Make Football Shit Again

I’m watching Manchester City beating Scum and barely enjoying it. I’m barely enjoying it because, though my hatred of Satan’s own football team is bitter and foundational, I now also hate Manchester City in a new and boring way. And I hate Sky TV. And Gary Neville. And the Scum fan I just saw in a half and half scarf. And every single gambling and penile pep-pill advert I dully sat through at half-time — a numb consumer of information half tempted to buy the stiffy-pills in a vain hope they’ll cure the socio-cultural impotence of wasting my life doing this with my Sabbath. At least if I had a raging rod-on in public I’d be shamed into going home.

“Who’s upset you this time?” you ask. Okay, well, granted, some of this is prolonged sulking off the back of missing out on another bore-draw point because the ball pinballed cruelly off GG’s head at the most unpleasant time to concede a goal. And some of it is me churlishly lashing out at anything to do with modern football, because it suddenly and inevitably has become too hard again. (Note that, when it’s good and we’re winning I just call it football. When it’s shit and difficult, it’s modern football. I’m more ‘Against Leeds Losing’ than I am AMF).

After a weekend of cumulative frustrations with EPL life — an aggregation of things and people I don’t like and things I didn’t want to see or to happen — it was watching Manchester City fans hanging over one another to take a shit phone pic of their unfairly expensive players then doing the Poznan that tipped me over into a ‘right, time to have a big fucking swear about this’ frame of mind.

Is it petty jealousy at seeing other football fans enjoying something that I would like us to do? Yes. Am I fun-policing people in a way that would annoy me if done in our direction? Also yes. But more than anything, it was that group of fans not watching a game they were easily winning that felt doubly ironic.

They are post-supporters of a post-Man City who, postmodernly, sing about ‘not really being there’. In any fair competition, they shouldn’t exist and they, along with the other grotesquely force-fed colossi of Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and the other two sets of jokers, could have been excised from the British game altogether had their unscrupulous owners got their way in 2021.

I’m jealous of other fans being happy about beating Scum, but I’m not jealous of this version of it. They should be beating Scum easily and did. It’s Michael Owen scoring past a thirteen-year-old — if the kid had been a Scum bastard. It’s why some of us were frustrated and even (whisper it) bored at times last season, in spite of it being one of the most fruitful in our club’s history. Winning when you’re expected to win can make it unremarkable.

Even Gary Neville is numb. Well before full-time, he silenced his lead commentator for too many seconds with the deadening asseveration, “I just feel nothing.” The rest of the coverage went on and desperately on about how great it all was, talking up the product and droning on about how great Man City are as if it’s in any way interesting or unexpected, and how shit Scum are as if it’s in any way interesting or unexpected.

So what do Leeds United do about all this? My proposal, which may well happily dovetail with what’s going to happen anyway, is that we persevere with devaluing the product of EPL football. We keep playing boring, shit games with dogged physicality and determination and drag it all down with us, driving fairweather fans away from the game one goalless minute at a time.

The Newcastle game was objectively terrible and I fucking loved it. If we make the sport shit enough, the money will eventually fuck off. Maybe we stay up, maybe we don’t, it barely matters — genuine anti-football may be the only way to dismantle the modern game. Embrace never scoring, embrace big tackles, embrace low blocks and low ambition. And I will gladly, joyfully and proudly watch every boring second of it with my stupid human eyes, phone firmly in pocket or smashed under a violent heap of limbs whenever we beat the odds and actually score. While we’re still here, where everyone and no one wants us to be, let’s really fucking be here. ⬢

This article is free to read from The Square Ball magazine issue two, 2025/26 — get your copy here.