Why are all football pundits morons?

Watching ITV’s half-time studio discussion yesterday between football pundits Roy Keane, Peter Reid and Gareth Southgate for the City vs Utd FA Cup match, I felt like I was being subjected to lowbrow torture. I don’t expect to be intellectually challenged when tuning into a game of football, but the level of their chat was so mindnumbingly inane I almost felt like booting the TV in.

Of course it didn’t help my frame of mind that I was undergoing cold turkey at the time after coming off the opiate tramadol for back pain, but I think I’d have reached my punditry breaking point regardless. It was quite simply years and years of moronic football commentary coming to a head.

In a 10-minute discussion about the first half which saw Utd go 3-0 up, all the pundits kept going on and on about was how Vincent Kompany’s two-footed challenge on Nani wasn’t a sending off. Have they not being watching English football during the past five years? A two-footed tackle always results in a red card these days. Those are the rules. Rules that are there for a reason – to stop players picking up horrific injuries – and which have been applied consistently for several seasons now.

Yes, the rules weren’t so strict when Keane, Reid and Southgate were playing but the game has moved on, unlike their punditry. So why do we still have to be subjected to their misinformed gibberish? Would it have been too much to ask for some insightful half-time analysis which highlighted the tactics and play that resulted in one team's superiority over the other? After all, top-level football is like chess nowadays. Not that you'd know it of course listening to the rubbish on offer from these supposed experts. 

The standard of punditry on the BBC’s flagship football programme Match of the Day is just as bad. After ten pints of snakebite and black I could come up with more meaningful analysis than Alan Shearer. How hard is it, after all, to state that “the boy done good” after Rooney scores a hat-trick or “Tottenham were sensational” after a 5-0 win? What annoys me the most, though, is how black and white the MOTD boys are in their views. One week Blackburn are, according to Alan Hansen, “bad, just soooo bad!” after they narrowly lose 2-1, but “brilliant...brilliant!” when Rovers scrape a 2-1 win the following week.

There are never any grey areas with TV football punditry; each team’s performance is judged only on a week-by-week basis in complete isolation. Thus a first defeat for a side who’d previously won three on the bounce makes them rubbish overnight. What a load of shallow nonsense.

It’s not like the alternative on the radio is that much better either. 5Live football commentary is undoubtedly a step up from its TV counterpart, but you’re still subjected to the same old hackneyed views from people like Alan Green who habitually declares everything on and off the pitch as either “Absolutely disgraceful!” or “Absolutely shocking!” and nothing else in between. Once you move onto TalkSport and other less well-known radio stations you might as well check in to the looney bin. In fact, you need to be certifiably mad to agree with anything they say.

Compare this all to genuinely insightful pundits in other sports like John McEnroe in tennis or Phil Liggett in cycling – people who actually teach you things you don’t know about their sports – and you realise football is horribly short-changing its viewers and has been for some time. I know I'm not the only one who thinks this. The question is what can be done?

All football pundits are morons. I dare you to disagree.