Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Italian football podcast. We get a lot of people asking us to define what is a prem face. Now, the word prem face has now gone mainstream, as we will explain in a minute on our bedroom prem face segment. It's gone mainstream, now the mainstream media are now starting to use this term. It's a term, to give you a bit of background on this, it's a term that I coined probably almost 15 years ago.
Speaker: And I have to be honest that I didn't actually come up with the name myself. It was while I was at goal, and it was in a work meeting. And I was with a Scotsman called Ewan McDonald, right? Who used to be a football journalist. He's no longer any more. And we can't remember what we were talking about, but we were talking about, I think, some kind of English mainstream media
Speaker: journalist and how, you know, he something stupid that he said about about European football. And you would just come out and go, oh, God.
Speaker: what a prim face he is. I just thought that is brilliant. That is just the perfect way of describing your typical kind of English Premier League fan or journalist who is just willfully ignorant about any football outside of England. Proudly. Proudly.
Speaker: So I started using this word. This was around the time that Twitter was born. And I started using it on Twitter, almost just jokingly, really. I didn't mean anything mean by it. And then I used it in some of my articles that I used to regularly write features on Go. And then it started to take off. People started copying it and using it on social media as an insult, as a way to mock an English Premier League fan who
Speaker: who, you know, doesn't know anything about football, doesn't watch any football outside of the Premier League, doesn't know anything. You know, prem faces will, you know, repeat kind of stereotypes. So if they're talking about Serie A, they call it, you know, a retirement home or corrupt, or Italy play catenaccio. And if they're talking about Germany, you know, they call them efficient.
Speaker: you know, they must never be written off, you know, they'll never call them Germany. They'll always be called the Germans. No, no, it's not that prim face. Germany is never England to play in Germany. It's always England to play the Germans, you know, like they're like they're an alien species, you know, always notice that and you see you see it on you see it on TV like BBC when they when they when they
Speaker: when they're introducing a World Cup game that Germany are playing. So today on the BBC, we have Ecuador are playing against the Germans. You know, if it's Argentina, it'll be their divers.
Speaker: You know, these kind of things. And then if England are playing in a World Cup, you know, they're always the favourite before every tournament. So these are the kind of things, you know, we could go on. Everybody knows what PremFace is now. I think it starts. And then, of course, you know, declare your astonishment and how England could lose, I don't know, 2 -1 or draw goalists against a team where not even one player would make the England team. That, to me, is the definition of like that. There's lots of there's lots of things that PremFace is, you know,
Speaker: And of course, are Premier League proven or unproven unless you played in the Premier League? Yeah, unproven unless you played in the Premier League. If you're comparing a Premier League team to a team from outside the Premier League, you'll always do how many of that foreign team's players would get into the Premier League team. You'll see that all the time whenever they're previewing a Champions League game between, you know,
Speaker: anyone and anyone. Man City and someone else, it will always be, well, how many of that team would get into the Man City team? So these are the kind of things. So that is really the definition of a prem face. And it's just something just, you know, don't take it too seriously. Don't be mean with it. Just something just to kind of have a laugh about really.
Speaker: And it's not all fans of the Premier League or Premier Faces. No, of course not. Or all fans of the England national team or Premier Faces. No, no, no, no, absolutely not. New journalists in the English media are... Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Are Premier Faces. There's a specific bunch who are very loud.
Speaker: in the mainstream British media, who are, I would say, are the ones that they're the loudest. They're the ones that, you know, that you hear about. It's always the same five to ten people, I'd say. Yeah, Martin Samuel was incredible. And also five, like, I mean, my experience is like most English football fans that I've ever encountered, whether it's when I lived in the UK and went to university,
Speaker: were actually quite knowledgeable, to be honest. Or when I've been invited on other podcasts about English football, usually. I mean, more often than not, the person... I was on an Aston Villa podcast and the guy there, it felt like I was talking to a friend of 20 years. He was a complete football nerd. He'd watched the Serie A all his life. He remembered these details of
Speaker: that most people don't even watch the city I don't even remember. So my experience is that this is a very specific small but very loud group of people that go on about this, that do this, and that's something that we discovered this week, didn't we?
