A day to rejoice for football fans to be sure, with Sepp Blatter’s unexpected resignation hopefully heralding an opportunity to fix the game globally. Here in England, however, there seems little chance of the national game enjoying a similarly welcome shift from its current trajectory of becoming a sanitised, middle class, family-friendly entertainment industry. Mega TV deals and ever spiralling ticket prices at the top end of the game continue to inflate the English footy-bubble, pricing out many fans and sparking protests, whilst this season even saw supporters being harassed by on the gate breath tests before they were allowed in to games.
Meanwhile, this excess of money is turning the still largely working class lads who emerge from the top clubs’ youth set ups into teenage millionaires and convincing kids who’ve had one or two half decent seasons that they deserve contracts worth more than £100k per week (yes, I’m looking at you, Raheem – trophies, my arse). Not that there’s anything wrong with that – good luck to them (if I was anything but a Liverpool fan I’d be cheering Sterling on). In the same position, the vast majority of us would take what we could get too.
Some football observers clearly disapprove of working class kids making good, however. The Telegraph’s Oliver Brown for one. Having written a cracking piece on the 30th anniversary of Heysel last week he then went and wrote this sneering piece about Jack Wilshere’s antics on the balcony of Islington Town Hall at the end of Arsenal’s FA Cup winning parade. The article reeks of class-based hand-wringing, disdaining Wilshere for celebrating his FA Cup winners medal by having a few bevvies and singing rude songs about his team’s inferior local rivals. In other words, for doing what any Arsenal fans worth their salt will have done (except for those middle class arrivistes like Jonathan Freedland, I’m sure). Brown accuses Wilshere of behaving “like the tanked-up oaf at whom you would inwardly shudder as he reeled out of your nearest Wetherspoon’s”, a sentence dripping with ill-disguised snobbery.
Brown’s lament that Wilshere no longer seems “the cultured player whose magic wand of a left foot underpins Arsenal’s entire aesthetic” betrays a wider obsession of the latter-day middle class fan that football should be a form of entertainment akin to theatre or opera, rather than what traditional fans think it should be: a game that matters, regardless of how it looks; a game about local pride, tribalism and identity. It was these sentiments, of course, that Wilshere’s behaviour conveyed. The cup win meant something to him, even if he did only play 15 minutes of the final. But drinking? And singing about Tottenham being rubbish? And wearing an Arsenal fisherman’s hat? Tut, tut, tut. How uncouth. How working class.
This tension between traditional fans, for whom supporting a team, going to the match, lord, even having a beer beforehand, represents an inheritance from their father (who inherited it from his father) and those who discovered football’s appeal post-1992 is writ large in Brown’s article and its treatment of Wilshere. The depth of feeling of those fans born not made was reflected most recently in the differences between the commentary surrounding Steven Gerrard’s and Frank Lampard’s simultaneous departures from the Premier League. The reason for the hagiography surrounding Gerrard was not scouse sentimentality but genuine affection for the efforts of a fan on the pitch, who remained loyal to the club he loved and in the process lived out the most rampant fantasy of us all: to pull on the shirt week after week, to captain his hometown club.
No matter that Gerrard didn’t win all he could have. He repeatedly chose to stay at Anfield when he could easily have left, spurning the promise of more medals for fewer, but arguably more meaningful medals. Contrast this affection with the respect shown towards Lampard, who left his first club yet was arguably a better player (scored more, won more – see also Wayne Rooney, who sported the infamous ‘once a Blue, always a Blue’ t-shirt yet left Everton as soon as a big club came calling promising gongs).
For those of us who can’t remember our first match because we were too young to do so, who are red or blue or white or hoops by birth, football fandom is not a choice but an impulse; an inherent part of our identity and intimately bound up with our relationship with our fathers. For us the game is at its best when it is tribal and noisy; when it reeks of cigarette smoke and tastes of Wrigleys chewing gum; when it brings genuine heartbreak far more frequently than uplifting joy; when it sings expletive-laden songs about our most hated enemies after most of a bottle of Aussie White on the coach; when it looks like Jack Wilshere or Steven Gerrard.
I wouldn’t have it any other way, Oliver.
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