Should I stop using football chat to bond with strangers?
When I heard Ann Francke, the head of the Chartered Management Institute, complain about blokes talking football in the workplace, I was initially furious. “A lot of women, in particular, feel left out,” she said. What tosh. But on reflection, I wonder if she may have a point. I know a lot of women who are mad on football, but the data is clear: women are less into it than men. And I doubt it is only women feeling left out; there are men who aren’t into football or cricket, too. Hard to believe, I know, but true.
I feel sorry for people who aren’t into sport. Where do they go for their extreme, explosive joy, to scream and hug strangers? I think they miss out there, but also in the sense that Francke is getting at.
Related: 'It's not gender specific': readers on workplace sports banter
For many years, I presented a programme called Working Lunch with Adam Shaw. Adam is a brilliant broadcaster who has done all sorts of amazing stuff in the business, and in the real world, too. However, he isn’t, possibly to his detriment, into football. I took him with me to the away end at Fulham once. I think the word he used to describe the whole experience was “awful”. That is absolutely fair enough; there is a lot that is awful about it. But he nevertheless said he envied me my “footballness”. We would go together to many events and filming locations and whatnot, often involving tricky social situations with people we didn’t know. Invariably, I would soon be engaged in animated conversation with groups of blokes (and it was mostly blokes) about sport. Poor Adam – a much cleverer and funnier man than me – would be left shifting from foot to foot, trying to pull the right faces and make the right noises. He got a bid fed up with it, and I don’t blame him.
Once, sitting in the cafe at Television Centre, we were approached by a man who turned out to be Mark Byford, then the BBC’s deputy director general. Unbidden, he rattled off the entire West Brom 1968 FA Cup-winning team. “What on earth was that about?” asked Adam. “Just football,” I shrugged. Now, I doubt this football bond I seemed to have with one of the big cheeses ever really advanced my career, but neither did it do me any harm.
I can’t think of a single other subject area so useful for starting a conversation and establishing a bit of mutual ground. It can be on any level – trivial, technical or emotionally profound – and it can happen between people of any age, class, gender and social status. Ahead of Gordon Brown appearing on The One Show when he was prime minister, I was asked to go to No 10 to speak to him. I was left to wait in a small room, frightened and alone. But then he marched in, asking how our then manager Tony Mowbray was doing. He named a few of our players, too. All was well; we were on a level.
This all makes sport, and football particularly, an incredibly valuable thing, in and out of the workplace. I suspect society gains more from it on the swings than it loses on the roundabouts. But I do get that if you’re outside this giant clique it must all be very annoying, as well as exquisitely boring. A bit like football, actually, from time to time.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster and writer
