Football matters. I cannot tell you how many weekends have been salvaged by last-minute goals or ruined by offside flags. It is the escape valve of passion, enabling people, historically men, to express feelings of joy, despair and everything in between because the normal rules of emotional suppression have been suspended.
Football marks out the important moments in our lives. I only recall the date of my bar mitzvah party (held at Highbury, in keeping with religious doctrine) because it took place the day after Arsenal lifted the 2002 league title. It also works for events before our time. That is how I know Britain adopted decimalisation in 1971 — the year Charlie George lay down on the Wembley turf.
This is all by way of context for what I’m about to say next: football matters precisely because it isn’t real life. This can cause confusion, because it shares many of the characteristics of reality. For starters, the players aren’t actors. Their wages are accepted in all shops. But if you wanted a clue that something was amiss, surely It’s the cheering, booing and singing. This isn’t warfare, it’s panto that runs all year round.
In its purest form, football is escapism. Problem is, the outside world is, like a veteran defender, encroaching ever closer. This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, of course. The moments of tragedy are, horribly, all to real — most notably the Hillsborough disaster and subsequent, egregious police cover-up.
It feels as if something has changed, that the chance to turn away from moral quandaries isn’t on offer
But it feels as if, recently, something has changed. That elite football no longer guarantees the “Stop the world, I want to get off” injection it once did. That the opportunity to turn away from the moral quandaries of life in the 21st century isn’t on offer. Sure, the old truisms stand: Arsenal are good, Spurs bad and Chelsea beyond contempt. But what about the owners? And the fans having to choose between whether their team can afford to buy a new right-back or whether they want to go out to bat for owners whom they never had any say in choosing?
This is all getting too real so let’s turn for a moment to the simulated version. Playing Championship Manager as a child, seasons passed in hours, but the options for raising funds were fairly limited. To purchase players, you had to sell them. Perhaps if you were lucky (or, in my case, highly skilled) you could convince the board to expand the stadium. Except, in a case of hyper-realism, Islington council would continually block the redevelopment of Highbury, an incredible level of insight into English planning law from a badly scratched CD-Rom.
I’ve not bought a new version of the game in over a decade, but for any semblance of realism, it would today require options for ever more outlandish, unbelievable and dislikeable owners. In a computer game, it hardly registers. In real life, it matters a great deal.
Perhaps this was inevitable. As the sport grew larger, as first billionaires then hedge funds and finally countries piled in. Football cashed the world’s cheque and now the world is sharing its problems. On the scale of global injustices, it’s hardly in the top division. Still, it doesn’t seem fair that football fans now have to grapple with sticky-wicket questions like a mid-ranking government minister doing Today’s 8.10am interview slot.
I want football to matter so much that it can make or break my day, no more and no less. Supporting your team shouldn’t require a moral compromise. What the hell kind of escapism is that?
Tory plans off track
“No HS2 = no ambition for our country” — Jeremy Hunt, February 2020.
“We remain fully committed to building HS2. Building it shows we believe in Britain” — Mark Harper, June 2023.
Listen, I’m all for collective Cabinet responsibility as it’s the only way this thing is going to work. But telling people on the Monday your policy is a necessity and then ditching it on the Wednesday relies on one of two contentions: you think the voters are either too stupid or too busy to notice.
It is all right to change your mind. And the facts may have indeed changed. But they haven’t done so overnight. The benefits of additional rail capacity, of linking England’s great cities, of burrowing all the way to Euston — these are the same as they were when the Transport Secretary, Mr Harper, made that statement following a trip to Japan.
And Sir Keir Starmer is the only one who flip-flops?
