There was a time when football punditry felt like a useful extension of the game. Analysis arrived after the final whistle, opinion followed evidence, and former players helped translate what we had just seen into something clearer. Somewhere along the way, the balance tipped. The pundits did not just start analysing football, but became football’s loudest protagonists.
Turn on Sky Sports, scroll through social media, or glance at a news app and you’ll see it instantly. Today, a clip of Roy Keane scowling at a co-panellist travels further than a 20-pass move up the pitch. Jamie Carragher breaking down a pass with telestrator precision is ofen reduced to a single hot take. Gary Neville, once the voice of the tactical nuance, is now likely to trend for a political rant as for a back-three explanation.
This is not a piece arguing that pundits are bad for football. Quite the opposite. It is an attempt to understand how their dominance in the sports news cycle has distorted discussion, drowned out the facts, and in some cases, begun to shape the environments in which clubs and managers or coaches operate.
The Age of the Loud Former Pro
Modern football coverage is built around personalities. The studio sofa has become as important as the touchline. Pundits are rewarded not for being right, but for being repeatable: a phrase that can be clipped, shared, debated and weaponised.The most obvious example is Roy Keane. His appeal is undeniable. He speaks with the authority of someone who captained Manchester United at their most ruthless, someone who lived standards rather than theorised about them. When he looks into the camera and says players are “impostors” - a line delivered on Sky Sports during one of United’s post-Mourinho slumos - it cuts through because it feels authentic, visceral, and uncompromising.
Authenticity is not the same as accuracy. Keane’s worldview was forged in an era before social media, before any player power, before data-driven recruitment and squad rotation. His football morality play is binary: effort or failure, courage or cowardice. In a modern dressing room, that framing is not just simplistic; it can be destabilising.
When Analysis Becomes Theatre.
It is important to separate Keane’s brand from the work of pundits like Carragher and Neville at their best. Their tactical breakdowns on Monday Night Football are excellent. Carragher’s use of spacing, rest defence and pressing has educated a generation of fans who previously saw football only in goals and tackles. Neville, particularly in his early punditry years, was thoughtful, empathetic and capable of admitting uncertainty, a rare quality on television.
Even Thierry Henry, whose punditry is sometimes meme-able, offers something extremely valuable: the attacker’s eye, the sense of movement before the ball arrives, the subtleties that data struggles to capture.
The problem is not the analysis. It is the way the analysis now competes with performance. Television demands moments. Algorithms demand heat. And so nuance is squeezed between rants, memes, jokes, or plain rude attacks.
Roy Keane and the Weight of Words
Nowhere is clearer than in the way Keane’s commentary can hover over clubs like a storm cloud. During Manchester United’s transitional years, his criticism frequently became the dominant narrative, regardless of what was happening on the pitch.
When Michael Carrick stepped into management, first as a caretaker at United, and later at Middlesbrough, Keane’s comments were dissected obsessively. Even when he was being particularly measured, acknowledging Carrick’s intelligence while questioning the culture he inherited, headlines focused on the implied doubt rather than the context.
This is where the modern pundit becomes a problem for clubs. One voice, amplified endlessly, can frame a manager before he has a chance to define himself. Decision makers say they ignore it, but supporters do not. Players do not. The noise seeps in.
Keane’s criticism is not inherently wrong. Standards matter. But when his worldview becomes a weekly referendum on a club’s legitimacy, it risks freezing the process in nostalgia.
The Entertainer Pundit
Then there is the rise of the entertainer. Micah Richards brings joy, warmth and accessibility to the broadcast. His laughter is infectious, his presence disarming. He is a reminder that football is fun.
But even this has a downside. The show becomes about chemistry, about who plays the role of the stern uncle, the class clown, the intellectual. Debate is framed less around evidence and more about contrast. Keane scowls, Richards laughs, Carragher explains. The football itself becomes the backdrop.
Figures like Paul Merson sit somewhere in between, leaning heavily on intuition and gut feeling. Merson’s predictions are often wrong, sometimes wildly so, yet they persist because certainty is more marketable than doubt.
Opinion Without Facts
The most damaging shift is how opinion has begun to replace reporting. Pundit quotes are now treated as news. A manager’s job security can be debated for days without a single reference to underlying performance metrics, injury context or squad quality.
Football is more measurable than ever. Expected goals, pressing efficiency, squad age curves, and more. Yet much of the mainstream conversation still hinges on whether a pundit “likes” what they see.
This creates a feedback loop. Clubs respond to fan sentiment. Fan sentiment is shaped by punditry. Punditry is shaped by the need to dominate attention.
The answer is not to silence pundits or retreat into blandness. Football needs voices, and former players offer perspectives no data model can replicate.
Clubs need to learn to manage the noise. Media literacy should be a part of modern leadership. Managers and sporting directors must contextualise pundit criticism internally, helping players understand when commentary is performance and when it is entertainment.
Broadcasters, too, have a responsibility. Balance personality with evidence. Let analysis breathe. Resist the urge to turn every disagreement into a shouting match.
When the Noise Wins: the Case of Ruben Amorim
The Premier League has a habit of devouring young managers, and Ruben Amorim offers a cautionary example of how pundit pressure can accelerate that process. He arrived with a clear philosophy, forged in Portugal, rooted in positional play, control and collective responsibility. What he did not arrive with was experience of the Premier League’s scrutiny machine - a media ecosystem where ever selection, sub, and press conference is instantly filtered through former players with microphones and enormous reach. As results wobbled, the commentary grew louder. Words and phrases like “Naive, stubborn, obsessed, too idealistic for England” spread like wildfire. He buckled with safer selections to try to combat the noise. In trying to do so, he diluted the very identity that earned him the job, and he admitted in his later press conferences that the Gary Nevilles of this world were simply too loud.
Younger Managers Suffer More
This is not unique to Amorim. Graham Potter experienced something similar at Chelsea. Potter was hired precisely because he was thoughtful, process-led and resistant to knee-jerking. Yet, once results faltered, pundit discourse reframed him as weak, indecisive, out of his depth - the exact opposites of the praise he received while at Brighton. The pundits’ ability to flip like a coin is pure fandom. It's fickle, purely opinion-based based with no patience. Studio debates focused less on the structural chaos at Chelsea, but more on whether Potter “looked like” a Chelsea manager. Authority became a visual test rather than a strategic one.
And imagine being asked, on live TV, week after week, about your own job security. It is frankly rude, disrespectful, and purely for entertainment.
Even someone as ideologically confident as Roberto De Zerbi has felt the shift. Initially celebrated as a breath of fresh air, his Brighton side was praised when results aligned with aesthetics. But as opponents adapted, the same pundit voices began to question his adaptability, his defensive balance, his realism. The conversation quickly moved to how his team player was, and whether his ideas were sustainable at all - often with zero reference to squad churn, injuries or underlying metrics. Vincent Kompany experienced the same reframing: bravery becoming naivety, philosophy turning into recklessness. Yet the trouble is, most of these pundits made for terrible first-team managers. It's probably the easiest job in world football, with deadly consequences.
The common thread is not flawed ideas, but a media environment that demands instant surrender to convention. Young managers are not simply analysed; they are judged for culture fit by pundits whose authority comes from a different era. Too often, clubs fail to shield their own, allowing television verdicts to fill the vacuum left by institutional silence.
Maintaining Total Control
Some managers, albeit before the emergence of the power-pundit and social media, were experts at shutting down journalists. Sir Alex Ferguson even famously banned some journalists and publications all together from his Manchester United press conferences. His ruling with an iron fist maintained total control on external, distracting factors and maybe modern managers need to take a leaf out of his well-read book.
In modern football, survival depends as much on resisting the pundit machine as on beating the opposition. Manage both, and you’ll hit Pep-like levels, who himself has suffered abuse despite his obvious brilliance. You can never be too sure in football as opinions take centre stage, ahead of long-term planning, improvements or revolutionary football. Managing a football team from the comfort of a television studio makes it look easy, and we must remember that it is all for entertainment and for football to continue to reach a huge global audience. Clicks generate viewership, which generates income. Its a simple rule of thumb to follow.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial policy or position of LiveScore
