It Could Only Be Us: Fourteen infuriating football disasters that only ever befall *your* club

Dave Tickner
Upset Arsenal and West Ham fans
We've all been there, but it only ever happens to our team...

If you’ve followed football for any length of time you will have said or at the very least heard the following ominous words: “It could only happen to us.”

No good can come of hearing or using that phrase. It means something bad has happened, or is about to. Something that no other fans could understand, something they have never suffered.

And yet we’ve all been there. How does that work? Mad.

So here we have 14 assorted footballing grievances, disasters, misadventures and unfairnesses, all of which only ever happen to your club and never to anyone else.

Feel free to add your own further examples in the comments and remember: if you feel personally attacked by any of these, you’re only proving our point. Ha! Checkmate! Could only happen to you, couldn’t it?

 

Managers who wait to long to make changes
We have never, ever, ever heard a football fan complain that their manager makes substitutions too early. They might complain about the specific substitution that is being made, sure, but not the indecent haste of it.

We are impatient creatures – and by that we mean humans in general, not even just football fans – and we crave something to grab our attention. Football fans do not want a manager who’ll give it another 10 minutes to see what happens, they want changes NOW, dammit. Bring me my game-changing triple substitution in the 42nd minute, you incompetent dilly-dallying fool.

Every other club can do it; admittedly we can’t think of specific examples right now, but that’s not important. What’s important is why can’t YOU do it? Right now? This is so frustrating.

 

Corners that don’t clear the first man
Everyone else takes good corners, don’t they? Fizzed into the box with pace and accuracy. You concede loads of goals from them, don’t you? That’s right. But you don’t score from them. By your guesstimate, your team hasn’t scored a single goal from a corner since 2016. Unless you’re Arsenal.

And the reason is clear. That massive overpaid f*ckwit you’ve got taking them never clears the first man. Paid all that money, can’t kick a football over a bloke from 20 yards. Ridiculous.

Of course, deep down, you know why corners sometimes hit the first man. It’s for the same reason professional tennis players sometimes hit a first serve into the net. They’re not just trying to clear the man/net; they’re trying to just clear them in such a way that creates the greatest chance of eventual success. But f*ck that noise. Just kick it over his head! I could kick it over his head! Give me 150 grand a week!

 

Your former players scoring against you
You look at the teamsheet. Uh-oh. Who’s that on the bench for today’s opposition? The player you let go on a free at 21 after he’d played 17 first-team games without scoring a goal. We all know what happens next here, don’t we? It could – and absolutely definitely will – only happen to you.

 

Rubbish players scoring against you
And not just those who were once on your books. Is there any more terrifying sentence to hear about an opposition striker than the words ‘without a goal in his last 12 games’? What happens next is as inevitable as Thanos. It’s really only a question of when rather than if they complete their hat-trick: before half-time or just after?

Why does no other club have to put up with this sh*t?

 

Biased refs
Obviously. You see his name and you just know the day is ruined. This ref hates you, always has, often because he is from a different part of the country and thus likes the teams over there or he is from the same part of the country and thus hates you because he likes your local rivals. So unfair, and so unique to you. A miracle you have managed to survive at all, frankly, with these weekly miscarriages of justice that quite literally nobody else ever has to deal with.

READ: Neville blames Arteta for Michael Oliver abuse as Arsenal ‘corruption’ narrative ‘inflamed for 12 months’

 

The media agenda
This is the big one really. We’ve got a whole bunch of specific sub-categories coming up that fall under the umbrella of the very obvious and very real Media Agenda against your club.

Here, The Media (or ‘Mainstream Media’ and ‘MSM’ if you’ve turned your tinfoil FA Cup into a particularly fetching hat) is always to be regarded as one homogenous blob that acts as one at all times, and always against the interests of your club or in favour of another.

In its broadest terms here before we get into the specifics below, this falls into two categories: too much attention on things you’ve done badly and not enough attention on things you’ve done well.

If one of your players scores a particularly pleasing goal, for instance, it simply won’t do to just enjoy that goal for its loveliness. You must note how had that goal been scored by a different player at a different club – favourite examples here include Lionel Messi and Kevin De Bruyne but it can be anyone, really – we would all have heard a lot more about it for a much longer period of time from those MSM shills.

 

Injury crises
And specifically, injury crises that are ignored by The Media (see above) while other, obviously far lesser injury crises at other club are being discussed at great length and used to explain away results for which your club would be pilloried. Other clubs simply don’t have the same injury crisis that you do, it is a wonder you have even managed to put a team out this season.

Two seemingly counter-intuitive things are vitally true here.

First your club obviously has the most incompetent medical department around. Only at your club are players initially ruled out for a fortnight and then not seen or heard from until six months later.

But second, at no point must the existence of an injury crisis in the first place be considered anything more than rotten bad luck. There cannot be meaningful time wasted on whether something your club might be doing has had any impact on all these misfortunes.

And, of course, the flip side of this is also true. Any team that is doing well and not suffering injuries is simply being very lucky and their success can thus be ignored and/or dismissed as a fluke.

 

Being last on MOTD
Admittedly, feels like this used to be a much bigger thing a few years ago. We remember spreadsheets being produced and lots of numbers being thrown around and now we think about it did it maybe involve Stoke quite a lot? Is this one actually about one club? Was it actually a Stoke thing that was a legitimate complaint? Was it even Stoke? Could have been Burnley, now we think about it. Dyche’s Burnley, that is. Not Kompany’s, obviously.

Anyway, if this one isn’t as much of a thing any more, how about a more 2025 version: never getting an extended analysis segment from Carragher and friends on Monday Night Football?

 

Unfair pundit and co-commentator representation
Which leads nicely into this one. How come every game you play on the telly always has a co-commentator who played for the opposition? Happens every single time, doesn’t it? Specifically to you and not any other club.

And those three pundits in the studio? Two from the other team and only one from yours, isn’t there? Plus he only played for you for two years anyway and was mainly sh*t.

READ: Man Utd fan Rio Ferdinand continues to infuriate but a new star emerges – the football week on TV

 

Mediocre goalkeepers turning into Lev Yashin for 90 minutes against you
That’s enough media-based stuff for now. Let’s get back into what might be our absolute favourite. It’s a variation on the former player scoring against us trope and the rubbish striker scoring against us trope, but might actually be the best of the lot.

It strikes more purely than those at something that sits at the very core of football fandom: that your team is getting screwed over not just by referees, and the media, and your own manager, but by the most capricious beast of all: stupid dumb bastard fate.

The sheer mix of the potency of the rage and impotency of the situation makes the ‘not winning a game you’ve dominated’ one of the purest forms of football irritation out there. The more absurd the stats, the more weirdly fun it all is.

But you know who never fails to win games they dominate? Other teams. They always find a way, don’t they? But no, when it’s you the third-choice goalkeeper for a team eight points adrift of safety makes 13 saves in a 0-0 draw, doesn’t he?

And that’s if you’re lucky. Because literally the only other possible outcome is that other bunch of pricks scoring from their only shot on target in the whole game, and it was probably about 35 yards out as well.

Everyone else is so lucky this never happens to them, you think to yourself. All of you. We like to think that everyone reading this is now dredging up a name they haven’t heard in a long time from the memory bank with which to torture themselves. Ours is Boaz Myhill, if you’re interested.

 

PSR double standards
This is a new one, and instantly very much one of our favourites. A lot of the categories here could be filed under ‘double standards’, the illogical and incoherent but deeply held suspicion that the world is against your club for some reason, or favouring another.

It’s easier than just accepting you might just be a bit shit or even in fact be the skull-badged baddies, isn’t it?

But what we like specifically about the PSR version of “When it was us, this happened, but now it’s them, something different has happened” is how much of it by definition from people who are absolutely definitely on top of their brief when it comes to arcane legal knowledge and reading between the lines of complex financial results.

 

Assorted fixture-computer machinations
Your team has never had a home game on the first day of the season. Or the last day of the season. Your team has the hardest run of fixtures at the worst possible time.

And, again, the flipside. Your most hated rival? Always at home on the first day of the season. And the last. And on Boxing Day. And always about to embark on a really nice-looking run of five winnable games.

Sometimes it honestly feels like you have 27 away games a season and 14 of them are at Anfield. And then there’s Newcastle, isn’t there? Who’ve famously never once played a Premier League game that wasn’t at St James’ Park. Go on, try and think of a Newcastle game that wasn’t at St James’ Park. That’s right, you can’t do it.

 

Difficult cup draws
On the same lines here, aren’t we. Who have you got? Man City away, again, for the fifth year in a row. Who has that team you hate got? A non-league team at home. It happens in every single draw. Even the Carabao ones, and there aren’t even non-league teams here.

Bonus points for dark mutterings about ‘warm balls’ and jokes about conspiracy theories you secretly believe where the police are now also involved in f***ing your team over specifically by trying to avoid certain unwanted clashes.

 

Drawn-out transfer sagas
This one’s interesting, we think. Because we reckon this one speaks of a wider point about how we all consume football now in the internet age. Essentially, it is now entirely possible and really quite strikingly easy for fans of any football club to spend every waking moment of their life consuming content about the latest goings-on at their football club without ever a) running out of things to read/watch/listen or b) having to read/watch/listen to anything about any other club, or crucially c) having to go to any site or podcast or whatever that isn’t solely focused on your club.

In that kind of environment, is it really any wonder at all that we all think our rivals are always just plucking new signings out of thin air while our stupid club drags its heels and negotiates for weeks and months before the transfer falls through at the last minute? You know who doesn’t have transfers fall through at the last minute? That’s right, all the other clubs.

READ: Watkins 4th), Tel 2nd): Ranking the Arsenal striker targets from worst to best buy