At a bar I used to go to when I lived on the west side of Chicago, there’s a space in the back where the Bayern Munich fans congregate while everyone else is up front watching Spurs or Chelsea, and when Bayern score, they call out something in German, which is not a language that should be shouted, and then recite the score, which is invariably DIE BAYERN! DREI! and some depressed-looking opponent—almost always Hamburg, for some reason—zilch. Or that’s how I remember it.

My recollection isn’t too faulty. Bayern have lost ten times in the past three seasons of Bundesliga fixtures. They’ve won by three or more goals thirty times. It’s common, in the English-speaking world, to dump on continental leagues for their lack of competitiveness at the top of the table, and I can tell you from watching La Liga that the rest of the league make Madrid and Barcelona work far harder than they get credit for. Perhaps that’s the case with Bayern and the Bundesliga’s lesser clubs, but I wouldn’t know. There are only so many hours in a Saturday and outside of the odd tussle with Dortmund or Leipzig I only follow Bayern when they’re playing in the Champions League. I admire them mostly from afar, and the distance smooths out their peculiar features. From my vantage point, they’re all below-market summer signings and Arjen Robben being two weeks away from full fitness.

This is obviously an illusion. Robben is fit sometimes. But it’s an illusion I don’t often examine closely. If you ask me about Bayern Munich, I will tell you things about them that I have heard other people say as if I arrived at those opinions myself. You know, David Alaba’s development has really stalled these past couple seasons. Ignore me; I have very little idea what I’m talking about. Yet the impulse to have something to say, to seem at least somewhat knowledgeable, persists. 

Not that I’m unique—fronting is a universal hobby—but I am a sportswriter, which means it is occasionally my job to be disingenuously expert-like in print on topics that I am just, as I’m typing, getting familiar with. Though I try not to do this, it’s an unavoidable part of the gig. At least a couple times a year, I’m writing something I’m considering for the first time like I’ve dedicated my life to studying it. 

There’s a good chance the topic is soccer-related. The sport is so vast that it’s impossible to keep completely abreast of. I’m intimately familiar with La Liga, catch an EPL match or two every weekend, and check in on the bigger Italian clubs intermittently. I’ve seen maybe four or five Porto matches over the past few seasons. I don’t have a take on Andrea Bellotti’s potential. When Genk show up in the Champions League, I have to google whether they’re Swiss or Austrian. (They’re Belgian.) Santos and Fluminense and Corinthians are all basically the same club to me. And I don’t watch any MLS.

This isn’t to bask in my own ignorance so much as to illustrate that soccer gives you more material than you can process. I spend many hours per week thinking and learning about it and couldn’t tell you with any conviction whether or not Nélson Semedo is going to work out at Barcelona. I mean, I’ve seen YouTube compilations but that’s not the same thing as being informed. 

This bothers me like it bothers me that I haven’t read a lot of books I probably wouldn’t enjoy reading but would like to have knowledge of, just for reference. Late Henry James might be a useful thing to have in my back pocket. But that’s my (trivial) problem. The point where me not knowing stuff becomes somebody else’s problem is when there’s some Big Important Match that I want to preview but can’t do justice to. Bayern are playing Juventus and it’s not like I’m clueless about the squads but I don’t understand Juve’s defensive principles the way a Serie A head does and I don’t know if Thomas Müller’s role at Bayern is significantly different under Carlo Ancelotti than it was under Pep Guardiola. I can and do study match reports and tactical analyses, but there’s not enough time for me to develop a genuine fluency in the two teams. I’m doomed to borrow others’ perspectives or draw conclusions based on too little data. I half-ass it even if I give it my best shot.

I’m not the only one who has this issue. I can sense when someone is writing about Dortmund but clearly only follows the Premier League. The prose is antiseptic and careful and there are a lot of stiff statements of fact where there would otherwise be loose, conversant commentary or jokes. I can hear it especially well on podcasts, when voices start tip-toeing because someone’s trying not to say something stupid about Roma or they’re worried about mispronouncing Kalidou Koulibaly’s name. I’ve listened to the typically loquacious Chris Ryan tentatively float that Koke would break out for Spain in Euro 2016. (He barely played. Anyone who keeps up with La Roja could tell you Vicente Del Bosque’s not a fan.) And Marc Stein, the least secret soccer fan in the NBA universe, once stammered for a full five seconds trying to come up with the name of a fourth Spanish club. (My man was searching for Valencia, I think.) For my part, back in 2015, I wrote a piece about the Europa League that contained a paragraph on the upcoming final between Sevilla and Napoli. Just after publication, I realized that I had read the bracket wrong and Sevilla were actually playing Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk. My editor pulled the thing down and I had about twenty minutes to come up with some words about a club I had never heard of before. (I’m the biggest moron in this paragraph.)

And these are just innocent mistakes and brain-farts. There are also arrogant low-grade sociopaths who care so little about getting their facts straight that they invent their own reality. You’ve watched ESPN and Fox Sports broadcasts; you know what I’m talking about. Those pinstriped studio bros are frequently lazily off-base in a way that communicates contempt for the sport. 

There’s an unavoidable degree of fakery in a job where you’re constantly implicitly arguing for the importance of what you’re saying—and you have to come up with something new to say on a daily or weekly basis—but we could do with more intellectual honesty. Not unctuous humility or unreadable caveat-fests, but the occasional acknowledgment when we’re out of our depth. Sports media is (hopefully) moving away from put-on authoritativeness anyway. Empty, windy takery is passé. We could carry that development toward its logical endpoint and simply be unafraid to own the limits of our expertise. This isn’t the same thing as shutting up. We can write and speak politically or humorously or ontologically about a team without having a firm grasp on how they use their fullbacks. Not everything needs to be a demonstration of deep and specific knowledge, though that’s obviously welcome too.

We can even, say, use what’s supposed to be a season preview of a German club we catch fewer than ten times annually as a jumping off point for media criticism. Though too much of that would get irritating. I’d guess that Ancelotti gets fired at the end of the year, by the way, but it’s just a guess.

More 'End-To-End Stuff': Paris Saint-GermainChelseaManchester CityTottenham HotspurManchester UnitedAtletico MadridBarcelona, Real Madrid, Borussia Dortmund