ABSTRACT
Post-match football (soccer) interviews (PMI) are a type of sports interview with distinctive characteristics and constitute an established part of a full television broadcast of a football match. They share some of those characteristics with related interview types such as expert interviews with the team coach or other football experts, interviews with an ex-player who might also act as co-commentator and with the specific genre of press conference interviews (Sznycer 2010). Typically, on German television, the post-match football interview takes place right after a match, on the pitch, the player still in his kit, sweating and often still in motion. In contrast to this impression of spontaneous immediacy is the apparent ritualised form of the PMI, which is characterised by a rigid question-answer structure and formulaic language. PMIs are regularly criticised in public for their lack of journalistic quality, informative content and the players’ competence as interviewees. Such criticism is voiced on social media networks, in internet fora or by journalists commenting on their colleagues’ skills. One particularly prominent form of criticism is the humoristic exploitation of the PMI, for instance, on websites collecting players’ quotes or by comedians parodying the PMI. The direction of criticism is apparent: interviewers are said to be too uncritical while players are regarded as linguistically unimaginative or even incompetent.
