There's a scene in an episode of The IT Crowd, "The Work Outing", that I keep thinking about lately. Roy is about to use a disabled toilet. After briefly discussing it with Moss, he tells himself that it's ok to use it, he says "It's ok. I think."
And I think about this scene whenever I think about my nonsense opinions around football and my opinions about those nonsense opinions.
But lately, I've realised I hate football.
But before I
get into why, l need to remember how I got into it. It was when I was seven and lost in grief and bewildered by bereavement.
Hating football is a pretty easy position to take right now as an
Aston Villa fan. The club are in yet another tailspin of a season, have yet
again wasted hundreds of millions on players who probably aren’t good enough
and are now looking for someone/anyone to pick them out of the shit imposed on
them by the latest failure namely the fairly dislikeable Steven Gerrard.*
That’s not the only reason why I hate football.
There’s the Premier League. Which is essentially a race
between three or four super powerful clubs to dominate the trophies and
European places, an almost closed shop, the romance of the game I loved as a child
finally smashed into the ground, buried with the amount of love a Trump would
show for an ex-wife. Two clubs owned by corrupt Petro-wanker states, intent on cleaning
their PR up by building up previously unsuccessful sides with superstar
players. Other clubs openly playing the moral relativity card by pointing out
the horror of this but still prepared to walk out on the game as we know it and
join a ultra-bastard Super League with those evil oil teams because they wanted
to. That, as we know, didn’t happen in the end but it will eventually. Money
talks loudest. It did with Murdoch. It did with the Champions League and it did
with Qatar. Football isn't so much coming home as it is breaking in to it; it’s already nicked the telly and the
silverware and now it’s turning your nan’s mattress over for her savings.
Oh, but there’s more.
So, Qatar. Fairly well publicised what a fucking awful
decision that was by FIFA but, having awarded the previous tournament to that
other beacon of progressiveness and tolerance Russia, I guess they felt obliged
to go the whole hog and let an absolute toilet host the World Cup next time
around. The hundreds of millions of donations definitely helped, mind you.
So, my favourite sporting event of all, the one I look
forward to more than any other, is
one I either must choose not to watch, or watch as an unwilling approver of all the dead
slave workers, oppressed women, imprisoned gay people and disappeared
pro-democracy protestors.
Friends of mine are going out there because Wales haven’t
qualified before and they’re determined not to miss it. Part of me gets that
and part of me is disappointed in them.
Even these horrors aren’t even the main reason I hate it.
I think it's lads.
It’s lads, isn’t it? Lads have been the one constant
fucking thing I’ve hated about this game for forty years and more.
First of all, I played the game for over thirty-five years. Wasn’t very good at it but that’s fine. Neither is anybody else at the level I played in. That won’t stop the lad from screaming at you for making a mistake in a crunch game against The Fox and Grapes in the 3rd division of the West Humberland Sunday League. He believes, as do so many hundreds of thousands of idiots across the country, that it wasn’t a lack of talent that meant he would not be gracing Sky Sports on a Sunday afternoon, it was just not being spotted, or being injured, or something else completely unrelated to a lack of talent.
I don’t know how many times I’ve told teammates that we’re all essentially
toddlers on glue at this level but it never seems to stick. You’re only going
to get into a fight. I once quit a game, just walked off. Once a teammate calls
you a cunt because you missed an open goal in a match you
are already losing 9-1, where else is there to go?
Fight or flight. I’m not getting into a fight for a game
in the Cardiff and District Idiots Conference, Div. 5. I quit the team there
and then.
You only have to make the mistake of walking past any
kids game on a weekend morning to see where all this starts. The dad at the touchline
acting as if his child, let’s call him Cuthbert, is being held back from an
incredibly successful footballing career by one of three things.
If Cuthbert is lucky, thing a) is his teammates. The reason
this team is losing this apparently vital six pointer is that little Cuthbert is
being forced to play on the wing instead of his preferred playmaker role in the
pocket, because the middle of the park is dominated by kids just blindly chasing
the ball in fun. As seven-year-olds will do. Because it’s fun.
If Cuthbert is not quite as lucky then its thing b) which
is because the referee, chances are a well-meaning volunteer trying to give something
back to society, is in fact a clueless sexcase hellbent on destroying little Cuthbert’s chances of being spotted by An Academy and therefore not giving any
decisions to Atletico Bedford Falls under 8s.
Incidentally why would anyone referee? The chance to be hurled abuse
at, the chance to be hated by strangers for the crime of trying to perform a
key task vital to the functioning of a game of football. Referees were actually
murdered in Canada and El Salvador this year. Hundreds more were assaulted in this
country. Can you guess what representatives of which gender did it?
Back to Cuthbert. If this hypothetical child’s luck is truly absent, it’s thing c). The
parent screaming at his child to play better, get stuck in, hurt another child
if needs be. Probably behaviour learnt from the Dad’s own childhood and all the
more toxic for it.
Lads. It’s just a fucking game. And in my time I’ve been as guilty
as anyone of screaming abuse at the telly when a ref or player makes what I, an
idiot with no real understanding of what is happening on the pitch, no relatable
experience to the split-second decision-making process necessary for any
professional footballer to succeed in any given moment, see what appears to be
a monumental cock up.
I can't prove the following yet I suspect it's true. One of the key reasons England have failed at so many tournaments for so many decades is, I think, the culture around the national game. The toxic masculinity still present, at every game, at every level. The tolerance of violence. The celebration of the hard man, the veneration of the thug. On and off the pitch. Hooliganism celebrated in literature as a necessary stress valve for the under pressure, under paid working-class man. A bit of sociological porn for the prurient Fight Club wannabe.* *
I have no idea what I mean by this last sentence,
I’m quite tired and could probably do with a shag truth be told.
I was in the pub last weekend to watch the Liverpool v
Man City match. I find the rivalry between these two teams compelling but nonetheless
it triggers parts of me I wish not to think about. These are the two best sides
in the country, no doubt about it. Both teams are managed by charismatic,
obsessive, driven men. Klopp seems forever on the edge of violence, Guardiola
on the precipice of complete emotional collapse. Liverpool play with pace, controlled
aggression, guile and verve, City are ruthless, sly, exciting and brilliant. Like
the great United-Arsenal rivalry before them, this is a fixture that splits the
country. I always wanted Wenger to triumph over Fergie, now I must admit to
wanting Pep to beat Klopp. And why?
City are all the things I should despise, a massively expensive team funded by a Middle East dictatorship. Liverpool are a team with a traditionally strong working class local support, an aversion to Murdoch, a team that still play in their regular strip, in a stadium that hasn’t changed it’s name or location.
But I grew up in the 80s, a time Liverpool
dominated England and Europe and, like a lot of kids at the time bored with their relentless but undoubtedly
deserved success, became an ABL before I even knew what one was. This isn't an excuse, is it? It's laughable, childish bullshit.
However, I am pleased for my Liverpool-supporting friends when they win trophies because I like my friends to be happy. It is nice to see people you care for being happy. I am also pleased when they lose because I am mildly traumatised by memories of Ian Rush regularly scoring hat-tricks past a hapless Nigel Spink in the 1980s.
A quick mental poll of my friends. By far the most common clubs they support are Liverpool and Manchester United. I chose Villa because my uncle supported them, my immediate family hating all sport, and that was it. But there was also a thing of not wanting to be like Them, one of the fucking lads. Lads being any group of men. I don’t like groups of men as a whole. This is probably due to being bullied as a child by groups of lads. To this day, I see a group of men coming and, wrongly I know, instantly presume the worst of them. I don’t attribute such negativity to any group of men that I might find myself among because, as with the City thing above, I am a massive fucking hypocrite.
Anyway, back to the pub. There’s an advert on one of the
tellies as the girl tries to get the big screen on the right channel. It’s the
Virgin Airlines advert with the gender-fluid steward(ess) and the female pilot.
There’s nothing wrong with the advert, it’s nice and if it makes one bigoted wanker
make one less air-polluting flight down to a fear of other people's sexuality/gender identity then it’s a success. The advert is greeted predictably with a
couple of “poofs” and “fuck offs” from the throng that has gathered to watch
this game. The atmosphere is set for the afternoon. It is vile but I stay.
This is a pub in a very affluent town. We’re hundreds of miles from Liverpool or Manchester. It is still the year 2022. It’s still just a football game. But this pub is now a pit of “lads.” Tables of grown men in replica shirts seething into their lagers. Every tackle is met with cheers, jeers, boos and hoorahs.
Maybe not hoorahs, it’s not that affluent.
Every missed pass, every slipped tackle is screamed at and
celebrated. The noise increases with the amount drunk. It feels like the pub
could actually go insane if a team scores. That a riot could break out for no
reason other than a millionaire has kicked a football past another millionaire hundreds
of miles away. It’s exciting but at the same time it frightens me.
City score and the air is thick with disgust. A man in a
Liverpool top puts dowh his pint and moves to scream abuse at the screen and returns to his chair next to a
girlfriend who now looks mildly concerned as to what she should do next in
terms of her personal safety. The goal is disallowed. Across from me, a man in
a City top instantly turns red with rage and storms out the pub moaning about “Hillsboroughs”.
This is what it is like watching a Premier League football match in a pub in 2022.
And I don’t doubt it is like this in every pub across the country. Men losing
their minds next to terrified girlfriends. Others slandering the dead with vile
insults. No one seems to enjoy it.
Liverpool score. Roles are reversed. A man who has
clearly placed a lot of money on this game is now numb with pain at a nearby
table, staring into his phone with the expression of someone for whom the fun
has well and truly stopped. Who here is having any fun?
Social media has, as with just about everything else it
touches, made something already awful a thousand times worse. Now you can
racially abuse a footballer from the comfort of whatever padded cell you’re
currently in, flinging your metaphorical shite for all to see. The club account
will condemn it, an arrest might be made. The offending tweet will be deleted,
the user banned, but the message will have been seen, retweeted, amplified and
the hurt caused to the player at the same time will be exponentially
multiplied. As if the pressures of succeeding in the cauldron of professional
football are not immense enough, now the modern player must deal with the knowledge
that he dare not look at his phone after a match should he fail to play to the best
of his ability.
And it’s lads, it’s always lads.
Occasionally one will try to take the moral high
ground. Much as I’m failing to do here, I suppose.
A hypothetical situation. Footballer A is charged with a
crime. Fans of Footballer A take to social media to call this accusation
bullshit and unfair and finally unleash all those unenlightened opinions which
seemed so unlikely of them before. Fans of rival clubs will call Footballer A’s
club a disgrace for not having instantly sacked Footballer A, because there’s
no way their own beloved club would employ someone charged with rape/murder/kidnapping. The victim of the crime is not even
an afterthought. Loyalties and rivalries mean more than understanding, empathy and truth.
An actual situation. Club B is taken over by a despotic
regime. The regime fills the club’s coffers with cash, top players are
recruited, success is assured. Fans of rivals of Club B will then say that this
success is tainted with blood, undeserved etc. I should have a great deal of
sympathy with this view. Except I am wildly inconsistent on this.
I treat Man City in my mind differently to how I treat Newcastle because I don't particularly care for Newcastle. Again, this is nonsense. Why do I do this?
I wrestle briefly with my own conscience, like a sitcom character created by a now disgraced transphobe wondering if having a piss in a disabled toilet is conscionable behaviour. No, I don’t think it is.
I try to tell myself partly because this is a league started by Rupert Murdoch’s money, the cash cow of one of the very worst people on this planet. That in an organisation funded and initiated by an Absolute Bastard like Rupert there is no place for Moral Purity.
I say to myself it's also partly because once the PL had allowed Roman Abramovich to buy Chelsea then this was always going to be the end result. If the House of Saud had bought BIG CLUB instead, would BIG CLUB fans desert their club en masse? I don't think so. But I don't know for sure.
It would cause the ones I know some anguish certainly, but the
emotional link to these teams is set now, there’s nothing else we can do etc,
money talks yada yada. We will go to the fridge, pick out a can, order a pizza
and sit down to watch the game. The World Cup is on, and I know all those slaves
died, but what can we do? Football has poisoned us all to some extent.
In the coming weeks, England will be knocked out of the World Cup, most probably by some seemingly unprecedented stroke of official incompetence. Or we'll miss a penalty shootout as usual. Tens of thousands of lads will get out their phones in that moment. Players will receive death threats. No doubt about it, incidents of domestic violence will increase significantly. Cars will be wrecked. A loss of rationale and perspective will cloud the following days for far too many people.
As for myself, I will probably lose interest in the tournament at that point, mutter
something about it being a corrupt death-splattered feast of evil that I
shouldn’t be watching in the first place. I will recall the tearful joy I felt
watching Chloe Kelly win the Euros for England in the summer. Momentarily I
will feel good about myself, the moral high ground conquered at last. The
feeling is brief.
I will finally realise what it is I hate most about football.
It’s me.
*Typically, Villa sacked Gerrard not long after I wrote this paragraph. They then won 4-0 playing exciting, confident, vibrant football. The bastards.
**Interjection here. Much as I have enjoyed the show Welcome to Wrexham, the episode on "Hooliganism" wasn't nearly harsh enough on those wankers. Labels such as Stone Island know the kind of wanker who buys their ridiculously over priced shit. They never condemn it.
