(Photo by Julian Finney - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

Did you stay up? I decided not to and on balance I’m satisfied with my call to hit the hay before England kicked off against Mexico at the Azteca last night. It was a selfless decision. I can’t describe to you in words how petulant I get when I’m overtired and I’ve reached an age where getting pissed and staying up until 4am would have prevented me from writing enlightening updates about football for the best part of a week.

See? I’m always thinking of what’s best for the brand.

Going full Likely Lads in 2026 is an novel proposition though. I didn’t have to get through a whole day - just survive the ten or so minutes it took to make coffee - but I think we can all agree that the world comes at you much faster now than it did when the episode landed in 1973. Bob and Terry had to dodge pals in the pub, newspaper and radio reports and an extremely youthful and enthusiastic Brian Glover before finally seeking sanctuary in a church.

Thankfully last night’s game wasn’t called off like in the sitcom (SPOILER ALERT), just delayed by an hour, so when my alarm went off I swerved the news alerts, social media, texts from friends and family by turning off my wifi and, since I live next to a field full of sheep, the only bellowing I heard from outside was from irate ewes whose lambs had wandered off to get stuck in a hedge.

Not now, mate.

There are striking parallels though. The existential distress Terry experiences upon entering the hairdressers and finding out that blokes are have started having blowdrys and women have entered the job market while he was away in the army isn’t dissimilar to the reaction of some pundits and fans today when a player wears gloves or has an opinion. His barely concealed panic at the thought of receiving a ‘blow dry’ at the hands of any of ‘that lot’ is driven straight back at him down the wicket by Bob, who advises him of the following:

“Well known fact: anyone who’s always putting queers down and being aggressively masculine all the time - like you - is only masking their own latent tendencies.”

Utter woke nonsense from Bewes there, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Anyway, to the match. The first World Cup tournament I was properly aware of was Mexico ‘86 - the experience of being the only girl in the playground arguing about Panini swaps setting me up for the first twenty years of my life in and around football - and so many of my core memories are infused with the green, white and red of El Tri. In the run up to the game, those memories conspired with concerns about altitude, the right back position, England’s defensive frailty and that frankly indefensible performance vs. DR Congo to inflate the spectre of embarrassing defeat to the dimensions of the Trump blimp. It hovered over me until kick off, blotting out the sun and crushing my will to enjoy football.

And then Jude Bellingham. Remember how we all laughed when Birmingham City retired his shirt when he left them at the tender age of seventeen? Remember the tabloid media kick starting their campaign against him, never quite using the word ‘uppity’ to describe his attitude towards them but deploying the same dog whistle tactics that gradually eroded the will and desire of the player formerly known as Raheem Sterling? That’s the guy.

I’m almost certainly still hysterical but I’m sure I’ve never seen England play like that before. The courage and resilience. The unity and belief in moments of pressure. For once the pride isn’t some abstract concept foisted upon us by a regressive media desperate for our team to stumble because ruining footballers is where the real numbers lie. It’s a feeling that makes the heart soar. A unity all the sweeter because they don’t want us to have it.

Of course, this wouldn’t be an England performance without some baffling catastrophe unfolding. You know that moment of misfortune that always hits our football team at the most inopportune moment and defines our tournament regardless of how we play? The Hand of God, say. Beckham’s kick on Diego Simeone. Lampard’s ghost goal.

That misfortune was circling above England last night in the Azteca, just as it always does. Waiting to strike. I thought it had alighted on Jarell Quansah when he foolishly inserted his studs into Jesus Gallardo’s calf for the red card but somehow we hung on and Jordan Henderson selflessly distracted it by trying to casually hop over a hoarding. He is now in hospital with a serious wrist injury and those still questioning Tommy Tuchel’s decision to put him in the squad now have their answer.

Thank you for your service, Hendo. You may well end up being England’s most valuable player.

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(Photo by Richard Pelham/Getty Images)

England beat DR Congo last night. You may have heard.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have missed the post-mortem. The analysis and punditry during the game is inescapable but at least it’s confined to people who have worn England colours or are at least in some way adjacent to how a football team operates under pressure. The newspaper reports and player points allocations tend to be number chasing pieces, often written by blokes who can only dream of proximity to the camp and whose envy of those who are is frequently visible in their match reports.

Any sane fan will avoid the next tier. The men (it’s nearly always men) who call in to the radio, write the flammable hot takes on social media or hold court in the pub. The means of expression may vary but the connective tissue is evident. This is what the manager got wrong, this is what the players got wrong, this is how I’d resolve these problems. What’s worse is they seem to be labouring under a misapprehension that they’re the only person who has seen what they’re seeing and they’re providing a service by amplifying their opinion to as large an audience as possible.

(Image via reddit)

I haven’t conducted scientific research but I have my suspicions that the Venn diagram of England football fans who think they could manage the team to victory and the people who reckoned they could take a point off Serena Williams at her peak is a large circle. Leaking lager and piss.

Let’s be clear. This England team is not without its problems. The defence is so porous and confused it’s hard not to close one’s eyes when the opposition is attacking. The wing play in the first half was ineffective at best, deeply frustrating and toothless at worst. There’s an argument to say DR Congo should have won that game, and they would have done if not for Harry Kane dragging his men over the line by the scruff of the neck. It was a horrible watch.

But there’s is a lot wrong with the England support base too. The entitlement that runs through our veins. The sense that an error on the field of play is an excuse for aggressive abuse.

A number of people on socials pointed out that the reaction to a starting line up performing that poorly and containing only four white men was likely to prompt a backlash on social media if England conspired to lose the game. This is not without precedent as anyone who watched the fallout from Rashford, Saka and Sancho’s penalty misses in the final of EURO2020. Despite D:REAM’s promise, things have very clearly got a lot worse.

Does anyone ever wonder what kind of an impact this has on a group of young men who have been selected to play for their country? We blindly bang on about honour and gratitude for being in the team, but when they walk out onto the pitch they know that the punishment for a mistake - a missed opportunity, a badly struck penalty, a red card - is aggressive abuse on socials. It’s not confined to the players either. Wives and Girlfriends have been fair game since 2006, when several newspapers sent journalists to the German town of Baden-Baden to report the drunken exploits of the couture clad women led by the enormous sunglasses of Victoria Beckham.

(Photo by Gary M Prior/Allsport via Getty Images)

It’s not new but it’s devolving as social media continues to ‘democratise’ free speech. Elders will vividly recall the effigy of David Beckham hanging from a pub in London after he kicked out at Diego Simeone during England’s penalty defeat to Argentina in 1998. The headlines were bad enough. ‘10 Heroic Lions, One Stupid Boy’ was the Mirror’s effort under the editorship of one Piers Morgan. Clearly on a roll, the paper published a dartboard with his face at the bullseye, encouraging readers to take out their frustration on it. Death threats and relentless abuse from opposition fans for much of the following season followed.

We’ve been trained to respond to disappointment with anger and accusations of incompetence. Many of this morning’s callers on the phone in wanted to talk about Harry Kane ‘diving’ in the penalty area, how there was no contact from the keeper and that he should have been yellow carded. Few wanted to discuss the ferocity of his winning goal, his relentless work over the two halves and the fact that we’re through to the next round.

No one is asking for blind support of a flawed entity, but as I was watching last night I was thinking about Iceland in 2016 and how the players looked petrified of the abuse they knew they would receive when the second goal went in. I wonder how many of the blokes on the pitch were thinking about that too.

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Not all heroes wear capes. (Photo by Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

It’s Day 15 in the FIFA World Cup house and we’re talking about rapists.

After decades of pretending footballers are merely hapless and horny young men who can’t expect to fend off the attentions of fame hungry women with dubious aspirations of becoming a WAG, it’s a welcome relief to see serious conversations about consent and responsibility taking place in the mainstream media and social channels.

As a feminist, a man appearing to shun a handshake with an opposition player charged with seven counts of rape and one of sexual assault shouldn’t feel like a watershed moment in football, but it does. I was similarly delighted when Jude Bellingham appeared to mouth ‘rapist’ in the general direction of Mason Greenwood during Real Madrid’s 2-0 victory over Getafe in February 2024. Examples of players showing solidarity and support towards women in these matters are so infrequent they stand out. Just knowing that the men you admire in football aren’t contemptuous of your gender and role in their lives is, in the moment, a wonderful feeling, even if you do end up feeling a bit grubby afterwards.

In entirely unrelated news (ahem), a research paper that began circulating yesterday confirmed something we denizens of the internet have suspected for some time. In the endless, pointless debate over which player is the Greatest Of All Time (GOAT), people who err on the side of authoritarianism tend to prefer Cristiano Ronaldo to Lionel Messi. Those who embrace a liberal ideology and demonstrate a greater capacity for cognitive reflection skew Messi.

While it's worth noting that this is a qualitative position and the debate is far from binary, most people have an feeling on it one way or another and the paper itself explains in its introduction why it is a functional comparison worthy of academic scrutiny. Many of us have suspected this to be the case for years, but it makes a refreshing change for vibes to be backed up with scientific study.

Both men are carry legendary status and have dominated the football discourse for the last ten years or so. This is a given. But there are other factors at play that lean into the formation of their inferred political ideologies, not least the rivalry between the two clubs they played for during the peak of their careers.

Messi came up at FC Barcelona, an intrinsic part of the Catalan identity and ideologically opposed to the Franco regime during the Spanish Civil War. Famously ‘too small for football’, he had a growth hormone deficiency as a child, his first contract for Barca was written on a paper napkin, and moved to the city from his hometown of Rosario when he was thirteen. It’s almost a cliche now but he plays with a kind of profound immersion one rarely sees outside the school playground.

Basically the Messi family made a lot of sacrifices to get their boy where he is today. The humility he displays both on and on the pitch has visible roots.

But that can’t be it. All elite tier footballers and their families have to work hard and make sacrifices to get where they’re going. Cristiano Ronaldo grew up in poverty and he and his siblings frequently experienced hunger as his parents struggled to make ends meet. When he took his first steps into elite tier professional football with Manchester United he was raw and skinny. Seasoned Premier League players took great pleasure in smashing him off the ball when his rapid feet took him past them.

Messi was already a star when Ronaldo tipped up at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in 2009. It was a good fit for the Portuguese - Real Madrid were and are proudly establishment, with royal patronage and direct links to Franco’s regime - who quickly made himself at home in the white and gold and set about breaking as many football records as he possibly could.

(Photo by Lars Baron/Getty Images)

No one doubts the contribution that he has made to the game. But somewhere between 2009 and his departure to Juventus in 2018 his purity was corrupted. He became a relentless machine, scoring an average of 1.07 goals per game in La Liga, an insane statistic by anyone’s standards. He bulked up in the gym, tanned his body to the tone of fresh walnut and took his shirt off at every opportunity. That pale leggy kid who was humiliated and booed endlessly during his first year in the Premier League was but a distant memory.

Now he’s back, like the ghost of football past. Like all those who rely on abstract concepts of manliness to define themselves, Ronaldo is raging at the dying of the light. His power is entrenched in his physicality and to see that atrophy, the fragility of the human form withering in real time, must feel like an existential crisis. One that must be deferred for as long as possible, in any way he can.

Messi, on the other hand, continues to amble around in the final third of the pitch, scanning, waiting, holding and then bursting to life with a flick on, a short run or a goal.

If two such vast and enduring careers can be neatly summarised, it might be that Lionel Messi reads the game and acts when he sees it unfold in his favour. Ronaldo, in his pomp, controlled the game and the actions of everyone involved in it.

Both approaches have their merits. But only one attracts the insecure men of the internet.

Makes you think.

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You off? (Photo by Michael Regan - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

Revelling in the misery of another human being doesn’t make me proud. For one thing, it’s morally repugnant. For another, there’s enough of that in the world right now and a significant proportion of my written output is spent complaining about people who go on the internet and do just that.

But things can be two things.

As I’ve said before, football is a place where normal rules don’t apply. Putting aside the serious debates by grown ups like Orwell about football and politics - how football represents honorable battle and sending our fighting age young men to figure it out without blown up or mentally destroyed - when we walk into a stadium or flick on the TV we activate our inner child. There’s no better place in the world to exercise our petty grievances, complain that everything is against us and totally unfair, all while bellowing and singing with our friends until we can no longer breathe.

Football is a safe space where we can exercise our innate small mindedness. We’re human after all, and so terribly flawed. In football it’s perfectly reasonable, common even, to loathe a bloke because he’s really good at his job. If you’re a supporter in the stands there’s that one guy you see twice a season who perhaps once badly tackled one of your players and you’ve never quite got over it. You boo him whenever he touches the ball and you love it.

All that said, he’s still really good at his job so he’s first pick for your Fantasy team every week. Twat.

The real world isn’t really built for this level of cognitive dissonance but football thrives on it. Football is binary. You win, you lose. Your striker is a genius or he’s stealing a living and not fit to wear the shirt, at least until next week when he scores a hat-trick in the derby. And when it’s good, it’s impossible to describe to anyone who doesn’t feel it.

When these behaviours start emerging outside the ground, dragging themselves through the back alleys to the town square of social media sites, they’re no longer fun. They’re misshapen, malformed ideas that present as opinions, the kind of thing you used to hear said in the pub by that idiot who no one really likes but is somehow always there. He was just an outlier then but now he’s Dave Numbers, verified on X and exercising his racist, misogynist hate because he’s an edgelord who has figured out what the algorithm wants. And his favourite player is probably Cristiano Ronaldo.

I’m not going to sit here and spell out why Ronaldo’s performance for Portugal last night delighted me. Why I feel like Messi’s unexpected hat-trick vs. Algeria the day before made it taste even sweeter. How Thierry Henry’s deconstruction of his presence on the pitch after the game thrilled me, indicating as it does that Ronaldo’s strain for the stats tape at the end of his career will stain his legacy. There’s enough of that. And it’s not football’s job to punish Cristiano Ronaldo for his actions off the pitch.

We don’t need to be crass. Anything can happen in a football ground and for once, karma seems to have stepped in and begun serving her own brand of humility. We can let her get on with it.

Abdukodir Khusanov. Just look at that face. (Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)

Elsewhere, congrats to Colombia who comfortably dispatched Uzbekistan 3-1 in Mexico City last night. Honorable mention to Abdukodir Khusanov, Manchester City’s and Uzbekistan’s central defender, who almost killed a cameraman by barrelling into him while chasing a ball down during the game.

If you’re out there thinking I’m not totally in love with the baby oaf who has forgone the glamour and glory of attacking roles because he loves to smash into other men and put his face where most wouldn’t put their foot, can we really be friends?

(Photos by The Asahi Shimbun & Stefan Koops/EYE4IMAGES/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

A longer essay about the relentless panic attack that is England will appear in due course. Suffice to say that last night was a game of two halves, terrifyingly familiar in the first and unlike anything we’re used to in the second. I’m still nervy but this is mitigated by the fact that Daily Mail sports desk will be fuming these two were instrumental.

Lovely stuff.

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Poch already seems to have a good grasp on the group. (Photo by Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images)

Football is a simple game. Many great (and some not so great) men have said it but despite the fanfare and deafening noise of this World Cup iteration - the hydration breaks, absurd ticket prices causing swathes of empty seats, kick off times, a higher than average population of problematic blokes in corporate boxes - early indications show it holds true. You can overcomplicate it as much as you like in the preamble but football will find a way to shine.

The opener was a banger for those of us who still get misty eyed over our Mexico ‘86 sticker book. Many senior football writers and correspondents covering this tournament were radicalised by the red, green, white and black of that album so seeing those vivid colours occupied by a new (admittedly more ripped) generation was a visceral thrill. Core memory unlocked, if you will.

(Photo by MB Media/Getty Images)

It always helps when a host nation wins the opener and Mexico boxed that off beautifully, a Julian Quinones strike in the first ten minutes putting the nerves to rest and Raul Jimenez heading it in at the near post to confirm the points. Anyone concerned that the heartbeat of this tournament may have been weakened by Gianni Infantino’s attempts to rebuild it in his own image - a schmoozing corporate cash grab - will have been reassured by the intensity of Jimenez’ intense and emotional celebration, matched only by his compatriots in the crowd. Three red cards in one game sets down a lovely marker too. It’s exactly what we want to see on a football pitch.

The competition is being held in three host nations across north America, making it one of those World Cups that requires a degree of tenacity to follow. The kick off times feel wilful if you’re northern European but extensive media coverage means it’s easier than ever to catch up with the action via replays and highlights. This is before we even touch on the extension of the schedule to include forty-eight teams. Early on this felt unwieldy and irritating but six days in I’m happy to report I’m feeling the gentle of rhythm of tournament footie building, even after sleeping through Scotland’s narrow 1-0 victory over Haiti. Scotland don’t exactly need my support anyway. The Tartan Army have reportedly taken over Boston and are currently terrorising Red Sox fans with kilts and close harmony bagpiping.

Germany issued the first thrashing of this tournament to Curacao, who managed to retain a veneer of dignity Brazil could only dream of in 2014 when on the end of a similar scoreline. Kai Havertz continues to live up to his Big Game Player status, scoring two of Germany’s seven goals. If you didn’t say ‘why the hell doesn’t he play like this when I pick him in my FPL?', do you even change your team after August?

Similar was expected on Monday night when favourites Spain faced debutantes Cape Verde, and while a 0-0 draw isn’t the purest form of upset, it’s certainly enough to make those of us who have been banging on about Spain winning it at a canter take pause.

Despite La Roja’s relentless probing of the opposition box, virtually every ball in was repelled by a defender who was perfectly placed to do precisely that. This isn’t a magical new way of playing football - snuffing out crosses before they become goalscoring opportunities is rather the point of a back four - but in attritional games like this where one team is more skilful, technical and faster, the defending team always tires. If not physically knackered, mental fatigue creeps in and concentration fades. Teams like Spain are built on pouring through these tiny cracks, passing opposition to death, but Cape Verde were impenetrable. Like a tremendous flood barrier that actually works. To do it for ninety minutes plus stoppages and concede only one foul merely amplifies their discipline and commitment.

(Photo by Grzegorz Wajda/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

No World Cup is complete without a star and he came on around seventy minutes, a ripple of audible excitement coursing through the stadium when he was observed removing his bib on the touchline. It was the loudest noise the notably sparse crowd had managed up to that point. Lamine Yamal is eighteen, one of the youngest to generate this level of curiosity and column inches at a major tournament (Theo Walcott in 2006 notwithstanding) and for once the hype is justified. He brought an energy and verve to the Spanish side when he came on, coming close to changing the outcome, but one worries about the intensity of the reaction. Yamal’s exposure is unprecedented, his TikTok videos frequently surpassing one hundred million views, and it’s hard to imagine anyone sustaining the levels required to play elite football under that level of scrutiny over a meaningful period of time.

I hope I’m wrong. He and his friends look like they’re having fun doing those dances, even as they make me want to put my tits through a mangle, as my marvellous Gran used to say.

Having waited for a big game for a while, several come at once over the next two days. Can Senegal upset France like they did in 2002? Will Erling Haaland catch fire in Foxborough, both literally and figuratively? Can Messi still do it? Will anyone be brave enough to tell Ronaldo he clearly can’t?

And England. My England. A team for whom the game has never been simple, hamstrung as we have been by the north/south divide, cliques, boredom, ghost goals, Lampard, Gerrard, pints of wine, waistcoats and the ruddy Germans.

It’ll drive the flag shaggers and the tabloids wild if we win it while being led by one. Let our tournament commence.

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(Photo by Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)

The first tournament I remember was World Cup 86 in Mexico. I had the sticker book.

I’ve followed football properly since EURO 96. The first tournament I covered professionally was the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. I remember I had an exam on the day of the first game and got home just in time to see South Africa take the lead against Mexico. Everyone wanted to see Bafana Bafana do well in their home tournament, despite FIFA’s shameless corruption parading itself up and down the tournament like a catwalk model on Pay Per View.

They failed to make it out of the group along with France, whose traditional tournament firework display resulted in bans for players that totalled twenty seven games. The French, as we know, do not muck about when it comes to beef. As part of my employer’s coverage, I photoshopped Patrice Evra into a ring master costume. I like to think this contributed hugely to the debate.

England were rubbish, as usual. Obviously we could have won the whole tournament and every one since if Frank Lampard’s effort against Germany hadn’t been cruelly disallowed, but we wouldn’t have deserved it. There was no joy in watching England’s Golden Generation™️ who performed consistently for their club teams but couldn’t really be arsed in an England shirt. And why should they? Expectation heaped on expectation by an entitled tabloid press whose only reference points were colonialism and xenophobic banter.

EURO 2012 was defined by racism. Host countries Poland and Ukraine were the subject of numerous investigations into racist behaviour from fans; a conceit many of us gave the side eye to given the actions of our own heroic supporters. Spain won it and received a lot of coverage on Kickette.com.

2014? England didn’t get out of the group, which coincided neatly with Raheem Sterling earning his second cap and the attention of a tabloid press desperate to blame someone. Looking back now, this is where the tabloid press’s insidious but undeniable racism began to gather pace. What he spent his money on, his behaviour and his sleep patterns; everything he did was dissected in a manner that stank of imperialist condescension. I wrote an article for my employer at the time, The Football Ramble, entitled ‘England Expects: That Entitlement Complex In Full’. The premise was that it’s impossible to do your job effectively with thirty million people screaming at you, even if you’re paid a hundred grand a week.

“Footballers are paid too much. There’s no denying it. No one deserves to earn thousands a week when there are people living in poverty, And when we see them frittering it away on gold plated buffoon-mobiles and fish tanks with more luxurious facilities than we could hope to afford for our own homes, it’s perfectly normal to resent them. Especially if you’re worried about how you’re going to buy enough food to feed your family this week.

But the question we the fans have to ask ourselves is whether we’re going to let ourselves be manipulated by a media with an agenda to sell product or support our national football team. For me, the two are mutually exclusive.”

In 2016 we lost 2-1 to Iceland in the last sixteen. Apparently Iceland has a population of 300,000 (who knew?!) and if you were watching the game, the weight of the words about to be written about them were writ large on their slumped shoulders.

“…if there is to be any hope for the future at all, we need to expand our horizons when it comes to distributing blame and moving forward. Throwing cash at a shiny, previously successful, manager who oversees an exceptional qualifying campaign only to falter at the first competitive hurdle is a sticking plaster we’ve applied tournament after tournament and I think it’s safe to say it’s not working.

If we want success in the future, we need to strip bare the open wound that is the current England football setup and decide how we can best fix it. The time for politely averting our gaze is over.”

After this ignominious defeat, we appointed Sam Allardyce as England manager. This was our sliding doors moment. The FA’s intention was clearly to fill a gap with a ‘no nonsense’ man who wouldn’t tolerate any inflated egos. I can say with some confidence that I wouldn’t be writing this article now if the Biggest of Sams hadn’t been covertly filmed allegedly taking bribes while drinking a pint of white wine by a Panorama/Daily Telegraph investigation.

We’ve come so far under Gareth Southgate. His focus on the mental health and emotional needs of his players has given them the confidence to perform on the pitch, but for the first time ever we’ve seen them collectively stand up to the masses of fans intoxicated by the febrile atmosphere of failure and blame. England lost the semi-final in 2018 to Croatia and last night we saw them play, mostly in the first half, as a team. Playing with a degree of confidence and verve unprecedented in my long career as a cross, frustrated hack.

More importantly, they have intelligence and courage to stand up to an English fan base who have been indoctrinated by media intent on creating division. When I went to sleep last night, it occurred to me that Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho might be in the receiving end of some racial abuse after missing their penalties, but nothing like the monstering they’ve received.

I wasn’t planning to write about this. I have a different job now and quite honestly, I’ve written so many words about this England team, I didn’t think there would be anything to add to the noise.

I want to say this though. Be under no illusion. Ask an English person whether their country is tolerant and welcoming to everyone and most people will say yes*. This is conceit we’ve collectively carried for far too long and pretending it’s just a few bad actors spoiling things for the rest of us feels like a wilful refusal to look at the facts.

The fact that three English men who have given their all to ‘bring it home’ to us are now being bombarded with offensive imagery and insults. One of those men campaigned to ensure that kids had access to free school meals during the pandemic, and Tory MP Natalie Elphicke tweeted the following message after the defeat:

“They lost – would it be ungenerous to say Rashford should have spent more time perfecting his game and less time playing politics.”

Ungenerous? Or psychopathic? Depends on which paper you read, I suppose.

Home should be a warm safe place where you’re surrounded by supportive people who love and want to celebrate your victories as one, but are ready to embrace you and nurture and encourage you through your low moments. Our home, England, is currently an abusive, gaslighting, coercively controlling, self-harming partner that requires isolation and extensive therapy before being anywhere near the kids again.

Let’s hope they forgive us before the end of next year.

*This point aged well, didn’t it? KW.

(Photo by Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)

After months of testing, tweaking and concessions to the ‘No! Make it more Bane!‘ lobby, Nike have started promoting their Squad Snood.

In the real world it’s just another fashion transgression from the people who bought you day-glo boots, ham shirts and the Gucci manbag. For some members of the football community though, its reappearance heralds the start of another pitched battle for football’s soul.

In a war as ironic as it is tedious.

To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, the snood’s life in football was nasty, brutish and short. Having smuggled itself onto these shores around the necks of Martin Petrov and Carlos Tevez in January 2010 (yep, someone actually looked into this), the snazzy new accessory spread like a virus across elite training grounds of England. A particular favourite of players from warmer climes, hardly a match was played in the 10/11 Premier League season without someone having the temerity to try and keep their neck warm.

For proponents of ‘real football’ – those who get a bit wistful when thinking about Bert Trautmann playing on in the 1956 FA Cup Final despite a broken neck, say – the snood signified everything wrong with modern football and launched a coordinated attack on its velvety softness.

Ostensibly it was for players’ protection; concerns were raised about potential neck injuries caused by opposition players holding onto the snood for leverage (see also: Peter Crouch & Brent Sancho’s dreadlocks) and former FIFA president Sepp Blatter went as far as to suggest someone might end up getting hanged. His concern for the welfare of footballers was quickly crushed by his desire to distance himself from the dangerously feminising neckwear though. “I was a player in both winter and summer and I never wore a snood.”

He wasn’t the only one. Even respected men of the game made fools of themselves over this. Sir Alex Ferguson claimed snoods were for powder puffs, which is surprising as he doesn’t look like a man who wears a lot of make-up.

“I wonder what Norman Hunter and Chopper Harris would’ve made of the snood being adorned by some prem footballers? Broken leg time!” opined Graeme Swann on Twitter, presumably forgetting that cricket is not a contact sport and therefore by definition, a girls’ game.

It was left to former Millwall and Republic of Ireland striker Tony Cascarino to hammer it home.

“It’s like a fashion accessory and personally, I think it’s typical of the modern footballer. I would see it as a weakness, slightly, that they’re not a real man.”

“It’s not frowned upon now, but 20 or 30 years ago a player would not have got away with it. He would have been buried [with abuse].”

The snood was duly banned from gameplay by the International FA Board in March 2011, which is an amazing turnaround given how its members have had decades to sort out racism in football and have singularly failed to do so.

So why have Nike, one of the biggest sports apparel brands in the world spent the last god knows how long researching and testing the Darth Vader-esque Squad Snood if players aren’t going to be allowed to wear it?

In an astonishing turn of events, it seems that pundits and commentators and some football fans have literally no idea what they’re talking about.

A relatively straightforward google search suggests there are some applications for football kit that are more important than whether it makes you look like a ‘powder puff’.

Breathing in cold air can irritate the airways, potentially leading to shortness of breath and a cough. While this is the entry criteria for some Sunday League pitches, for athletes at the top level this can be a performance threatening problem. Hence the snood in training.

You’ll find this with a lot of sciency stuff in football. Arsene Wenger was nearly lifted up and chucked back to France by the Arsenal back four when he turned up and tried to ban ketchup, alcohol and chocolate from their diets. Today, many players have diet plans and meals prepared for them by nutritionists and private chefs to ensure they’re remain at peak fitness.

Cold hands and feet can affect tactile sensitivity and manual dexterity so sometimes players wear gloves and short sleeved shirts. If the wailing and gnashing of teeth are any evidence, some pundits and commentators would rather see break an opponent’s leg than slip on a pair of club branded digit warmers.

Don’t get them started on tights or pink boots.

Is it homophobia? Racism? Misogyny? A cheeky little cocktail combining all three?

Look, it’s football. Home of the shithouse. No one expects miracles. But really, should media outlets be employing people who perpetuate pathetic, misguided myths that feeling the cold is a bit gay? That young men today are overly feminised because they eat well and want to be the best they can be?

It such a tired narrative and so at odds with the inclusive message many of these media outlets like to align themselves with, I’m beginning to question whether they really mean it.

And whether Bert Trautmann could have saved us all this trouble by just wearing a proper bloke’s wooden snood between the sticks on that fateful day.

Article originally published in 2018. Revisited ahead of the World Cup.

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As a fan of some years standing, I can confirm that football is not an easy life companion. I love it, of course, but it’s like that mate who turns up late to the Christmas Day do, drinks all the brandy and then starts throwing shapes on the dancefloor thinking they’re Travolta.

Just as you’re trying to quietly usher them out without further embarrassment, you realise they’ve tucked the table cloth into their collar and in bolting to the bar for last orders, have showered your Gran in Iceland vol au vents.

Mere proximity to their work taints you.

Unless you’re Arsenal, Forest Green or my Gran, the vol au vents analogy doesn’t stand. The rest does. The bloke next to you at football who insists on defaming the linesman at full volume, even though you’re in the family stand and a child (probably his) is looking up at him with a mixture of fear and admiration on its ruddy little face. The people who used Shkodran Mustafi’s tweet of condolence to Leicester City’s players and fans as an opportunity to criticise his form.

Do you ever see these things and wonder if you walked in the wrong door when sporting preferences was being handed out?

You’d think, then, that I’d be grateful of an opportunity for football to show its true colours. That I’d be proud to see football band together as it has over recent days, first over the sudden illness of Glenn Hoddle, then the horrific helicopter crash at Leicester City.

Well, I was for a bit. Pausing during the minute’s silence on Saturday at Cardiff City, I was overwhelmed by the loss and buoyed by the togetherness. As a neutral I had no horse in the title race of the Premier League season 2015/16, but I’d be surprised if there’s another as thrilling in my lifetime. The story of that season, the 5000/1 outsiders lifting the trophy is proper Roy of the Rovers, and football’s always been a sucker for a blond bombshell.

Then, as is also traditional, I over thought it. Why do people have to die horrifically in order for it to be deemed acceptable for football people to cry? How come players are issued with death threats if they leave one club for a rival and yet those contentious club rivalries disappear like mirages when a tragedy of sufficient magnitude occurs? Why can a minute’s silence be observed when it’s ok for another to be heckled?

I may be a minority here, but it somehow feels worse when we show our compassion and understanding at times like these because it demonstrates that we all know how we should behave. Apparently some people just choose to be disrespectful, immature and intolerant when it suits them.

People who really love football love it because of the partisan nature that encourages us to shout without thinking, not despite it. A suspension of rational adult behaviour occurs when one is parked in a plastic seat, handed a pie with ketchup on the lid and told to cheer the Blues or the Reds. It’s intoxicating and vaguely primal to leave dignity behind in favour of reckless abandon.

Presumably that’s why a minority of people forget to leave it in the stadium. Life is so much easier when you can ignore gray areas such background information and nuance and move directly to shouting abuse. It’s no coincidence that most of this fomenting happens on Twitter, which actively encourages the hot take by providing us with character limits and snake emojis.

It’s important to remember these details as we immerse ourselves in the now standardised confusion and intolerance football experiences as Armistice Day approaches. It’s easy to get sucked in, but those who care enough to understand what wearing a poppy truly means will appreciate someone’s right to choose. Be a proper grown up about it and represent the game.

The rest? Including the chap who decided Matic’s legs should be broken upon spotting his poppy-less shirt during Saturday’s game? They’re essentially that mate you find in a pub car park insisting he’s fine to drive, despite the fact he’s trying to unlock someone else’s van and isn’t wearing any trousers. Take his keys off him and call him a cab.

He’ll be grateful to you in the morning, and he’ll probably (hopefully?) apologise for all the swearing.

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It was the summer of 2009 and the biggest transfer in football history was about to be announced. The gangly eighteen-year-old with crooked teeth, greasy hair and extraordinary trousers that arrived at Old Trafford four years before was about to take the next step on his journey towards becoming a global icon. 70,000 people would turn up to see Real Madrid present Cristiano Ronaldo as their new player.

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The Ronaldo that turned up at the Bernabeu was an entirely different beast to the one who had been savaged during so many of his early Premier League appearances. The unnecessarily flamboyant stepovers that agriculturally minded opposition players found irresistible were gone, replaced with decisive, compelling movement on the ball. His body, most frequently seen airborne after a hearty challenge, was the sporting equivalent of a teak mantelpiece; solid, difficult to miss and with contours and recesses upon which one could spend hours gazing. Running into it was the province of the brave and the foolish only.

We know what happened next. Over the next nine years Ronaldo would become the global icon he’d dreamed of since leaving home at the age of eleven.

In 2003, when he signed for Manchester United, Ronaldo’s aim was to emulate David Beckham. Beckham was the first player to translate recognition on the pitch to revenue streams off it and while Cristiano Ronaldo began his career on the same path, he quickly eclipsed the England captain. Beckham’s reach was created and maintained through the mechanism of tabloid celebrity, not least because of his marriage to former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham. Ronaldo is more of a numbers man.

If Beckham was John Connor, practicing free kicks on the training ground while simultaneously inventing ‘pretty footballers in hairbands’ chic, Ronaldo was the Terminator. Global domination was the target and the means to get there was to become a machine capable of a thousand sit ups a day. Not even Messi could perform such feats of metronomic athleticism.

The summer of 2009 was a pivotal moment in Ronaldo’s career. More pivotal than any of us imagined until eleven years later, when German newspaper Der Spiegel published an interview with a woman alleging the player raped her in June that same year. Kathryn Mayorga’s claims are vivid and precise – perhaps not to everyone but to many – and sufficiently damaging to have seriously derailed a twenty-four year old athlete’s career at a critical juncture.

But that didn’t happen. The Der Spiegel article states that after reporting the incident to the police and entering into negotiations with Ronaldo’s team of lawyers, Kathryn Mayorga accepted $375,000 (a week’s pay for him) in return for remaining silent.

This is not an uncommon way to settle rape cases in the USA, but other factors conspired against Mayorga ranging from the fact Ronaldo is not a US national and difficult to charge to police telling her that a consensual kiss undermined her case. She also gave him her phone number and went back to his hotel room, albeit accompanied by a friend, and as we know these optics are everything when it comes to the credibility of rape victims.

It’s significant that it’s not just Cristiano Ronaldo who benefitted from this conspiracy of silence. Agents, managers, lawyers, the media, clubs, sponsors, the football industry itself, have all made a lot of money from his brand. It is darkly comic that Ronaldo himself responded to the allegation being made public in 2018 by stating:

“Keen as I may be to clear my name, I refuse to feed the media spectacle created by people seeking to promote themselves at my expense”.

This is Ronaldo. More brand than man, a rare commodity to be traded in, but it is a traumatised woman who is guilty of self-promotion?

A significant amount of Ronaldo’s income comes from sponsorship; he currently has a ten year endorsement deal with Nike said to be worth €162m a year. These contracts contain moral clauses that would be invoked were he to be charged with a sexual offence. The silence he bought was worth hundreds of millions, not just to Ronaldo himself, but to the entire sporting industrial complex constructed around him.

It was confirmed yesterday that Cristiano Ronaldo is returning to Manchester United, where it all began.

The media are covering the story with eyes firmly forward. Ronaldo’s career, goalscoring and assist record, honours and age have been discussed extensively, but few outlets have addressed the allegations head-on.

The stock answer to the conundrum seems to be that if it has not been criminally prosecuted we cannot pass judgement. Leaving aside for a moment the fact only a fraction of rape cases so much as see a courtroom, there is so much else upon which these experts in their field could expand, and yet they remain wedded to the sporting narrative alone.

The refusal to dissect the cultural cognitive dissonance; this legend cannot be mere man, with the same frailties and dark impulses contained within him. The presumption of innocence we afford all footballers, not just Ronaldo. The onslaught of fan fury towards any woman who suffers at the hands of a footballer: slags, whores, mercenaries on the make. Were it not for the details of the NDA being made public Mayorga would simply have been dismissed as a disgruntled groupie looking for a payday. Ronaldo’s own account in the NDA disclosed by Der Spiegel is uncomfortable reading.

“I entered her from behind. It was rude. We didn’t change position. 5/7 minutes. She said that she didn’t want to, but she made herself available … But she kept saying ‘No.’ ‘Don’t do it.’ ‘I’m not like the others.’ I apologised afterwards”.

If these words are in the public domain and we choose to ignore them, what does it say about us?

This is not something female football fans confront comfortably. We too marvelled at that seemingly superhuman pairing of skill and power; the seemingly effortless ability to stand over a ball from 30 yards and place it in the top corner. None of us want this legacy tarnished, but an estimated 20% of women have experienced sexual assault – if it’s not us it’s one of our friends or family – and the awful reality of it is stamped on our psyche. We have to confront the fact that while Ronaldo bought silence enabling him and all connected the Ronaldo™ to thrive and flourish, while Mayorga simply sat with that trauma in the knowledge the payoff was the only approximation of justice available to her.

Can you see how that hurts? How disempowering it is to constantly hear about powerful men being cosseted and indemnified simply because they are masters of their craft?

Powerful men, drunk on their own mythos, view their entitlement to women’s bodies. Ignoring pleas to stop is “rude”, a social faux pas, but surely it can’t be rape? As a society, we impose gradations of sexual assault, with violent stranger rape the only iteration we regard as truly brutal. Surely it can only be an honour and privilege to be in the company of a footballing legend? Many genuinely cannot comprehend how traumatic, how violating and emotional scarring rape is if you aren’t also beaten up, or if the perpetrator is not a gruff stranger in a back ally.

We are all so invested in the narrative of Ronaldo, the boy we saw become a man who dazzled us with his unique skill and precision, coming “home” to Manchester in the twilight of his career. It is hard to square this with the allegations against him; we don’t want hard reality to impose on a fairytale.

But this reality and its far-reaching implications are something a civilised society must face head-on.

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The faces on those kids. They don’t know what they’re singing about. Thirty years of hurt? Fifty? Most of the people in that crowd weren’t born when England lifted their last footballing trophy.

You might think it’s all about the kids, but it really isn’t. While their faces lit up our screens during EURO 2022 and we spoke of a utopian future where boys wore shirts with women’s names on the back and girls dream of being Chloe Kelly, for many of us it was something else too. I’ve been watching the men’s game for over twenty years and have never felt as much excitement, as many nerves and as much pride as I did on the final whistle.

I’ve also never felt like I’d missed out on something as much as I did on that day.

Baddiel & Skinner’s ‘Three Lions’ suffering yet another tournament update was appropriate, in its way. Seeing those kids gustily belting out lyrics written for a tournament we failed to win twenty-six years ago is an appropriate bookend for a period of time that hasn’t been particularly enjoyable for England fans. For those of us who care to remember, the trauma is conveniently conveyed via the peculiar tropes of the managers. Glenn Hoddle and Eileen Drury, say. Keggy resigning in a toilet at Wembley. Svennigans. The Wally With The Brolly. Capello in South Africa. Roy the Boy. Big Sam and his pint of white wine. Southgate and his waistcoat. To the uninitiated, it might make no sense but to fans, every one of those names brings up harrowing memories of dramatic and/or embarrassing defeats. Sometimes both.

Everything is different now. The kids singing those words weren’t born when they were written. The entitlement they express doesn’t exist in the women’s game, where until very recently, players had no alternative but to work outside football to support themselves. These players cannot be accused of not wanting it enough or being complacent over their positions. There’s no fetid air of selection due to pressure from sponsors or media profiles hanging over the Lionesses. They are all there on merit. While the final of the men’s EUROS last year is tainted by the violence, the only fears that surfaced on Sunday involved Mary Earps’ safety as she danced on the desk during Sarina Wiegman’s post match presser.

Now we sit in the debris, still half pissed and removing ticker tape tin foil from our bras, we can’t help but wonder how this will affect the future of the sport. There are so many opportunities for improvement in both the men’s and women’s games, but are we capable of enacting them after all this time? Even if we are, are they sustainable?

Already elements of the press are starting to follow a predictable narrative. The Daily Mail has already begun comparing female contestants of Love Island unfavourably with the Lionesses. THIS woman *points to an image of a woman in a football kit* is superior to THIS woman *points to an image of a woman in a swimsuit*.

It’s the same argument we’ve been using to divide and conquer women since Eve supposedly ate the apple. ‘Don’t be this, be this.’ Throw a little surreptitious fat shaming in the headline and you have the full house.

The trouble with binaries, as we’re learning, is that while they might be broad enough to appear inclusive on many levels, they’re also exclusionary on many more. Allow me to digress a moment to show you what I mean.

If you’ve read my work before, you won’t be stunned to learn that I didn’t have a lot of confidence when I was a kid. Football wasn’t offered to girls at either primary or secondary level back then, so I played netball and tennis resentfully and disliked games vocally. During break times, especially in primary school, I would sit on the edge of the gravel playground and watch woefully underskilled boys pretending to be Gary Lineker.

In 2019 I shared a stage with comedian Sara Pascoe during a viewing party for England’s World Cup match vs. Scotland. We talked about our first experiences of football and like many girls in that era, they were similar. She too sat on her backside, shifting uncomfortably in the ubiquitous cotton school frock that provided no protection from the stony surface, watching boys kick a small plastic ball around. I knew I could do better than some of them. I expect Pascoe did too. The difference between us? She and her friend would evaluate the situation, decide they wanted to play and enter the fray.

I never did. I didn’t have the courage and the rejection would have been too much for me to cope with, even at six years old.

There have always been little girls who will run out, snatch the ball and play their game. Chloe Kelly, the twenty-four-year-old who scored the winner on Sunday, used to play in the cages in Ealing with her five brothers and their friends. She says they never took it easy on her and she liked it that way. It taught her self-belief. Others have said the same. They are the girls who got up and took the ball.

I only realised the complexity of my own emotions surrounding those moments when the final whistle blew on Sunday. I’ve always felt like a failure for not doing what Pascoe did. I’ve always felt like my lack of self-confidence was something to be ashamed of and I didn’t deserve the joy of football because I didn’t have the guts to take it.

Now an adult, I feel the full weight of that anger on behalf of the kids who, like me, ‘didn’t have the guts’.

Kids shouldn’t have to be brave to try sports. They should be led there kindly and shown that anyone can kick or hit a ball. Anyone. Self-confidence is built in the playgrounds and playing fields, and inclusion and opportunity should be built into the school systems. No child should ever be left on the sidelines and ignored because they’re shy or even worse, not that good.

The beauty of this win, the true glory, is that it will force institutions to make changes. Today it’s much easier for kids to access football at school – according to England Football’s recently published figures, 72% of primaries and 44% of secondary schools offer equal access – but it’s only when it becomes the norm will fewer kids, both male and female, get to try something they burn to do but can’t ask for.

The Lionesses’ victory can be many different things. It can be a catalyst for change at the top tier. But if in twenty years’ time, there are still kids sitting on the sidelines feeling that it simply isn’t their place to stand up and take the ball, we’ve failed. We won’t see it and we won’t feel it.

But they will.

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It took a hell of a lot of coincidences and unpredictable events to get English football to where it is today.

A country voted to remove itself from a union by pissing all over its legs until the other party let them go. That heady cocktail of disenfranchised nihilism, inherent mistrust of outsiders, and picket fence parochialism radicalised some into believing the most present threat to the average person are the people arriving on the Kent coast in dinghies. Successive governments looking for short term financial gain privatising services, pushing a service economy that grudgingly supplies shit money for work that may or may not be available tomorrow.

A global pandemic widened the fissure. George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in a manner so heinous it should feel otherworldly but that sick feeling in your belly tells you it lives here now.

Footballers took the knee in what was a moment of great pride for some of us, tired of the constant ‘spoilt, overpaid nancy boys’ narrative. Some club fans booed. The players kept kneeling and the boos got louder.

England got to the final of EURO 2020 anyway. Amid drunken fighting, a man stuck a flare-up his arse in Leicester Square. The match went to penalties and three young men, one of whom had embarrassed the government into feeding children during the aforementioned pandemic, stepped up to take the penalty kicks that would determine whether England would lift a major trophy for the first time in fifty-five years.

They missed and a switch flicked in a lot of minds. When I wake up in the morning, I thought, social media will be a bonfire with those lads atop it. Like George Floyd, their supposed crime was dwarfed by the punishment they received. Why?

Because they were all black.

Racism, homophobia, sexism and violence are the Four Horsemen of football’s apocalypse. And the lens has shifted now, football being a microcosm of society at large. Like an eclipse, football has briefly become a lens offering a clear view of our society.

It’s a reckoning and going to hurt. When the Premier League season starts in a couple of weeks players plan to continue taking the knee, dismissing disingenuous claims they’re supporting a Marxist movement intent on defunding the police. They’ve indicated that talks have taken place and they intend to continue disobeying a minority disingenuously insistent that politics cannot coexist with sport.

While we’re all here, certain we’re on the right side of history, let’s get it all out on the table.

In news that will surprise no one familiar with his football career and associated works, it’s been reported that Joey Barton has been charged with assault by beating. In a statement, the Met Police confirmed that “the charge relates to an incident which took place at a residential property in Kew on Wednesday 2 June in which a woman received a head injury”. At the time of writing, Barton pled not guilty to the charge in court. Newspaper reports claim the victim of the assault is Barton’s wife Georgia, although she herself has denied that in an Instagram post. The club he manages, Bristol Rovers, made a statement so flagrantly biased, media sources have not reported it for legal reasons.

Barton is not the first player to have been accused of violence towards women during his career. In April this year, former Manchester United and Wales winger Ryan Giggs was charged with assaulting two women and coercive and controlling behaviour between December 2017 and November 2020. He pled not guilty to the charges but stood down from his role as Wales manager before EURO 2020.

The recent death of Diego Maradona, a man generally agreed to be one of the finest players to strike a ball in history, provoked an almost unprecedented outpouring of grief among fans. His artful, elegant and frequently controversial actions on the pitch seemed to capture the very essence of football and to many, 25th November 2020 was and will forever be the Day the Football Died.

It would be unfair to say that coverage of Maradona’s other hobbies was neglected. Joan Smith, writer and chair of the Mayor of London’s violence against women and girls board, wrote a superb article in the Guardian pointing out that bad behaviour, specifically violence and abuse by high achieving sportsmen, is frequently overlooked by fans dazzled by on-field achievement. Maradona was filmed hitting his girlfriend of the time, Rocio Oliva, but denied it. He also denied other allegations before and since.

Paul Gascoigne has enjoyed a similar position in the public eye. Despite well-publicised episodes of physical violence and controlling behaviour involving his former wife Sheryl, the former England midfielder enjoyed yet another renaissance during EURO 2020 when his iconic goal vs. Scotland was used extensively in promotional material for the tournament. Midfielder Phil Foden bleached his hair in honour of Gascoigne’s EURO 1996 horror trim, and looked to emulate his hero during his appearances.

Indeed, Gascoigne and Maradona’s lives read like efforts to test the boundaries of how much bad behaviour football fans will accept before admitting their hero is an arsehole. And the answer appears to be a metric shit ton. The more talented they are, the more willing we are to forgive their transgressions.

Football is the perfect framework for this to unfold, and in those cases specifically, the apocryphal stories contribute to the ‘good lad’ narrative. George Best’s exquisite performances on the pitch were only augmented by his reputation as a top banter merchant.

“I used to go missing a lot… Miss Canada, Miss United Kingdom, Miss World,” he once said of his libidinous past. His witticisms and mastery of the football so pleasant to look at, they drew the eye from his less auspicious entanglements. Particularly the ones that ended in violent misogyny.

When their playing careers are over, the myths proliferate. They became figures of fun; their excesses a source of amusement and seen as an inevitable buckling beneath the sheer weight of their talent. Remember when Gazza did the Dentist’s Chair? When Maradona became ‘tired and emotional’ during Argentina’s game vs. Nigeria in the 2018 World Cup, the glass screen on his stadium box smeared in cocaine baking soda? Kings gonna King.

We sympathise with these men when their inevitable flaws fulfil the criteria of the story we want to tell. But why, when describing greatness as a concept, in sport, as in art, music, and literature, do we consistently overlook the fact that great cruelty, violence, predation, and unfettered prejudice are frequently present as well? Wrestling with separating the art from the artist is hardly unique to football, but now we claim to be making a concerted effort to rid the game of these endemic wrongs. It’s relatively easier with a case like Joey Barton, an unlikable figure seemingly determined to destroy a bang average legacy, but the real challenge comes in confronting it in those we otherwise worship.

This isn’t a call for cancellation. That serves no one and is a deeply flawed way of dismissing challenges to what we deem culturally acceptable at any given moment. Great art is great art and it’s up to the individual whether their consumption of it is soured by events outside its creation.

We’re simply suggesting that while we have the opportunity of a big reset in football – a moment in which we can all stand together as one, united against abuse – ignoring violence against women by the players we admire undermines the whole effort.

If you can see nuance in the way certain newspapers talk about Raheem Sterling, why can’t you understand that it’s offensive to confine Paul Gascoigne’s violence to a sentence involving the words ‘flawed genius’, or ‘mercurial talent’ before writing five hundred words about how he used to shoot at the White Hart Lane cockerel with an air rifle? Do you really think that by writing he ‘battled a lot of demons’, you’ve offered a three hundred and sixty degree view of the man attached to The Hand of God?

The men you adore won’t see your adulation and careful footsteps around their less celebrated activities. The women who suffer at the hands of violent men and use football as an escape will.

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If, like me, you’re watching the Premier League title race unfold from a neutral perspective, you’ll have enjoyed Sunday’s game and particularly the exquisite side eye offered by Erling Haaland as he walked past a camera after the final whistle. The striker’s war with Arsenal defender Gabriel has been raging for some time now but his goal in this game may end up being one of the most important he’ll ever score in terms of the Premier League narrative.

Rarely is smug an attractive state but in this case the Norwegian earned the right to act the shithouse.

As he strolled around the Etihad topless, long blond hair blowing gently in the breeze, he was creating memes in real time. We all knew it, but even as I was obediently reposting these images to my socials, I was aware of my complicity in enabling this pantomime. I complain about the influence social media has on football frequently but when something funny happens, you can guarantee I’ll be there with a smart remark and gif.

As a woman it can be hard to navigate the often fetid world of football. It’s always going to be this way if you obsess over this version of the game the way I and my friends do; the one played by extremely rich, talented young men who know little about the world but what it can give them. Humour and infantilisation are the lenses through which I can comfortably watch and love this world, training my eyes to focus solely on the wholesome aspects of the game in order to distract from its harsher, darker realities.

This is my version. Don’t be under any illusion though. Cognitive dissonance runs deep in football. It might even be essential to our enjoyment of the game. But a carefully honed ability to ignore what we don’t like and focus on the lighter side means the other stuff, the awful stuff, can easily creep past in the darkness we create at the edges.

Drunk driving, car crashes, coercive and controlling behaviour, rape, sexual assaults, violence against women. Footballers have been accused, to varying degrees, of all these crimes in recent years. You would find examples of these offences in any cohort of young men, but footballers will often escape proportionate consequences because of the value they represent to their fans, clubs, owners and the brand.

The manner in which Roberto de Zerbi rolled back his comments about Mason Greenwood recently upon his appointment at Spurs is an example of how flexible football can be when placed under pressure.

De Zerbi was appointed manager of Marseille in June 2024, a month before Greenwood joined the club on loan from Manchester United via Getafe. Upon Greenwood’s arrival, the Italian made the following statement about the player.

I don’t want to get involved in anyone’s private life. I don’t even get into the private lives of my children, because I want to give everyone their freedom.

All I can see is that Mason seems a good lad, he paid in a strong way for what happened. He has probably here found the right environment for him, which gave him affection, and held out its hand to him.

When I look at him as a person, I feel sad for what happened in his life, without getting into the details.

Because the person I know here is very different to the one that has been described, especially in England.

Greenwood enjoyed a great deal of success at Marseille but in April 2026, rumour had it that De Zerbi was set to replace Igor Tudor as Spurs manager. Several fan groups expressed opposition to the appointment because they felt the Italian had downplayed the severity of the allegations against Greenwood in 2022. It should be noted that the case against Greenwood was dropped before reaching court.

Spurs appointed him anyway and De Zerbi issued a statement on Spurs’ website shortly after.

I have never wanted to downplay the issue of violence against women, or violence against anyone more broadly. I’ve consistently fought and taken a stand to be on the side of those who are most at risk.

Those of you who know me well, will know that I’m not the kind of person who makes compromises to win more games or win an extra title.

I’m sorry if I offended anyone’s feelings with this subject matter. I have a daughter and I’m very sensitive to these things and I always have been.

I hope that over time people will get to know me better and understand that at that moment, I didn’t mean to take a stance.

It’s the kind of apology-by-committee we’ve come to expect. Emphasising how he’s a good guy, he’s got daughters, he’s not that kind of person. He’s on our side, goddamn you all! And to the football gods a plaintive wail of ‘I didn’t mean to take a stance,' as though the problem was the fact he spoken at all and nothing to do with what he said.

This isn’t a De Zerbi problem. He might be a nice bloke. He might be an awful bloke. I’ve never met him. He’s was just humming along. It’s not his fault the music stopped and he didn’t have a chair.

This is a football problem. We’re so desperate for football to be an escape. When it’s good, our game is a place where togetherness and tribalism can live side by side, fostering closeness and encouraging us to find common ground instead of points of difference. There are fewer and fewer places like this in the world.

But if it’s going to continue being the escape, we can’t rely on selective blindness. I can’t solve this by not posting memes about Erling Haaland. De Zerbi can’t solve this by assuming a position on the actions of another human being. But if all of us who love the game could maybe take a moment to decide what we’re prepared to tolerate and be more vocal about it, the game could be the source of pure joy we’re all intent on projecting.

Games between Fortuna Sittard and NAC Breda from the Eredivisie rarely receive much coverage in the UK but the gash on Holtby’s shin was unpleasant enough to gain traction on social media. Of several thousand comments, the most frequently liked and reposted were suggestions that if Holtby had been wearing ‘proper’ shin pads instead of the micro shin pads favoured by many players today, he would not have been as badly hurt in the incident.

The moral panic against shinnies variously compared in size to Tic Tacs, a bar of soap and custard creams is but the latest to grip football apparel. Long time subscribers to The Football Narrative™️ will remember the snood crisis of 2018, when players were banned from wearing the stylised neck warmers because Sepp Blatter feared they might ‘hang somebody’. More recently, outrage fomented after players were seen to be cutting holes in the backs of their socks. In one of his weekly blog posts, former Sky Sports anchor Richard Keys invoked the spirit of Bobby Moore when discussing this latest atrocity in February 2024.

Enough of this nonsense.

Gallagher will be at Wembley this weekend - the spiritual home of Bobby Moore - the greatest England captain ever to have played the game. Bob never once looked anything but immaculate on a football pitch. I hope Gallagher understands that - like it or not - he’s a role model who youngsters emulate and he could learn from Moore’s example.

Godwin’s Law is an adage that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1 (certainty). In the football realm, the longer a discussion continues the greater the likelihood that someone will point out that football used to be a proper man’s game.

This has been true for decades, but the creeping enshittification of football ensures that these arguments make less and less sense as the years pass. In 2026, is football a proper man’s game or not? If, as many on the internet contend, the game is played by overpaid prima donnas, let’s get them in body armour and full face helmets. If Fermin Lopez had been wearing the kind of ‘proper protection’ demanded by the commenters when he bravely stopped Juan Musso’s boot with his face last night, his nose wouldn’t be spread across three counties this morning.

Alternatively. if football is truly a man’s game in the traditional meaning of the term, let’s ban shin pads altogether. Real men don’t care about getting kicked in the shins. In fact in some corners of the world it’s considered to be a proper test of masculinity. I know this because I’m from the Cotswolds; Home of the Cotswold Olimpick Games since the seventeenth century, a highlight of which is the Shin Kicking competition.

In fact, let’s dispense with penalty kicks to decide stalemates and bring in Shin Kicking. We already have a referee, a centre circle and enough testosterone circulating the stadia of English football to ensure enthusiastic engagement.

The PGMOL could learn a lot from this lad reffing too, no?