I can’t stand football. I recall at the age of eight being taken out onto a wet, muddy pitch, half naked in the freezing cold mid winter and having the rules explained to me along with the rest of my class. I realised then that this wan’t going to be for me. If things had been left like that instead of spending the next decade force feeding me, we might have got away with indifference rather than visceral loathing, but I digress. It seems that the news is full of a new league. And why would this interest me? Well, it doesn’t. It’s the response that does.
Boris Johnson today vowed to make sure the proposed European Super League ‘doesn’t go ahead’ as fans and football royalty turned on the ‘greedy’ mainly-foreign billionaire club owners trying to force through the £4.3billion plan bankrolled by a US investment bank.
The Prime Minister has said the clubs, which include Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool and Spurs, ‘must answer to their fans’ before launching the ‘very damaging’ change that would make them billions in new TV money and advertising.
Mr Johnson said the European Super League was not ‘good news’ for supporters and he would work with the football authorities ‘to make sure this doesn’t go ahead’ as the six rebel clubs were threatened with expulsion from the Premier League and European competitions with their stars also banned from playing for their countries.
If the people involved are entering into a freely arranged contract that is mutually agreeable, it has nothing to do with anyone else. Certainly it should not be within the purview of governments to interfere. This is why we need limited government. One of the first departments that should go is that of media culture and sport. Sport – as in this case – is nothing to do with government and Boris has no business interfering. Given the absolute shambles that has been this past year, the best thing that Boris can do is shut up about everything, frankly.
If it damages the sport and fans are turned off by it, then the venture will ultimately fail due to lack of revenues. If, on the other hand, fans like it and want to watch, it will succeed. But whatever happens, it is no business of governments.
Of course the various governing bodies are up in arms as well. Much like a closed shop union when the members decide to go their own way, they see power slipping from their grasp. To which my response is the same one that made Windsor Davies so well known. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
The Government is said to be drawing up ‘very robust’ plans to fight back, including the Home Office withdrawing policing support from matches. They could also lead a legal charge to the High Court amid claims the move could be illegal under UK competition law.
They are setting up a new competition. Getting together to have another league is hardly anti competitive, given that something very similar occurred when they set up the premier league back in the nineties. There was much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth then, I recall.
The most extreme change mooted is to change the ownership rules for clubs to mirror the German model where investors can only own 49 per cent of a club and fans own the remaining 51 per cent.
It’s big business and has been for decades. It’s what happens when sport becomes professional. Nothing to do with government. There is nothing stopping fans voting with their money.
Speaking in Gloucester today, the PM said football clubs were more than ‘great global brands’, they needed to have a link with their fans and communities, with supporters already threatening to tear up season tickets and protest outside stadiums in huge numbers if the ‘money-grabbing’ owners pursue it.
Actually, global brands is precisely what they have become. However, if enough supporters boycott them, revenue will drop and the idea will die. That is consumer power in action.
Ultimately though, this is inconsequential. Fuss and fury about something that is of no importance whatsoever. It will either succeed or fail on its own merits and the government should leave well alone.
Fartball? Pardon my total indifference . . .
Same here. It’s the frenzied over reaction that interests me here.
We used to mock countries with a Minister of Culture.
I thought there was some kind of football tiswas on Twitter this morning, but didn’t care enough to fine out what they were jabbering about
You did well at school if they taught you the rules. My school just expected boys to already know the rules to football, so didn’t teach us any of them. I hated it
It was a peculiar experience. Almost a rite of passage. At the infants school, they didn’t have football during PE lessons. This happened when we went up to the junior school at age eight and I remember it being a big thing. And, yes, it was explained to us how to play it. It was expected that we would all take to it and like it, although running around on permafrost in shirt and shorts in the middle of the winter is a pleasure that promptly bypassed me. This expectation continued despite my being far from the first boy who didn’t, yet they persisted with ramming it down our throats – an exercise that continued when I went to the senior school at eleven. Far from making me like it, it had precisely the opposite effect. One of the reasons I was desperate to leave school was that I never, ever, wanted to endure another PE lesson and forced football ever again. The loathing is so strong that it still persists some forty-odd years on. So they did a grand job on me.
Whenever the subject of being forced to do hated sports at school comes up it always results in a passionately expressed thread. My loathing of field sports and my ineptitude made me think that I was rubbish at sports generally. Once I had left school and was able to choose to do sports that I actually enjoyed, it turned out that I was quite good. This ugly aspect of life resurfaced decades later when my place of work started doing the team building cack. There was a certain satisfaction to be had in telling them that I wasn’t doing it unless they could find it in my job description.
I think the strong feelings are a case of having been bullied for ten years by PE teachers who forced us to do something that we absolutely hated. It was miserable and uncomfortable experience that went of for years. At least maths had a reasonable purpose as a life skill and was conducted in a warm classroom. I have used that throughout my life, but I have never needed anything from football.
A similar timeline to me, apart from never being told the rules of the game, just being berated constantly for doing it wrong. After the first year I think though, the PE teachers got the message that I simply wasn’t interested and wasn’t going to improve, so they pretty much left me alone to hang about on the edge of the field and avoid the game as best I could.
It makes me cringe now, listening to people at work talking about it, or gameshow contestants saying they ‘love thier football’. No other sport I’m not interested in, makes me react that way, but I have a deep loathing for football
I had a similar experience. They eventually left me to hang about by the edge of the pitch. I still had to go out twice a week for the misery of freezing in shirt and shorts and still had to put on those stupid boots. When we moved to Wales, I was allowed to disappear on a cross country run, which meant a quick jog down to the beach and an hour sitting behind the sand dunes. That said, it was mostly rugby in Wales. They made us all sit and watch when the All Blacks played Wales one year. They put a television in the gym so that we could all see it. That was a tedious hour and a half of my life I’ll never got back. I don’t remember much of it, but I probably read a book as I did during the interminably dull school sports days. These idiots think it teaches teamwork. It does nothing of the sort. It teaches people how to be creative about avoiding the whole thing. It also teaches people how to loathe something that they would otherwise not be bothered about.
Like you, no other sport evokes such a visceral reaction in me, not even rugby.
I’m quite disconnected from football’s appeal but my own visceral hatred is reserved for rugby. At my school football was banned, even in the playground, but rugby was sainted. I was compelled to participate and detested every minute.
However, I eventually discovered the delight that is athlete’s foot – if you said you’d got that, you couldn’t share the communal bath afterwards, so you couldn’t play the evil game. It was never cured apparently, so I never played rugby again (not that I’d ever really played it, my sole objective was to avoid any contact with that odd-shaped ball – if you’re ever anywhere near that ball, it hurts.)
My reaction to rugby was similar, but my exposure much less, so I never developed the deep loathing for it that I did for football.
“it teaches people how to be creative about avoiding the whole thing”
Yes, the strange way my dental appointments were always on Wednesday afternoon, the numerous ways of disappearing without being noticed. Eventually I just plain refused to turn up and went to the library instead. PE teacher: ‘I will talk to the headmaster about you’, Go ahead, he needs my exam results nore than he needs you (I’ve got more passes than you and you know it).
An abiding lifelong dislike of ‘sport’, though for reasons of my own I’ve run a marathon, skied, and in my seventh decade cycle 30 miles or more.
Those sports are outside the imagination of the average PE teacher. I was pretty good at judo and archery. I detest any game that involves chasing around after a ball and anything that involves teams. None of my PE teachers had the imagination necessary to get this.
Tear up your season ticket that you’ve already paid for, yeah that will show ’em. I’m the same with the indifference and agree that this is nothing to do with the government.
When I visited Hanoi my driver asked if I could send him some memorabilia of his favourite football team, which was Manchester United. Truly a global brand. So I sent him a scarf. Gets cold in Hanoi in winter. As for this new league thing, I couldn’t care less.
Bojo trying to keep the redwall inside after destroying theirjobs.
On the telly I have just caught some football pundits agonising about this issue. I think that it might have the potential to be hugely entertaining for those of us that don’t care about football.
I remember when Manchester United fans were complaining about being ripped off because they were being forced to buy several different away strips in order to be able to attend away matches. The strips were being sold at a ludicrous mark up obviously, but I was fascinated by the idea that buying them appeared to be compulsory. It never seemed to occur to these outraged fans that the answer was to just not buy the overpriced merchandise.
I didn’t think I could loathe Doris johnson any more than I did only this morning.
Totally agree on foolball, zero interest at school and now. Thankfully schools I attended didn’t teach it. I like [real] cross country running; playing squash, basketball, cricket & baseball, but not watching
Agree on Boris wrong (again), also his political stupidity of pretending to like foolball which will bite back. Yes abolish Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and it’s subsidies. None are anything to do with Gov’t and they should allow a free market
We’ve seen the result of DDCMS over past year via Ofcom: No media dissent permitted from Gov’t, WHO, NHS, PHE Covid narrative. talkRadio tried and deleted, now a hollow shell. Little wonder GB News has still not launched
Became decades ago: 1971 Tunisia, dad told us (7 & 9) to mention Man. Utd when speaking to locals, it worked
Exactly. Also a distraction ploy to bury bad news like Keir Starmer debacle
Not doctored like BBC version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkhrWgaAygM
Interview with Rod Humphreys the pub landlord that barred Keir Starmer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-OOl8pWIt4
Gov’t needs a large cull and to stop interfering in free market
Personally, I can’t wait till I pay through the nose to watch Emirates playing Falken Tyres in the Hugo Boss Cup at the Granola Stadium. On the other hand, may go down to the local park and watch two pub teams playing football because they enjoy doing so.
This point has been hovering in the back of my mind all along. If fans are that interested, go support the local team. If they are worried about greed and money (bit late for that) then don’t spend it with the big teams.
Littlejohn today sums it up well: I no longer care, football abandoned fans long ago
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9488757/