Wayne Rooney\u2019s 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<\/p>\n
Won\u2019t someone think of the streaming platforms? Wayne Rooney\u2019s departure from Plymouth Argyle<\/a>, after seven months and a winless run that left the club bottom of the Championship, not only suggests the former England star\u2019s managerial career has reached its end \u2013 it\u2019s also a signal of how contentious the fly-on-the-wall documentary has become in modern football. Rooney was the driving force behind Plymouth\u2019s announcement last November that it would produce a behind-the-scenes documentary about the club\u2019s 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 \u2013 amid deindustrialization, post-Brexit economic malaise, the stresses and joys of small-city life, and the slog of the English Football League \u2013 into streaming gold. The plan was to sell the finished product to a streaming service like Amazon or Netflix, thereby boosting the club\u2019s coffers and stamping Plymouth Argyle on the cultural map with a force that games away to Preston and Oxford United alone can\u2019t quite muster. Now, however, the plan is dead: with Rooney dispatched, the club has scrapped<\/a> the documentary, which it feared could become a distraction as the team fights relegation. Neither decision has been lamented by the club\u2019s fans, who never warmed to Rooney and reviled<\/a> the idea of the documentary from its inception.<\/p>\n Plymouth\u2019s abandonment of this sweaty content \u201cplay\u201d 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\u2019s camera. Amazon\u2019s All or Nothing is the series most emblematic of the modern soccer club\u2019s need to \u201ctell its story\u201d, 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\u2019 freedom of speech and movement (\u201cWe had to be careful all the time,\u201d he wrote<\/a>). It may also be the product of simple cost-benefit analysis: Spurs and Arsenal each reportedly hauled in around \u00a310m for their respective stints on the All or Nothing merry go round, and while that sum is nothing to be sneezed at (it\u2019s good enough for a decent back-up defender, say, or an under-the-radar prospect from the lower reaches of Ligue 1), it\u2019s perhaps not quite enough to justify the disruptions and reputational risks involved.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wayne Rooney\u2019s 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\u2019t someone think of the streaming platforms? Wayne Rooney\u2019s departure from Plymouth Argyle, after seven months and a winless run that left the club bottom of the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}