Transfers aren't football and summers are tedious
Sorry, dorks. The football is back soon.
To kick off this week's issue, a recommendation. My favourite podcasters, Ian King and Ed Carter, are back in the saddle and they're doing it right here on Substack.
Ian's writing is the main thrust of Unexpected Delirium but the boys' new podcast series is long overdue. The subject is football in fictional television programmes and quite frankly there's nobody better to discuss it.
To get the best out of it you'll need to hand over a fiver a month but take it from me: once you hook the feed up to your podcast app, it'll be worth that and more.
Anyway, on to me. It always makes me feel a little uneasy poking fun at the ways in which other people enjoy football. My experience is no more valid than theirs (mostly), yet I expend a lot of mental energy wondering how football culture became what it is in 2023.
It's essentially an academic exercise, one rooted in curiosity rather than contempt, but I can't claim that it's impartial.
What follows in this week's newsletter and has popped up several times in the preceding 29 are the fruits of a lifetime of partisan ethnography.
Sounds fun, right? Let's begin.
Transfers aren't football and summers are tedious
Football culture is fracturing. There are growing fault lines in a multitude of directions, each exacerbated by the tribal club loyalties that persistently chip away at any semblance of sane relations between supporters.
Within that monotonous fug lies an infinity of cracks. Between the polished elite sport and the game lower down. Between online fanatical weirdos and real-world participants. Between advocates and opponents of video assistant referees. Between those unwilling to endorse certain types of ownerships or politics or sponsors and those who simply define their football experience by winning.
If I listed out all of my football opinions, each would place me on the other side of a ravine from supporters of the opposite view. That much is obvious. But it also applies to preferences, likes, dislikes, tolerance levels – and that’s pretty fascinating from a sociological perspective.
The same thing is happening in online culture. I used to work at a creative agency, We Are Social. In their 2023 Think Forward trends piece, they led with the idea of fragmentation in what defines online communities:
“On a cultural level, gone is the universal watercooler chat dictated by shared popular culture – today’s agenda is set by ever-more niche and transient corners of the internet. And on a personal level, identities are more layered and fluid than ever before, more like an ‘avatar du jour’ than a static understanding of self.”
The result is a sort of patchwork of cultural bits and pieces; an identity pick ‘n’ mix. As Facebook, Instagram and even Threads disappear up the recta that are their godforsaken algorithms, as Twitter nosedives into the dirt at the hands of the world’s most divorced dad, the places in which we gather online are changing.
People now congregate around increasingly specific strands of their identities. Subreddits and Discord servers are scooped up and dropped into our personality paper bags. A sports team here, a band there, a little art and professional interest and some laughs thrown in, and we can each build an online experience that reflects who we are and what we want from connected culture.
In football we at least retain that unified central point of interest, but no two ways of enjoying it are alike. We select the parts we like and don’t like, and we each experience the game in our own way.
That versatility helps to make the game special. It also means we can make these choices and decide how we interact with the game, flirting around the fringes of our personal football fiefdoms and getting into arguments about more or less anything.
Every summer we reach one of the edges of mine. If one of the dividing lines is between people who consider the summer transfer window to be a part of the spectacle and people who just want the football back, I’m ready to go full Braveheart in favour of the latter. Transfers aren’t football and summers are tedious. You will never persuade me otherwise.
This simmering distaste for transfer chatter is amplified by the absurd numbers and politics involved. Whether it’s Saudi Arabia offering to make Kylian Mbappé richer than god twice over or just about any English player moving for upwards of £50m – to be clear, that is fifty million pounds – the whole thing seems to take on an almost abstract quality.
With no basis in a sensible reality, the summer transfer market has no consequence. And, as all intelligent football supporters know, football without consequence is barely football at all.
The eye-rolling tedium of transfer talk was highlighted during Bayern Munich’s nakedly public courtship of England captain Harry Kane. With Tottenham Hotspur in Thailand at the start of their pre-season tour, manager Ange Postecoglou was faced with a press conference stunt by the risible German newspaper, Bild.
The awful rag’s balding, bumfluff-bearded reporter, Max Schrader, later had his accreditation revoked for introducing into proceedings a Bayern jersey bearing Kane’s name. Given the tepid nature of the gag, one can only assume the press ban received by Schrader was imposed on the grounds of shite patter. Even Bayern fans were annoyed.
That’s the thing with these summer months of mercato back and forth. They’re full to bursting with crap jibes, baseless rumours, the baffling trend of ‘ITK’ fakery and circuitous discussion about nothing.
Lurking within all that nonsense is the actual transfer market – real updates about things that are really happening. Until a player is holding up their new shirt that’s boring too, yet millions obsess over it for weeks and weeks and weeks, apparently enjoying it as much as, if not more than, the football itself.
The sainting and celebration of football’s leading transfer newstwats and whatever it was Jim White claimed to be is confusing to me. Football happens on the pitch. The rest is just admin, yet here we are living in a world in which Fabrizio fucking Romano has a catchphrase.
If you enjoyed the main piece, please share this week’s newsletter using the button below.
“A study led by psychology experts from four universities measured the volume of gambling adverts during 10 matches that took place last season, featuring every Premier League club.
“West Ham v Chelsea featured by far the most betting logos, a total of 3,522, or 37 for every minute of the game. The figure was particularly high because of West Ham’s deal with the online bookmaker and casino firm Betway, whose logo is plastered around the club’s home, the London Stadium.
“According to the analysis, the average game featured a gambling logo every 16 seconds.”
Awesome. Seems fine.
Salty beef extracts
The Lionesses could win the World Cup – but UK women’s football will need huge support to stay on top (The Guardian)
Gündogan and Modric are indispensable players and the sum of everything (The Guardian)
Jordan Henderson left his morals at the door when Saudi Arabia waved £700k a week in his face (i)
In Search For The Industry, We Lost The Product (Football Paradise)
No One Likes Us: Photographs that take a second look at Millwall football fans (Creative Boom)
Dessert
Last week I made a Twitter thread listing twenty of my favourite newish football kits for no particular reason.
By the way…
High Protein Beef Paste is a free newsletter.
However, if you’ve enjoyed my writing over the years you might consider purchasing a Systematic Decline art print or a This Decay t-shirt.
I’m open to writing commissions and artistic or t-shirt collaborations. Get in touch if you’d like a chat.
That’s your lot. Thanks for reading. Please subscribe if you enjoyed it and haven’t done so yet.
Don’t be shy when it comes to sharing the newsletter. If I can get a decent handful of subscribers I can sack off Twitter and isn’t that the dream for all of us?
Have a week.