I don’t know if the World Cup imposes every four years an “abusive relationship into which we fall like ducklings”, as my colleague Gustavo Alonso said, but I consult the television schedule every time my poor spirit asks for another bad alibi to justify yet another mistake with the gravel – or with the functional, or with yoga – of the day.
Ivory Coast, Korea, Mbappé and Vozinha invariably win, but not only that: Arnaldo Ribeiro, Tironi, Barrinha and their more senior colleagues also win my audience and my immobility.
The brilliant journalists mentioned above star in “Posse de Bola”, UOL’s football debate program, one of the many classic format round tables that are now swarming on the internet: no images of the games, just an hour or more of discussions, speculations, memories of previous World Cups and other hotter news brought by the special envoys who cover the writing on the spot.
How can something as old as moving forward, which has at least six decades of existence on Brazilian TV, if considered the “Grande Resenha Facit” as the pioneering program, manage to be so successful in these times of attention economy?
(I didn’t ask UOL for the numbers, but I’m guessing that the “Posse” is crushing it by now entering daily frequency and, on days when the team plays, twice a day, the second session right after the prelim.)
The program has something that perhaps we should dedicate more time to: it obviously values argumentation, the concatenation of ideas, all of this hot, without much time for cheating or stricter scripting. It is still necessary to be didactic, as the exposure time is relatively short.
The program also has a bit of irony: in the morning of this Monday (22), the “anchor” Tironi, when responding to a comment from an internet user who said that the lazy people there had the best profession in the world, or something like that, said that luck is also necessary in life.
But the point, from which I distance myself, is that if I were responsible for admitting someone to a job under my leadership, or if I were an HR professional responsible for selection, I would require some argumentative defense, more or less as some universities already do in their entrance exams.
And, as I once did when I wasn’t a precarious journalist, I would also ask the candidate to tell a joke (well), which is for me the best way to evaluate how someone performs in an unforeseen situation.
This argumentative and narrative ability is today called socio-emotional skill or, in corporate Portuguese, “soft skill”. They say it is a property that should gain more space in times of AI.
Therefore, watching a football round table in which the commentators strive to convey an idea, a deduction, a statement that has some basis in reality, seems very healthy to me – even more so than watching the games that give it its reason for existence.
Maurício Stycer, my neighbor and another colleague from this Sheethas already discussed in more depth, here, the structural changes in journalism demanded by these round tables, which, he recalls, are closely associated with the caricatured braggadocio of fan commentators, or, my guess now, with the sterile manifestation of knowledge.
How to recite team lineups for 1960s-and-ball championships, something so well satirized in the first “Boleiros”, Ugo Giorgetti’s film franchise.
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