If you walk down Olympic Way from Wembley Park station to the stadium on a matchday – it doesn’t really matter which match, or which day – you’ll soon start passing lamp-posts bearing relevantly-branded banners. As you get closer to Wembley stadium itself most fans are funnelled up two large ramps, while those destined for the posh seats head straight on. The blank side of each ramp will be plastered with themed panels, as will the concrete pillars that hold it up. And these aren’t just whatever signage the organisers had lying around: they are bespoke items, precision-crafted to snugly fit that bit of ramp-side or this specific column.
It continues inside, where there is barely a surface left unclaimed. Walls, columns, tunnels, lintels, nothing is safe. When Spurs play at Wembley their club motto is plastered on the floor of the home dressing-room; when England play it is peeled away and the three lions crest put in its place, just in case the players’ feet forget in whose cause they are performing.
It is uncontrollable. From the pitch, whose white lines demarc the sensible boundaries of their relevance, teams and their sponsors spill over every surface like a poison fog, before eventually leaking outside and oozing down the street. Nobody walking past any of these signs will be unaware of what event they have handsomely paid to see, but neither will they be able to travel more than a couple of paces without a reminder. There is no horizon too distant, no object too inconvenient. When it comes to unnecessarily branding vacant surfaces, to dare is very much to do.
But it is not easy to meaningfully cover every surface in the neighbourhood of a stadium. Life was so much simpler when you could slap a modest This is Anfield sign on the entrance to a tunnel and consider your job done. Rousing photographs and sponsors’ logos are easy enough to source but there are locations where only words will fit. Chelsea’s changing room at Stamford Bridge contains a quote from Jimmy Greaves claiming that the club boasts “probably the greatest name in the world” because it “conjures up the best part of the biggest city in the world”, which is both factually incorrect – London having been overtaken as the world’s largest city before Greaves was born – and also absolutely nothing to do with the game of football and Chelsea’s place within it. Still, a legendary former player said it, and without it a section of the foot-tall strip of wall that separates the players’ lockers from the ceiling and is occasionally interrupted by air conditioning vents would be unforgivably undecorated.
The desperate search for words to fill space that could just as easily be left empty led to the invention of perhaps the year’s great sporting catchphrase. In early November the dressing room at Perth’s Optus Stadium was plastered with pictures and inspiring words and phrases before Australia’s cricket team occupied it for an ODI against South Africa. They included the unarguable “pressure!”, the obvious “patience!” and the bewildering “elite honesty!”. “You can lie to everyone else, but you can’t lie to yourself. So that’s elite honesty to yourself,” said their coach, Justin Langer, when asked for an explanation. “The Aussie way I know is to look a bloke in the eye and tell them the truth and be happy to get some truth back, so that’s elite honesty.”
This, of course, is an Australia team that earlier this year employed sandpaper and skulduggery in a ball-tampering fiasco that fell some way short of even the most amateurish honesty. Still, perhaps the message has seeped through. This week, for the first time since that game, the Australia team returned to Perth for a Test against India, and while on the field their captain, Tim Paine, turned to India’s Murali Vijay and started a conversation about Virat Kohli. “I know he’s your captain,” Paine said, “but you can’t seriously like him as a bloke.”
These are precisely the awkward but honest conversations Langer prizes. Paine looked a bloke in the eye, told him the truth and was happy to get some truth back. That’s some elite honesty right there. (Langer is a veritable jukebox of elite catchphrases, having in May exhorted his team to display “elite professionalism, elite mateship and elite humility”.)
As the increasingly prevalent practice of sportspeople covering their mouths during conversations to guard against lip-reading miscreants shows, in sport loose talk can cost if not lives then at least reputations. That they are wise to do so was proved by the recent FA charge against José Mourinho for using foul language, a claim that was decided in favour of him before he was sacked by Manchester United after the “expert in the translation and interpretation of lip reading of colloquial Portuguese language” employed by the FA was out-argued by the “expert in the Portuguese language, including colloquialisms” hired by Mourinho. Undeterred, the FA insisted it “will continue to take action for any form of abusive, insulting, or improper language or behaviour, which is directed towards a camera”, it being of vital importance to protect the sensibilities of demure photographic apparatus.
It is not just overproductive stadium decorators who could benefit from allowing the action to proceed without distraction in all its glorious simplicity, and stem the tide of words that senselessly swills around it like so much beer sploshing from a clumsily-carried plastic pint glass. Though perhaps a newspaper column is not the best place to argue against the practice of producing unnecessary words just to fill space.
