It Actually Could Only Happen To Us: The things that really *are* about Your Club
As always, it’s dangerous when we start thinking.
Having covered common football occurrences and inconveniences that everyone thinks are about their club rather than all the clubs, our brain immediately set about the idea of which football things truly are kind of club-specific?
These things aren’t always entirely exclusive to the club in question, but definitely fall more on that particular club than others. We welcome disagreement and further suggestions to a list we would never dream of calling exhaustive in the comments.
For some reason the first couple of these came out like Harry Potter book titles and we decided to stick with that for the rest. Sorry about that, and indeed everything else.
Tottenham Hotspur and the Trophy Drought
First, let us not ignore the fact that if any club actually is That Club then that club is obviously Tottenham, a club that spent 30 years in a banter era before anyone had even come up with the term ‘banter era’ and shows absolutely no sign yet of leaving it behind. Lads, it’s Tottenham. Spursy. Dr Tottenham. Etc.
We think about that tweet about how no matter what is happening in football, the joke is somehow on Spurs, at least twice a day and usually more. It is just so impossibly true. Laughing at Tottenham is a national sport.
Most recently, of course, you have Liverpool getting knocked out of the FA Cup by Championship basement-dwellers Plymouth, and the joke is nevertheless very correctly on a Spurs side that lost 4-0 to Liverpool a few days before. That sort of thing.
But clearly the biggest and most important part of modern Tottenham Banter Lore is the Trophy Drought. And that is a very, very Spurs-specific phenomenon.
And to be clear here, we’re not saying it’s specific to Spurs in that they are the side that has specifically had a trophy drought. No, it’s that they are the club for whom that trophy drought has become such a rich source of amusement for the rest of English football.
It does make sense, a bit. Spurs are not the only big club with a long trophy drought, but they are the only club in the ‘Big Six’ to have a long trophy drought. Everyone else in that group of clubs that the rest of the sport hates for assorted reasons large and small actually wins stuff. Even banter era Man United have won more in the last two seasons than Spurs have in 25.
So yes, Spurs occupy a unique place in English football. Big enough for everyone to notice, loud enough for everyone to hear, sh*t enough to always, always, always fall flat on their face at one hurdle or another.
But when other similarly failure-afflicted clubs have their own trophy droughts mentioned at all, it is nearly always in the sense of an opportunity to end that drought. Newcastle in the Carabao, or Villa in the FA Cup, or Everton… well, maybe one day people will get round to noticing that Everton haven’t won anything for 30 years.
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Arsenal and the Celebration Police
Again, not entirely unique to Arsenal. But in the same way that in a game of Mallet’s Mallet ‘Trophy Drought’ is always going to be followed by ‘Tottenham’, then ‘Celebration Police’ can only be followed by ‘Arsenal’.
Other clubs do get their celebrations policed occasionally, but never with the same ferocity as Arsenal. Only with Arsenal does the policing of celebration routinely turn into a week-long debate. It is very joyless and very not fun.
The complaint will generally fall into one of two categories: that Arsenal are celebrating when “they have won nothing yet” or that their celebration has been deemed “disrespectful” by such esteemed and infallible judges of righteousness and probity as Gabriel Agbonlahor or Jamie O’Hara or some other half-remembered former player who has opinions for money on talkSPORT.
It should go without saying that neither of these categories of celebration wrongness have the slightest thing to recommend them. This is sport. It is supposed to be fun as well as agonisingly painful. Above all, it is supposed to be an escape from the real world where there truly is so little worth celebrating.
And there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with boiling a reservoir’s worth of p*ss.
Let’s deal properly with category one first, because it is the most annoying one. It is purely and simply an attempt to sap all remaining joy out of following football. You know who doesn’t actually win anything? Most teams in most seasons. By definition.
If you can only celebrate the final decisive moment at the end of the road, most will never get there at all and the path becomes entirely barren and devoid of joy and fun. If you want the life of Arsenal and its players and its supporters to be barren and devoid of joy and fun, that is also fine but at least be honest with yourself and the rest of us.
They are annoying, aren’t they? Arsenal? They are quite uppity. Bit full of themselves. Prone to self-mythologise like Liverpool but with far less to back it up. Liable to call themselves ‘The Arsenal’ at a moment’s notice. If that means you think they don’t deserve to feel joy or happiness then you do you. But own it on those terms.
Because absolutely nobody else is so routinely criticised for enjoying the small wins that they hope will help them on their way to winning something tangible. Absolutely everyone celebrates stuff and this is absolutely fine.
By far the funniest and most outlandish celebration we’ve seen this season was Romain Esse giving a full run to the corner flag and knee slide when reducing Palace’s deficit at home to Brentford to 2-1 with five minutes to go.
We all know what football convention requires of a player who scores a late goal to reduce the deficit to one goal: run directly into the goal, fight with the opposition keeper for the ball and return it to the centre-circle post haste. This doesn’t actually achieve anything, but it shows you mean business, that you understand a task half-done.
Esse was having none of that. He’d just scored his first goal for his new club and was extremely excited and wanted to do a knee slide.
Now there’s a good chance this is the very first you’re hearing of it. Or that you saw it and went “Haha, what’s he doing?” and after those five seconds and perhaps a quick tweet went about your life never giving it another thought.
‘Imagine that was us’ is a classic It Could Only Be Us tactic, but in this instance it is a million per cent valid.
Imagine a young Arsenal player – let’s go with Myles Lewis-Skelly for topicality – scoring a late goal in a 2-1 home defeat and celebrating it like that. Then imagine how miserable the discourse would be for the following week. Exactly.
But it was a young Palace player, so it was three minutes of whimsy on ex dot com and then done.
And then we have the even thornier issue of disrespect. Arsenal, in fairness, do have some expert knowledge here having been on the end of the most wondrous piece of disrespectful celebration in Barclays history from Emmanuel Adebayor. But here’s the thing: Adebayor is rightly considered the hero of that wonderful moment of Our League goodness, and Arsenal fans the villains.
Now imagine, say, Declan Rice scoring against West Ham and running the length of the pitch to rub Hammers fans’ faces right in it. Who’s the villain?
When Neal Maupay took the p*ss out of James Maddison’s w*nky little darts celebration, did we all laugh at Maddison’s crybaby response, or did we all think Maupay had cheapened the very serious business of Premier League football?
But when an Arsenal player scores a goal against City and gently mocks Erling Haaland – a player with whom Arsenal have significant and legitimate beef – this simply will not do.
Especially as he hasn’t even won anything yet.
Liverpool and the Meaning of More
Generally with these we start from a position of some sympathy for the club involved and the fact they don’t really deserve the often lazy and self-fulfilling stereotype that has been foisted upon them.
None of that here, where Liverpool have quite literally nobody to blame but themselves. They literally came up with the nauseatingly arrogant ‘This Means More’ slogan themselves, and generally comport themselves with an air of specialness that goes far beyond the obvious fact of their status as one of English and world football’s most successful clubs.
If anything, that vast level of historical success ought to have the opposite effect. It should make each success mean less. Leicester winning the Premier League or Wigan winning the FA Cup or Porto winning the Champions League; that’s what means more, surely. Not a team that’s already won loads of things before winning another thing.
But as we’ve discussed elsewhere, logic does not and should not feature at the top of the list of football fan responses to anything. Again: escapism. So yes, Liverpool winning stuff does mean more, if you are Liverpool.
The same, though, is true of literally every football club on the entire surface of the earth. There is literally not one non-Liverpool fan in existence who considers That Night In Istanbul more important than the most trivial and inconsequential success of their own team. This should be entirely obvious and go without saying, and until Liverpool’s marketing department went all weird on us, it was and it did.
Newcastle United and the World’s Best Fans
There may be widespread uncertainty and discomfort about the whys and wherefores of Newcastle’s recently-acquired status in English football, but one thing almost everyone can agree on is that those fans deserve it, don’t they? The best fans. Newcastle fans.
Absolutely no further discussion is required for this obvious and inherent truth about the game, but in the unlikely event that someone inexplicably doesn’t immediately nod in agreement and robotically repeat “Yes, these uniquely loyal and passionate supporters truly are the best there is and they deserve success” and instead asks “Why?” they will be met first by confusion and then eventually by some half-baked attempt at justification.
This justification will generally start with Newcastle fans having had to endure a previous owner who was one of those really rich blokes who turns out to be an absolute and complete self-centred prick who doesn’t give a sh*t about anyone else. This is a situation unique to Newcastle among football clubs, and this particular prick among really rich blokes.
In the unlikely event that this doesn’t instantly win the argument, step two is usually to point out that they have sometimes been known to sing very loudly at their stadium even when success has been in such short supply, again marking them out as fans unlike any other.
If this still hasn’t worked, it is time to wheel out the big guns and what we think people really mean when talking about Newcastle fans being the best in the world: large gentlemen with a willingness – a desire, even – to adopt a state of shirtlessness even in weather conditions that make this unwise.
West Ham United and the West Ham Way
Just complete and utter bollocks, isn’t it? All that ‘Academy of Football’ sh*te, and winning the World Cup and the rest of it. It’s all a bit Liverpool if we’re being brutally honest about it, but if Liverpool were a club that had never even won a league title or even finished second.
We can’t think of another team with as mediocre a history as West Ham that is nevertheless celebrated as something so significant. The only other team that comes close is Spurs, and that is in itself revealing. What could it be about two London clubs who are between them supported by about 42 per cent of all national newspaper football journalists that causes them to receive such excessive coverage in relation to their overall position within English football?
Truly, it is a mystery.
But Spurs have at least historically done things that mark them out. The first double of the 20th century. The first English club to win a European trophy. Even now, with Spurs still mired in a decades-long banter era with no end in sight, there are still only three English clubs with more proper European pots.
West Ham, an undeniably biggish football club, have had even less actual success than Spurs over the decades. Which is awkward.
So how to deal with this? Make it all about the intangibles. Pretend you were the first and still only club to think of scouting and developing your own young players, and then give your academy the most absurdly grandiose name imaginable. Talk about a ‘West Ham Way’ that exists almost entirely in your own head and bears little to no relation to anything ever seen on an actual football pitch for the last several decades.
Insist you won the World Cup having – again, quite uniquely – been the club some World Cup winners played for.
And also have bubble machines for when you score a goal.
Manchester United and the This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About
Where would football pundits be without the phrase ‘This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About’? It is all that ever needs to be said, the beginning, middle and end of the argument, the perfect summary of whatever bullsh*t is happening at Old Trafford, from their new cartoon villain boss Scrooge McRatcliffe’s penny-pinching antics, to Marcus Rashford’s disappointing form or Erik Ten Hag having a bald head.
When Manchester United are being bad it is an affront to all that is right and correct about English football. They should be successful. Because This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About.
Now, TIMUFCWTA are indeed a hugely successful football club. They have won an enormous amount of stuff over a long and storied history. But you know when they mainly won that stuff? During a couple of glorious periods of magnificent dominance but most specifically the genuinely astonishing Fergie Years.
It is Ferguson’s reign that elevates United’s trophy count from big club to stratospheric. What has happened to United in the 12 years since his departure – years that, it should be noted, have still brought them a further four major trophies – is far more in keeping with the overall history of the club.
Before Ferguson, United had won seven league titles (fewer than Everton), six FA Cups (fewer than Spurs) and a European Cup (fewer than Nottingham Forest). It’s a solid history, but in brutal reality an unremarkable one. It saw them trail Liverpool by an absurd margin, a margin that – equally absurdly – Ferguson was able to wipe out entirely over the course of 25 years.
Now Ferguson’s success was unprecedentedly vast, still relatively recent and above all else exquisitely timed. His era of success beginning as the Premier League was being born was so important to the overall effect of elevating United from a Very Big Club to The Biggest Club.
It coloured the thinking of all those of us who grew up through it, grew up knowing nothing other than United dominating English football under Ferguson’s guidance. They did, as United fans still quite rightly enjoy pointing out, ruin all our childhoods.
So it does make sense that United’s dominance – its scope, its length and its specific timing – created a world where that was just the way things were. That not only could there never be a time when United might go, say, 25 years without winning a league title but that such a time had never even existed. It’s not just football being invented in 1992 that coloured this thinking, but it’s part of it.
But what it all means is this. While TIMUFCWTA has become all it’s ever necessary to say about United’s current reduced status, it’s also not quite complete. Because when pundits say TIMUFCWTA, what they actually mean is This Is Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About.
Or TISAFMUFCWTA.
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