The art of presentation: Blades team ranked by Twitter profile

Eleven sideways reflections on eleven Sheffield United players and their social media profile...and a lesson in speechwriting.

Blades team ranked by Twitter profile

Words: Sam Parry

There are apparently more than 16 million people in the UK signed up to Twitter, and at least eleven of those play for Sheffield United Football Club. I care not a Sammon about what they post for the most part. I do, however, have a perverse fascination with how they present themselves.

Like a front door or a bedside drawer, like clothing and cars, a social media profile says a lot about a person. How we present ourselves through Twitter’s profile and cover photo is a choice. The gist of our biographies are intentional. And in the case of footballers, the words and pictures are (for me at least) often hilarious. A curious combination of humble-brag, pride, careers advice and ego.

In this article – with an intentional whiff of ‘Top Ten’ clickbaity pulp – I’ve ranked my favourite profiles from eleven down to one.

Here goes…

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#11 Oli McBurnie

In eleventh place, our number nine.

This is the profile for people who download phone wallpapers. It’s over-engineered, the background is like looking through a crap club shop kaleidoscope. The double Blades pictures (profile and cover photos) are a plus, but I’ve seen more artistry in a Nick Montgomery cross.

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#10 Daniel Jebbison

Lovely monochrome profile photo. I like the ampersands too – the boy knows his way around a QWERTY keyboard. But he’s chosen too much England here for me; it’s all brilliant white and squeaky clean. He’s already got a tough task to convince fans to put ‘Jeb’ on the back of a shirt, so show us how it’s done first!

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#9 John Egan

Ninth. Sorry John.

I can’t ignore the double Ireland imagery. And the short biography, whilst clear and concise, makes me wonder…

@Sheffieldunited @FAIreland

It wasn’t always so sparse. My notebook tells me that Egan’s bio used to read “there’s beauty in the struggle”. And as we all know, the Blades have struggled in the previous couple of seasons with a relegation and a play-off defeat.

Maybe the struggle has become too much and John is looking for beauty in West Ham? He’ll have a job on his hands, they play in Stratford.

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#8 Rhys Norrington-Davies

Rhys, Rhys, Rhys.

The simplicity of this belies a shabby exterior. I’m looking at a guy who’s trying to say I have three vacancies in my team on LinkedIn, but all I’m seeing is the wonky profile photo and empty stands in the background. It’s an attempt at professionalism sorely lacking the grey-suited Heckingbottom touch (see #3). My advice would be to have a bit more fun with it or knock it on the head; Twitter might not be for you.

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#7 Enda Stevens

I have a soft spot for this one. Enda is a man who cares not for the tit-for-tat of social media. Like Jeremy Corbyn at the wreath-laying at the Cemetery of the Martyrs of Palestine, he is there but he’s not present. What makes me think this?

Footballer for 👉 @SUFC_tweets

Notice that Enda has been on Twitter for more than a decade; he has been at Sheffield United for more than half of that time; and still, his bio refers to the old Sheffield United Twitter handle (what was @SUFC_tweets is now @SheffieldUnited). I imagine he got the memo from the social media team about updating it, but….. CBA.

Enda is obviously a sometime-scroller. A tepid Twitterer. A man content with the occasional scan on a Sunday after eating a good meal and before watching a bad thriller. For sure, he ignores his notifications and sticks to browsing boxing clips and Eddie Hearn gifs. A wholesome profile, harking back to the days of 180 characters and content like this:

Genuinely posted by @SUFC_tweets

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#7 Rhian Brewster

Seventh for Seven.

Double Blades photo ✅. Don’t like the profile pic, but that background kiss-blowing is a thing of beauty harking back to the days of Currie. Solid work. Lots of red and white.

But just look at that bio, it says it all!

Footballer for Sheffield United FC & England U21 | @adidasuk athlete | Enquiries: @bengageduk

The straight virgules separating each sentence fragment speak to the neat, tidy and clinical personality we sorely missed at the end of last season. Clearly, we can extrapolate that Rhian Brewster is an organised bloke. Everything in his house has a place; he doens’t employ a cleaner, preferring to don the marigolds and dig out the Dettol himself. A man who means business in both his online and offline world.

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#6 Jayden Bogle

Now we’re talking… double Blades photo and both of them are action shots ✅. That claws Jayden into a well-earned sixth place, but then we hit the bio. On such nebulous phrases are many footballer’s profiles based (see Mark Duffy’s “never get to [sic] high, never get to [sic] low” which is now deleted so you can’t see it).

This is bad, isn’t it? It is possible to deploy a truly inspirational quote (see #1). But thanks to an “a” instead of a “your”, this sounds less like motivational career advice and more like a slogan ditched by a Cadbury’s advertising team hell-bent on selling something to an aspirational Tory:

work hard to make a dream your reality

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#5 Iliman Ndiaye

Simple bio. And who doesn’t love the colours of the Senegal flag?

What really sets this off is the sterling action shot of a crowing Iliman Ndiaye running up to strike the ball with all the fury of a back-of-the-Kop stoner still banging on about Paddy Kenny. You may not know this, but the picture was taken by Derek Geary on the training ground. Iliman hits it and the ball thunders into the backside of recently-departed Oliver Burke. Burke, who had been bent over attending to his oversized turn-ups, failed to realise the lads were playing a friendly game of red arse. And wallop! It sent him all the way to Bremen.

*for those unaware, red arse is second to Wembley as the greatest street football game; often the culmination of losing Heads and Volleys. See below:

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#4 Ben Osborn

Nice action shot in the profile picture of Ben curling the ball out for a throw-in. Another wallpaper mess in the background. But forget those.

This is a man who has, famously, read a book. And given the quote in his bio is lifted out of Karen Blixen’s elegiac, genre-defining memoir Out of Africa, we now all know what that book is:

The world is round to stop you seeing too far down the road.

Blog 👉 http://osbornon1.com

What’s not to like about a footballer who likes books? I’d be the first to sign up for the Ben Osborn Book Club, meeting at the end of July to discuss *CHECKS NOTES* Out of Africa.

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#3 Paul Heckingbottom

A bit of sweet symphony in grey © P Heckinbottom. Loaned by the V&A

Straight in at number three and straight out of the Next catalogue: it’s Paul Heckingbottom.

When studying Elite Performance and Talent Development at Leeds Beckett University, the gaffer was known to his peers as ‘the absolute boy’. Boyish charm, boyish smile, and oh boy… can you possibly add more grey to that top photo?

To see his profile photo is to look upon the real-life embodiment of a design-your-own FIFA manager on Career Mode. What sets this profile apart, however, is its sheer professionalism (take note RND!). It says: I’m on LinkedIn, want to connect? He’s got the hair of Tintin and the accent of a default-setting Tom Tom: “Proceed to route”.

His biography is succinct and without flowery flourish.

Manager @sheffieldunited . Ex-professional footballer

And with such a simple communication style, it was no surprise to me to see that SkyBet had Hecky at 5/1 to become the next Mayor for the South Yorkshire Region. Gaffer: you’ve got my vote.

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#2 Billy Sharp

clearly, billy sharp hates capital letters with the exception of FAT LAT FROM SHEFFIELD. Pablo Picasso once said: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

To break the rules you’ve got to be special, but you’ve also got to know the rules. And at fifty-two years of age, Billy’s tearing up the rule book both on the pitch and on Twitter too. There’s professionalism in the profile photo with that whiff of Heckingbottom Grey. But it gives way to the dream-like blur of a team photo on promotion with Sharp right in the middle; it says “I’m a reyt Blades me” but also “I’m the fucking daddy here.”

captain. leader. legend.

#1 Wes Foderingham (and the art of speechwriting)

Finally…a big “well done” to Wes Foderingham for pulling off the motivational quote.

Double Blades photo ✅. Fantastic, but that’s not why he’s number one. What sets Wes apart are the words.

Ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship

“But it too is nebulous!” I hear you cry. WRONG!

Dig a little deeper into that bio and you strike on something powerful. Because when Wes quotes Denzel Washington’s speech at an awards ceremony for The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he quotes something special. It is a masterclass in how to give a short speech.

And as a jobbing speechwriter, it tickles my rhetorical fancy. I promise it’s worth a couple of minutes of your time.

Washington begins at a slow pace with a contrasting racing metaphor, cast in a kind of loose form of chiasmus:

“without commitment, you'll never start, but more importantly without consistency, you'll never finish" (not a bad bio in itself).

Then comes the power. Washington repeats: “If it were easy, there would be no Kerry Washington…if it were easy, there would be no…if it were easy, there would be no…” (that’s anaphora). Repetition builds pace. Pace builds rhythm. And rhythm leads the mind of the audience in a state of preparation for the point to come (and that is explanation by Yoda-speak aka anadiplosis).

And then it hits, first with parallel sentences (where the grammar stacks up perfectly against each other….)

Keep working. Keep striving.

Then a call to action using a universal but never tired Churchillian line…

Never give up.

Then eight perfect syllables subconsciously emphasise the final word of the sentence.

Fall down seven times, get up eight.

And that brings us to the big one. With three uncountable nouns in an aphorism that almost makes no sense but in the context of everything else, makes total sense.

EASE IS A GREATER THREAT TO PROGRESS THAN HARDSHIP.

Just like that…you are convinced and you don’t even know how.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the type of persuasive artistry that I have tried to match in this piece. I may not have convinced you of much, but if you are to take one thing from this inane missive, let it be this:

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