The sequential and reflexive achievement of coach participation in the live TV broadcasting of football

ABSTRACT

This article draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to explore the accountability of coach participation in-game – i.e. its observability, tellability, reportability – by scrutinising the interactional practices by which the coach, on the sideline, is perceived, filmed, and described by TV technicians and commentators. The contribution offers an empirical investigation of the local procedures, sequentially ordered, by which coach participation in the game is reflexively achieved. It adopts the perspective of TV control room members while broadcasting football matches to show how they produce real-time audiovisual and verbal accounts tailored to the emergence of the coaches’ embodied and verbal actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Coach participation
• sports broadcasting
• ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
• perception and representation of coaching

Introduction

The sidelines of collective sports matches are a singular locus of social life. This delimited area borders two territories – game and ordinary life – with different legislations and normative expectations. From this space, the coach looks at the match, instructs his players, assesses their performance, or contests the referee’s decisions. Although he is interactionally involved in the game, he is maintained outside its spatial limits. Both bystander and actor of the game, the coach’s ways of participating in-game are complex and diverse. His participation status raises analytical difficulties for the scientists (who mostly disregard the coach’s activity during the game). It is also a practical problem for practitioners, whether they are coaches wanting to enhance their influence on players’ performance or broadcasters reporting the match.

This article draws on ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992) to investigate the issue of the coach’s participation in the match. The conversation analytic approach of multimodal interaction (Goodwin, 2000a; Mondada, 2016), based on the use of video to document and analyse natural interactions, explores how participants mobilise verbal and non-verbal resources in action. This conception has been particularly fecund for examining situations of instruction (Lindwall & Ekström, 2012; Lindwall, Lymer, & Greiffenhagen, 2015) and assessment (Lindström & Mondada, 2009) in different domains implicating the teaching, learning, and training of embodied actions and manual skills. Sports coaching is one of them. Through the analysis of instructed action (Evans & Lindwall, 2020; Okada, 2013), or correction (Evans & Reynolds, 2016; Keevallik, 2010), multimodal conversation analytic studies are interested in the ordinary, social, and material dimensions of training and coaching (see Evans, 2017 for a development). The coach’s professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) – i.e. the ordinary competencies of seeing and judging players’ performance (Evans & Fitzgerald, 2017; Corsby & Jones, 2020) – is especially addressed through the scrutinising of “practices of seeing” (Goodwin, 2000b), involving talk and embodied actions, in assessment sequences during training or match time-out (Meyer & V Wedelstaedt, 2019).

In ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA), like in other fields of research on collective sports coaching, most of the literature on coach-players interactions involves situations of training. There are some obvious methodological reasons for this. During training sessions, the coach and the players share an interactional order, allowing interruptions, pauses, and talk sequences. There is no doubt that the coach is a participant during training. However, competition situations raise multiple methodological and theoretical issues regarding coach activities. The performativity of the coach’s actions for the players’ performance seems more challenging to establish empirically. The analogy with the orchestrator could be one of the more accurate ways to depict his agentivity (Jones & Wallace, 2006). Outside of the EMCA framework, few studies have yet empirically tackled “coach performance during performance” (Partington & Cushion, 2012) in various collective sports, such as hockey (Trudel, Côté, & Bernard, 1996), football (Cushion & Jones, 2001) or rugby (Mouchet, Harvey, & Light, 2014). These contributions focus on coach behaviour but confront the difficulty of preserving indexical properties of actions and considering the reflexive and dynamic nexus between activity on the sideline and the emergent organisation of players’ actions on the pitch.

Another significant difficulty in reckoning coach active participation in-game comes from the traditional conceptions of games, particularly structuralist and rationalistic ones, that establish a rigid delimitation between games and the common ground of everyday affairs. According to these conceptions, game behaviours are rational regarding a rule and predetermined goals. The social normativity of the everyday world is perceived as secondary vis-à-vis players’ rationalistic attitude.

EMCA refuses such a deterministic and rationalistic vision of behaviours in games. Rules are instead viewed as local, procedural, and negotiated accomplishments that participants mobilise as a resource for action (Garfinkel, 1963, 2019). Following the programme of ethnomethodology, some studies have challenged the classic conceptions of participation in games and sports. They consider the deployment of actions occurring in games and sports activities as natural and contingent events of the social world without primarily correlating them to a rules book. Sequential order in games (Goodwin, 1985, 2006) and sports (Ivarsson & Greiffenhagen, 2015; Keevallik & Ekström, 2019; Sánchez García & Liberman, 2021; Svensson & Tekin, 2021) has been a substantial domain of investigation. These developments contribute to respecifying the participants’ status in games by showing how roles and places are routinely negotiated and achieved beyond pre-established regulations. The distinction between audience and players in games is also contested by revealing practices by which spectators join the game in e-sport and transform their participation status (Tekin & Reeves, 2017). Despite different agendas and methodologies, EMCA multimodal analysis converges with more established orientations in sports studies, promoting a holistic conception of coaching against the rationalistic game-oriented model of sports coaching (Potrac, Brewer, Jones, Armour, & Hoff, 2000), by considering the actions in-game – including coach’s and players’ ones – as emanations of the social life.

Following these developments, the present paper addresses coach participation in-game by observing social practices by which this participation is locally perceived, understood, and produced by audiovisual means. It investigates, in particular, how directors and commentators sequentially produce audiovisual and verbal accounts of the coach’s actions and, by doing so, reflexively achieve the “scenic intelligibility” (Jayyusi, 1988) of in-game interactions.

Sports broadcasting and participation in an EMCA mode

TV broadcasters rely on their expertise for seeing and describing the game (Fele & Campagnolo, 2021). This professional vision (Goodwin, 1994), shared among commentators and technicians, consists of a common understanding of what retrospectively happened on the pitch, and capacities for projecting next actions. Such expertise allows them to produce relevant accounts adjusted to the emergent and contingent dynamics of play and preserve the indexical characteristics and sequential orderliness of the game (Macbeth, 2012).

For detailing how coach participation is reflexively achieved through expert practices of seeing, the paper draws on the EMCA literature on audiovisual production. Used in the context of audiovisual production, the ethnomethodological notion of reflexivity refers to the mutual and dynamic configuration between audiovisual accounts and the interactional order of the situations they display (Lomax & Casey, 1998; Mondada, 2006). The crux of that conception is that film representations are not pure captures of transparent scenes but are situated accomplishments, implying routine practices of seeing and videoing.

When participants achieve camera moves or video editing, they display and rely on their common-sense knowledge of the scene they are recording. Macbeth (1999) shows how the filmmaker’s movements adjust to the trajectories and boundaries of the recorded activity. By body postures and camera movements (pan, zoom), the camera operator manifests a proto-analysis of the scene and, at the same time, achieves its observability for a viewer (see Mondada, 2014). Professional editing practices also reveal a common-sense knowledge of the interactional order (Mondada, 2009). In live scenes recorded with multiple cameras like, for instance, in interviews, talk shows or media events, the director switches from one camera to another. The succession of shots adjusts moment-by-moment to the contingent trajectories of talk and the dynamics of embodied conduct. Thus, the assemblage of audiovisual sequences respects and preserves the sequentiality of the filmed activity, the limits of participation frameworks, and the participants’ stances.

This approach to participation follows from the Goodwinian critiques of Goffman’s (1981) canonical model of footing. Goodwin and Goodwin (2004) suggest a more labile conception of participation, which takes into consideration (a) the progressivity of action and the multiple stances endorsed by the participants in context, (b) the potential involvement of participants in different courses of talk and action and the laminated character of different participation frameworks, (c) the active role of the listener in the co-constitution of meaning, and eventually, (d) the embodied dimension of participation, including bodily postures and gazes.

Video practices thus appear as a perspicuous setting (Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992, p. 184) for studying how participation frameworks are reflexively and sequentially constituted in different domains. A series of EMCA studies have scrutinised the local practices of filming and editing to demonstrate how practitioners, in different contexts, contribute to achieving the participant framework with video. Such an analytical approach transforms the issue of participation from a speculative questioning to a practical problem that participants encounter in ordinary situations and that, as such, can be the object of an empirical investigation.

Different embodied practices of filming have been examined to show how uses of video configure participation frameworks in interpersonal video communication (Licoppe & Morel, 2012) or in professional settings, such as tribunal (Licoppe, 2015) or surgery (Mondada, 2003). TV production has also been a classic object as it is a recurrent resource for studying the organisation of talk in EMCA (Clayman & Heritage, 2002; Hutchby, 2006). Drawing on workplace studies (Luff, Hindmarsh, & Heath, 2000), Broth (2009) relocalizes the study of TV programmes in the worksite where they are methodically produced, by observing interactions in the control room between the director and technicians during live coverage. The multimodal analysis is extended to the moment-by-moment achievement of camera movements by the operators (Broth, 2014). By examining the interactive production of “the listener shot” during live interviews, Broth (2008) builds on Goodwin’s argument about the role of the listener in the co-constitution of meaning (Goodwin, 1979). The analysis underlines the relevance of embodied practices of listening for the TV practitioners and exhibits the visual establishment of the participation framework as a participants’ concern, methodically achieved.

Sports broadcasting has recently emerged as a topic of interest for studying the reflexive nexus between broadcasting practices and the in-game deployment of action by exploring the local production of replays in hockey (Perry, Broth, Engström, & Juhlin, 2019) or football (Camus, 2017a, 2021a). The interactional procedures of the production and selection of replays manifest how TV technicians apprehend the ongoing match. The replays reflexively achieve the relevance of some segments of the game to be re-examined. The temporality of the insertion also reveals the meticulous practices by which technicians preserve the visibility of the ongoing match for TV viewers.

Once conceived as an interactional achievement (rather than a fixed and objective reality), participation in sports events – and more broadly in media events (Dayan & Katz, 1992) like parades, marriages, coronations, etc. – may be challenging to address analytically. Sports events involve many participants with various engagements in the activity (players, staff, referees, TV technicians, spectators, etc.). In contrast to studio production, sports events are naturally occurring activities taking place in a much bigger locations (the stadium) than the usual TV production sites. Producing visual accounts that preserve the phenomenal features of the events implies embodied and interactional practices for accomplishing the temporal delimitation of the events (such as the practices of countdown, Camus, 2017b) or for excluding some participants considered as non-relevant for the show (Camus, 2021b)

Data and setting

By mobilising video data, the article examines how participants in a TV control room use verbal and non-verbal resources, such as gestures, postures, gazes, and camera movements, to observe, understand and document what is occurring during the game. The article shows how the coach’s participation in-game is reflexively produced by focusing on the interactional practices of perception, filming, and talking by which the TV crew achieves the intelligibility of the coaches’ actions. The analyses are built upon a collection of cases revealing the sequential and normative organisation of broadcasting the coach’s embodied and verbal activity during game.

The contribution is based on a corpus of video data collected in the control room during the live coverage of 16 French professional football championship matches (Ligue 1). The data collection comes from fieldwork of two seasons of Ligue 1 in different TV control-room teams across France, with technicians, directors, and journalists working on the league’s broadcasting.

The matches were produced by the exclusive broadcaster of the Ligue 1 at that time, Canal+. The interactions occurring in the control room are videotaped with two cameras placed by the researcher for analytic purposes, one focusing on the activity in the control room and one other on the wall of screens.

It provides access to the activity of the whole TV team, namely the director editing in real-time, 25 camera operators filming the match, and 12 replay operators producing replays. The wall of screens displays each camera operator’s ongoing activity of videoing and offers a multi-perspectival view of the match. The director, observing the scene from this panoptic standpoint, edits the programme in real time by pushing buttons corresponding to the chosen camera on a keyboard. He can communicate with distant operators via a microphone and speakers, and thus, he gives instructions for producing expected shots.

The commentators (journalist and pundit) are in the stadium. They can see the match both through direct vision and mediated vision, thanks to screens. Inversely, on-air talk is continually broadcast in the control room, audible through speakers for the technicians. This configuration makes the study of the reflexive nexus between talk and images possible by observing the dynamics of visual and verbal actions from the control room.

Thus, the access from backstage delivers an original perspective on the match through the emergent procedures of filming and commentating. Thanks to the video corpus we have collected from within the control room, our investigation is not restricted to the images members effectively produce, as is generally the case in content analysis-based studies. It makes it possible to examine the local and contingent procedures by which the shots are interactionally produced, assessed, selected, and finally broadcast.

That analysis relies on expert knowledge in TV broadcasting acquired during the fieldwork. Besides technical competencies in mastering specific broadcasting technologies, it includes more essentially an ability to see the match from backstage as a professional, and thus to be able to perceive and identify phenomena occurring on the pitch among the diversity of the camera flux in the unique temporality of live broadcasting.

TV technicians and journalists consider the coaches as essential participants in the game. However, filming them poses specific problems because of their location, outside the pitch and on the side of the main camera angle. In order to show them during the game, two cameras with operators are specifically dedicated to producing coaches’ shots, one for each team. The camerapeople are close to the benches and follow the course of the coaches’ actions with their cameras. Thus, thanks to the footage produced, the coaches’ behaviours are fully available for the director, who is continuously in a position to observe their actions and, therefore, select the shot for broadcasting.

This complex organisation presents some advantages for our analytical perspective, which aims to investigate the members’ endogenous and tacit analysis of the social world. The paper tackles the coach’s participation in-game by empirically investigating the procedures by which technicians and journalists mobilise coaches’ behaviour as a topic or a resource for producing audiovisual accounts of the match. Thus, it offers the examination of this reflexive move by enlightening the sequential and normative order of the local and routine practices of broadcasting.

The data transcripts are adapted from Jefferson’s (2004) conventions for the verbal and Mondada (2018) for the multimodal aspects. Transcript conventions of Broth (2017) are also used for the specific practices inherent to TV production. The transcripts represent two intertwined modalities of participation. Talk off-air (only audible in the control room) is transcribed in black. Talk audible on-air (including commentators’ and coaches’ talk) is transcribed in grey. Simultaneity of talk between these two parallel (and partly autonomous) participation frameworks are indicated with specific brackets ({}). Multimodal actions, including camera moves, editing procedures in the control room, and embodied actions on the pitch, are transcribed in dedicated lines under the speech line. Such a visual organisation of transcripts aims to preserve the sequentiality of actions and to reveal their temporal orderliness.

Analyses

The ordinary accountability of coach participation in-game

The first extract aims to introduce the analytic part by demonstrating with a simple case how the intelligibility and visibility of coach behaviours are ordinarily co-produced during a scene of goal scoring.

In this first excerpt, the player #19B scores (l.1). The goal projects a reconfiguration of the activity both in the control room and on the pitch. Firstly, the scene is filmed with a large shot (#1) until the ball enters the net. Then the director (DIR) verbally orients to this scoring and commutes to a close shot of the scorer celebrating his goal (l.2, #2).

The goal also projects expectable activities on the bench: the coach (COAb, Gillot) celebrates the scoring by rising, screaming, and clapping (#1b, 2b, 3, 4). This course of action is not visible to the TV viewers but solely to the control-room members. In line 4, the director verbally selects the coach’s shot of CAM16 and puts it on air in line 5 while the coach is standing, yelling, and clapping (#5).

By co-producing an ordered series of shots, the director contributes to a reflexive production of the participation framework. He establishes the scorer and then the coach as participants in the game. These operations of attribution of agency are not ex nihilo constructs: they are reflexively adjusted to the embodied activities that the players, the staff members or the public make visually available during the match.

By their ordinary conduct, the participants accomplish the intelligibility of the game as a sequentially ordered, significant, and projectable course of action. Expert broadcasters rely firstly on their expert knowledge of the game, enabling them to project action trajectories, but also on their common-sensical ways of seeing and projecting mental states (such as intention and emotion) displayed by participants (Coulter, 1979; Jayyusi, 1993) in response to game events. The mundane normativity of those practices stands as a consistent and powerful resource for control room members (director, camera operators, and commentators) engaged in the audiovisual production of the game.

The coach achieves the accountability of his participation by acting in an adjusted manner to the temporal organisation and the normative expectations of the game. The broadcasters collectively rely on the intelligibility of coach actions as “actions-in-game” and work on producing visual accounts preserving the phenomenal features of the scenes. By filming and live editing, the technicians accomplish the relevance of some phenomena and participants for the public visual account of the match. The images they deliver, based on meticulous and routinised collective work, constitute a visual incarnation of their common-sense understanding of what happened on the playground and a moment-by-moment delimitation of the participation framework.

Coach as an emergent topic: the sequential organisation of talk on-air and filming

This section unveils the temporal organisation by which broadcasters accomplish the synchronicity of visual representation and talk. It exhibits two modalities of coordinating practices of filming backstage and talking on-air in the coproduction of narratives about the coach.

Coach shot as an illustration of commentators' talk

Extract 2 shows how technicians produce close shots of a coach by actively listening to talk on-air, and how “talk about the coach on-air” projects the production of a visual representation of the coach.

At the beginning of this excerpt, the journalist evokes the records of Marseille’s coach (Didier Deschamps) against the opponent (Paris Saint-Germain). The director (DIR) constantly listens to commentators’ verbal activity thanks to audio speakers broadcasting on-air sounds in the control room.

This active listening enables the use of the commentator’s turns as resources for the interactional activity of videoing the ongoing action on the pitch. Thus, in line 5, the director selects a shot of Deschamps, the coach who was introduced as the topic of the current on-air talk by the journalist (JOU) (from lines 1 to 4).

The use of the shot is made possible by a situated and emergent organisation of filming. The camera operators can also overhear the on-air activity via their headphones. In line 2, the discussion about coach Deschamps reorients the activity of camera operator 2 (CAM2) to the coach. While filming players on the pitch, he takes advantage of a ball going outside to pan to Deschamps (lines 2 to 3) and to zoom on him (lines 3–4). By those moves, he tacitly proposes a face shot of the coach for broadcasting. In line 5, the director accepts the proposition with an “‘okay’ +CAM number (2)”. The cam number (2) here is an address term used to select camera operator 2. That projects his broadcasting on-air on line 6.

The airing of this shot is retrospectively oriented towards the comments and projects a continuation of the narrative about the coach. In this way, the journalist reuses Deschamps’ image as an illustration in lines 6 to 9 to resituate the narrative in the stakes of the ongoing game.

Coach shot as a resource for commentators' talk

In the previous case, we have described how an image of a coach is interactionally produced and broadcast by using the commentators’ talk as a resource. The fine-tuned and timely adjustment between verbal and visual description is treated as an illustration of on-air talk, which reflexively accomplishes coach participation in the game, at least in a narrative form. In the following case, we will show how video images of the coach can be mobilised as an emergent and unsolicited resource for on-air talk.

In this excerpt, the pundit (PUN) talks about the performance of one team (Lille) when the ball goes out (l. 1–5). The director (DIR) instructs and selects a close shot of Lille’s coach, Rudi Garcia (l. 4). The shot of Lille’s coach is constantly available on camera 16 (CAM16) for the director. Just after the address term used for selecting operator 16, the director presses the button and thus switches from camera 2 to camera 16, showing the coach. From lines 4 to 6, Coach Garcia appears on-air, drinking.

After the pundit’s turn, there is quite a long pause (l. 6). Then the journalist (JOU) explicitly mobilises the shot as a resource for introducing a new topic. His turn is prefaced by a reference to this shot (“ah we have glimpsed Rudi Garcia”) which offers a visual resource for a narrative on the coach (l. 7–9). Here, coach images, contingently produced by technicians, are used as resources for commentator’s talk on-air. This reflexive and incremental relation between verbal and visual accounts contributes to introducing the coach as a participant in the journalistic narrative of the match.

In this previous section, we studied coach participation in the game by examining how the coach interactionally emerges as a topic in commentators’ discussions. We have pointed to ordinary interactional devices in the synchronous production of audio-visual accounts of the coach activity. In the first case, the coach shot is retrospectively oriented to the ongoing talk on-air about the coach. In the second case, the coach shot projects the introduction of the coach as topic on-air to describe the performance.

Accounting for coach talk in game

The cases explored in the last section allowed us to underline the relevance of coaches’ participation for TV practitioners. The analysis reveals modalities of participation in-game mainly based on using the coaches’ shots as a resource for commentators’ talk. Here, participation is not based on the coach’s actions per se but solely on the simultaneity between talk and video images. Images of coaches are used as a resource for the match’s narrative.

This synchronicity is one of the most fundamental practices for live broadcasting. It results from the meticulous and routinised work of broadcasters (journalists and technicians) that the analysis thoroughly examines. The production of this synchronicity is also the basic infrastructure of more complex forms of enrolling coaches in the game. The following section will consider coaches’ participation formats based on the coach’s accountable activity, i.e. on the coaches’ intelligible embodied and verbal actions.

We will investigate three interactional devices: instruction, correction, and contestation. This array represents typical modalities of coaches’ participation in-match. The analysis focuses on how the intelligibility of these interactional situations involving coach talk is reflexively co-produced.

The three devices are organised in pairs of two sequentially ordered actions: one part corresponds to an embodied action accomplished by players or referees on the pitch, and the other to a verbal action of the coach. The nexus between verbal and non-verbal actions leads to different temporal interaction organisations with various orientations of coach talk. An instruction projects the realisation of a forthcoming action by the player. A correction is retrospectively oriented towards a past action and projects new trajectories for the player’s actions. A contestation is addressed to the referee. It is retrospectively oriented towards a past action. It generally does not imply any responses or subsequent actions from the referee other than a sanction when the contestation is considered too virulent. Broadcasting these scenes allows TV producers to make available the coach’s vision of the match, his players’ performance, or the referee’s. However, it raises technical difficulties since it requires not only visual access to the sideline but also a sonorization of the coach talk. Filming and sonorizing coach activity implies both a spatial arrangement of technological devices (placement of the camera person and microphone in relevant places close to the coach) and a temporal organisation for broadcasting (i.e. selecting the camera and triggering the microphone in an appropriate moment).

Accounting for an instruction

In lines 1–2, the director (DIR) first requests (l.1) and then launches a shot of the coach on the air just after a sequence of replays (l.3). Just on live, the coach (COA) takes a breath and instructs one of his players, with an address term (“Gervais”) followed by the instruction (“inside”), repeated twice (lines 5 and 10).

In line 6, during the coach’s in-breath, the director projects the forthcoming talk and instructs the sound technician to increase the microphone’s volume near the coach (line 6). This projection makes it possible to achieve the audibility of the coach talk for the audience.

In line 14, the director first acknowledges the technicians for capturing the coach’s instruction and then repeats the word “inside” (“intérieur”) used by coach Garcia. By recycling this term, the director highlights its public availability for the TV-viewers and possible utility for narrative purposes by the commentators.

In the sequence developments, the pundit (PUN) mobilises the coach talk and recycles the term previously “inside” used by the coach and the director. In lines 15–18, the pundit employs this term to support his analysis of the game and indexes this specific instruction as an instance of effective coaching and as a reason for Lille’s domination.

Just after hearing the word “inside”, the director formulates a strongly positive assessment, acknowledging the recycling of the term “inside” by the commentator (l.17). It reveals the normative orientation of broadcasters for synchronising talk and films and for involving the coaches in the live production of the match. The accomplishment of the coach’s instruction as a public phenomenon of the match is a co-operative action (Goodwin, 2018). The term “inside” is a multiple-layered resource for coordinating participants at a distance, lodged in different spaces (pitch, backstage, stage) with different forms of commitment towards the match.

Accounting for a correction

The following extract shows another method of producing and mobilising coach talk during broadcasting, with an instance of correction, retrospectively oriented to player action.

The journalist (JOU) is engaged in his commentary (l.1) when the coach (Antonetti) (COA) shouts on the pitch and is distinctly audible on the air despite the overlap with the commentator (l.2). Coach Antonetti addresses one of his players (M’vila), giving an instruction first (“wait”). Since the player keeps moving forward, he asks a rhetorical question (“where are you going?”) (Koshik, 2005) and uses a directive (“stay here”) as a new instance of instruction. Despite his coach’s instructions, M’vila kept running with the ball without waiting for his partners to move up on the pitch. He is too high on the pitch compared to his teammates and has no simple solution for giving the ball to a partner. M’vila provokes a foul by being tackled by an opponent (l.3–4) and stays on the ground. As soon as the game stops, the director (DIR) switches from the large shot to a close shot showing M’Vila sitting on the ground (cam8, figures #13 to #14, line 4).

Despite the pause in the match, the coach still shouts at his player M’Vila and corrects his actions (“But make the team play higher”, line 6). This formulation is retrospectively linked to the previous instructions (“wait”, “stay here”), which were not actualised by M’vila, who kept running. With this correction, Antonetti formulates a negative assessment of M’vila’s actions. Listening to Antonetti’s talk, the director requests a shot of Antonetti on camera 16 (line 7) and switches in lines 5-6-7-8 (fig. #15). As coach Antonetti appears on-air, the journalist ceases to speak and gives the floor to the coach (lines 5 to 8). In line 9, he is audible and visible on-air, repeating his previous instruction and question.

By producing a series of two close shots “player/coach”, the director builds a categorial pair “recipient/talker”. In this way, he makes this interaction relevant and intelligible for broadcasting. He tries to continue the pairing by soliciting a new shot of the player M’vila with camera 8 (line 11). But the script indicates that the game is starting again (line 13), and the director leaves the close shots series to return to the match in a large shot (line 13) and acknowledges the camera operators for the production of the sequence of shots (line 15).

At the end of the extract (l.16–17), the journalist mobilises Antonetti’s turns as resources for his comment. He rebuilds the pair coach-player, i.e. talker-recipient. Thanks to the coach’s intervention and his apparition on-air, the journalist transforms an ordinary series of actions on the pitch (a player provoking a foul) into an event of the game likely to be described in detail. The negative assessment vehemently formulated by the coach is used as a support for this transformation.

Coach contestation as a reason for a visual inquiry

The last excerpt of this collection focuses on the coach’s role in identifying and contesting litigious situations. Such practices are quite common in football since some coaches are used to challenging referees’ judgements during the match. This extract will show how broadcasters mobilise coaches’ quarrelling to identify some game events that need to be replayed for further investigation.

At the beginning of the extract, one player of the team in red (Montano) is tackled by an opponent. The referee does not stop the game (l.1). The contact between the two players projects a quick and audible contestation of the coach with a repeated “oh” (l.2). Just after the first “oh”, the pundit makes a statement concerning the actions, which also differs from the referee’s judgement, by repeating twice “there is a foul” (l.5). In that way, the coach’s first negative assessment of the referee’s decision (“oh”, l.2) projects a continuation from the pundit, in particular by taking a stance regarding the game event (whether or not it is a foul). This controversial perspective about the game events is a recurrent resource for TV broadcasting. The divergent ways of seeing, or “contested vision” (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1997), be it between players and referee or between commentators and referee, project systematically a visual investigation concerning the contested event and, consequently, the production, the diffusion, and the comment of a replay revealing the details of the action (see Camus, 2021a). Here the coach is the initiator of this inquiry.

In the continuation of the extract, all the commentators take up the coach’s view. The pundit (lines 3 and 5), journalist (line 4), and interviewer (line 7) all agree in formulating a foul against the actual referee’s decision. Then, the interviewer and the pundit give reasons for explaining the perceptual discrepancies (lines 7–10 and 14).

In the control room, the contested vision projects a variety of actions. One part concerns the coordinated production of a replay showing this suspicious action. The replay operator chief (REPc) picks up the replay produced by operator number five (REP5) and announces his number (line 9) as a request for confirmation. In line 11, the replay operator confirms the availability of the whole course of actions (“from the beginning to the end”) in the sequence he produced.

The other coordinated activities concern the director and camera operators’ live filming and editing of the scene of contestation. In the first part of the sequence, the director has switched from the large shot to a close shot of the victim (Victor Hugo Montano) suffering on the ground. The director first requests for a shot of the coach (“don’t move cam 16”, line 6) and then a shot exhibiting the referee (line 8, “referee Fabrice”).

As the images are made available for live editing, the director can produce a sequence involving three actors: the victim (suffering on the ground, from line 4 to 9, and 17 to 19, fig. #18), the referee (from line 12 to 17, fig. #17), and the coach (contesting the referee, l. 9 to 12, and l. 19 to the end, fig. #19).

From line 17, the commentators stop talking and give the floor to the coach. From line 19, he is both visible and audible. The coach uses the indexical “ça” (it) to refer to the “unseen foul” and yells at the referee to contest his vision. The interviewer reformulates this statement as a display of anger (line 22). In line 23, the coach demonstrates the reason for his contestation by describing what makes this action faulty and, thereby, the referee’s decision inaccurate (“and the foot forward!”).

In line 24, the director brings the scene of contestation to an end by launching on-air the replay announced in lines 9 and 11. Launching relies on the coordination between the images’ producer and the commentators. As the replay is launched on air, the director addresses the commentators to warn them about it. The journalist prefaces his description by reusing the category of anger in reference to the coach’s attitude, as it was introduced by the interviewer (ITV) in line 22. Therefore, the replay is not only the support of verifying an objective matter-of-fact; it is an opportunity to rally the TV viewer to one of the opposite views and, namely, to promote the coach’s perspective by giving reason to his anger (l. 27–28).

Conclusion

The article has adopted a unique perspective on coach activity in-match by exploring the practices by which the coach is perceived, filmed, and described from within a control room during live broadcasting. It highlighted the relevance and importance of the coach’s actions in producing audiovisual accounts of the match and how broadcasters make sense of it. The paper has shown how TV professionals reflexively accomplished the coach’s participation by producing the visibility and audibility of the coach’s actions and mobilising it as a resource for the match’s narrative.

This singular perspective on football matches and coaches’ activity invites us to respecify the issue of participation in-game. In contrast to traditional conceptions that associate participant status in-game to preestablished rules and thus exclude or limit the idea of coach participation, it adopts an ethnomethodological perspective to show the local methods that members use to account for coach participation in the game. It reveals the taken-for-granted orientation of commentators and video technicians for crediting the coach with a participant status in-game, despite seeming firstly exterior to the frame of play.

We highlighted different formats of the audiovisual involvement of the coach, revealing multiple layers of participation. We first demonstrated how the scenic intelligibility of coach actions is used to produce video images of the coach that are adjusted to the emergent dynamics of the match. Then, we unfolded more complex sequential patterns by illuminating the reflexive nexus between the ongoing production of shots and the trajectories of commentators’ talk. It reveals especially how coach participation appears as a members’ concern through the local methods by which technicians and commentators collaboratively reconstruct categories of participants related to the ongoing accomplishment of the game.

We finally dealt with the issue of coach talk during the game. Technicians work on producing the availability of coach talk (instructions, corrections, contestation) for the audience. These sequences of unsolicited speech appear as essential resources for broadcasting. Coach talk is both retrospectively and prospectively oriented. On the one hand, commentators mobilise coach instructions, corrections or evaluations to reconsider players’ actions. By doing so, they offer an endogenous analysis of the game based on the perspective of an insider and expert participant. On the other hand, coach talk – particularly during situations of contestation – can initiate incremental sequences of inquiry and act as a pre-sequence for the production of replay.

Transcript conventions

Talk is transcribed with the conventions developed by Jefferson (2004).

Embodied actions are transcribed according to conventions developed by Mondada, see https://www.lorenzamondada.net/_files/ugd/ba0dbb_3978d2a34cf44376adb7a341975d23aa.pdf

Table

+ + ∆ ∆	Descriptions of embodied movements are delimited between two identical symbols, one symbol for each participant. Descriptions are synchronized with corresponding stretches of talk/lapses of time
$ $	For referees on the pitch
n*n’	Exact moment of switch from camera n to camera n’
±- -> - ->+	The action described continues across subsequent lines until the same symbol is reached.
>>	The action described begins before the extract’s beginning.
–>>	The action described continues after the extract’s end.
COA	Participant talking is identified in capital bold letters: in black when he/she is part of the control room participant framework, inaccessible for TV-viewers (off-air); in grey when he/she belongs to the broadcasted scenes, accessible for TV-viewers (on-air).
coa	Participant accomplishing an embodied action is identified in lowercase
fig	The precise moment at which a screen shot has been taken is indicated with a symbol # showing its temporal position within turn at talk/segments of time.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to all technicians, directors, journalists, and producers who made this work possible by accepting my presence among them and offering time to me. I particularly thank François-Charles Bideaux, Michel Giuliani, Laurent Lachand, and Grégory Nowak. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Charlie Corsby, SCR’s associate editor, for their close and attentive readings and precise remarks. They considerably helped me in clarifying and improving the paper. Misconceptions, analytical errors, and other divagations, of course, remain mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).