The media is a big part in the life of a football player or anyone who is famous for that matter but we will focus on football players. The way that the media portrays a particular player is very important to that player’s career. If the media portrays a player in a positive way, than everything is good and the player will have the fans behind him. However if the media does not portray the player in a positive way, then the player will have a lot of problems with the fans and this could even result in the player being benched. The image of a player is very important to a team so if he doesn’t have a good image, he will most likely see a lot of time on the bench.
To tie this into Colombian football players, it is important to see how the media has affected them, particularly how the media practically forced James Rodríguez out of the Spanish club Real Madrid CF. After the world cup in 2014 in Brasil, James was signed by the Spanish giants, Real Madrid where he stayed for three seasons. During his first season James was spectacular scoring seventeen goals playing in the heart of midfield under former Italian manager, Carlo Ancelotti. Ancelotti was fired at the end of the season and was replaced by Spaniard coach, Rafa Benítez. Things didn’t go so well for James under Benítez. He was struggling to convince the coach to play him. This led to the media speculating a bad relationship between the two. This also led to other medias saying that James was out of shape and that he was getting fat. Here is James responded to such claims.
Midway through the season Benítez was fired due to poor results and French manager Zinedine Zidane took over at Real Madrid, which made things worse for James. James worked under Zidane for one and a half seasons and did not manage to play much, this lead to more speculation from the media. The Real Madrid fans began to jeer James at the stadium. Fortunately with a couple of good performances he got the fans back on his side but never got the playing time he wanted under Zidane. This led James to sign a two year loan agreement with German giants, FC Bayern Munich. The media wasn’t very nice to James in his last two years in the Spanish capital and was part of the reason for his departure.
