'I hope the game delivers some moments of joy and laughter for you in 2023. It always has and, God willing, for all the ups and down, ins and outs, trials and tribulations, it always will.' JohnnyTheNic
As the tributes to Pele poured in last week, it was hard for anyone of a certain age not to look back to 1970 and all that. I was buying an off-cut in a local carpet warehouse and got talking to the owner about the great man and football more generally in the 1970s. He waxed lyrical about The Big Match, the Leeds team under Don Revie and giants of the game like Jimmy Johnstone and Norman Hunter. And I’m always happy to talk football to anyone.
’ I looked objectively at all periods of the game to overcome both blind nostalgia and what Daniel Storey once coined for me as ‘hindshite’ – the notion that the future is always better than the past, which is just as crippling a condition to suffer from, intolerant as it is, of any challenge to the orthodoxy that modern is always best. The denials involved in asserting that as a truth require the same levels of delusion as nostalgia.
So as we start 2023, what is the state of the game? How will the future judge this past? Good things? It’s often said in society that the vicious right wing has won the economic war and liberal left has won the cultural war. It’s a broad assertion and not without caveats but it holds fairly true in life and in football.
Women’s football still attracts gobshite misogynists who can’t resist telling us how they’re sick of having it literally rammed, literally, mind you, down their throats. But increasingly, people scorn such stupidities and that scorn will only become more widespread. While men’s football still has issues to resolve about gay players, the women’s game has shown the way forward on this.
However strongly we feel, it’s just how we feel. It isn’t a fact. There are no facts to prove anything. If the money has ruined top football for you, the majority of football is not played for silly wages or transfer fees. And some players use their money and status to help the disadvantaged. The player I talked to for ‘Can We Have Our Football Back? Is still giving away everything he earns. Whatever turns you on, there’s somewhere in the football universe that will welcome your support.
Yet there are also plenty of good people who own clubs, people who understand what the club means to locals and they run them responsibly. The squeaky wheels do tend to get all the grease, especially in the social media era, but they’re not everything.
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