Over the weekend, Everton fans started a FreeZouma trend. Marco Silva refused to get drawn in due to Chelsea’s media watch and that is exactly the point.
Everton is currently on one of their semi-annual spending sprees. On paper they are getting great players to strengthen the whole squad, but in practice they have brought a lot of new players together suddenly and making them work well together is a task. Ronald Koeman tried during their last spending spree and he was gone early in the season.
But, as they always say, “this time will be different” and Kurt Zouma seems to be the last remaining name on their list until some other shiny new player distracts them. Over the weekend, Everton fans started the trend FreeZouma because apparently Chelsea has him tied up in the bottom of a pit where he needs to put the lotion in the basket or else he gets the hose again.
This was seemingly based on Everton fans feeling buoyant with all their signings and Zouma not smiling as he got on the plane to Gladbach. The movement grew so big that Everton manager Marco Silva was drawn into making a comment. He refused because it “might end up on media watch” and that is exactly the point.
Fans assume that media watch is for them because of its similarity to articles one could find on news websites. But fans are not and have probably never been the main target of media watch.
Media watch is a (small) way for Chelsea to control the story and drive clicks on the website. Case in point: Silva’s non comment on Zouma. Media watch stopped him from talking about the player at all. Mission accomplished media watch.
Media watch is also a whole lot of smoke from real things going on. Media watch was talking about Frank Lampard early and often in the cycle. That helped to fuel papers talking about him too. Did that put pressure on Derby County to work out a deal? It is hard to tell but the end result is that Lampard became Chelsea manager, just as media watch had been hyping up.
And really, the idea behind it is the same as the idea behind FreeZouma. It does not matter that Zouma is very much free and has a solid shot at starting for a Champions League side as Everton wonder if they can finally make Europa League again. But make enough noise and anything can happen.
That is actually what happened with the last few managers. Many, many fans were clamoring for Maurizio Sarri before he was ever linked to Chelsea. The same (more or less) happened with Lampard. Media watch and FreeZouma are the means by which those types of fan swells happen.
Media watch is simply inorganic in how it goes about starting fires. It starts a lot of fires and blows a lot of smoke but it is a very wide scale approach to controlling the narrative. But on FreeZouma, it worked because it got Silva not to comment. For the Chelsea media watch team, that is considered a success.