Wayne Rooney’s exit was a reminder of how common the fly-on-the-wall club documentary has become. The age of perpetual content is upon us, and it is viciously uninteresting
Won’t someone think of the streaming platforms? Wayne Rooney’s departure from Plymouth Argyle, after seven months and a winless run that left the club bottom of the Championship, not only suggests the former England star’s managerial career has reached its end – it’s also a signal of how contentious the fly-on-the-wall documentary has become in modern football. Rooney was the driving force behind Plymouth’s announcement last November that it would produce a behind-the-scenes documentary about the club’s battle to stay in the Championship. This was a scheme cooked up in the fires of the post-Welcome to Wrexham content jamboree, which has made seemingly every sub-top flight club across England eager to spin its struggles to stay afloat – amid deindustrialization, post-Brexit economic malaise, the stresses and joys of small-city life, and the slog of the English Football League – into streaming gold. The plan was to sell the finished product to a streaming service like Amazon or Netflix, thereby boosting the club’s coffers and stamping Plymouth Argyle on the cultural map with a force that games away to Preston and Oxford United alone can’t quite muster. Now, however, the plan is dead: with Rooney dispatched, the club has scrapped the documentary, which it feared could become a distraction as the team fights relegation. Neither decision has been lamented by the club’s fans, who never warmed to Rooney and reviled the idea of the documentary from its inception.
Plymouth’s abandonment of this sweaty content “play” points, perhaps, to a broader indecision among professional teams across Europe about the benefits of flinging open the training ground gates to the corporate documentarian’s camera. Amazon’s All or Nothing is the series most emblematic of the modern soccer club’s need to “tell its story”, but it appears to have lost much of the momentum it had a few years ago, after the success of its seasons featuring Tottenham and Arsenal. This may have something to do with the overwhelmingly negative perception of these documentaries among players: former Spurs captain Hugo Lloris, for instance, was withering about the Amazon series in his recent autobiography, describing it as a muzzle on the players’ freedom of speech and movement (“We had to be careful all the time,” he wrote). It may also be the product of simple cost-benefit analysis: Spurs and Arsenal each reportedly hauled in around £10m for their respective stints on the All or Nothing merry go round, and while that sum is nothing to be sneezed at (it’s good enough for a decent back-up defender, say, or an under-the-radar prospect from the lower reaches of Ligue 1), it’s perhaps not quite enough to justify the disruptions and reputational risks involved.
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