One year. One whole bloody year. A year of new High Protein Beef Paste issues every Tuesday morning at 7.30am without exception.
It's been fun. It's been a little tricky sometimes. On one occasion I thought it was a missive from my death bed. But he we are and I wish you a belated Merry Christmas. I hope you felt in your yesterday like I do in my today.
Unsurprisingly I've spent a lot of 2023 thinking about what this newsletter actually is. What's it about? Who's it for? What is it that pushes me towards football culture and away from football news at every turn?
I think my conclusion is that my starting point is an increasingly unfashionable position: I care about the game, as a whole and in the round, as a social phenomenon as much as a sport.
That's seen as a sort of weakness in the hypercompetitive, toxically partisan world of 2023. It's met with suspicion, as if it can't be real and that the inherent biases that come with a support must necessarily trump it.
Active participants in the culture not caring about “the game” leads to mental gymnastics in support of bollocks like the European Super League. Some fanatics will contort themselves into impossible shapes because billionaire businessmen align their greed to a particular football club.
So I'd like to end the year with a call to supporters that I've repeated often. The owners of your club may or may not be good for it but you aren't obliged to tug them off either way. Your role is not blind support but protective scrutiny.
Be vigilant even when the going is good. One day the club you claim to support might need it. One day football might need you.
Boxing Day football is brilliant
There have been times in football history when a Wolverhampton Wanderers win over Chelsea would have been noteworthy simply for being. In December 2023, it passed almost without mention even in spite of the drama of two stoppage time goals.
Without mention, that is, apart from the reaction to its scheduling. Wolves welcomed the Blues to the Black Country on Christmas Eve, their first match on 24th December for many decades and the first in the English top division for anyone for nearly thirty years.
The response was forthright. Christmas Eve is a particularly unsociable day for a Premier League match and the rearrangement was unwanted and poorly received.
Matches were held on Christmas Day, once upon a time. Not all traditions are good traditions and that's one that can stay in ancient history where it belongs. Christmas Eve – and New Year's Eve for that matter – should be right there with it.
Boxing Day is another story. Boxing Day football is a good tradition and it must be protected at all costs. It's right up there with the first day of the season and FA Cup Third Round day. There's no afternoon like it.
Tradition and ritual aren't necessarily reasons to keep things the same but they are the best argument in favour of Boxing Day matches. There are other compelling considerations but let's not pretend that tradition isn't bigger than all of them.
As the passage of time populates the world with more and more people younger than us, as modern media strips us of our humanity, the idea of tradition is often considered archaic. Progress only moves in one direction. But tradition is intrinsic to our anthropology and hardwired into who we are.
Centuries of research tell us that the social, familial and individual benefits of traditions and rituals are not only significant but elemental. Traditions are bigger than age or race or class or ability. They make us part of something bigger and consolidate the shared values of that something. Without that our mental health can suffer.
Boxing Day fixtures seem to be under semi-constant threat, square in the crosshairs of the winter break lobby and fixture congestion fundamentalists alike. Any part of the calendar that looks like too much football too close together is at risk and the longstanding case for a winter break has, sometimes, argued for a shutdown over Christmas.
With all that going on at the top and the huge burden placed upon the commitment of non-league players further down, the future of Boxing Day football isn’t at all certain. The winter break debate has mercifully quietened since the Premier League introduced its rolling pause for clubs after new year.
It’s not just tradition that justifies disrupting the festive period for a big ol’ slab of football the day after Christmas Day. It can be vital socially, not least for supporters whose involvement in football is everything. Football is a weapon against isolation and loneliness, neither of which are easy to manage at this time of year.
Festive football is especially powerful for families who like to attend or watch matches together, not least those dispersed by life and love. People grow up and they fly the nest. Now, more than ever before, that can mean significant distance as students head off to university, jobs take people from one end of the country to the other, and the obvious selling points of emigration grow by the week.
At Christmas time families come together to celebrate the season. Parents and children, siblings and cousins, multiple generations, have an opportunity to go to the football together on Boxing Day that they don’t have at other times in the year simply by dint of geography.
Better yet, these gatherings become traditions in their own right, each spawning a hundred little rituals that make them special. Take Boxing Day football away and they just wouldn’t be replaced.
Ask anyone who watches non-league football or is involved in running a club about Boxing Day and there’s a decent chance you’ll see their eyes light up. It’s a wonderful way to pass a couple of hours in the weighty afterglow of Christmas, sure, but it’s commercially crucial for clubs too.
Reunited families account for part of what they hope will be a bumper gate, boosted further by curious eyes and, with a fair wind, helpful fixture scheduling. In the week following Wolves v Chelsea on Christmas Eve, the National League fixture list featured, across its three divisions, derby double-headers for Aldershot Town and Woking, Banbury United and Brackley Town, Southport and Curzon Ashton, Eastbourne Borough and Worthing, and others.
These games are a big deal, as much a part of Christmas as pigs in blankets. Who doesn’t like a little venomous enmity? ‘tis the season, after all. For most non-league clubs it’s on Boxing Day that most of their supporters are in town, that their biggest games will be scheduled, and that people can be tempted to give non-league a try. It’s the number one money-spinning moment of the year. That wouldn’t be replaced either.
Football, they say, is a funny old game. It sure is. And never more so than at Christmas, when games are squeezed together and played with high stakes in front of big crowds. Kick-off times are moved for reasons both good and bad. Groundhoppers scour the fixture list for a chance to cram in two or even three matches on Boxing Day, if only the bastard weather would hold out.
Don’t be fooled into thinking this stuff is trivial. It’s not trivial at all. It’s not even merely important. These afternoons, these clubs, these people, they make football. They generate the rituals and memories and nuances that set football apart. They are us. We are them.
Boxing Day is pure English football, in full and unfiltered. It must continue until at least the day after my first day dead.
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“Uefa's monopoly is over. Football is free. Clubs are now free from the threat of sanctions and free to determine their own future.”
A22 chief executive Bernd Reichart. What a prick.
Salty beef extracts
Farewell to Steve Cooper – the man who made Forest fans dream again (i)
Moyes’ perennial P45 battle at West Ham is not just due to pragmatic football (i)
The new European Super League won’t happen – and here’s why (i)
David Squires on … Maupay Unwise and other Christmas TV highlights (The Guardian)
Hearts of Oak FC: A Jewel of African Football (Football Paradise)
MLS Tries, Fails To Chart Bold New Frontier In Anti-Competitivity (Defector)
Dessert
The New Balance BB550ATM is a collaboration with Japanese fashion house atmos, and they’ve done a rather sleek job of it.
By the way…
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Have a week.