Amid a virtual age, illustration is claiming its space in sports journalism. Video highlights fill our feeds—either of recent replays or historic moments—and stat sheet graphics proliferate through articles and posts alike. However illustrations are working to break up that highlight-stat malaise.
Illustration in sports journalism has been pioneered by indie sports mags and social media; really any entity without rights to raw video. It has become not only a viable way to market content, but also to tell a story and to provide a perspective that stats and highlights can’t.
Every time a pro athlete scores, a graphic is posted by their team’s social media. If the player is big enough—or the play deserving of a highlight—illustration will likely be posted on the account of a site like The Score or Bleacher Report.
As for print, publications like These Football Times, No Place Like Home, and Racquet use unique illustrations to prompt and tell their printed stories. Guardian Sport includes illustrations for each major column on Saturdays and Sundays. One of Guardian Sport’s illustrators, David Squires, who also works as a cartoonist, author, and illustrator of “The Illustrated History of Football” and more recently “Goalless Draws: Illuminating the Genius of Modern Football,” had more to say about illustration in sports journalism.
According to Squires as print media seems to be fading away across the board, illustration—a practice traditionally linked to a pen and paper— may be expected to follow suit. But he believes that “there’s still a place and demand for illustration” because it “provides a unique offering, quite separate from video.”
Illustration provides context and personality that are impossible to get with video and statistics, which are, by their nature, objective. “I often try to include political commentary in my cartoons. I mostly draw cartoons about [soccer], and feel that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum separate from the rest of the world,” says Squires. Just last week, Squires created a fictional soccer squad (Fictional FC) bereft with racism amid the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Bleacher Report has been one of the most fervent adopters of illustration, as well as animated content. In 2014, when they were still an upstart sports site, Bleacher Report acquired the now famous “Game of Zones,” an animated show depicting story lines from the NBA season in the style of “Game of Thrones.”
Such was the success of “Game of Zones” that in 2016 they launched “Gridiron Heights,” an NFL-centric animated show, and in 2018 released their latest animated venture, the European soccer-focused “The Champions.” Each of these shows introduces some sort of off-field variable into a story arc relating to the trend of the season in the respective sports, often through comedy. They morph San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich to the cold, relentless, and unfeeling Night King, and depict Lebron James sitting on an iron throne as the “King of the East.” In an episode of “The Champions,” as the house tries to figure out what happened to a seemingly dead Neymar, Phillipe Coutinho suggests that they should focus on Cristiano Ronaldo as a suspect, only for him to receive a letter titled “From Ronaldo’s Lawyers” and subsequently change his tune and accuse Edinson Cavani.
Although Squires considers himself somewhat of a luddite, working primarily with pen and ink, he has tried to get himself acquainted with the tools of the 21st century. “I have had clients asking to use more creative use of social media,” says Squires, “such as some of the animation features on social media platforms like Instagram.” And, like Bleacher Report’s mini-series, Squires attempts to make each of his illustrations “with the basic premise that it should be funny.”
While some lament the turn towards faceless stats, Sports Illustrated is publishing pieces about the move toward journalism focused on, what they consider, “the simple—if sometimes problematic—joys of being a fan first”. First Take and Undisputed along with sports-commentators-turned-personalities Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless dominate today’s broadcast sports market as fans yearn for less objective, higher energy reporting.
Subjective reporting may actually be why illustration is growing as a storytelling device. This subjectivity is displayed through how Squires chooses a subject, and how he creates his content. He said that he often just chooses the most prominent news story, and uses his cartoons to express how he feels about it. “I am fortunate to be given a lot of creative freedom by clients [like The Guardian], so in terms of content I am still mostly able to write cartoons about whatever subject takes my interest.”
Illustration is subjective, albeit often in a less obvious way than Skip Bayless demanding that the Cowboys make the playoffs, or Shannon Sharp arriving at the studio in a James jersey and a rubber goat mask. Perhaps it’s this extra bit of bite, and the personality behind it that makes it an attractive way to compliment, or even produce, sports journalism today.
