Hello. I see you’re back for more. Another hit of my thoughts. Another line of my feels. I am the dealer of a drug that nobody really wants. But since you’re here, you might as well sit back, grab that belt and start slapping your forearm…

In Part 1, Sam was unemployed and he didn’t like it. Wah wah wah.

In Part 2, Sam felt horrible colonial guilt and hated on everyone else for not sharing these slightly irrational feelings. Luckily, in a rare moment of optimism, moving to Madagascar is a great way of dealing with these feelings, which is great.

Part 3 is beautiful descent back into the mire of negativity, as discuss the industry that I fleetingly semi-entered, both adored and loathed, and then decided that it wasn’t for me.

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At the risk of sounding like a cliche, sports journalism was something I wanted to enter since I was a wee lad. It’s a familiar tale; a well-trodden path, from unsuccessfully harassing the Mid-Sussex times for work experience, to witnessing Boubacar Barry score the winning penalty in the final of the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations at the Estadio de Bata in Equatorial Guinea. It’s story I feel quite vindicated in telling, as writing is one of the few things I have genuine confidence in my ability to do well.

Most people in the industry can recount a similar story, albeit with a less obscure ending. The thoughts of a teenager, confused about where their life will take them, is often populated with dreams of sitting in the press box at the Emirates, fiddling about with your MacBook, earning money as you type. Or, as its more frequently termed by those aiming social media insults at moaning hacks, “you’re getting paid to watch football”.

And I guess for me, despite my limited experience, I felt that, when you take it in its purest form, its pretty close to this ideal. When at the stadium, that is essentially what you’re doing – getting paid to watch football. Of course there’s the extended sitting in the press box pre-game, the complaining about the wifi and the frantic tweeting of every event that occurs on the pitch, but – from what I understand at least – its pretty close.

In the meantime, when your mandate extends to the world outside of the stadium, you’re basically paid to think about football. You think. You ponder. You consider. Then, when you’ve thought, pondered and considered enough, you punch out some stuff containing “colour” and “narrative”, file it to whatever publication you may be writing for and they give you some money. That’s the theory anyway. What’s not to like?

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Indeed, as I have mentioned, my experience can be condensed into two separate month-long periods of “being” a football journalist: the 2014 World Cup, in which I wasn’t there, and the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations, in which I was. And they were both very good.

The 2014 World Cup allowed me to get a real taste of being paid and stuff, despite not actually being in Brazil. I say it lasted month; in fact it was more like two weeks, as the failures of both Cameroon and Ivory Coast to escape the groups meant that my role as official African Football Expert was over sooner than you could say “Giorgios Samaras last minute penalty to send Ivory Coast out of the group stage”. Regardless, it was pretty damn good, as shown by the fact I was given permission to write an article entitled, “Ode to Sol Bamba” – which is now my official barometer of comparing journalist experiences.

Then, six months later, came the Africa Cup of Nations. Other than a “what the fuck am I doing?!?!?” filled flight to Equatorial Guinea, followed by one of the dodgiest (and expensive) cab rides of my life at 1am from Malabo airport to my hotel, it was an almost exclusively positive experience, and easily one of the best things I’ve ever done.

Primarily, I got to do African football for a whole fucking month. That’s all I had to think about, tweet about, talk about and write about. My favourite thing, for a whole damn month. I watched 20 games in about 30 days, doing all the journalism-y things that you’d ever want: complaining about the wifi, eating crap pasta in a packed hotel lobby at 1am, trying to manipulate Bakary Sako into saying he wanted to leave Wolves, complaining about the wifi, live tweeting a police helicopter hovering concerningly close above a stand full of fans, almost getting crushed by a swathe of onrushing Gabon fans in the mixed zone, and complaining about the wifi. All in a very exciting and bizarre (mostly bizarre) new country with a wonderful group of pals.

Here I must repeat a sentiment echoed earlier in this blog: what’s not to like?

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Unfortunately, when I came back down to earth from a getting selfies with Aristide Bance frenzy, post-tournament thoughts began emerging on how I wanted to take this forward.

Ultimately, I did want to take it forward. As previously mentioned, I don’t believe it to be too different on a basic level from what you idolise to be as a child, as well as a number of other benefits. The fast-paced environment, the flexible lifestyle, the camaraderie – but ended up being something I have almost continuously moved away from since.

The two main forms in which it seems you can be a journalist these days are as follows – staff writer, in which you have a salary but less creative freedom, or a freelancer, in which you do not have a salary but more creative freedom. Personally, as someone who likes to keep his finances in check and know where the ins and outs are coming and going from, the former is far more attractive. The supposed subjugation of your remit doesn’t bother me especially, and I figured you’d still have the majority of the perks discussed above, in exchange for a solid income.

Alas, whilst this is a nice idea, these don’t come around very often. Fundamentally, an employee a publication can chuck whenever they wish but does all the same things is far more attractive than one they cannot chuck with such casualness, and in a time of “cost cutting” and “budgets” in the industry, this is something you have to accept. The idea of freelance doesn’t scare me enough for me to not try, however. Only thing is, my fears over finances not only manifested themselves in the form of not getting writing work, but also in the way of not getting paid for what you have already done.

Long story short, it took me ages to get paid, to such an extent that – as I write this blog, almost six months since I returned to England – I’m still owed about 20% of what I earned in Equatorial Guinea.

Now as a 22-year-old, living at home with no expenses, this shouldn’t really be a problem. And its not a problem, really. I had enough money to tide my minimal expenses in the meantime, so the lack of cash in my bank account sort of doesn’t affect anything. The thing that concerned me about this profession is what if I wasn’t in the cushty position I am currently in. What if I had to pay rent. What if I had to buy food. This industry tradition to not pay the people who do work for you for as long as possible put a serious dent in the allure of the whole idea.

As well as the practical issues of surviving, there’s also the deeper stuff about where I want to take my life, and whether being a sports journalist would be satisfying in the long-term. I feared the excessive crossover of work and play; the interference of my job in enjoying something that I have always loved and will probably continue to love. I thought that I might want to build a more solid wall between these two parts of my life — even if it does mean I have to discuss football with the muggles down the pub who haven’t even done any writing before (THIS IS A JOKE).

Similarly, I started questioning what the point was of sports journalism. This is going to sound wanky, and not even something I fully believe, but I kind of feel football – in the grand scheme of things – just isn’t that important. I know its an amazing outlet for joy and something that billions of people around the world love, but do I want my life to be defined by a piece of bollocks clickbait I’m forced into writing entitled “10 things we love about the Capital One Cup”? Again, I must reiterate, this is a notion I’m by no means convinced by, but is something that has crossed my mind multiple times.

This is a world where people get paid to work for LADBible. I feared that my journalism career would be crammed full of tosh that I fundamentally didn’t care about. I don’t give a shit about Jose Mourinho saying provocative things to the press, I don’t give a shit about the transfer window, and I don’t give a shit about comparing Lionel Messi and Cristiano fucking Ronaldo. Depressingly, this is what people want, and thus journalism must flex as such. And I figured it’s only going to get worse.

This is another silly thought but, I kind of feel my journalism may have already peaked. I don’t really see how it could get better than AFCON 2015. My first tournament – which must always be the best, covering my favourite tournament, with some cracking people. African football and Arsenal are only things that really gets me worked up and properly excited. From here on in, it’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic quotes and 17 things you didn’t know about Jason Puncheon.

I feel a pang of dissatisfaction about where everything is going. As far as I understand it, the challenge of bridging the gap between print and online in journalism is an immense one, meaning modern day publications need clicks as well as newsagent sales to survive – with this pursuit of clicks ultimately damaging the quality of the work produced. A match report becomes “five things we learned”, the transfer window becomes a cacophony of bollocks being spouted by ITKs and fake agent Twitter accounts, whilst the miserable tale of a player dying on a football field in somewhere unfashionable like Algeria is bumped out of the queue for a ditty on Lukas Podolski’s latest Instagram post. Everything is hashtags, lists and provactive headlines; and I don’t like it.

The majority of the people in the business are still phenomenal writers and lovely people. What I’m saying should by no means demean those who do work in the industry, as people should just do whatever makes them happy. The output from a lot of the major papers and websites I still find enjoyable, perfectly complemented by things like The Blizzard, but I just struggle to feel optimistic about the future.

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This has been a difficult topic to write about, as ultimately is something that I have thought about quite a lot over the past six months – this dichotomy between the journalism and international development. I could spend years trying to break in to what is an immensely competitive industry, scraping by, but when then is such a great alternative – one that I’m equally passionate about and am actually qualified in – there’s no point in drawing it out. For now, based on what I have experienced and basic gut instinct, I have made my decision, and I feel very happy with that.

It is nevertheless weird walking away from something I worked so hard towards – especially when I had a sniff. I wouldn’t say that I had my foot in the door, but I was knocking on it pretty hard. But this is not necessarily goodbye to journalism. I’ll always maintain an interest in this strange and complex world, and it is the strength of this interest and extent to which I am able to let it influence my decisions that will dictate my future. I have vague plans to be in Gabon for AFCON 2017 if things work out at the time. But, for now at least, it will be something I look back upon with a smile of contentment, knowing that I gave it a good go, and had a thoroughly enjoyable time in doing so.