Who's to blame for football swill?
Football content is Satan’s slop bucket
Every fibre of my being wants this issue to be about Aston Villa beating Bayern Munich in the Champions League.
It was quite something. The club has come a long way in a short space of time and having such a tangible marker of that felt like a sort of collective catharsis.
But the truth is, it’s not my story to tell. I wasn’t there. I didn’t experience it. For various reasons, my support isn’t as direct and tangible as it used to be. I’ll include a couple of links below to articles by people who were there, one of them a Villa supporter and one of them not.
Their right to cover the game is much greater than mine. Suffice to say, I was floored by the whole thing. What a moment.
Don’t miss this week’s Beefy Bites!
Who's to blame for football swill?
Physicists and sci-fi fans will be familiar with parallel dimension theory. It holds that there are, or could be, infinite universes in which every possibility is played out somewhere in the multiverse. For every decision we make, every moment that goes one way, the opposite occurs in another dimension.
I hope it’s true. I want there to be a me in some other existence who doesn’t work in social media, who doesn’t look after marketing for a football club, who is able to avoid social media entirely. I hope there’s a me who doesn’t have to see the avalanche of bullshit published every day in the name of football content.
Football culture online is on its arse. It has been for more than a decade. Without even the slightest demand we’re subjected to a bottomless supply of dismal, boring, basic, vacuous garbage. And that’s just the stuff that’s not actively malicious or partisan to the point of missing the point of football entirely.
We might hope this is the nadir, if only there were any reason to suspect an upturn. People are still creating excellent football content. There are brilliant writers, artists and broadcasters adding value every day. That is a fact.
Sadly, it’s also a fact that for every piece of content worth a damn, there are a million social media posts that do nothing but poison culture and waste electricity.
This deterioration into cultural pigswill is not unique to football. It’s become the pathetic, dribbling fabric of social media and the platforms themselves – not to mention the very idea of social media as a construct – have created the environments in which large volumes of zero-value content appeal to their godforsaken algorithms and can be monetised.
The popularisation of artificial intelligence (AI) has exacerbated the problem and allowed the parasites to multiply. But the underlying spirit of pointless content has been festering for years.
News fell first. Politics. Clickbait journalism breeds social media like-baiting breeds content slop. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the others reward its production. Generative AI makes it easier than ever.
My involvement in non-league football unfortunately means I see a Facebook feed most days. In a year, I must have blocked a thousand profiles or more, every one of them served to me by an algorithm despite their posts having no appeal whatsoever and zero possibility of any relevant input from me suggesting an interest.
Whatever the social media platforms tell you about how their algorithms serve you content organically, know this: they’re fucking lying. I set up a Facebook page for this newsletter recently, very much against my will but marginally preferable to Twitter. From a standing start, the news feed was all fascism and plastic tits.
When the algorithms learn that the singular interest of the page is football, here’s what will happen. I’ll be served football slop and there will be nothing I can do about it. I can’t block it all. I can’t ignore it because it won’t go away. I can’t fire the bots and businesses that publish it into the sun because god knows there just isn’t the fuel to get them all there.
Football content is broken. We don’t need a million Arsenal and Manchester United fan accounts posting everything and nothing all the time. We don’t need to see the baseless musings of distant nobodies whose asinine football drivel has somehow clocked up enough followers to fill the stadiums they’ve never been to many times over. We don’t need Manchester City’s legion of nouveaux plastiques celebrating legal outcomes like football matches won. We don’t need bots.
Civilisation would be better off without stadiums.football posting footage they don’t own to ask a potential audience of two billion people whether Luka Modrić is a legend. We could do without Chelsea Addicts and Arsenal Lab and United Poop Chute and Barca Banter and all the other faceless, pointless, witless swill merchants spewing their sewage into culture. If you think these are strong opinions, you should hear the views I’m not willing to publish.
The tragedy is that these accounts work. Their posts are distributed to millions despite their net value to society being less than zero. Mark Zuckerberg, Adam Mosseri and Space Karen are opening our windows, squirting cultural gruel into our houses and laughing in our faces.
Their algorithms serve only the platforms, their bosses, and their nefarious affiliations. Do not make the mistake of thinking it’s harmless fun. It’s 2024 and we have no control over what we see on their platforms. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.
But this is how it is and it’s difficult at this point to blame billionaires or their platforms or their algorithms or their bots or their millions of willing slop publishers.
They’ve been showing us who they are for twenty years. Space Karen is hiding in plain sight. Zuckerberg oversees the greatest cultural abomination in human history. Mosseri is an under-appreciated world-class bastard. This we know.
Users are to blame. People are to blame. We are to blame. If you weren’t on Twitter and Facebook, Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t exist. My football club is on Twitter and Facebook, so I am part of the problem. If half the people who know what Twitter is really for voted with their feet, it would be sold off tomorrow.
Maybe people just don’t care enough about having their lives invaded sixty times a minute by cultural backwash to start saying no.
A few years ago, PR data expert Andrew Bruce Smith explored the ‘passive information consumer’ on social media. In a suite of industries obsessed with measurable engagements, passive information consumers are overlooked.
Smith argued that they made up the vast majority of a typical social media community and, despite it all, I still believe that to be the case. These are the people who see content, who absorb it, but don’t actively engage with it in any way. They are, said Smith, the most important social media audience.
Instead, social media creators and agencies and brands pander to what they can measure: the people who do like posts. The trouble with that approach is that it fundamentally misunderstands the pretty obvious fact that a lot of people smash like, like, like on any old shite because that’s just what they do.
They’re less engaged than some of the people who never click anything, yet we’ve built platforms, algorithms, content, norms, expectations and standards based wholly on their input. We are now living with the consequences of that. This is the upside-down failure of insight that’s brought us to this point.
Football culture and content haven’t atrophied by themselves. Football is a consequence, a victim, of what’s happening to social media content in general. It didn’t cause Shrimp Jesus but it’s not entirely separable from it either. It’s not the cause of the algorithmic death of sensible, discerning society but it is a symptom of it.
Football is a cultural bellwether. If the Facebook feeds to which I’m reluctantly exposed on a daily basis are anything to go by, we’ve got a lot to worry about.
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Salty beef extracts
Aston Villa vs Bayern Munich was a date with destiny (House of V)
Aston Villa owe their success to the fans – and that shouldn’t be forgotten (i)
From grief to Fleetwood: Charlie Adam and the moment that turned his life around (i)
The National League Cup gets off to a predictably dismal start (Unexpected Delirium)
Celtic's hammering in Dortmund is a joke that may wear off quickly (Unexpected Delirium)
"Let's get Physical!" Let's see how that works out (Referee Tales)
Bare Feet, Myths and Missed Chances (Maldini’s Chain)
Game Nostalgia - World Soccer (Goodnight Vienna)
“The way we are playing, the way we are defending right now is going to get us in relegation and we have to be honest about that right now. Gary is not the problem. He is doing really well. If you say Gary O'Neil is the problem then you are liars and cheaters, because he has given us a lot. A lot of things we didn't have before.”
Mario Lemina, the captain of Wolverhampton Wanderers, is not prone to minced words.
Dessert
The Nike Air Max 90 is the greatest trainer silhouette in the history of humankind. Rinse. Repeat.
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Have a week.