Jamie Redknapp’s lawyer-forced apology a worrying sign for football pundits

No question as to the most toe-curling moment of TV this weekend: Jamie Redknapp’s on-air apology to Lord Sugar on Sky’s Friday night football coverage. Jamie had incurred the wrath of Lord Siralun a few weeks ago on Sky when he had told viewers that the former Tottenham Hotspur owner had left the club in “a complete mess” back in the day, which he obviously definitely very much absolutely didn’t.

Lord Sugar immediately took up the cudgels on social media hellsite X, thundering: “Jamie Redknapr is a double barrel idiot. He talks a load of rubbish. He said when Daniel Levy took over Spurs Alan Sugar left the club in a right mess. He and SKY will be hearing from my lawyers Monday @redknapp.”

Much to enjoy there, especially if you hear it in Lord Sugar’s voice and imagine that he is giving some hapless Apprentice contestant a beasting for failing to sell 400 sausage rolls on Threadneedle Street in half an hour or whatever it is he has them doing these days.

Unquestionably the funniest possible way to write out “Redknapp”, for one thing, but when you’re as flush as the man who parlayed a hundred quid’s worth of car aerials into a £1.2bn fortune you can definitely get someone else to do the spellings for you. The @ bit at the end is in fact the social media handle of Redknapp Senior, rather than Junior: presumably in error because Lord Sugar was spitting feathers at such levels of apoplexy that he got his Redknaprs muddled rather than an invitation for Harry to discipline his errant heir. Lord Sugar followed that message up with another one a few minutes later: “I am coming after you @MrJamieRedknapp idiot.”

Oh dear. Not what you want to read on a Saturday teatime, and unfortunately Lord Siralun was as good as his word, with the end result being that Jamie had to tell viewers this Friday night: “I just want to make clear that he stabilised the club and invested heavily during his time as chairman…” and there was quite a bit more of that sort of thing but it’s on balance just too cringey to type out, I’m afraid, including the former Liverpool captain and England international having to say sorry to Lord Sugar’s family and being “happy to set the record straight”.

Ooof. As a football viewing experience, the only thing I can really compare it to is watching someone in a defensive wall take a thunderous direct free-kick full smack-bang in the unmentionables. Ouch. Poor bugger.

An extraordinary fuss, really, and something of a cautionary tale about upsetting punchy plutocrats with deep pockets. But also noteworthy in that being a football pundit in the social media age has become increasingly about who can say the most spiky and spicy things about the people under discussion, and isn’t this the sort of thing that TV talkers like Jamie are supposed to be doing, to keep themselves relevant and In The Conversation?

Generally, but not exclusively, it is the players and managers getting monstered, not the suits, and Gary Neville, for his part, has said that the Glazer family have “been failing miserably” and that they “are hiding in Tampa”, and apparently without censure. Presumably the likes of Roy Keane (and the Sky lawyers) are confident that Luke Shaw or Ruben Amorim or whoever aren’t going to sue for being called useless.

Lord Sugar’s public identity and status is based on him being brilliant at being a businessman, so he’s got that reputation to defend. But by the same token, it’d certainly be interesting if a football manager felt that someone saying he was no good at managing a football team was libellous, an assault on his professional standing.

A non-lawyer might say all of the above are just matters of opinion and fair comment but… the lawyers just don’t see it like that, I guess. It seems in the final analysis that Jamie was probably unlucky to catch Lord Sugar on a bad day, but you wonder if it will set a precedent. With players on hundreds of thousands a week, maybe they – or, more pertinently, their personal management goons and handlers – might not want the brand undermined by ex-players trying to keep themselves in the media limelight with harsh critique? It would be ironic indeed if such a likeable and uncontroversial TV figure as Jamie Redknapp ended up setting the agenda after all.