In the Football Twitter era, Premier League clubs are responsible for their fandoms
Own your maniacs, football clubs
Short and sweet this week. I've been away and we're all watching the Euros anyway.
Let’s go.
In the Football Twitter era, Premier League clubs are responsible for their fandoms
Once upon a time, football journalist Jacob Steinberg posted some horrendous stuff on social media. We’re not talking vaguely whiffy either, but massive, stinking stuff that might well have cost him his job had it surfaced closer to the time.
So many years have passed that it’s difficult to condemn him any further for those posts. They were abusive and tribalistic but not racist or discriminatory.
That’s more than can be said about the sequence of events that led to Steinberg’s past transgressions being dredged up by the dregs of humanity because of their claimed football loyalties at the end of the 2023/24 season.
Steinberg inserted himself into the developing story of Erik ten Hag’s fate as Manchester United manager as it bloomed before and after their FA Cup win. The day before the final, The Guardian ran a Steinberg exclusive reporting that United’s new leadership would remove Ten Hag irrespective of the result at Wembley.
The exclusive wasn’t followed elsewhere. No man is an island but when a football story runs with such surety and iffy timing but sounds without an echo, the question of where the tip came from – and why – has to be asked. It turned out to be bollocks anyway but the details don’t seem to matter much now the journalist has faced some shocking consequences.
When Ten Hag’s stay of execution was announced, after United had shopped around quite openly and failed to come up with less of a bald, the response of United fanatics on Twitter was disgusting.
Steinberg’s old posts were dragged up in the name of bloodlust of the mob, not justice. It was just one part of an unconstrained hate campaign that also threw up personal abuse and, inevitably, anti-semitism. Nobody among them held back. Nobody called them out. Twitter did nothing because Elon Musk is hiding in plain sight.
Journalists aren't immune to scrutiny and criticism and nor should they be. They've become part of the game to a large degree and they are at the very least involved in the conversation around the fringes of football. But they're not fair game for the extreme nonsense of social media.
It's easy to look around society and let social media off the hook. Toxicity isn't limited to the internet, that's for sure.
But let's be absolutely clear about two things. First, this is a social media issue and a so-called Football Twitter issue. Second, Manchester United are not an outlier but a single example of a problem that's now everywhere.
The participants in this venomous mess are, generally, not match-going supporters but Extremely Online fanatics. It's not limited to football because these are the behaviours not of a fan base but of a typically sick, campaigning social media fandom with a life of its own, far beyond the limits of what it purports to represent.
There are big differences between the two, notably that a fandom is very much an online phenomenon.
According to contributors to the venerable Urban Dictionary, fandom is “an innocent word used for describing a cult of sleep-deprived people who obsess over one or multiple comics, books, tv shows, movies, video games, etc.” or “a group of people who willingly have their souls devoured by an obsession” or “the satanic cult that will destroy you and everything you love.”
The idea of a fandom as a vehicle of participatory culture (as opposed to fandom, the straightforward property of being a fan of something) emerged decades before its more modern usage, which refers to a specific set of characteristics and is, by implication if not definition, aggressive and unrefined.
Noteworthy online fandoms include those swearing unwavering loyalty to Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber, to Beyonce and One Direction, or to all sorts of total k-guff. Being a fan of something is a noble pursuit. Being ‘in’ a fandom is beneath contempt.
Football Twitter – a cultural abomination in its own right – has naturally fractured into inner fandoms. Club allegiances and tribalism abound because of course they do, and the result is a now well established avalanche of trolling that gleefully embraces racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and the online equivalent of tragedy chanting.
There are no limits to what these inadequates will post to compensate for their lack of actual involvement in meaningful support for their chosen Premier League clubs. To a great extent this is where racist abuse and death threats actually come from. The vicious eruption against Steinberg is an especially alarming example.
Everything about it is awful, from the speed and unity with which Football Twitter’s Manchester United fandom mobilised to the unbridled social media warfare that followed. What isn’t spoken about nearly enough is that the social media professionals at all of our Premier League clubs are highly capable and well aware of it all.
Football clubs on Twitter have a duty to moderate their fans, whether they like it or not. It’s not a matter of censorship – they have no mechanical means to do so even if it were – but of leadership and responsibility.
The biggest voice to the sensible United fan base and the unhinged United Football Twitter fandom alike is the voice Manchester United. It’s the same for any Premier League club.
Clubs are understandably reluctant to confront their own fans but when the shared cause is used as justification to threaten, abuse and dox individuals whose perceived offence was minuscule by comparison, silence is not good enough and ignorance isn’t an excuse. The only action for a club that leads by example is to stand up and say “not in our name” as clearly as possible.
All twenty Premier League clubs should be reconsidering the ethical implications of staying on Twitter at all. Not one of them is; the apparent positives outweigh the negative of their tacit support for everything the company and its despicable owner stand for in 2024.
But if the clubs want or need to be present there, they should step up to the plate. The smooth comes with some rough, and one happens just as firmly under their badges as the other. Solicited or otherwise, fan or fandom, those who identify with a football club in public represent it. Saying nothing says everything.
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Dessert
This is the Diadora Brasil OG ‘94. It’s blue because Baggios. And what a beauty it is.
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