Not Against Modern Football, just Against Football Tw*ts

“Pablo Zabaleta…”

“C***.”

“John Stones…”

“W***er.”

“Raheem Sterling…”

“C***. We need to hit that c*** early.”

And so it continued throughout the teams being read out, and not just by one person. After every single name of every single player who happened to be playing against their team that evening. If there was any discrimination, it was that it was the black players who needed to be ‘hit early’. Football is weird.

Work, a toddler and geography all contribute to me seeing very little live football so a trip to see Huddersfield Town getting thwacked in the FA Cup at Manchester City was a rare treat. Undertaken with someone who had not seen live football in about 30 years, her observation was that nothing had really changed bar the pricing and the stadium. It was still visceral, it was still loud, it was still predominantly male and white, it was still full of hate and love and love and hate.

“Football is still a regressive world that is scared to move forward,” said Arsene Wenger this week.

He was predominantly talking about a resistance to video technology but in international week – when traditionally, issues get pushed centre stage while domestic football takes a break – he could also have been talking about footballers being criticised for choosing to represent a country other than England, fans chanting about a century-old war, fans still chanting homophobic abuse, black footballers being criticised for buying houses, female sports presenters being called ‘darling’ or international footballers being punished more severely for swearing than breaking legs. Football is really bloody weird.

“I always say being an island saved us in 1945, I’m not so sure it’s helped us ever since,” said Gareth Southgate in one of those moments that makes him far easier to respect and admire than we thought possible. Of course, he was talking about an insularity that holds us back in football terms, but he could be talking about all aspects of life in 2017; and no aspect of British life is more insular than football.

“Would you rather play for England or the Ivory Coast?” asked white Englishman Danny Mills on a show hosted by a middle-aged white Scotsman on a radio station whose listeners are predominantly white, male and British. Because of course nobody is presumably more qualified to talk about the decision of a young, black man not born in England.

Anybody who has watched pantomime pundits Chris Sutton and Robbie Savage smirk while listening to an England goalkeeper with 82 caps talk in technical terms about goalkeeping, just because those 82 England caps have come for England women, can dismiss them as idiots. They can do the same to Paul Ince, after he was the court jester in a conversation with Queen Jacqui about video technology and ended it with “we’ll have another chat in five years’ time darling”.

Idiots, the lot of them. But these idiots represent football in 2017. Along with John Hartson for suggesting that Oliver Burke should join Burnley rather than RB Leipzig, Dean Saunders for almost every word that comes out of his mouth and every single ex-footballer who says football is a ‘man’s game’ and insists that spitting is far, far worse than breaking a leg. The last part of that sentence should sound bizarre – it is to anybody outside this game – and yet we have heard it so many times that it no longer even registers.

When asked what he had thought when watching video technology in blatantly successful use this week, Wenger said, “I thought ‘we are really stupid, why did that not happen 15 years ago?'”, but the answer is obvious – football is petrified of change. It is petrified of inclusion, of advancement, of anything that makes football any different from 15, or 20, or 30 years ago. Saunders can say a player has gone off when he wasn’t “properly injured” and not be challenged (the player in question had broken a bone) and Graeme Souness can react to a horrendous tackle from Dele Alli – which had far more intention than the one that broke Seamus Coleman’s leg this week – by saying: ‘If I was his manager, I would be quietly saying to myself: ‘Thank goodness he has got that in him.”‘

Apparently it’s still 1979 and I really should be off to nursery.

Of course, I am conflating several issues (and really, I only wanted to share that anecdote about going to the Etihad) and many will say there is no issue at all with any of this. Others will say that things are indeed changing – explicit racist abuse is no longer tolerated, there are increasing numbers of women and families at football matches, video technology is the slowest-moving unstoppable force ever recorded and football is no longer an immovable object – even if the change is too long coming for some.

There are many willing to put their names to a campaign Against Modern Football. But some of us would quite like some elements of football to be more 2017 than 1979. Can we be against corporate culture while still preaching tolerance and embracing technology? Maybe we could call it Against Football Tw*ts.

Sarah Winterburn