Abstract
This article details the functions of the imperative verb ‘listen’ in the pre-match build-up discussions of television football pundits. Data were recorded from live coverage of recent national and international football competitions. The analysis shows how ‘listen’ plays a role in what is referred to as prospective expertise: the work accomplished during the extensive pre-game build-up sections of a show, in which pundits engage in highlighting potential points of drama or sporting adversity to be anticipated in the game that is yet to be played. Three patterns are identified, in which different sequential positionings of ‘listen’ yield differing kinds of statements or evaluations, assessments, predictions and caveats regarding the forthcoming game.
Keywords
Introduction
Televised football represents an enormous and lucrative sector of the international broadcast entertainment industry. For decades, even pre-dating the massive expansion of the market brought about by the advent of satellite TV, the producers of television football programmes recognised that fans not only like to watch the game but also talk about the game, both in anticipation of it, and as a way of dissecting their experience and opinions of its outcomes (Gerhardt, 2014). Consequently producers have increasingly incorporated these kinds of pre- and post-match discussions into their programme formats. In the UK, this dates back to the 1970s with programmes such as The Big Match, and long-standing staples like Football Focus (Saturday lunchtimes, previewing the day’s games) and Match of the Day (Saturday evenings, showing highlights and reviewing the results).
However, with the increasing dominance, over the last three decades, of subscription-based dedicated sports channels like Sky Sports and its competitors, there has come the opportunity to massively expand the pre- and post-match discussion elements. Nowadays, especially in coverage of live games in the Premier League and in European cup competitions like the Champions’ League and Europa League, on numerous evenings in any week during the football season, there can be found programmes of three or four hours in length which usually feature one full 90-minute match, bracketed by ‘build-up’ segments and post-match analyses that can take up as much airtime as the game itself.
The present article focuses on the build-up segments of the show, in which the discourse is based around highlighting potential points of drama or sporting adversity to be anticipated in the game that is yet to be played. I refer to this type of discourse as prospective expertise: meaning the authoritative discussion of significant events that have not yet taken place but are about to. The analysis concerns a particular linguistic resource that is regularly deployed in this form of talk-in-interaction: the imperative verb ‘listen’. Based on a collection of fifty examples drawn from a wide range of live UK television broadcasts, I use conversation analysis to tease out the range of work accomplished through the use of ‘listen’ in relation to the production of expert talk by televised sports pundits.
Punditry and prospective expertise
Pundits are persons with recognised expertise in a particular field, employed to offer authoritative opinions to the general public. In televised football, the pundit is usually an ex-professional footballer. He or she can adopt a number of roles, thus producing different forms of discourse, and varying types and levels of expertise in relation to the live game (Tolson, 2016).
One such role is a co-commentator on the game as it is underway. This involves working in close collaboration with the main commentator, who would be a professional sports broadcaster, to provide additional colour, detail or insight at key moments, especially during in-game replays of goals, fouls and other significant refereeing decisions. The type of expertise involved here is similar in many ways to the ‘smooth talk’ produced by commentators themselves (Kuiper, 1996): a requirement to speak quickly, fluently and authoritatively about the events of the game unfolding in real time on the pitch. In some sports, including football, the action can be extremely fast with unpredictable turns, and the commentators therefore have to be adept at thinking on their feet, drawing out for the viewer an orderly narrative from what can often seem a complex melee of players. They are helped in this by the extensive use of slow-motion replays (Marriott, 1996).
The present article considers a second type of pundit, who plays a very different role to the co-commentator. Their role is to talk about the game in pre- and post-match discussions involving a central host and two, three or sometimes four ex-professional players. Guided by the host, or anchor, the pundits are expected to marshall their superior knowledge and experience in order to speak from a position of heightened epistemic authority, with the aim of (a) building up tensions and expectations for the audience, and (b) using professional vision (Goodwin, 2003) to instruct the viewer on how to interpret key events that transpired.
Although they typically involve exactly the same set of individuals, the kinds of discourse involved in pre- and post-match analysis, and the specific work of ‘showing expertise’ or speaking with authority in the two distinct contexts, are very different. Post-match analysis involves the pundits dissecting the key ‘talking points’ of the game, often assisted by sophisticated touch-screen technologies enabling pause and replay, shifts in visual angle and overlay of highlights, arrows and other visual aids onto the recorded action from the game (Fele and Campagnolo, 2021). The level of analytical detail that can be achieved by pundits trained in the use of this technology is immense. Using its range of visual devices the pundit works to render ‘recognisably meaningful what audiences have already seen without noticing’ (Fele and Campagnolo, 2021: 617).
By contrast, in pre-match analysis the pundits’ discourse is necessarily prospective rather than retrospective. Here, the task is to express authoritative opinions as to the qualities of individual players who are likely to feature; the history, recent performance and likely strengths and weaknesses of the two teams in question; and in a broader sense, to offer views on potential points of drama that will underpin the ‘spectacle’ of the game to come. In short, pre-match discussions involve a form of prospective expertise designed to heighten audience tensions and expectations regarding the evening’s game.
Listen as an action-preface
The discourse marker listen is related to other turn-initial particles, such as oh, well, so, but, uh, look, and so on, the functions of which have been studied in English (Bolden, 2006, 2009; Heritage, 1984, 2013; Raymond, 2004; Sidnell, 2007) as well as German (Deppermann, 2013), French (Adam and Dalmas, 2012), Russian (Bolden, 2018), Japanese (Hayashi, 2009), Polish (Weidner, 2016) and Estonian (Keevallik, 2012). In various ways they are designed to convey information about the kind of utterance the speaker is engaged in producing, and how that utterance relates to a co-participant’s prior turn; often, to mark some kind of disjuncture (Heritage and Sorjonen, 2018).
For example, in English, oh functions significantly as a marker of repair, including self-repair after a misunderstanding (Schegloff, 1992); as well as indexing a change of state in a speaker’s understanding of the prior speaker’s action or agenda, or some other shift in their grasp of an informational terrain (Heritage, 1984). Well is centrally involved in marking dispreferred responses (Pomerantz, 1984); as well as resisting or rejecting the terms of a prior speaker’s perceived action (Schegloff and Lerner, 2009). So has been shown to function in a range of ways to modulate the actions embodied in the turns it prefaces, such as implementing ‘incipient’ actions in conversation (Bolden, 2006) and reframing or evading questions in interview settings (Hutchby, 2020).
In that they are ‘sequential markers that convey some relation between what the current speaker is about to say and what the previous speaker has just said’ (Heritage, 2002: 197), turn-initial particles can also be referred to as action-prefaces. In fact, in the case of listen, and the closely related look, this is a better term since these items can just as easily occur during a turn (turn-internally) and in turn-initial position (Sidnell, 2007). As we will see in the following analysis, listen can be used to preface new, usually contrastive, actions deep within a turn that has been underway for some time.
The analysis will reveal both a core function of listen in sports pundit discourse, as well as a wider range of interactional functions all related to the work of prospective expertise in pre-match discussions. The core function is the provision of a ‘bottom line’ evaluation, assessment, prediction or caveat regarding the forthcoming game. I describe three main ways in which the particle is sequentially positioned to accomplish this kind of authoritative talk. The three patterns of use relate in different ways to the key discursive task in this setting: displaying the authoritativeness of the pundit’s opinion whilst also highlighting points of dramatic tension, unpredictability and non-taken for grantedness in the match that is about to be played.
Data
Data were collected by recording the pre-match segments of live football coverage broadcast by UK television channels, both subscription-based (Sky Sports, TNTSport) and free-to-air (BBC and ITV). The games themselves ranged from standard matches played in the English Premier League or the EFL Championship, usually played at the weekend, to significant international club matches in competitions such as the UEFA Champions’ League, usually played midweek.
From this substantial data set (each pre-match broadcast ranging in length from 20 minutes to an hour), 50 examples of sequences in which listen occurs in a pundit’s talk were extracted. Examples of listen produced by other participants, such as the anchor, or guest interviewees such as the manager of one or other team, were excluded as these contributors are not formally identified as pundits. Extracts were transcribed according to the widely used conventions originally developed by Jefferson (2004), and analysed using the sequential procedures of conversation analysis (CA) (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2008).
Turn-initial listen and elaborating agreement
In the first pattern to be discussed, listen occurs at the outset of a pundit’s turn. In such a position, we find that the particle is bound up with the work of agreeing with a suggestion proffered by a prior speaker; moreover, it presages further, more detailed talk through which the pundit elaborates on that agreement.
In the following extract, the match is at the half-time interval. The pundits’ key task here is to manage the expectations audience members might have for the unfolding of the game in the second half. In this particular case, the score is 0-0, and the discussion is focused on the possibility of greater drama to come, including hopefully the scoring of some goals.
In her turn the anchor suggests to the pundit that there might be ‘goals’ as the game progresses. The pundit opens his response with an agreement token (‘Yeh’) followed by ‘I mean’ and ‘listen’ (line 3). Thus, although the particle listen does not occur strictly as the first item in the turn, it is positioned as part of a turn-initial action (agreement + listen) that precedes the substantive topical content of the utterance. The pundit then goes on to highlight the possibility of there being goals, first of all by referring to Leeds United’s tendency to ‘play with freedom’ (in other words, play attacking football) whether at home or away. Furthermore, the opposing team, Burnley, are described as being ‘safe now’ (i.e. they have accrued enough points to avoid relegation at the end of the season) which encourages him to think they might ‘come out’ (play less defensively) in the second half and ‘we’ll see some goals’.
Thus, the particle listen is used as part of the overall action of agreeing with the suggestion that has been proffered by the previous speaker. Placing the item at the start of a turn enables the pundit to highlight, not only that he is agreeing with the proffered scenario, but that in addition he is about to speak from a position of heightened authority or expertise, as the talk following listen is focused on providing further evidence for that agreement.
A similar set of features can be seen in extract (2). Here, the pundits on the panel are discussing the skills of one particular player featuring in the forthcoming game:
The anchor raises the topic of a particular player, Callum Wilson, who she suggests is the main if not the only goal-scoring threat that Newcastle currently possess. Moreover, she suggests that if the opposing team can stop this player from scoring, ‘doesn’t feel like there er any other outlets fer- f’ Newcastle’.
In response, the first pundit agrees and highlights the player’s early versatility (lines 6–12). Then, in lines 13–18, he turns to address the second pundit (‘Darren’), suggesting now that the player should make changes to his current playing style (‘do a little bit more outside uv the box’) in order to rediscover earlier goal-scoring prowess.
In line 19, pundit 2 begins his turn in an identical way to the pundit in extract (1): an agreement token followed by ‘I mean listen’. Again, then, the particle listen is positioned as part of a turn-initial action that precedes the substantive content of the utterance. In the lines that follow, the pundit goes on to produce a more detailed account of the player’s initial success at the club in which he displays heightened epistemic authority by quantifying that success, in terms of six goals scored in the first seven games; then comparing that number unfavourably with the more recent record of ‘two in ’is la:st nine’. Finally, returning to the overall agreement with the anchor’s initial suggestion, the pundit states that the player’s decline in form is ‘prob’ly why Newcastle at the minute er where they are’; that is, in the bottom part of the league.
In extract (3), the pundit’s listen is pushed back slightly further into his turn. While still recognisably part of an overall action of agreeing, this positioning allows us to see more clearly a further role played by listen in the overall construction of the turn.
The anchor’s turn concerns the danger of relegation from the Premier League for Leeds United. In the English football league system, the ‘Championship’ is one tier down from the top level ‘Premier League’, and there are enormous financial consequences for a team being relegated, which happens to the bottom three teams (with corresponding promotion for the top three in the Championship) at the end of each season. The suggestion is that the ‘team spirit’ on display could avoid this fate for Leeds.
In line 6, the pundit’s listen is preceded not only by the same kind of agreement tokens we found in extracts (1) and (2), but also by a short inbreath and ‘erm’. In itself, a structure such as this – ‘.h erm,’ – can be treated as marking the embarkation on a substantive response to a prior turn: in particular, the production of an opinion or assessment. In previous work on radio phone-ins (Hutchby, 1999) I referred to this as a ‘buffer device’, showing how callers frequently use it to move from an initial greetings exchange with the host to the stance of one expressing an opinion on some topical issue.
In the above extract, therefore, the listen becomes not just part of the overall agreement action at the turn’s outset, but also part of a buffer device by which the pundit additionally marks his move into expert talk, commenting further on what the anchor has described as Leeds United’s ‘team spirit’ which may save them from relegation. It is in this sense that, as we will see in more detail below, the particle listen can often take on a ‘pivotal’ function in the turn’s construction. This becomes clearer once we look at turn-internal uses of listen in the sports pundit data.
Turn-internal listen and contrastive assessments
As noted earlier, listen can just as readily be positioned turn-internally as it can turn-initially. In that position, listen is produced as an action-preface, but at some point within a turn that is already underway, and may have been so for some time. In the following set of extracts, the pundits’ turn-internal listen is produced as part of a contrastive device in which one type of assessment of a team or of individual players is set against some kind of caveat. In so far as it therefore marks a shift in the contents of a turn from one kind of assessment to another, in these extracts listen can be said to act as a turn-pivotal particle.
In extract (4) the pundit is in the course of discussing the chances of one team, Paris St Germain (PSG), winning tonight’s game to go through to the next stages of the competition. As the extract begins he is producing an assessment of the mentality of key PSG players like MBappé and Neymar:
Lines 1–8 comprise a positive assessment of PSG’s chances in tonight’s game, focusing especially on the approach of ‘big players’ to such important matches. With ‘the likes of Mbappé and Neymar’, in other words, there are good reasons for supporters of PSG to feel optimistic that the team will ‘go well in this competition’. Then in line 9, ‘listen’ prefaces what turns out to be the final clause in this longer utterance. That clause, ‘this is goina be so tough here tonight’, offers a different kind of assessment to the talk preceding ‘listen’; one that counsels against taking anything for granted. Despite the previously mentioned ‘big players’ that PSG possess, this final assessment highlights the difficulty of the task facing PSG against their opposition, and therefore the unpredictability of outcome in the forthcoming match.
In this example, then, listen is placed in between two parts of a contrast structure. Whereas the agreement-oriented work of the pundit’s talk in extracts (1)-(3) was evident at the start of the turn with phrases like ‘Yeh I mean listen’, in extract (4) we find, deep into the pundit’s utterance, the disjunctive phrase ‘but, .h listen’ (lines 8–9) which serves as a kind of pivotal point separating the two contrasting emphases in his assessment of the forthcoming game (‘big players [who] step up ’n perform’ vs. ‘this is goina be so tough here tonight’).
Extract (5) shows the same pattern. Again, some way into the pundit’s turn we find the contrastive use of ‘But listen’ (line 11) marking two distinct parts of his evaluation of a team (in this case Atletico Madrid) and their qualities:
As in extract (4), the talk prior to ‘But listen’ can be described as foregrounding positive aspects of the team in question. The first part of the pundit’s turn (lines 5–10) highlights Atletico Madrid’s resilience and attacking approach to the game. Comparing them to their manager (ex-player Diego Simeone), the team are described as ‘fiery’, ‘determined an:: aggressive’. Again, then, there are good grounds for fans of Atletico to feel optimistic about their team’s chances. However following the pivotal ‘But listen’ (line 11), as in extract (4) there comes a very different evaluation; one which counsels caution as opposed to optimism. Atletico ‘lost the spine uh their team last season’; in other words, a number of very important players left the club, with the result that it is now significantly weakened as a unit. Fans should therefore not take anything for granted about the team’s chances of winning the game.
In both these extracts, the particle listen is produced at a point of contrast between a largely optimistic assessment of a team’s chances and a more pessimistic, bottom line evaluation highlighting the problems that might befall them. In the context of a pre-match ‘build-up’ discussion, the pundits here can be described as heightening the drama of the upcoming game for the benefit of the fans in the audience. Optimism needs to be tempered by a recognition of the scale of the challenge.
Extract (6) is from slightly later in the same Atletico Madrid discussion. The arrowed turn shows the pundit producing a similar, pivotally contrastive but listen with the same features:
In lines 1–6 he highlights points of strength that could mitigate the earlier mentioned loss of the team’s ‘spine’. Three particular players are named who have ‘the ability the experience’ to lead the team to success and therefore, in spite of his previous caveat about the loss of key players, there now appear to be new grounds for optimism in the game to come. However, following a ‘but, listen’, in lines 6–8 he again highlights the immensity of the challenge facing the team, agreeing with a co-pundit (nicknamed ‘Crouchy’) that they are about to face ‘the best team I think in Europe’.
Finally, in this section, the next extract is from half-time pundit talk at an international match. Matches between national teams have a number of interesting qualities, including the possibility of established and successful sides coming up against so-called ‘minnows’: teams from smaller nations or those with less of a footballing tradition who are generally not expected to do well, but can sometimes achieve ‘giant-killing’ victories. In extract (7), Denmark, a team which regularly reaches the later stages of competitions such as the World Cup, are playing Tunisia, a team with no real record of success who are therefore widely expected to lose the game. At half time, however, the scores are level.
The pundit begins by highlighting the unexpected prowess of the underdog, Tunisia, in the first half, suggesting that the favourites, Denmark, must have ‘under
In this section we have seen how pundits, having talked up the qualities of a team, use a pivotally contrastive but listen to issue caveats against taking the game’s outcome for granted. Utterances like ‘but, .h listen this is goina be so tough here tonight’ or ‘But, listen Tunisia are: r::
Listen and the ‘turn reboot’
There is a third type of usage revealed in the data corpus, in which listen is used in a different turn-constructional context. In this group of extracts, the pundit seems less concerned with highlighting unpredictable factors in the forthcoming game or elaborating upon a prior speaker’s suggestion, than in emphasising the authoritativeness of their own assessment. In such examples, the production of listen comes at a point of self-repair. That is, an ongoing utterance is cut off mid-sentence, following which there is a listen, by means of which the pundit seems concerned to ‘reboot’ the turn with a new, ‘bottom line’ opinion, in the process reasserting their heightened epistemic status as an expert.
For example, consider the following extract. In the opening turn the anchor asks if the pundit is ‘worried’ about Liverpool. Historically a top team in the English league, Liverpool had spent some years in the doldrums, but recently returned to consistent success. This season, however, the team is once again performing below expectations. After replacing the word ‘worried’ with the slightly downgraded ‘concerned’, the pundit goes on to produce a lengthy and somewhat complex assessment of the reasons behind the team’s dip in performance (lines 3–20):
The heart of the matter, for the pundit, seems to be that the three midfield players, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Tiago, and Wijnaldum, do not play in the way that Liverpool’s midfield have successfully played in recent years. In lines 10–20 he gives an account in which the midfield ‘fuh the last three years es been all about, .hh intensity::, and aggression. . .’ (lines 12–14), which is then contrasted with the ‘craftsman’-like playing styles of the current three midfielders (lines 19–20).
From this point, however, his talk suddenly loses its fluency. There is an inbreath followed by ‘er:m’, another inbreath followed by a 0.4-second pause, before he embarks on an upshot-marking ‘so’ (lines 20–21). As discussed earlier, structures such as ‘.h erm’ or ‘.h erm (pause)’ can act as buffer devices; and in this case, the ‘so’ that follows indicates that the pundit may be about to move from analysis to some kind of definitive assessment. Yet following the ‘so’, what we find are further and more marked indications of disfluency: ‘so ehhh- ahh-.h-’ (line 21). Audibly, if not in the transcript alone, there is a sense in which the pundit at this point experiences difficulty in articulating the upshot to his analysis.
What happens next is that he emerges from this period of disfluency by means of a self-repair prefaced with ‘Listen’. The turn then proceeds in a noticeably different thematic direction to the previous emphasis on the weak midfield. Here, and for the rest of his turn, the pundit places himself and his personal perspective at the centre of events (‘Listen, if I’m if I’m in that dressing room. . .’). In doing so, he overtly draws on his own experience and expertise as both an ex-professional player and a team captain – and also, in this particular case, as an erstwhile manager of Premier League teams – to create an imagined narrative in which he gives a pep talk to the team and indicates that, with success in tonight’s game, they are ‘only three points off the leaders’.
In extract (9), two pundits are in the course of a discussion about Newcastle United, who recently appointed a new manager, Steve Bruce. Considering how Bruce can improve the team, the pundits agree that the team he inherited from the previous manager has to be built upon in careful stages.
At two points in his turn, pundit 1 produces a ‘Listen’ (arrowed lines). In both instances, we find the same pattern. First, a brief disfluency: ‘an’ they- if- they-’ in line 7; and ‘.pt But they’re- they’re-’ in line 12. Second, a self-repair beginning with ‘Listen’, which is then immediately followed by a definitive assessment highlighting positive outcomes for the team as a whole (‘Listen, they er in
In the final extract, two pundits are discussing the chances of one of the league’s leading strikers, Harry Kane, becoming the all-time greatest Premier League goal scorer, beating the long-standing record of Alan Shearer. At the time, Kane played for Tottenham Hotspur, a team that regularly finishes in the top five or six of the Premier League but has never won the competition. There was speculation over whether he would move to another English team with greater chances of winning the Premier League. (As it turned out, the following season, Kane was to leave England to play for Bayern Munich, Germany’s most successful team.)
At the arrows marked ‘a’, the first pundit sets out a position in which he draws upon his claimed personal access to Kane’s thought processes (line 3, ‘knowin’ Harry like I d
This response seems to throw Pundit 1 into some doubt. Here, again, we find some difficulty in articulating a thought process which is ultimately resolved through a ‘listen’ reboot. First of all, in line 13, there is the first of what will become a series of three pauses of around 1 second in length in his construction of a response. As Jefferson (1989) found, 1 second seems to represent some kind of ‘standard maximum’ tolerance for silence in ongoing talk-in-interaction. In other words, after about 1 second of silence, there is a strong tendency for one or other participant to produce some form of verbal action, whether that be repeating a question, carrying on with a paused turn, proffering a solution to some kind of word search, and so on.
In this first pause, it is Pundit 2 who initiates the next action, prompting Pundit 1 with a reminder of his own claim to ‘kn
At this point, then, Pundit 1 has not only been presented with a differing opinion on the significance of Kane’s professional achievements from his own; but also issued with what could be taken as a challenge to ‘come through’ on the only aspect that might make his assessment the more authoritative of the two: the initial claim to ‘[know] Harry like I d
There follow two abandoned starts on a turn separated by further pauses of about 1 second. In line 15, the pundit breaks his own silence with a turn beginning ‘I th
It is interesting to note how this combination of a ‘listen’ preface with a contrast structure enables the pundit to escape the prior dilemmatic positioning. The response at arrows ‘c’ first acknowledges his co-pundit’s implied position that ‘winning the Premier League is- i-is the
Conclusion
Television sports pundits are involved in the production of at least three different types of expert talk. They may use their professional experience to add detailed interpretations of key events during a live broadcast game in the role of co-commentator; they may use televisual technologies such as slow-motion replay or ‘telestrator’ screens to analyse the post-match talking points of the game; or they may engage in pre-match discussions lasting up to an hour, which are designed to highlight potential points of sporting drama or tension to be anticipated in the game that is yet to be played.
This article has focused on the third of these types of expertise. In pre-match discussions (and much shorter half-time discussions of how things might develop in the second half) pundits engage in what I have called ‘prospective expertise’: the production of authoritative opinions about a match that has not yet taken place but is about to.
The analysis has explored the functions of one small linguistic particle that pundits were found to deploy in the production of pre-match discussions: the action-preface listen. Like a wide range of other action-prefaces such as oh, well, erm, so or look, listen has been shown to have a number of different discursive uses, which relate overall to a core function of the item.
The core function of listen is to herald some kind of definitive, summarising or ‘bottom line’ assessment. We have seen how pundits utilise the item in three different ways. First, in the context of agreeing with the assessment proffered by a co-participant, listen can be used to signal the production of additional authoritative talk. Second, listen can be used as part of a contrastive device to do a bottom line assessment that highlights non-taken for grantedness in the outcome of the evening’s game. Third, the item can preface a reset in a pundit’s line of talk when their thought process appears to have become somehow problematic, at the same time emphasising their own epistemic authority in the setting. Overall, the item is bound up, in the context of television sports punditry, with the interactional requirements of prospective expertise: that is, highlighting dramatic tensions and building audience expectations regarding a sporting event that has not yet occurred but is about to.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
