Here in the larger cities of the US we have a form of entertainment called “sports talk radio”. In case you aren’t familiar with the concept, it consists of radio channels (either AM or FM) that have been solely dedicated to conversation about sports.
There is usually very little pure sports news content (maybe brief news and score summaries a couple of times per hour)…instead, the format consists of 3- or 4-hour blocks of time dedicated to regular hosts who answer phone calls and also monologue or dialogue about recent sports events. The phone calls often involve shouting and talking over one another; the ‘hosting’ often consists of multiple hosts at the same time shouting and talking over one another.
So that’s the basic idea. My questions:
Do some or most of the large cities in your country (please name the country) have such stations and formats?
If so, is football (aka soccer) the main topic? I ask this second one because in the US if you actually call one of these stations to discuss soccer they make fun of you for a minute and then go back to football, baseball, basketball or hockey.
Yes, the UK has lots of Sports Radio, both on a national scale and locally. There’s also phone-in shows on Sports TV channels, like Sky Sports, or the now defunct Setanta. Lots of sports get discussed: football, rugby, tennis, golf, etc. but it is most football (soccer).
What about the tone of these shows? Do the hosts and callers frequently razz and ridicule the players, the management, and rival teams? Or is the discussion kept fairly civil?
I’m not actually aware of any local sports-only stations. There are a couple of national stations, Talk Sport and BBC Five Live, but even the latter is by no means all sports.
Talk Sport is probably the closest to what you describe, with forcedly opinionated presenters and deliberately antagonistic phone-in topics. It’s basically the back pages of a tabloid newspaper, in spoken form. Five Live is slightly more civilised, but also quite moronic at times.
BBC GMR (Gtr. Manchester) has phone in shows, IIRC, and so does BBC Merseyside. BBC Scotland also has a show, though I’m not sure if that counts as “local” or “national”. The BBC Scotland shows I listened to have all been fairly civil.
I know Spain has Radio Marca, apparently also a Radio Deportes, but I don’t know whether they are available countrywide(ish).
There are some radio stations and chains which are “music only”, specially in FM; any generalist station either in FM or AM will have sports information. Some morning programs are 55 minutes of sports, 5 of “oh yes, there is a world outside the stadiums” and back to sports. On a day with football games, it can be difficult to find a station which is not on the games; depending on location, your only non-football option on a Sunday afternoon is Radio 2, “Classical Radio”, which for some reason has better coverage than the public network’s two other FM channels.
Whether the programs are civil or behave like a bunch of hooligans depends on the station. Apparently some guys think their dick will shrink if they admit that a Míster can be a decent human being or say anything good about a team that’s not “their own”; others have no problem with that, and do not try to hide which is “the team they love” but can say Them Other Guys Done Good without losing their voice.
As for ridiculing rival teams, I have not actually heard much of that. Partly because even local stations will have several teams in their area. It’s not like the US system of (generally) one team per city. So Radio Manchester, for example, cannot be nakedly pro-Man Utd, because it will piss off all the City fans, not to mention Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale etc.
I suppose if you’re listening to a station in somewhere like Norwich where they only have one big team, they might be a bit more partisan and make disparaging remarks about Ipswich Town.
[semi-hijack]Is there a football (soccer) season?[/semi-hijack] In the US, the professional sports have strictly demarcated seasons, exactly 162 games for baseball, 82 games for basketball, plus playoffs for both, etc. But I seem to hear soccer results year-round. When American Football season is over, football talk is minimal. When Baseball season is over, there is little baseball talk, etc… The sports radio hosts talk about other stuff for months at a time. Same in soccer countries?
Canada has such stations in all the really big cities. Here in Toronto it’s The Fan 590.
This being Canada, the main topic is, by far, hockey. Hockey is the primary topic year-round. Baseball, football, and basketball are secondary concerns. Soccer gets some time, but on a tertiary level with golf, tennis, stuff like that.
Yes. It runs from July to June .
Seriously, there are many separate competitions. In England, the Premier League runs from mid-August to early May. There are also two knockout competitions, the FA Cup in which top-level involvement runs from January to May, and the League Cup which runs a couple of months earlier. Then there are European-wide club competitions for a small number of teams that did well in national league and cup competitions in the previous season. These run on a roughly two-week schedule from about August to November, then I think February to May for the latter stages.
And then there’s the World Cup every four years, and the European Championship every four years in between. Leading up to those tournaments, there are qualifying games dotted through the year.
So, in non-World Cup/Euro years, there is basically no top-level football from late May to mid-August, apart from a few international games.
New Zealand has one national station Radio Sport. It doesn’t have much shouting though. During summer most of hte day is taken up by cricket commentaries.
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