The dynamics between football reporters and the clubs they cover can be tough to navigate and tricky to predict.
There is rarely an issue when results are going well and both parties generally try to foster constructive relationships, but there are a surprising number of ways in which they can fall out.
Last weekend, Brighton & Hove Albion banned newspaper The Guardian from home matches. Sometimes such bans relate to serious issues, such as accusations of wrongdoing, but they can also happen for what appear far more mundane, or silly, reasons.
We asked our reporters to share stories of the times they were banned, whether during their time at The Athletic or when they worked elsewhere.
Ferguson’s six-year ban for ‘bad manners’
Daniel Taylor: Blimey, where do I even start? Sir Alex Ferguson banned me from his Friday-morning press conferences because I’d written a book about him. I did inform his press office in advance, but they were too scared of him to pass on the news.
Fergie saw that as bad manners by me and hit the roof when the book came out. And that was me gone for, no kidding, six years. Gretna FC 2008 were a horrible lot when I got in touch for this piece (that was a long drive to be turned away at the gate) and Billy Davies banned me from Nottingham Forest’s press box because I’d been to a match and not written a report. He thought I was freeloading.
My sports editor at The Guardian did offer to pay for the costs of my half-time pie. But the joke didn’t go down well.
PS: The unnamed manager in this story banned The Athletic for reasons never explained.
I was banned… but didn’t know about it for six months
Ken Bates during his time as Leeds owner (Paul Gilham/Getty Images)
Matt Slater: It is not big or clever to be banned… but it can be quite funny.
Former Leeds United owner Ken Bates told the BBC, my employers at the time, that I was banned from Elland Road after I wrote a piece which suggested nothing had changed when he announced he was the club’s new owner in May 2011.
His announcement followed a Premier League threat to withhold its solidarity funding to the club if Leeds did not reveal the identities of the beneficiaries of the three offshore trusts that controlled the club. Faced with this threat, the Monaco-based businessman, who had remained in charge at Leeds despite them going into administration on his watch in 2007, reluctantly stepped out of the shadows.
As bans go, this one did not really bite as I didn’t know about it until a local BBC reporter asked me if I had tried to go back. I had not and that was six months later.
A more inconvenient interdict came when I was covering cycling for the BBC. I had upset Team Sky’s Chris Froome one too many times with something I had written, so I was told a few hours before a sit-down interview with him in Majorca that he would not answer my questions. This was potentially a stick in my spokes, as the Six O’Clock News was expecting some words from the Tour de France champ in the TV segment I was meant to be sending that evening.
Luckily, I had just done a course on how to shoot my own packages, so I told the cameraman what to ask and I grabbed the camera. Froome frowned but delivered three useable sentences and we all got what we needed. I think he was almost in focus by the second answer.
Going to Brighton games in disguise
Andy Naylor: Bans came with the territory in my former role covering Brighton for The Argus, the local daily newspaper, for 32 years. Sometimes you have to write stories that upset managers, executives, players or the club as a whole.
In the mid-1990s, the paper uncovered plans by the despised then owners to asset-strip the club, selling the Goldstone Ground with nowhere else to go. That left me in the unusual situation of writing far more often about what was going on away from the pitch and matches, working with the paper’s investigative specialist Paul Bracchi on a series of stories about the scandal. David Bellotti, the chief executive, banned us.
I carried on covering games as a normal punter, disguised in a peaked cap. Photographer Simon Dack still took images via a helpful resident, whose garden overlooked the ground. Manager Liam Brady cooperated as well, speaking to me after games. He hated what was going on as much as everyone else. Our coverage was unaffected, so the ban was unsustainable.
Brighton did eventually sell the Goldstone Ground (Aubrey Washington/EMPICS via Getty Images)
Peter Taylor refused to speak to me for a period when he was manager over a back-page story that linked him with England again (he had two spells in charge of the under-21s and made David Beckham captain in November 2000 when he was in caretaker charge of the senior side).
Micky Adams briefly banned me from speaking to the players after I contacted the agent of Rod Thomas in 2000, pursuing a story about the winger’s absence from the team. Unfortunately for me, the agent was a good friend of Micky and rang him straight away! It soon blew over. I remain on friendly speaking terms with Micky to this day, along with the vast majority of the countless Brighton managers I have dealt with. Life is too short for trivialities to linger.
A headline act that was a little too honest
Paul Taylor: When Gary Megson faced the media in the aftermath of a limp 2-1 defeat in League One at Huddersfield Town in 2005, I asked him a straightforward question: what is going wrong?
The Nottingham Forest manager’s answer was something along the lines of: “I have no idea, if I knew what it was, I would fix it.”
His response was an honest one, albeit hardly insightful.
When filing the story, I put a note at the top for the sub-editors requesting they not make an unnecessarily mischievous headline out of that quote.
The next day, the back page of the Nottingham Post was emblazoned with the giant headline: ‘Megson: I’ve got no idea’.
Factually correct, mildly amusing even. He was out of the door by the following February.
But there was quickly a phone call from the press officer, who wearily informed me I would not be allowed to ask any more questions in press conferences for a while.
Danny mentioned Billy Davies above… Well, at one stage Davies effectively banned almost all of the media — at least from talking to players and attending what became pointless press conferences. There was never any explanation for it.
Laptops in the stands after ban from Moyes’ farewell
David Moyes waves farewell to Everton fans in May 2013 (Lindsey Parnaby/AFP via Getty Images)
Greg O’Keeffe: After 11 years, it was time to say goodbye. David Moyes was preparing for his final game in charge of Everton (against West Ham United, the club he would eventually steer to European silverware) and it felt significant.
The Scot had agreed to succeed his mentor Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford, and Everton were faced with big choices about how to proceed and build upon a progressive era.
There had been a sense that Moyes had to move on to fulfil his ambitions after spending so long over-performing on Merseyside, squeezed against what felt like a financial glass ceiling, even if he did manage a fourth-place finish in 2005.
In January of that final season, Moyes had wanted to sign a top goalscorer. He felt that if he was provided the budget to get one, Everton might have qualified for the Champions League.
The money could not be found, despite the best efforts of chairman Bill Kenwright and chief executive Robert Elstone, and in the end Moyes was Manchester United-bound (Everton eventually finished sixth with 55 goals, 17 fewer than Arsenal in fourth).
As the Liverpool Echo’s Everton correspondent at the time, I wrote a column suggesting things could have been different if Moyes had been able to spend big on that elusive centre-forward.
Elstone was not impressed and decided I would be banned from the Goodison Park press box for Moyes’ final game. Instead, joined in a show of support by the paper’s sports editor and his deputy, I covered the game from the Bullens Road stand. The three of us squeezed in among bemused but polite supporters, with laptops on our knees.
We were barred from attending Moyes’ final press conference after the 2-0 win too, but reprieved by the time Roberto Martinez was unveiled as his successor a month later.
Stadium, stewarding, sight lines… suspension
Seb Stafford-Bloor: When I was freelancing for FourFourTwo, I went to the London Stadium during its first season. West Ham were soundly beaten by Manchester City that night and with little competitive football to write about, my match piece ended up reflecting some of the issues within the stadium — the sight lines, the distance to the pitch, the odd gaps that existed between the stands during that first year, and the stewarding problems that had run through the stadium.
It was a fairly mild commentary overall and nothing that hadn’t been written elsewhere, but I was young and irrelevant and easy to target, so West Ham — who I think were particularly sensitive about their stadium back then — advised my editor that my accreditation requests would no longer be welcome.
I’ve never been back. West Ham have been through plenty of press officers since then, so I’m sure it’s long forgotten about.