I don’t ‘hate’ Mikel Arteta and I don’t read your below-the-line comments

When you’re a novelist, you tend to put a lot on the line and lay yourself open. It takes a form of bravery. It’s not exactly bungee-jumping off a bridge but you’re revealing yourself for the public to see; the more honest you are, the more you dip your pen into your own heart, the better the writing.

I don’t have the constitution to read reviews – good, bad or indifferent – but I’m told I get a lot of four and five stars. That being said, in the early days, I did read a one-star review which complained my crime novel wasn’t the true crime book they had expected. It’s one thing to be criticised for what you’ve produced, quite something else being attacked for not being something you’re not even trying to be. At that moment I realised the review culture has serious flaws.

I mention this only because people write to me in some numbers all the time, usually to point out when I’ve written the wrong route between Middlesbrough and Wolviston, though some are kind enough to say complimentary things about the books, for which I’m grateful. This is in contrast to the regular ad hominem insults I used to read on Football365, which really beat you down if you’re regularly exposed to them.

Football glories in the snarling aggression and paranoia displayed by a minority of its followers in comments. What started out with the ambition of democratically sharing opinions, quickly descended into lowest common denominator stuff, with a percentage of people seeing an opportunity to have a go at each other or anyone whose view doesn’t align with their own. That and the determination to expose supposed hypocrisy occupies some people every single day.

READ: Sky and TNT should sack off former footballers in another Rio Ferdinand lament

This isn’t normal. Why is it normal in football? Because football, it seems, cannot be left to self-regulate. It can’t be trusted. Just like it can’t be trusted in grounds not to be coked-up, abusive, misogynistic and aggressive while vociferously chanting about some terrible tragedy. And that also just isn’t normal outside of football.

Arsenal beating Real Madrid was apparently a riposte to my ‘hatred’ of Mikel Arteta, which is typical of the 11-year-old tone taken by some, who only have love or hate in their emotional tool bag, when all I did was call him a ‘nearly man’ because, well, he’s nearly won things and still has nearly won things. Nothing has changed. Sensible, what with it aligning with the facts and everything. But no, we get ‘Wah! He really hates him’, like we’re at infant school. Christ. It’s like being trapped with screaming children.

This idiocy must be why comments have been reduced in prominence or abandoned altogether on some websites. It can drag everything down. Even the volume of comments themselves seem down, as if more people see no point in shouting into the existential toilet and have realised that echo they can hear isn’t the sound of agreement.

While the Mail uses the comments section to stir up and monetise the angry misogynist xenophobes who are its core customers, it’s noticeably different on The Guardian. Many pieces do not have below-the-line comments facilitated. Of the ones that do, I’d say they are the least controversial pieces, as if deliberately avoiding stirring up the wasps’ nest.

Rob Draper’s excellent comprehensive piece on Newcastle’s ongoing ownership issues obviously has comments disabled; you can imagine some responses would be less than reasonable.

A few years ago, BTL comments were seen as an important driver of traffic and indeed still are for some commercial sites. But less so now for The Guardian, clearly. Maybe the screeds of insulting or pointless guff that football tends to elicit are actually deleterious to the reader’s experience and perhaps even damage the brand. Then again, maybe the subsect it attracts wants exactly that.

I hardly ever see any comments and never seek out responses to my writing. “Don’t take notice of what people who don’t know you write about you,” a wise person once advised me.

Imagine a business where people’s contributions are so little trusted that they have to be constantly monitored for legal transgressions. We’re giving you this facility but don’t trust you to play nice. Civilians outside of football look on askance. It’s a sport, not government trade policy. Why are people like this? The worst of it is that we don’t even think anything of it anymore, so inured are we to the abuse. Even death threats to footballers make us shrug.

It’s not my place to tell anyone how to use their time, though looking at the ones the Guardian has facilitated is hardly a life-enhancing experience and it puzzles me why people post such comments as these two, to pick a couple at random…

‘Arsenal should now rest their players for the Champions League. They won’t win the Premier League, time for them to be pragmatic instead of continuing this stupidity.’

‘Bit of a come down after beating Real Madrid..Arsenal played really well midweek and then back to the Premier league today against Brentford…I’m not sure what it says about our league other than it’s not straightforward.’

Yeah, alright, I suppose, I mean, whatever. Do they even care who reads them? Who are they writing for and why? What psychological itch does it scratch? Haven’t they heard or read similar thoughts already? Am I thinking too much about it?

I understand it more with politics because decisions have real world effects and there’s an understandable desire to be seen. And I understand people responding on a personal level to a novel. But football is a sport. How has all of this become ‘normal’ behaviour?

Johnny is talking with a production company about turning three of his Nick Guymer crime novels into TV shows and is currently trying to explain the difference between a Teesside accent and a Geordie one to someone from Dalston. Tricky. His latest novel, ‘The Ghosts Of Dunoon’, is the first in a new series and is set in the wild west coast of Scotland and has already been described as ‘a tense thriller about the ugly underbelly of beautiful places’.

You can buy it from Amazon (for Kindle and in paperback) or direct from Johnny…