Football? Fuck it, I’m out

Football? Fuck it, I’m out.

The Premier League, as a fair competition, stands as a total mess: sportswashers corrupt once humorous and self-deprecating Mancunian fans – who now wave plastic flags in a tax-payer funded stadium – with the club’s gulf-state owners (and their human rights abuses) threatening to spend more on lawyers than most clubs spend on players; in order to overcome pesky laws about massively overhyped homeland sponsorship deals that try to stop sport being unfair via the very sportswashing, financial doping and loading the squad with the kind of depth that allows heavy rotation with almost zero drop in quality. In other words, more than marginal gains – huge advantages – with illicit funding. And waiting for the 115 charges to finally be heard, as, at the other end, teams are relegated who do not have financial improprieties under investigation whilst the narrowest survivor does.

Fuck it, I’m out.

Jürgen Klopp’s fist-pump-pump-pump to the Kop after a win.

Fuck it, I’m back in.

Murderous state regimes welcomed with open arms (and by the once humorous and admirable fans who forgot their morals at the first whiff of billions), who claim to be part of a murderous government when it suits in a lawsuit in one country, but also nothing to do with that government when it doesn’t; and whose presence is not blocked due to the UK government playing global politics with football. Who will they get to sponsor them? Oh look, a Saudi business! – I bet that’s at market value. Oh look, how are they corrupting and dividing golf? Oh look, who now owns the top four clubs in their homeland? Oh look, who is offering ageing hamstrung defensive midfielders £86m a year but not paying the wages of its journeyman players? (Lewis Grabban is one of many claiming to not have been paid, according to the Athletic, which says “Players have seen wages go unpaid by Saudi clubs when injured and, in the worst cases, had contracts torn up and visas withheld.”) Oh look, if you still have a head to look with.

Fuck it, I’m out.

Bobby Firmino’s smile, after a no-look goal, and Bobby Firmino’s tears after saying goodbye when serenaded for what seemed like hours by fans who would love him just as much if none of the trophies he helped win were won. You can buy all the trophies and wave all the plastic flags you want, but you’ll never have what we had with Bobby Firmino. (Liverpool fans aren’t perfect, and there are plenty of dickheads in the fanbase, like any club. But at it’s best, it’s still special.)

Fuck it, I’m back in.

Ever worsening time-wasting and game-vandalising tactics, where at Anfield we’ve seen a goalkeeper go down with a headache after 60 seconds (Newcastle) to require three minutes of crowd-quieting shithousery; and players blatantly faking possible concussion after a standard headed clearance with no one near them (too many to count, Ashley Young the most recent); and games where the ball is in play for around 45 minutes and the rest is 60 minutes of dead time (Brentford, Aston Villa); and goalkeepers falling on every ball they catch as if they have some kind of neurological condition.

Fuck it, I’m out.

Memories, moments. Corner taken quickly; Alisson’s towering header; Cody Gakpo dinking in one of the seven goals against Man United from an impossible angle; the sound of Thiago kicking a football; Joël Matip taking the ball for a walk; Virgil van Dijk scoring with a towering header; Darwin Núñez charging up the wing like a demented bank robber escaping from 100 policemen in a speeded-up black and white film; a Trent Alexander-Arnold cross that fizzes and arcs and dips; the Hendo trophy shuffle; Ibrahima Konaté putting his full bodyweight into a fair tackle; Luis Díaz turning a defender inside and outside and outside and inside.

Fuck it, I’m back in.

Working hard to reach a Champions League final only to have UEFA, the local police and the French officials ruin it for the Liverpool fans who went there, by putting their lives in danger, and then blaming them, whilst the team felt the pressure of the stadium announcer blaming those from England for the long delay to the game, and to have to play as ‘villains’.

Fuck it, I’m out.

Coming within two games, or even just two goals, of the quadruple, with a team/squad that’s around 40% cheaper than the Abu Dhabi plaything club facing 115 charges. Outplaying Real Madrid despite being made the villains, and rising to be ranked #1 in the club Elo rankings. And 2019’s 97 league points when winning the Champions League is still the most in a domestic league when becoming champions of Europe; no one else has more than 90, I believe. Getting 97, 99 and 92 points, on a fraction of the budget of all the other teams teams to get 90+ points, achieved at Liverpool due to great coaching, scouting, data analysis and steady, sensible ownership, by buying only what can be afforded via genuine income.

Fuck it, I’m back in.

Fans invading pitches, punching players, confronting managers; objects injuring key opponents in a European cup final; players pushing referees and receiving the rightful wrath; but a linesman elbowing a player and, well, nothing to see here. Virulent trolls and snarks and nasty banter everywhere online and death threats (death threats, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention), and fans running onto pitches to physically abuse players from their own team.

Fuck it, I’m out.

Trent Alexander-Arnold. Cody Gakpo. Luis Díaz. Diogo Jota. Alexis Mac Allister. Darwin Núñez. Stefan Bajcetic. Ibrahima Konaté. Curtis Jones. Joe Gomez. Calvin Ramsay. Harvey Elliott. Ben Doak. Conor Bradley. Fábio Carvalho. Jarell Quansah. Luke Chambers. Bobby Clark. Others, too. All 26 or under, all likely to improve as they approach or enter their peak years (or in some cases, turn from teenagers into adult men), and who would want to miss seeing those, and any other new signings this summer?

Fuck it, I’m back in.

The PGMOL.

Fuck it, I’m out.

The peak years and twilight careers of Alisson, van Dijk, Mo Salah, Thiago, Matip, Andy Robertson, Fabinho, Jordan Henderson and any of the older statesmen who are still at the club next season and beyond, and the send-off they will get at the end of their time.

Fuck it, I’m back in.

Leicester fans telling their owners to sell up and fuck off. I mean, from 2nd tier to English champions and FA Cup winners, with a fatal helicopter crash for the family of owners in between, but a bad season and they can basically just fuck off. At which point … what’s the actual point?

Fuck it, I’m out.

The Kop in full voice, and the expansion of Anfield ahead of next season, to make it bigger, and hopefully fuller of voice. And the lack of plastic flags.

Fuck it, I’m back in.

Reckless venture capitalists overspending on the back of their club escaping relegation sanctions – saved from going into administration – in the writing off of £1.6bn of debt, and then claiming other sanctions, where they got off lightly, cost them dearly, as they then line up about 100 new players and drive up the prices of players. Clubs run as glorified fashion outlets, buying superstars to sportswash their human rights abuses at the heart of the world’s best footballing talent pool, that they ignore in favour of ageing superstars and raging egotists, and whose fans hate them all even though they win everything in France, every year. Barcelona buying lots of new players and not paying their existing players, and selling off rights to things for the next billion years. Burnley and other clubs being acquired via leveraged buyouts. Virtually every club outside the Premier League paying insane wages at levels beyond what they earn, when no one has forced them to do so – but where they want a share from better-run clubs above them. Agents and families syphoning off £40m in single deals. Players betting on their own games, and on their parent club to lose, as betting logos plaster football shirts everywhere.

Fuck it, I’m out.

Occasionally being at Anfield, in the old season ticket seat I gained in the mid-‘90s, and while unable to go regularly due to my health issues dating back to the late ‘90s, the few trips a season with the two friends I began going to the game with almost 30 years ago, as one of the only times I actually do something sociable with male friends, for whom football keeps links alive in an increasingly atomised real life world. Since Klopp arrived, every game I attend is a victory, or the occasional draw (albeit the result is never the only thing that matters, when you’re there to see proper elite football, and you’re there to be part of a community, and doing something with mates). It’s rarely dull; and if it is, that’s often down to the opposition.

Fuck it, I’m back in.

FIFA, UEFA and just about every footballing body trying to expand competitions, increase the number of games, milk the oozing product from its weary reddened teat and squeeze another golden egg from the exhausted goose’s grifted ovaries, while whoever broadcasts and bankrolls that particular bloated monstrosity tells us how important it is, and how lucky we are to have it, as we pay through the nose.

Fuck it, I’m out.

The community on this website (TTT), with thousands of subscribers and hundreds of regular commenters, some of whom feel my crosspatch wrath if they post substandard takes, but most of whom teach me things, and whose loyalty is fucking amazing. I never thank them much, mind, as I don’t want to be the naff singer who tells the audience between every song that they’re the best he’s ever known, and blow smoke up their arses. I don’t want to be captured by my audience, and to ever feel that I must tell them what they want to hear; they get what I want to say, which includes a few f-bombs (never at them), and sometimes we part ways as a result. But to still be doing this after 14 years of paywalled content (up until 2022 on WordPress and since then on Substack), and after 23 years of online Liverpool FC writing (including five years as the columnist on the official Liverpool site until I quit in 2010), all since losing my day job due to chronic illness that continues to narrow my options and makes life harder (in conjunction with just getting older), is something to be grateful for (although I also need to have my separate TTT ZenDen Substack to fill the shortfalls, where no commenting is allowed; just my thoughts.)

Fuck it, I’m back in.

Elon Musk buying Twitter (which is overrun with nutters and political extremists and #FSGOuters) and throttling all Substack articles so that they can’t go viral if they have a Substack URL, and making life even harder in a time of struggling economies; or Liverpool not winning the trophies that would have helped my football books to sell better (a book about a league title is always better than one about finishing 2nd), and boost TTT subscriber numbers, because the other team ‘found’ extra great players with extra money that 115 charges suggest was not legit.

Fuck it, I’m out.

Yet …

I’m a football fan. You have me by the short and curlies. It’s my addictive substance. And my job, as a football writer, is to rate the heroin. It’s to shoot it up, and say how it feels. It’s to drop the acid, rank the trip as good or bad; heavenly or hellish. It’s to smoke the super-strong pot, and get high or highly paranoid.

In between, I have spikes and crashes, fixations and cravings. You can flush my fix down the toilet – I’M DONE! – but then the next day I’ll be there with a straw, sucking at the U-bend. I love it. I hate it.

Sometimes I wonder if I’d feel less shame if discovered naked in an alleyway with a needle in my arm, carrying a copy of Mein Kampf and with an orange stuck up my arse. (Albeit each to their own, in private.) At times it feels like life would be simpler and more fun if stuck in a lift with Amber Heard and Johnny Depp.

But I’m a football fan. And it’s all I have to pay the mortgage.

Fuck it, I’m back in.

(For now.)

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