...More Than I 'Ate West 'Am (And I 'Ate Them Bastards)

"I 'ate Muslims. 'Ate 'em wiv a passion. More than I 'ate West 'am. And I 'ate them bastards." - Colin, 'Angry, White, And Proud'

lol turns out they're both trash

That quote up there sums it all up. To Colin, a centuries-long clash of civilisations, a disagreement on how you should act on this earth, what happens to your soul when you die, who created the entire universe, is only one step above which blokes you like to see run round after a ball. If you get it, you get it; if you don't, you don't. 

In the before-times my friend Nathan told me his mum asked him why we watch football, and passed the question onto me. As we sat watching Lancaster City lose to - I think - Ashton United, I couldn't answer. I have a better idea now, having had a year to sit inside and think about it. The short is answer is that football is life in microcosm. The long answer is the rest of this post. It might not ring true for everyone but it's true for me. 

Seeing claims that football was created by "the people" or "the poor", and oh if that were true. It was created at rich British boarding schools as a way to stop teenage boys masturbating.

— Grace Robertson 🏳️‍⚧️ (@GraceOnFootball) April 19, 2021

The game itself is only one small part of it. The rules have changed a lot since they were codified by those posh schools - they didn't create shit - but when non-football fans say "it's just kicking a ball in a goal" they are, obviously, right. All that is good about the game comes from context. I've talked about this on the blog quite a bit already; with the constant Ronaldo vs Messi allusions, yes, but also with the archetype of The Grealish I mentioned in Double Barrelled Meme Players. The allure of such a player is their ability to do cool tricks and get the ball in the net, of course, but the allure is also the fact that Grealish is FROM Solihull and plays for Villa. The allure is that Wilfried Zaha scores or assists half of Crystal Palace's goals, yeah, but also that he grew up in Thornton Heath. Rinse and repeat with Sean Longstaff and Newcastle United, Harry Kane and Tottenham Hotspurs, Marcus Rashford and Manchester United, and so on. Indeed, this is entire appeal of national football, the "He's one of our own!" chant, but applicable to the entire team. 

Tactics are another part of it, for me at least. Football managers and coaches take on the role in my psyche that a famed general would take in a Roman boy's. I study José Mourinho's campaign to win the Champions League with Inter Milan the way any patrician worth his salt would have studied Scipio's campaign in Tunisia. The way players fit into these tactical systems is interesting too. There are the "glamorous" players - what Italy calls the 'fantasista', the creator of fantasies, the player whose skill and flair become the reason to buy a ticket to the game - but even players that do the dirty work on the pitch can become revered. Everyone loves N'Golo Kanté because he's a sweetheart and works unbelievably hard, and in Argentina their defensive midfielders are just as important to the fans as their attacking talents. In an era where Argentina had Messi, Juan Roman Riquelme (who I'll get to), Agüero, and Tevez to choose from up front, Maradona was asked who should go to the world cup. He said "Javier Mascherano, and ten others". There's a lovely quote in the Zonal Marking podcast where Javier's quoted as saying "I haven't any talent, but I'll get the team moving... I'm just a football fan that happens to play" (skip to 4 minutes in), and that contrast between a player who does things we could never dream of, and a player that does what we all think we could if we were on the pitch, is adored by the Argentines.

Tactical roles can also reflect eras and countries. There is the Argentinian DM, the number 5, the enforcer, but also their 'enganche' - a hook between the defence and the attack with the ability to change a game with one pass. There is the English box-to-box midfielder, blessed with endless stamina, workrate, and a wonderfully British aversion to any fancy bullshit. The Italian regista, made for the slower pace of the game down by the Med, languidly raking passes halfway across the pitch while making sure his hair is still on point or making time for a wine and a fag after the game. The entire Brazilian ethos, from goalkeeper to attacker, is 'o jogo bonito' (the beautiful game), a commitment to playing with style and making things enjoyable for spectators. On the other end of the spectrum there is Uruguay and their 'Garra Charrua' - they will play as ugly as possible and break as many rules as is required to get the win.

Players who don't fit into these tactical roles can become cult heroes too, as can players whose roles become less significant over time. For various nerd reasons beyond the scope of this post there isn't really space for an Argentinian enganche in the modern game - Messi, for example, would've been one in any other time period than the 2010s, but instead had to find a home out on the right wing, then as an unorthodox striker - which made Juan Roman Riquelme a sort of man out of time. He had a reasonable career, but his significance was symbolic, not based on stats but on style - "Riquelme’s departure from Europe in 2007 would sever the final tie between the dream of classical football and the modern world. Modernity, travelling along the unstoppable arrow of time, would win out." 

The English obsession with no-nonsense central midfielders has led to an unending lineage of beautifully gifted attackers with absolutely no space to perform, sometimes at club level, but especially at England level. Matthew Le Tissier, Southampton's second-top scorer ever, Eurosport's Greatest Premier League Player, Le God - 8 games for England, no goals. Paul Gascoigne was rather more successful for England but never quite fulfilled what was expected of him because of his tragic personal life. Even Joe Cole was tipped for great things at the titular West Ham United before he moved to Chelsea and was ruined by the aforementioned José Mourinho. This same story is about to happen to Jack Grealish in the England setup if we aren't careful.

Move up to the level of club and the storylines become even clearer. Wimbledon were promoted to the old First Division playing unbelievably ugly football that reflected their gritty South London roots (Wimbledon the place is posh but Wimbledon the team was most certainly not), culminating in their fairytale FA Cup win in 1989 against titans Liverpool. Then they ran out of money. After sharing a ground with Crystal Palace for ten years the team and all its history was moved to Milton Keynes and rechristened MK Dons, a first in the franchise-averse English game. Everyone hated it, so much so that some gutsy Wimbledonians decided to form their own replacement, AFC Wimbledon, at the bottom of the football pyramid, in 2003. Fourteen years later, they reached League One, where MK Dons resided, and that year, MK Dons were relegated, meaning the franchise were objectively worse than the reformed team. That year, the governing authorities made sure Old Wimbledon's history was transferred to AFC Wimbledon, including that FA Cup.

On a smaller scale Dulwich Hamlet and Tooting & Mitcham United are bitter rivals, and in recent years that has taken on the added dimension of being a battle between the hipsters (Hamlet) and 'proper' Londoners and football fans (T&M). Yet, despite this very real and very deep divide, when Hamlet were threatened with eviction from Champion Hill in 2017 at the hands of some cunty developer types, the first people to help were Tooting & Mitcham United, offering them Imperial Fields for what ended up being most of a season, including Dulwich's winning of the playoffs to send them into the National League South. Then, once the Champion hill bollocks was sorted, they went right back to hating each other.

Those are just South London teams, the ones I know about and care about. You ask someone else and they'll have a completely different uplifting story for you. This is what football does, across the world, at the highest levels and at the lowest. It will highlight differences - as small as hipsters vs cockneys or as big as Protestant vs Catholic - and then collapse them completely through a shared love of the game and a solidarity when things do go wrong. Everton will always post a Hillsborough tribute. Every team in Brazil offered to loan Chapecoense a player or two following the horrific plane crash that decimated their first team. Dulwich and Tooting understand their common enemy is property developers. And every football fan on the planet has come together to tell the Super League to fuck off.

I may as well come to the reason I'm writing this now. You may have heard football is dying at the hands of a group of twelve teams breaking away from their domestic leagues to form a Super League. This will change a number of things that are integral to why we enjoy football.

The players will remain. Messi will be Messi no matter where he plays. The managers, too, will remain, probably in a merry-go-round where every big manager ends up managing every Super League team at one time or another (José Mourinho has already managed five of them, for example). But the team stories will be completely absent. The current plan makes concessions for as many as five teams (wow, five!) of the eventual twenty to be awarded their places on merit, but the other fifteen spots belong to 'permanent members'. You can't get that last-minute joy at Imperial Fields you saw above if promotion and relegation don't really exist. Wimbledon can't surprisingly win the FA Cup if they can't get in. 

Tactical variation is likely to decrease too, as are regional variations. If every remotely good youngster is bought by a Super League team and then educated in the same high-press-direct-transition football that pretty much every top team needs to play to win, there will be no more Riquelme, no more le Tissier, no more Grealish. Football will become a solved game, the way tic-tac-toe is, the way chess will be if computers ever get smart enough to just check every single variation. Variance will come from how much money teams can wring out of their fans to spend on those quality youngsters. 

Fans won't be able to participate much either. When things weren't locked down, I could say to myself, "I fancy some football" at 1pm, get dressed, walk across town, and be at Giant Axe by 2.30pm, pay £6, and be watching some football by 3. If a Super League fan fancies watching a game, they'll need to organise a plane to Barcelona, Madrid, Milan, Manchester, probably accomodation too, pay over £40 for a ticket, and probably pay for all manner of accoutrements too - the souvenirs, the food, the bevs - because they can't do this particularly often and they should make the most of it. And that's, of course, only if they've collected enough ArseCoins to qualify for Tier One membership that allows you to buy tickets for every game.

If you're a football fan you'll have noticed something. ALL THIS SHIT ALREADY HAPPENS. Tactics are already stagnant, ticket prices are already otherworldly, small clubs are already completely unable to compete at the highest level, except Leicester in 2015, an anomaly so severe I've come to understand it as a deliberate ploy so big clubs could point to it and say "See, competition still exists!". So what does the Super League change?

It's partly symbolic; okay, the English Premier League was a breakaway from the Football League, but it remained part of the English footballing pyramid. At best the Super League will leave, like, two spots for English teams, depending on which permanent teams join. It's partly an intensification of the trends; just because you have thus far accepted a bit of a price hike and a slight lessening of competition doesn't mean you must accept the complete destruction of the sport. But nonetheless, I think the current reaction is being overblown. Here's the counter:

The Super League removes hope. It is a collection of people rewriting reality to create something where underdogs and the hope they give to people are eliminated. And that it is being created by people who, largely have never been underdogs, stings.

— Carl Anka (@Ankaman616) April 19, 2021

Listen. I like Carl Anka. He does good football-journalistic activities. But he's off on this one. I know people who support the big clubs, the ones clamouring for this Super League to various extents. I know people who support the little clubs, and by little I mean anything from "other Premier League teams" to "only follow Tooting and Mitcham United". None of us small types have anything resembling hope when it comes to the big clubs. 

Of course, that doesn't preclude us from enjoying football. Look at the scenes when Dulwich were promoted. But the thing one must understand is they were being promoted to a league five steps below Manchester United, Liverpool, et al. Carl Anka is the Athletic's Man U correspondent, and a fan himself, so I completely understand why he's upset about this. But to my mind, the other levels of the English pyramid are more than competitive enough and would actually be MORE competitive without the influence of the massive Premier League and the money it injects into the sport - would Brentford have been promoted last year if Neal Maupay hadn't been tempted to Brighton? Would QPR be making more of a push this year if they still had Eberechi Eze (currently of Crystal Palace)? Would Reading be able to plan for the future better if they knew Michael Olise wasn't almost certainly gonna make a move next year?

Note that those aren't clubs going to the Super League, but other Premier League teams. The most obvious knock on effect of the ESL coming into existence is a cratering of the amount of money available to mid-level teams in La Liga, Serie A, and the Prem, (at present, they get TV money because in order to televise Liverpool, Chelsea, etc, you have to televise their opponents - if they're always playing each other you don't need to pay Southampton or Newcastle) and as a supporter of one of those mid-level teams I am telling you that is for the better. Proximity to that kind of money ruins a club. Take QPR, who spent big during their two brief sojourns to the Premier League in 2011 and 2013 and are still in debts that mean they NEEDED to sell Eze to Palace this summer. Take Leeds, who were competing in Europe one year, then stuck in League One three years later. Roughly the same thing has happened to, at various points: Sheffield United, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Sunderland, Ipswich Town, Southampton, Bolton, Wigan, Portsmouth, and others I'm sure I'm forgetting. Of course, someo of those teams have bounced back, and the Prem didn't invent teams getting relegated numerous times - Wolves went from the first division to the fourth in the Eighties - but it did invent the severe financial repercussions for doing so. Crystal Palace spent one season in the Prem - 04/05 - and it fucked them up so bad they went into administration in 2010. Lord knows what happens to a team that's heavily reliant on Premier League revenue over a number of years that sunddenly can't hack it. Oh wait, I do know - it looks like Portsmouth racking up £135m in debt, getting relegated twice, losing every single member of its playing squad, getting a 10 point deduction, and getting relegated again, all in the space of three or four seasons.

This leaves me in a weird position. Like I said, I have friends that support these big clubs, and it must be heartbreaking to see what's taking place. However, it is imperative that six clubs do what they will for the good of the other eighty-six. I feel as though I'm telling my boy that his girlfriend would rather he died and he needs to let her go to heal. That's essentially what these clubs have done; current press releases are focused on removing pesky "legacy fans" (people who had the audacity to follow these teams before 2021) and introducing future fans by making the game shorter and 'more exciting'. You know, like what's totally worked out for cricket. But I know that's not gonna register for people. The pull of everything I talked about in the first section, along with all manner of things I wasn't able to touch on (family history, local history, the matchday experience, etc), is far too strong. You cannot logically argue something that's emotional like football. This sport is, I remind you, one step down from religion, from the meaning of existence itself. "Look at the long-term economic impacts" isn't going to cut it.

What I will not stand for are arguments like this:

Maybe the people in these countries don't care about the traditions of English football because we took all their best players here.

— Grace Robertson 🏳️‍⚧️ (@GraceOnFootball) April 19, 2021

I don't like Grace. She has a habit of, when I'm already quite annoyed, popping up with a snarky take that sends me over the edge into full-on rattled. But this one is beyond the pale. NO ONE asked for English football clubs to poach talents from every country on the planet. No one. To suggest otherwise is to be ignorant of the history of English football, to despise the British public, or, in Grace's case, both. English football in general has historically been unbelievably insular, just like the country, culminating in its eventual stagnation in the 80s. Following the Heysel disaster in 1985, English clubs were banned from any form of European competition for five years. That had a lot of emotional impacts - the lives lost on the night, of course, but also the general public's response to Hillsborough. The South Yorkshire police are scum and so are the Sun, obviously, but the British people wouldn't have been so amenable to what they lied about if they hadn't all decided "that's just what Liverpool fans are like, innit?" after Heysel. The economic impacts were big too - for example, if Wimbledon had been eligible for the European Cup Winners' Cup after their FA Cup win over Liverpool it's possible none of that Milton Keynes bullshit happens - but the biggest impact was our standing among the rest of Europe.

Our pitches and stadiums were hopelessly outdated, our league was far behind the others tactically, and worst of all, hooliganism had made English fans the bane of the sport's existence. Things needed to change, and after Hillsborough highlighted just how bad things had gotten, things did. Over the 90s, with the creation of the Premier League, and with the gradual introduction of foreign players - Klinsmann at Tottenham, Zola at Chelsea, Cantona at United -  English football was able to slowly regain its standing and become the global, marketable league we see it as now. You can call this a deal with the devil, and it certainly laid the groundwork for what we've seen this week, but at the end of the day football had to make a choice between becoming an increasingly dangerous pursuit enjoyed by fewer and fewer people in a smaller and smaller geographical area, like rugby league, or modernising. It is as simple a question as "Would you rather football lose its nebulous, ill-defined 'soul' or lose hundreds of people's lives again and again?" It's a pretty easy choice, in my opinion. 

What absolutely did not happen was the English public saying "Haha let's steal all the best players from everywhere because we're racist". The Premier League decision went over the head of Sir Alex Ferguson. He didn't want it. If HE had no say what the fuck was Joe Schlub, season ticket holder at West Ham, supposed to do? I know you're not saying the English fans should have protested the introduction of foreign players, because they did pretty much that last year in Burnley and everyone called them massive racists and a blight on the sport and banned them from Turf Moor for life. For Grace, a supposed Liverpool fan, to ignore all that history and lay the blame for the influx of foreign playesr and foreign fans at the feet of the average football supporter is tantamount to blaming the Atlantic slave trade on mill workers in Accrington driving up demand for cotton. Scummy, scummy behaviour. These decisions happen above all of us. If you want to pretend that the fans in other countries have as much of a claim to Liverpool as you do, that's fine (they don't) but don't pretend it's xenophobia on the part of those who disagree with you. Xenophobia looks like Colin from the beginning. And I bet you any money that as a Millwall fan he'll be cheering Kenneth Zohore and Jón Daði Böðvarsson as loud as everyone else when those twats are allowed back in the Den.

To summarise, I'd meant to write this directly after I 'Ate Muslims..., hence the twinned titles and constant references to 'Angry, White And Proud' but then lockdown hit. I don't think I'm alone in thinking post-lockdown football sucks. A lot of the good things I've talked about are negated by the absence of fans and the overwork of players, and overall it loses all the stories and idiosyncracies that make football reflect the trials and tribulations of life, and it becomes just the twenty blokes kicking (and two throwing) a ball around that non-football fans believe it to be. Attention has waned. But the announcement of a Super League has really thrown things into focus for a lot of people. We're at a crossroads, a Nietzschean "great noon", and we get to pick what happens next, whether the league goes ahead or not. Will we head back to our seats at Anfield, Old Trafford, The Emirates, and so on, even though they despise us? Or will we protest them, with our voices and our wallets, and support the grassroots football that the Premier League abandoned in 1992? It remains to be seen. I cannot blame anyone that goes back to their club - I hope I've made clear how much these entities mean to people even if they're "just" private companies at this point - but I will be kinda sad. Because when it comes down to it, I hate Florentino Perez, Andrea Agnelli, John Henry, Stan Kroenke, and all the other parasitic perverters of the beautiful game. I hate them with a passion. More than I hate Brighton and Hove Albion. And I really do hate them bastards.