"Why I've fallen out of love with football"

[£440,000]

Interesting piece

 

A friend of mine says that when he’s driving and listening to one of the countless football programmes on talk radio, in which fans call in to rant about their team’s manager, opponents, referees, ballboys, et cetera, he feels the urge to phone in himself and say: “Have you ever realised it doesn’t really matter?”

 

That’s how I’ve come to feel about football. I played it until my left knee dissolved into pulp, and have written about it for 25 years, but now I often think: I don’t like the game any more. Partly, this is professional deformation: I’ve got too close to the adored object and seen what it’s really like. But partly, I’m suffering from a condition that is common among middle-aged men yet rarely discussed because it’s considered an embarrassing taboo. Football just isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

 

I should say at once that I’ve nothing against the players. The vast critical apparatus attached to the game (more of which later) likes to gripe that footballers are mercenary multimillionaire sex fiends. This argument often rests on an appeal to a supposed golden age when players lived like saints and loved their clubs. The simple truth is, of course, that the economic conditions of footballers have changed. Since the 1990s more money has entered the game, and it’s become easier for players to change clubs. If I were a 21-year-old multimillionaire with girls and Ferrari salesmen hurling themselves at me daily, even I might be tempted. And if someone offered me five times my salary to work for a higher-status employer with better colleagues (impossible, obviously, for an FT journalist) I might do it too.

 

Most footballers I’ve interviewed have been perfectly pleasant. My problem isn’t with them. In part, I no longer like the game on the field. In my childhood there were barely any live matches on TV. A weekly highlights programme was a highlight of my week. Now that we can watch six live matches every weekend, the secret is out: most football is boring. And the ceaseless flow creates too much repetition. Lionel Messi is the best ever, but now that he’s live on TV 60 times a year, déjà vu encroaches: Messi dribbles past four men and scores, again.

 

Still, the game itself is bearable. When my kids are old enough, I’ll take them to matches. Football is made for family ritual. What else will my boys talk to me about when they are teenagers?

 

Much worse than the football is that vast critical apparatus attached to it. The 24-hour humourless hype is exhausting. Every comment by Alex Ferguson about a referee is treated as world news – bigger than, say, a massacre in Mali. Last June about 500 of us journalists crammed into one of the England team’s meaningless press conferences in Donetsk, Ukraine. Meanwhile, the media lack resources to cover actual news.

 

Then there’s the anger: at a referee who gives a penalty, or a player who dares change clubs. Heavy use of the word “hate” (“I hate Manchester United” et cetera) means football talk often sounds like fascist propaganda. Hysteria would be much reduced if fans and media shed the fairytale notion that a footballer must love whichever club he happens to play for. Footballers don’t think that way. Listen to their language: they call themselves “professionals” with “careers”. Football is a job – well-paid and often enjoyable, but employees don’t love their employers. A friend who supports Manchester United told me he believed United’s long-serving players Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs loved United. I asked him if he loved the bank where he worked. Obviously not, he said. Well, Scholes and Giggs don’t love United either. They just have happy employee-employer relationships.

 

Anyone who peeks behind football’s curtain discovers there is no magic there. Another friend, a Sunderland fan, during a stint writing about football found himself in the tunnel with Sunderland’s players just before kick-off. He looked at them and realised, “It’s just a job”, and the magic died for him.

 

For me too, football is now a job. In Johannesburg in 2010 I sat in the stands watching my team, Holland, almost win a World Cup final. But when Andrés Iniesta scored Spain’s winning goal with five minutes left, my dominant emotion was relief. The match had gone to extra time, and football journalists writing match reports dislike extra time. Deadlines get missed, editors in London keep emailing to ask when you can file, and you can’t write a word because the score is tied and you don’t know who will win. Iniesta made my professional life easier.

 

I remain grateful to football. I entered journalism in the 1990s just as newspapers were collapsing, and that vast critical apparatus allowed me to make a living writing. I hope to keep covering football with the professionalism that other journalists apply to politics or the insurance industry. But love doesn’t come into it.

 

I don't feel the same way as him, but he says some stuff I definitely agree with.

[smithdown]

There's loads more reasons to be fed up with it than all that.

[Logic]

There's one thing I agree with in that article: “I hate Manchester United”

[Cobs]

it's become a job to him, is why

[cymrococh]

People like him do my head in.

[MarkD]

Poor f***** had to stay late at a world cup final.

[Romario]

Boo hoo. Slow news day.

[Epic Swindle]

It is s*** like.

[Stevie H]

People like him do my head in.

he's got a job most people would give their right arm for. it's hard to be particularly sympathetic.

[Benzo-13]

Can understand a lot of it.

Had to dial down a good bit this season due to taking silly s*** far too seriously.

 

Thats guy's got a good job from the game though which I'd probably love.

[DanielS]

Yeah, football is brilliant. Don't know what the guy is on about....ffs!

[StevieC]

he's got a job most people would give their right arm for. it's hard to be particularly sympathetic.

 

 

The Lawro Effect.

[£440,000]

he's got a job most people would give their right arm for. it's hard to be particularly sympathetic.

 

Don't think he's asking for sympathy. He's obviously someone who thinks deeply about the game, perhaps too much so, but I think he has a point about the media machine that now operates around football. I used to cover matches for the Press Association here in Spain and the sheer number of different media outlets at even notionally less important matches was stunning. Every Spanish league match is shown on one tv channel or another now. The guy who owns the bar where I have breakfast told me that he always had a crowd for the matches that were on the telly, but now that there are so many, people aren't as fussed. If it's Madrid v Barca or one of the local derby, people will come out, but otherwise, it's only the hardcore.

 

I think he's wrong about players like Giggs not loving their clubs though. Some do, some don't, but it's not like working for a bank. Bankers don't work whilst being given the adulation of thousands.

[matty]

Good point, wrong reason.

[Superjay]

The amount of first world problems in that piece makes me want to smack him. Actually moaning about being late at a World Cup final and messi dribbling past 4 and scoring. You don't like it lad? Move over and let someone else have a go otherwise maybe have a look at the f**king circus you and your f**king cronies create everyday. Maybe write about the agenda driven narrative that surrounds any game at any time. What next from him? "I hate my job, pity me... The pies in the press box are a bit cold Wah Wah Wah"

[cymrococh]

Don't think he's asking for sympathy. He's obviously someone who thinks deeply about the game, perhaps too much so, but I think he has a point about the media machine that now operates around football.

That doesn't change football though, I'm not going to let it affect me.

[aka Dus]

Football is 11 v 11, full stop.

 

Everything else he's talking about is not football, it's a secondary industry that he's a fundamental part of. I can identify with his ennui about that but if he wants to love football then he should just focus on the football. And maybe think about a career change.

[WillG]

Football is 11 v 11, full stop.

 

Taking it out of context here... but it's not!

 

I've no particular axe to grind here, but I've just watched Celtic v Juve and the playing field is as skewed as anything I've seen in sport.

 

You've got the Scottish champions :-( playing the Italian champions :-) off the park, only for them to be undermined by persistant and flagrant referee bias.

 

Celtic could have had as many as SIX penalties tonight - with no exaggeration - but the constant bias of the ref undermined the plucky, yet clearly superior, underdog!

 

Anyone would think they might be implicated in some kind of match-fixing scandal!!!

Edited February 13, 2013 by WillG

[aka Dus]

Well I'd include the ref in football too, he makes the park.

 

Celtic beat Barcelona - for every night like that, Celtic should reasonably expect 5 (or maybe 10) like last night.

[Rex Ham]

Anyone who uses vast crtical apparatus in nearly every paragraph must be a big bell.

 

That said, I'm with the sentiment, its much less important to me now than it was.

[growler]

I've found the last 5 years supporting us, watching the commercialisation, the lack Of response to racism, the rising prices and blatant bias to certain teams has been exhausting.

 

Ironically, it's the international breaks. They provide a break from football that each time they come round it becomes that much harder to stay with football.

 

I'll always follow Liverpool but football is killing itself.

[DanielS]

Doesn't help the counter argument that football is great when a 25 year old professional feels he has to retire because he just came out as gay...

[muleskinner]

Doesn't help the counter argument that football is great when a 25 year old professional feels he has to retire because he just came out as gay...

 

because its just footballs issue isnt it?

[£440,000]

because its just footballs issue isnt it?

 

No, it's not, but there aren't too many other careers you might feel you had to retire from by coming out.

[aka Dus]

I don't think that guy is retiring from football because he's gay. Doesn't read that way anyway.