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Everton FC: Ross Hughes (Content Producer)

Middlesbrough AFC: Dan Prince

Dressing up defeat is one of the hardest parts of a club journalists role with even Dan Prince (who has 12 years in the industry), claiming it’s extremely difficult” but you have to “choose” your moment.

“Yeah, it can be extremely difficult, and you’ve got to try and find the right balance, and I think it’s about experience really.

“Especially with the club I’m at now, we’ve obviously got a strong media team, and we’ll discuss the defeat together how we will create content despite the result.”

“We won’t be going off on our own tangents. We’ll discuss how to respond to it together.” 

“But in general, it’s just about reading the room. So, if you’ve got lighthearted pieces of content that you want to push out, you pick and choose your moments – you wouldn’t do it after a four-nil defeat and you wouldn’t do it in the middle of a bad run of form.” 

“If we wait two or three weeks, hopefully the tide will turn a little bit, and then that might be a better time to put that certain content.” 

“Yeah, you want to get that content out there, but pick and choose your moments in the right way.” 

South Shields FC: Sam Jones (Media Officer)

“When we lost our 1st league game of the season to Macclesfield it did take the wind out of me and definitely the content, because you are used to shelling out as much content as possible from the win, and like I say if you can’t dish out this “winning content” it’s much harder.”

“Effectively in our job, when the whistle blows for full-time we keep going.

“But when you lose you can’t really create a lot because the wind is took out of you, it’s flat.”

“You can do interviews post-match but the usual winning content obviously can’t be created.”

Burnley FC: Alex Waters (Content Producer)

Creating content with the club when they are not performing well on the pitch can get quite difficult as Alex said: “In terms of when results are not going our way, it’s not a case of no one wants to do anything, but getting that acess to players does become more difficult.”

“Because under some circumstances the manager could rightly say no we don’t want to do that we need our players focussed and training hard.” 

“The results do impact what you can and can’t put out. 

“Obviously you can’t post humorous content when you’re losing games.”

“But we still have our job to do, which is to post creative content.”

Shrewsbury Town: Jonny Drake (

“It’s all about managing expectations. It’s managing your audience. For example we will go to training every Monday or Tuesday after you win. But we won’t go or even consider it after a loss.” 

“Another example is, say for instance – you’re 21st in the league and you lose two games, you obviously won’t be posting certain stuff which can be deemed a distraction.” 

“So it’s all about managing your audience.” 

“What’s good to know as a journalist in our job, is being aware of what content you post too, thinking about each word and the caption and what is relevant to what the result is.”

“Like you don’t want to post something that has a word or caption that will create controversy or even allow the fans to think that isn’t right, for example off the back of a defeat.”

“You want to dress it up in a way that everybody is happy or at least neutral about the content despite the result.”

“I think if you do this people do really appreciate the consistency and reliability.” 

“Because there’s a lot of pressure on the players and on people in football. 

“So you’ve got 1000s of people every week who can get very angry with you if stuff doesn’t get a plan and you then go ahead and post certain types of content.”