Good news for sportsmen this week: they can now forget the pre‑tournament boot camps, and the on-tour karaoke. Travel agents, too, can cancel those large group tours to Gallipoli. Because the Ryder Cup gave us conclusive proof that the ultimate team-bonding tool is already here, and its name is WhatsApp.
The European team’s app-inspired love-in has removed all doubt. Even we on the outside could practically see the heart-eyed emojis fluttering between Francesco Molinari and Tommy Fleetwood. If Theresa May really wants to rally her cabinet behind her at the Tory conference, she should surely be changing her profile pic to Justin Thomas in a Beat Europe T-shirt.
Intriguingly, Rory McIlroy didn’t even have WhatsApp installed on his phone until the Monday before the tournament began. And here, I think, we can speculate on where it all went wrong for the Americans – they were probably still on Facebook Messenger. Jim Furyk’s attempts to motivate his men with big blue thumbs-ups were doomed from the start: no one likes getting those pop-up boxes in the corner of their browser. Just picture poor Tiger trying to Netflix and chill while Patrick Reed spammed Jordan Spieth with giant face stickers.
Yes, just as Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, major sporting tournaments can now be won in the text fields of a free-to-use cross-platform messaging service. Only a few weeks ago, when England advanced to the 2019 Women’s World Cup finals, Phil Neville revealed how his extensive use of WhatsApp had forged a special bond with his footballers. “It means that every single minute of the day I know what players are doing,” said Neville. Which strongly suggests he’s one of those friends who gets you to turn on location-sharing on the pretext of meeting up at a busy mall, then hopes you’ll forget to ever switch it back off.
“I know every part of their lives,” said Neville, adding more specifics than perhaps he should have. “I know about their animals – if they’ve got a dog I know its name. I know about their partners, I know if they go to the cinema – if they have an ice cream I know about it.” It sounded creepy, but it seemed effective. Although you did wonder if Neville had really grasped the purpose of WhatsApp given that he had 30 ongoing chats, one for each squad member. “It’s the only way we can be in constant contact,” he said, so either he doesn’t understand what a text message is or his SIM plan is data-only.
In professional sports, as in life, WhatsApp really has only two purposes: logistics and “bantz”. This was perfectly illustrated by Britain’s male gymnasts in the buildup to the last Olympics. When their group wasn’t dominated by Game of Thrones spoilers, Kristian Thomas explained to me then, it was largely men exchanging pictures of leotards, so that no one turned up at competition wearing the wrong one. The England rugby team has two different group chats precisely so Eddie Jones doesn’t have to contend with aubergine emojis and Mean Girls memes. That’s sensible because, let’s face it, one of those forwards is going to be that guy who always asks what the meet-up time is, because he can’t be bothered to scroll up and hasn’t yet discovered the search function.
Membership of a WhatsApp group can mean everything to a sportsperson now. Chris Ashton, for instance, only discovered he was back in the running for international duty when he was added to the scheduling chat for the summer training camp. Unfortunately, since he earned himself a seven-week ban in a pre-season “friendly” that sounded anything but, one can only assume that the dreaded words “Chris Ashton has been removed from the group” are now haunting his sleep. “Some lads try to get in there early to remove themselves in a nice way,” Danny Care recently told an interviewer, “other lads try to hold on”. Insert here gif of Martin Landau stepping on Cary Grant’s fingers, as he clings to the side of Mount Rushmore.
In a world where our sporting heroes are distanced from us by ever increasing fame and fortune, it’s nice to imagine Roger Federer posting his videos to his Laver Cup team and getting embarrassed when he accidentally voice-calls Rafa. There is after all something universally humbling about the agonising wait while Novak is typing. Mike Tindall admitted not long ago that he was in “about 25,000” WhatsApp groups because he didn’t want to look rude by leaving.
But then you’ve got to feel for Tindall – his family group-chat includes his Olympian wife Zara and her right royal cousins, which brings about etiquette issues of its own. And even masters of social media wrestle with this stuff. Just after his retirement this year, Kevin Pietersen asked his Twitter followers: [sic] “Why do some people’s whatsapp not have blue double ticks when messages have been read?” He got the instant response: “David Warner not replying, mate?”
Turns out we all have the same struggles. And that, I’d argue, is just another example of how the WhatsApp group is a powerful team-building technology. Not only is it a truly democratic space where sportspeople can engage in all the locker room chat they want, it is also where they learn to put up with the bowler who shares every aspect of her day in unnecessary detail, to tolerate the full-back who wants you to admire his latte art, and even to graciously accommodate the awkward addition whose number no one recognises. Plus, if it fails, there’s always the splinter group.
