they’d written casting the dissident as a victim of Chinese transnational repression. Now Langfitt is out with a follow-up story about journalists who covered the dissident—then found themselves accused of making bomb threats. (The dissident denies involvement.)
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
