On the second anniversary of Eddie Howe starting work at Newcastle United, a reporter in a press conference offered him tongue-in-cheek congratulations on managing two years without telling the truth about injuries.
“Thank you very much — that means a lot coming from you,” Howe replied, smiling.
It was a light-hearted exchange, but it shone a light on a wider issue.
In every media conference, Premier League managers will be asked to outline the team news. Journalists are duty-bound to ask the question, even if they know there is no guarantee that an answer will be forthcoming, or — if it does — that it will be honest.
Howe’s cryptic responses have become a running source of amusement for reporters and fans alike, but the Newcastle manager is far from the only one to face accusations of being economical with the truth when it comes to selection issues.
In his recent book Believe, Oleksandr Zinchenko revealed that Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta “likes to play games with the opposition. I’ve seen him tell injured players to come on the team bus and walk into the dressing room with their wash bag, to put the other manager off the scent.”
Arteta addressed the issue himself directly in a press conference after last month’s game against Liverpool, when Bukayo Saka started despite his manager saying that he had been “very uncertain” to feature.
“I don’t want to make it easy for anyone,” said Arteta. “The opponent has to make sure they do their homework — like I have to. When I know, I am not going to lie to you, I am not going to say, ‘He’s not fit’ and then I play him — I would never do that — but, if I am certain or I don’t want to tell you, I will keep you guessing.”
One of Arteta’s predecessors, Arsene Wenger, was upfront about the need to lie to journalists on fitness issues.
“If you ask me have I lied to the press to protect a player, I must honestly say ‘yes’,” Wenger told reporters in 2010, a comment which in itself was in response to Wayne Rooney denying his then-Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson’s claim that he had an ankle injury. Wenger added: “When I lie to the press, I speak beforehand with the player and say: ‘Listen, this is the story we’re going to give’.”
Managers are rarely so open about their approach but sometimes the mask slips. Earlier this season, Leicester City manager Steve Cooper insisted he had not lied in a Friday afternoon press conference about the fitness of striker Jamie Vardy, who he ruled out of a game three days later against Tottenham.
After Vardy then played and scored against Spurs, Cooper said: “I think if the game was yesterday or Saturday for sure he wouldn’t have played, so there was no mind games or, you know, lies going on. I wasn’t lying in the press conference. I have done that before, but I wasn’t this time.”
Few fans would have any misgivings about managers duping journalists if it could secure their team an advantage, but for the coaches themselves, there are several important issues to consider before committing their answer to the record.
“It’s about weighing up every single situation because some of them are different,” Chris Hughton, one of Howe’s Newcastle predecessors, tells The Athletic.
“What you generally try to avoid is telling untruths. There are always going to be the really clear-cut, straightforward situations when a player is out for a couple of months. They are generally the ones you can be quite open about.
“But what comes into your mind is always the responsibility you have to the individual and the team. So if you’re playing a couple of games in a few days, you might want to be a bit coy about things.
“Do you want your opposition to know if somebody is going to be fit or going to be out injured? The answer to that is generally ‘no’, so you don’t want to disclose that and give the opposition whatever slight advantage you might give them.
“There are also variables about how long a player might be out for and a player you think might be out for a couple of weeks makes great progress over the next few days and ends up being fit for the next game.
“In general, you don’t want to be telling untruths because sometimes they can come back and bite you, but you also don’t want to be giving people an advantage.
“You also don’t want to be setting precedents: ‘You were very open about the last injury, so why can’t you be as open about this one?’.”
Sometimes, however, managers’ attempts to deflect questions on player fitness can border on farcical.
Towards the end of last season, Arteta refused to rule winger Gabriel Martinelli out of a Champions League game against Porto despite the Brazil international being spied on crutches at Brentford three days earlier.
And the mind games can go further than simply fudging answers in managers’ pre-match meetings with the media.
For example, two seasons ago, Sheffield United chose to make striker Ollie McBurnie available at a press conference before an away game at Cardiff City in the Championship.
The forward declared himself fit but his club’s attempts to get one over on their opponents were undermined when McBurnie posted a photograph of himself at a Sheffield boxing show on social media when his fit team-mates had already travelled to South Wales.
At the opposite end of the scale, Marcelo Bielsa adopted a habit of announcing his starting line-up ahead of a game during his stint at Leeds United, until one day in 2019 he was admonished by a supporter he met in the street for handing an advantage to opponents.
At the next press conference, Bielsa told reporters he could no longer provide advanced notice but then quipped: “Between you and me, it’s going to be the same team.”
In the women’s game, there is the added complication of explaining the absences of pregnant players before they are ready to reveal their happy, but personal, news to the world.
Chelsea used German international Melanie Leupolz contracting Covid-19 in the early weeks of her pregnancy to explain her extended time out of action, with even her fellow players not being aware of the real reason why she was missing.
“I told staff members who needed to know and we kept it as a secret from the team for a long time — I think it was almost the third or fourth month,” Leupolz told Sky Sports in 2023. “I was still training, but we could use Covid as an excuse for why I’m not really in training sessions, having contact and doing that stuff.”
Medical privacy is certainly one compelling argument to justify a manager hiding the reason for a player’s absence. Mark Robins, shortly before his departure from Coventry City, even cited data protection laws as a reason for him not being able to answer team news questions, although that may have been tongue-in-cheek.
There are, however, plenty of good reasons why managers and media officers need to be economical with the truth to protect their employees.
“Sometimes, players would be out for other reasons,” said an experienced former communications chief at Premier League clubs who spoke to The Athletic on condition of anonymity to protect relationships. “He might have had a death in the family, but you wouldn’t want to say that publicly for obvious reasons.
“And you wouldn’t advise the manager to say the player is out for ‘personal reasons’ because that leaves a void of information which people then fill with speculation.
“So in that situation, you might advise the manager to say the player is unavailable because of a slight knock so at least you’re being upfront and saying, ‘He’s not going to play’.”
And there are times when revealing the truth could have financial ramifications.
Shortly after Omar Richards signed for Nottingham Forest from Bayern Munich in the summer of 2022, it became clear that he had arrived with a hairline fracture in his leg that would keep him out for a considerable time even though he had been able to train through the pain.
Conscious that they were in negotiations with Huddersfield Town to sign another defender, Harry Toffolo, Forest knew that news of Richards’ misfortune leaking could push up the asking price for Toffolo.
As The Athletic reported in July 2023, the then Forest media team posted photographs of Richards training on social media and the injured player was even named on the substitutes’ bench for a pre-season friendly against Hertha Berlin while talks over Toffolo and Huddersfield team-mate Lewis O’Brien continued. The pair eventually signed for a combined £10million.
The phenomenon of hiding the extent of injuries extends beyond the Premier League, where a host of managers have been found to have tried to keep the truth from opponents.
In Major League Baseball, the Houston Astros were forced in September to admit that outfielder Kyle Tucker had suffered a fractured shin after previously announcing the injury as a shin contusion, although the Astros claimed the true nature of the injury was only discovered when swelling had receded.
Several U.S. sports have rules in place designed to ensure transparency over injuries, but the regulations do not prevent misinformation.
Last month, the Philadelphia 76ers were fined $100,000 (£792,000) by the NBA for misrepresenting why star centre Joel Embiid is not currently playing.
And just last week, Philadelphia Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni seemed to reveal that Jalen Hurts was suffering from an ankle injury, despite the quarterback being officially listed by the Eagles as missing training due to needing “rest”. He then backtracked later in his press conference.
The National Hockey League has adopted a policy of announcing injuries only as upper or lower body in a move designed to inform supporters of availability but prevent ruthless opponents from targeting existing weaknesses during games. The Toronto Maple Leafs’ Auston Matthews, for example, is currently sidelined but the public only knows that he has an upper-body issue.
The move takes responsibility for injury information out of coaches’ hands but, in reality, more specific details often leak out.
Mandated injury transparency was introduced in part to ensure full disclosure for sports gamblers. It is a move not yet mooted in the UK, but accurate injury news is becoming increasingly important in a landscape where Fantasy Football games are growing in popularity.
“A large proportion of my audience will come at it from a Fantasy Football perspective and, for that audience, the Fantasy Football element will almost trump their own team,” Ben Dinnery, injury analyst and founder of the Premier Injuries YouTube channel, told The Athletic.
“I see a lot of conversations about having the level of transparency that they have in the United States. If it’s a high-profile or important player who disappears from a team sheet with no inkling or sign, that is really frustrating for supporters, especially Fantasy Football ones.
“They would prefer a bit of a heads-up that a player is having issues or needs a late fitness test so they have some idea.
“But there is always a get-out-of-jail-free card for every manager after a press conference, where you have that 24-48-hour period where a player can pick up a knock, go down ill or have an adverse reaction if they’re coming back from an injury.”
Many fans, and probably all journalists, may prefer full disclosure from coaches about player availability. But the reality is that the stakes are too high for that to ever be a feature of managerial press conferences — unless, of course, you’re Marcelo Bielsa.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
