Everything Is Alright

All of the following is a lie. It will never happen.

August

Phil Jones’ Manchester United début is cast into doubt after it emerges that the central defender is actually an arbitrarily-generated player from the videogame Football Manager 2011. “It’s a shame that he’s not actually real,” mumbles United’s assistant coach Mike Phelan, expressing an opinion, “because we had him pencilled in for the weekend. We should have noticed something was wrong when we saw his incredibly generic name, and in retrospect he does look a bit pixelly.”

The opening day of the Premier League season sees Andy Carroll ruled out for eight weeks with a collapsed fetlock. Michel Salgado, who was playing in a different game, is banned for ten matches because it had to be somebody’s fault. The Prime Minister announces a zero-tolerance policy on violent full-backs with great hair, declaring them “the single greatest threat to that Enormous Society thingy”.

Jack Wilshere buries his studs in somebody’s thigh and nobody notices, except the man whose thigh suddenly resembles a fleshy colander. Wilshere tweets something about giving 110%, and forms the Honest Tackle Preservation Society.

It is revealed that Joleon Lescott earns a basic wage of thirty-five thousand pounds a minute. The Manchester City defender buys a majority stake in the Bank of England and demands that they print more minutes.

September

Arsène Wenger absolutely loses his shit. “Look, I’m not going to buy a tall, experienced central defender. Sébastien Squillaci is thirty-one and over six foot and he’s not very good” wrote the Arsenal manager in his programme notes ahead of the game against Swansea. “Thomas Vermaelen, on the other hand, is in his mid-twenties and under six foot, and he’s very good. Furthermore, I am considerably better at coaching a football team than all of you put together.”

International week happens, and everyone cares so little about it that they pick apart both England fixtures with surgically masochistic glee. “I would give Capello a five out of ten at best” explains one fan who probably only watched the game and formed a detailed opinion on it ironically.

The second round of World Cup qualifiers begins in the CONCACAF region, and Canada playmaker Dwayne De Rosario proclaims that he would “literally devour my own eyeball” to play at Brazil 2014. MLS commissioner Don Garber, recognising an opportunity to grow the league, hastily arranges an All-Star Eye-Gouge at the Rose Bowl, with Chelsea competing against a team of MLS All-Stars to prepare the tastiest garnish for De Rosario’s ocular jelly.

With nothing to separate the two garnishes, MLS All-Stars win because they used a square plate. Joleon Lescott hires Landon Donovan as a pastry chef.

October

The Champions League group stages intensify, and it becomes apparent that poor performances by the French teams are due to all the players in Ligue Un having been bought by Newcastle United. “It is ridiculous” shrugs Olympique Lyonnais chairman Jean-Michel Aulas, struggling for breath having just put in a real midfield shift against Shakhtar Donetsk, “they – they’ve got all the players. There aren’t any more.”

In Serie A, Roma coach Luis Enrique faces a tactical conundrum. “In the last game Francesco Totti did, statistically, absolutely bugger all” said the former Spain midfielder, “Look at this spreadsheet. Kilometres run: zero. Passes attempted: zero. He just stood in the centre circle with his hands on his hips, swivelling around and demanding the ball.”

November

In the Bundesliga, the titanic clusterfuck at the management level of Bayern Munich results in statements by one member of the club’s hierarchy being immediately contradicted by another. “Yes, Leighton Baines is a player we are very interested in” says Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, ending a sentence with a preposition. “We will certainly be attempting an audacious summer swoop.”

“I don’t know who Leighton Baines is” said Uli Hoeness five minutes earlier, “is he a nineteenth-century industrialist?”

“We were never at war with Eurasia” confirms Franz Beckenbauer.

Jack Wilshere has bits of Yorkshire pudding between his teeth, and forms the Tapas Bar Condemnation Affiliates. Joleon Lescott buys St Peter’s Basilica “as a sort of summer house.”

December

Manchester United slump out of the Champions League after Sir Alex Ferguson is diagnosed with a case of quivering jowls, forcing Mike Phelan to take charge for the crunch game at Lyon. “I forgot that he isn’t real” says the charismatic assistant of the decision to pick Phil Jones. “He had a tackling stat of eighteen, and twenty for anticipation. I’m not made of stone. Credit has to go to Lyon, though, they exploited the space well. Aulas’ run from deep for the winner was worthy of deciding any game.”

There are calls for a public inquiry after a hundred thousand football fans all claim to be the only one who likes Mario Balotelli. The Italian striker marks the occasion by doing something utterly despicable, like wearing sandals or not jumping for an aerial ball.

Preston North End, flying high in League One, suffer a blow as manager Phil Brown returns to the Hull City job. “My ambition is as boundless as my talent, which is really fucking boundless” grins the hideously-tinted headset-wielder. “I will take this club to the very top – and back again.” Also in the Championship, Ian Holloway says something and everybody laughs at all the right bits.

In La Liga, a midweek round of fixtures sees several games experience chilly and rather bracing weather.

January

Midfielder Michael Bradley, son of United States coach Bob, changes his name to avoid being tarnished by association with his father’s unpopularity. “I’m so sick of being blamed for dad’s tactical substitutions, man” whinges the Gladbach player, “It’s like there’s so much focus on me during games, I just want to be less conspicuous. And I think Prometheus T. Badass is a better name anyway.” Bob Bradley does not comment, either because he isn’t available or because journalists are scared of him as he looks a little bit like Voldemort.

Swansea City are roundly patronised after holding Chelsea to a 1-1 draw. Scott Sinclair, who scored the Swans’ goal, is asked how it felt to score against his former club. He can’t remember the last time he scored a goal against a club he’s never played for.

Jack Wilshere is knighted in the New Year’s Honours List for “services to Tudor houses, antique tables, billiards & cetera.” It emerges that Joleon Lescott has become the heir to several baronetcies in the East Midlands.

February

The Premier League forecasts a record number of Swoops, Warchests and Snappings-Up for the fiscal year 2011-12. “Seriously you guys” says chief executive Richard Scudamore to Top Top Sky Sources, “that yellow ticker thing at the bottom of the screen is going to go literally bananas.”

A hotly-anticipated fixture at Old Trafford sees Manchester United’s team of wingers take on Liverpool’s élite squadron of energetic central midfielders. Javier Hernández, United’s only central player, receives the ball in midfield and looks up to see a stampede of thigh-pumping homegrown box-to-boxers razing the turf in his direction. He has but a split second to think about the wrath that’s about to set down on him.

March

Manchester United go fifteen points clear at the top of the table, and Mike Phelan is hired as Barcelona assistant coach. “This is an outrage” barks Sir Alex Ferguson, jowls a-quiver, “Now I will have to go without a number two for the rest of the season.” The massed ranks of the press are too scared to giggle.

Controversy in the Premier League as thirty minutes of injury time are added to the end of a match at Craven Cottage which the home side are losing 1-0. Fulham go on to win 3-1, and the referee’s report explains that “thirty minutes were added onto the end of this game due to numerous time-wasting tactics employed by the away side, and also because Fulham are just really nice. Look at this lovely ground. Nobody wants them to lose.”

A disciplinary hearing is cancelled after it transpires that nobody does mind all that much because Fulham really are just lovely.

April

Disaster at the Nou Camp as Barcelona are are knocked out of the Champions League by Borussia Dortmund. Kevin Groβkreutz sneaks in a hat-trick, but the continent is far too busy getting angry at Sergio Busquets to notice until they see the score in the morning papers. It also turns out that Busquets was actually rather badly hurt, and everybody feels bad for a while.

Hull City knock Tottenham Hotspur out of the FA Cup, and Phil Brown immediately changes the club’s name to The PB Amber-And-Blacks Feel The Force FC.

Luis Enrique substitutes Francesco Totti in the eighty-sixth minute and is immediately sacked.

May

The Premier League draws to a close with Norwich City already relegated, proving once and for all that being an intelligent and multilingual coach never got anyone anywhere. The league’s final day sees Blackburn and Sunderland join the Canaries in the Championship. Many distraught fans still haven’t learned not to wear fancy dress for the final game if your team might be relegated. The rest of the nation is treated to the sight of a grown man crying real actual tears while dressed as a banana.

Manchester City spectacularly win the title after overhauling United’s fifteen-point lead. Joleon Lescott wears a pair of enormously opulent trousers for their final game against QPR.

The PB Amber-And-Blacks Feel The Force FC beat Arsenal in the FA Cup final. Jack Wilshere has a particularly bad game, but it’s okay because he was thinking about the Queen.

Lyon become the second French team to win the Champions League, a team of their former managers overcoming Dortmund in Munich. Raymond Domenech scores the winner, somehow making himself even more unpopular in the bits of France not named Lyon.

With Euro 2012 approaching, things are looking up for England as nobody really expects them to win. The pre-tournament friendlies are encouraging, with Fabio Capello having finally settled on a system that solves the Lampard/Sidwell midfield conundrum. The Three Lions look good for a spirited quarter-final exit, and everybody is pretty much okay with that.

Football has happened for another season, and everything is alright.

The "Traditional" England XI

As is routine following an England team's tournament exit, a lot has been written and said about the U21's tactics and general style of play since their elimination on Sunday. Not for the first time, it seems that a fair amount of supporters were unimpressed with England's attempts at "the passing game". However, instead of bemoaning the players' lack of technical quality or calling for better coaching at grass roots levels, a rather loud minority indicated that their dismay on this occasion was because England had strayed too far from their roots; that the ol' kick-and-rush, for all its flaws, at least showed respect for national tradition.

With that in mind, I've put together a new setup for the senior team which recalls those good old days: no-nonsense, hard as nails centre-backs with real passion; no-nonsense, hard-as-nails full-backs with real passion; no-nonsense, hard-as-nails midfielders with... you get the drift.

Essentially, there's a keeper that can kick the ball into the opponents' box from his, eight hatchet men and two wingers. This way, the next time England get eliminated from a tournament their fans can say that they at least went out their way: with a pass completion rate below 50%, and with Johnny Foreigner bloodied and bruised, ruing the day he stepped onto the same pitch as England's brave boys.

The starting eleven:

GK - Paul Robinson

DR - Andy Wilkinson
DL - Paul Robinson
DC - Ryan Shawcross
DC - Phil Jagielka
MR - Jermaine Pennant
ML - Matthew Etherington
MC - Kevin Nolan (as the XI's most inspirational player, he gets the armband)
MC - Joey Barton
ST - Kevin Davies
ST - Andy Carroll

Substitutes:

Joe Hart, Zat Knight, Leighton Baines, Karl Henry, Dean Whitehead, Matt Jarvis, Jermain Defoe.

Manager:

Sam Allardyce.

Assistants:
Baddiel and Skinner.

Doesn't that fill you with pride? I'm bursting with patriotism just thinking about it. ...or perhaps "the passing game" wasn't so bad after all.

A Tribute to Edwin van der Sar

Just got home from training

Every day so draining

Got to sit down, take a rest from the sport

Imagination sets in

Purty soon I'm singin'

Doo, doo, doo, sortin’ out my back four

Awful shot from Gibson

Dimi’s reading Ibsen

Wes Brown’s making daisy chains and Nani’s on the floor

Taking a short throw-in

Injures Michael Owen

Doo, doo, doo, sortin’ out my back four

Giggs is playing left-back

And we’re losing to West Ham

Upson looks exactly like a spoon

Doo doo doo

Win the league tomorrow

Today I have no sorrows

Doo, doo, doo, sortin’ out my back four

Seven mil for Bébé

And Evans can’t defend

Can’t we pick a side based on current form?

Doo doo doo

Kuszczak out of position

I’ve got no competition

Doo, doo, doo, sortin’ out my back four

Xavi’s pass to Busquets

Ando’s eating biscuits

Look at all the crowds of people feeling so forlorn

Bother me tomorrow

Today I'll buy no sorrows

Doo

Doo

Doo

Sortin’ out

My

Back

Four.

The Day They Knocked Down The Palais

The film Frost/Nixon captures brilliantly the moment of Nixon’s almost self-inflicted condemnation. The “trial he never had” was made more extraordinary by the uniquely televisual way in which it unravelled. The momentary widening of David Frost’s eyes, the near-imperceptible knitting of his brow, Nixon’s uncomfortable shifting in his seat: it was a moment in which politics and television became inextricable.

It’s difficult to say when football’s relationship with television came of age in a similar way (a pretty sturdy bet might be the 1994 World Cup, a tournament bookended by hyper-televisual penalty misses), but it’s easy to picture how the international football landscape looked prior to that always well-defined process of globalisation.

Clearly it was the sort of bleak, brooding, uncharted affair usually reserved for dinosaur movies and Wigan Athletic home games. In 1966, Johan Cruyff shook off his shroud of mist to administer a 5-1 thumping of Shankly’s Liverpool. Pelé, of course, lurched from the gloom only every four years. Without the proliferation of televised football, the build-up to every international or continental tournament would carry with it an extra dimension of exotic anticipation.

Then the self-contained cultures of football started to be undercut by concepts like branding, marketability and Oleg Salenko. The game is now a global cultural mode, and it’s impossible to imagine a modern international tournament replicating that sparkle of the unknown.

Or perhaps it isn’t.

Seventeen years after the 1994 World Cup, the United States is hosting another tournament. The CONCACAF Gold Cup is a regional competition for the national teams of North and Central America and the Caribbean, and it’s made me think again about the ubiquity of global football.

Take Cuba, for instance. Every member of the Cuban national team plays his club football within the domestic league, about which relatively little is known (or, at least, about which I know relatively little). There was a degree of intrigue around the team that took the field in Dallas for the tournament opener. My northern European eyes were seduced by their technical dexterity, their slick mastery of the central third of the pitch.

That mastery, as it turned out, came at the expense of any influence in the other areas of the field. Cuba lost 5-0 but I, a child of the late eighties, was already hooked on the anachronistic frisson of watching a team from the ether. It’s the same story with El Salvador: Rodolfo Zelaya’s free-kick golazo against Costa Rica was more thrilling than if David Beckham or Lionel Messi had done the same, not because it was better but because I had no idea who he was.

And Canada! What a spectacle. I already knew the names of the Canadian players, indeed had watched most of them play for their clubs. But I’d never seen the national team before, and it seemed far more exotic than a side featuring a man named Terry Dunfield has any right to be. It felt like I might have been watching Mexico ’86. By the time Canada brought on Jonathan Beaulieu-Bourgault of the retro-tastic Preuβen Münster, I was already smitten with the Gold Cup.

With all the qualifiers and caveats that such a statement entails, I don’t lament the advent of the television and information age. I love nothing more than watching and learning about football wherever it’s played, and that’s easier now than ever before. But, as someone whose experience of football lies exclusively within the shiny and marketed, the Scudamored and Blatterized, stumbling across this piece of low-key romanticism is a rare treat. So please, for the sake of Cruyff and Pelé and a biannual few weeks of old style wide-eyed incredulity, never tell me who takes free-kicks for El Salvador.

I'm In Love But I'm Lazy

The US national team is part of that élite group referred to in England by their demonym rather than by the name of the country. At the last World Cup, for instance, England were shut out by Algeria after drawing against the Americans. They beat Slovenia but they lost to the Germans. It could be regarded as something of a badge of honour, like being criticised by the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

Last summer, an English football website published a link to footage of American fans celebrating Landon Donovan’s goal against Algeria. Readers were advised to ignore the “obnoxious” chanting of “USA! USA! USA!”

Chanting the team’s name following a goal – a historic goal, in this case – is not unusual, and it’s curious that it should be considered obnoxious when Americans are doing it. Clearly that’s in part an extension of a tedious stereotype, that of the brash, overweight and stupid American. Stereotypes like that make me gnash my poorly-maintained teeth and spit out my tea with rage.

The contempt for those fans is only part of a wider distaste for the US game. Major League Soccer is seen as a retirement league. Perhaps until Clint Dempsey’s success at Fulham, US players were good despite their origin, not because of it. There’s very little discussion in England of the American style of play, or the types of player that the country produces.

Why is that? There must be more to it than lazy national stereotyping.

Immediately, the word itself springs to mind. Soccer. It’s become the symbol of America’s perceived failure to understand the sport. But the word “soccer” - and, in any case, it's of English origin - isn’t the issue here, it’s just a punchline. It’s the front of the hotel.

Is it the NASL’s fault? Those dreamlike years of Pelé and Beckenbauer sauntering in Glorious Technicolor between incongruous gridiron markings? Those were dizzyingly glamorous times for an English audience to whom the likes of Cruyff and Pelé were semi-mythical figures, looming out of the mist only every few years to win a World Cup or knock Everton out of Europe.

The seeds the NASL sowed, though, have sprouted into something pernicious and lingering: a perception that US soccer is gleamingly insincere and fundamentally superficial. Altogether less real.

Towering over the whole issue is the idea that the United States is not a football country. Obviously soccer is far from the most popular sport; rather it occupies an incrementally-growing niche. Football isn’t the most-watched sport in Ireland either, but to denigrate Irish fans of the game would rightly be seen as absurd and unfair. Other Non-Football Countries might include Japan, or the hosts of the last World Cup.

Included in the Not A Football Country package is the perceived lack of history, which is a feature of English attitudes toward America in general. It’s a misreading – America has a long history of involvement in the game, particularly in places like Seattle and Portland. Philadelphia had a hardcore of fans before the city even got a team. Admittedly the game has never been as explicitly wrapped up in national identity as it is in Europe, but the US has its rivalries and heroes, its narratives and triumphs and tragedies.

Of course there’s also an enormous amount of possessiveness tied up in this. We invented football. Not codified, not exported – invented. The game belongs to the English, and Wembley is its home. The English are very uncomfortable with the idea that football has become bigger than them, that it doesn’t need them anymore. It only takes a quick glance at FIFA to see it for yourself.

There’s a protectiveness that goes hand-in-hand with that. What with America’s hegemony in nearly every other sphere – politics, economics, popular culture – football is pretty much the only thing England has left. All the while is the uncomfortable thought that if America, with the size of its population and economy, started taking football seriously it’d be a powerhouse of the world game. As a Mexican fan said in Simon Kuper’s Football Against The Enemy: “When the Americans [there it is again] like something, they take it over.”

It all adds up to resentment, and that manifests itself through the familiar prism of snark and disdain. Americans in general, and soccer fans in particular, are fair game in England, which is tremendously unjust.

It’s no exaggeration to say that, while the typical English person certainly knows more about the game than the average American, the average American soccer fan is considerably better informed than their English equivalent. Ask a non-football fan in each country to name every footballer they could think of, and the Brit would come out on top. Ask a football fan in each country to list the teams in Serie A, though, and the results would be rather different.

That’s nothing to do with the intelligence of either party, but the fact that every British newspaper is stuffed full of football news from on and off the field. The evening news on a Saturday will always tell you whether Manchester United won or lost. In the United States the coverage is there, but only if you look for it. It’s much more difficult to be a casual fan in the US, because you have to know which bar shows the Bundesliga instead of the NFL. For precisely that reason, the US soccer blogging landscape is sprawling and fearsomely knowledgeable. The fanbase in America is smaller but more committed, while the British fanbase is enormous but with a far lower proportion of diehards and fanatics.

Is there any chance of the perception changing? Not anytime soon, it seems. Success on the international stage certainly doesn’t change much: the US national team has taken part in more World Cups than many “football countries”, for instance Paraguay. It got as far as England in the 2010 tournament, indeed came a great deal closer to reaching the quarter-finals. But it's difficult to see a successful US team being met with anything other than resentment. Those Americans again with their insistence on being good at things.

What might have more of an impact is the slow growth of MLS. The league’s commissioner Don Garber is forever talking about growing the sport, about expanding to new markets and producing better home-grown players. And gradually the league is becoming less reliant on fading overseas superstars. Lothar Matthäus was almost forty when he went to MLS in 2000, whereas David Beckham and Thierry Henry were both thirty-one. Past their best, sure, but neither of them washed-up has-beens. Real Salt Lake notably won the 2009 title without any Designated Players (those players, like Beckham, for whom a club is permitted to break the salary cap).

It’s nothing new to say that English attitudes to football are held back by a pervasive sense of its own history. But it’s worth considering that almost every country has a football history too, however important it might be to their national sense of self. As Tim Vickery always says, football is a universal language that we speak with different accents. And it seems like what we have here is a failure to communicate.