Everyone agreed that Call of Duty’s Warzone needed a miracle to save it. Then that miracle came in Verdansk, and now everything seems rosy again. But whereas Warzone was bleeding out and in need of reviving, Football is in a state of cardiac arrest.
The days of talents like Ronaldinho and Zinedine Zidane are long gone. These days, excitement is being suffocated by over-coaching and over-officiating, which is leading the younger generation to find other interests. So, where did it all go wrong, and how do we resuscitate the sport we grew up adoring?
The Good Old Days of Football
Imagine the excitement. You come home from a long day at school and eat your dinner while chatting to your parents about what you’d learned that day. You then ask your dad what time the game is on that evening. He tells you 8 pm, and you start counting the hours until kick-off.
With about half an hour to go, you find your team’s kit in your wardrobe, which has your name on the back with the number of your favourite player. As you’re walking downstairs, you hear the classic Champions League music and take your seat in the living room between your dad and your brother. The adrenaline of your team scoring a winning goal in the last minute makes the risk of losing so worth it.
I’ve mentioned a few players of that generation already. Ronaldinho and Zidane were my favourites, but many others were worth watching. Every game seemed to be capped with a moment of brilliance. There was Zidane’s volley, Steven Gerrard inspiring the comeback of Istanbul, or my favourite being when Ronaldinho forced Stamford Bridge into silence by toe-poking the ball past Petr Cech. I could go on and on.
The Statistical Revolution
A new style of play was beginning to form in the mid-2000s. Jose Mourinho won the Champions League with Porto in 2004 by analysing the probability of conceding goals if his team defended in a certain way. He worked out that if he defended deep in his half, then the chances of the opposition scoring would reduce drastically. It was the equivalent of hiring out a bus and parking it in front of the goal. Even some of the greatest players struggled to score against such a defensive system.
Unfortunately for Mourinho, a young manager called Pep Guardiola had found a counter method. In placing his wingers as wide as possible, he would stretch the opposition’s defence until gaps would appear. One clinical pass was then all it took to break through the defensive block and score.
For a few years, Guardiola and Mourinho fought each other for the biggest titles in football, both winning Champions Leagues around the turn of the decade into the 2010s. Fast forward another decade, and Guardiola was winning a historic treble with Manchester City, while Mourinho had to settle for the UEFA Conference League. With Manchester City primed to have their full-backs ping the ball across their opponent’s six-yard box in every attack, defensive teams simply could not cope with the onslaught of the same, repetitive game plan for ninety minutes.
The Death of Showmanship – Over-coaching
Once managers were able to get their hands on the minutest of details, like how fast a player can run or how consistently they can control the ball in tight areas, the profile of a footballer changed enormously. Street footballers like Eric Cantona and Dennis Bergkamp, who scored some of the most memorable goals in Premier League history, were sidelined for athletes who were guaranteed to beat them in a sprint to the ball.
The intensity of a football match increased, causing the quality to decrease. As FIFA is determined to increase the number of matches teams are obliged to play, fatigue is inevitably going to play a part in decreasing that quality even further.
Twenty years ago, the most exciting moment in a game was when the winger had the ball. He would try to take on his marker or take a shot at goal because he backed his ability. These days, I’m losing my mind when decent players like Jack Grealish and Phil Foden are being forced to play the ball back to their full-back when they find themselves in a good position. It’s agonising for the supporters.
I spoke to an elderly gentleman who had watched football ever since he was a young man. He had a season ticket at Tottenham Hotspur during the sixties and continued supporting them for all of his life. Yet when I spoke to him, he said he no longer watched any games because it just wasn’t the sport he remembered. The excitement had disappeared.
Years ago, fans judged players on what they saw happen on the pitch. People knew that Pele and Diego Maradona were the greatest players of their generations because they could do things that the other players couldn’t. Then came the obsession with the goals-to-game ratio. There are people out there who believe that Ronaldo Nazario doesn’t belong with the all-time greats because of his statistics. Let me remind you that this was a man who received a standing ovation at Old Trafford, even after his potentially career-ending injuries.
Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo each have an insane goals-to-game ratio, but they played in a much weaker era of football, with the only competent defenders being Virgil Van Dijk and Sergio Ramos. Erling Haaland has scored a ridiculous number of goals, but if you watched a compilation of his greatest goals on YouTube, before comparing it to a video of Thierry Henry’s best goals, you’d see how football has evolved.
Where has the passion gone? – Over-officiating
When the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) was announced, most fans were optimistic. We’ve all witnessed some appalling decisions through the years, but Frank Lampard’s ‘goal’ against Germany was the turning point. As the ball struck the bar and looped downwards across the line, everybody could see that it was a goal except the referee and the linesman. The pressure became too much for FIFA, and they decided to introduce technology into the game. Goal-line technology works because there isn’t a human operating it. Whereas VAR doesn’t work because there is still the possibility of human error.
Martin Tyler told us that we’d never witness a moment like Aguero’s last-minute goal against Queens Park Rangers again, and he’s right because VAR probably would have overturned it due to an offside that only they could see.
The days when you could celebrate a goal in your team’s stadium with your friends are over. Instead, you have to wait patiently in your seat while some men in a building that’s hours away from the stadium study the passage of play thoroughly. They consult their guidebook and realise that they need to draw some lines to check an offside.
The only issue with that is that straight lines are useless if they’re at the wrong angle, yet the right angle is impossible to find because there aren’t enough cameras at the stadium. If a dentist can’t see the tooth he’s drilling into, he doesn’t just guess where it is and continue. He says he can’t do it and reconsiders his options. If that process takes longer than a minute, then give the on-field decision. For offside, why not benefit the attacker so that we can have a bit more excitement as fans? Anything to liven up the snoozefest of a 0-0 draw.
When Manchester United and Arsenal were both in their prime around the turn of the millennium, everybody watched them face each other because there was almost always a brawl. The rivalry between Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira is still spoken about today because of the passion that both players displayed. If a player shows even a quarter of that passion now, they’re immediately yellow-carded.
This has meant that games rarely ever become open or exciting because every time they do, the referee has an anxiety attack and decides to book a player for a fair challenge. If players even think about putting in a slide tackle, they’ll be red-carded because the VAR has slowed the image down to make it look as though they’ve fly-kicked someone.
It honestly feels like a referee can overthink a game so much the night before that their game plan is to hand out yellow cards early just to keep a lid on things. This game plan then backfires when a player they’ve yellow-carded harshly then makes a desperate lunge for the ball. Do they give him a second yellow, angering one team? Or do they show some leniency, angering the other team? Either way, they’re sucking the enjoyment out of the sport.
The People’s Game
In the previous century, football was the people’s game. The general population could afford to go and watch the team they support week in/week out without taking out a second mortgage. A young person would walk over to the local field and find it teeming with life, as groups of youngsters played matches against other groups. If one person had a football, he would usually make plenty of friends.
Fans would flood down to the nearest pub to watch the big game that weekend with a few of their mates, with drinks being reasonably affordable. Not many games were televised, but then not everyone had televisions anyway.
Then the big television companies stuck their teeth into football, and they’ve never released it since. In this modern technological age, there isn’t one streaming service that we can subscribe to and access every game whenever we want. No, we have to pay ridiculously high prices just to be able to watch one or two games each weekend. Most of the games on a Saturday aren’t on any streaming service, so a Sky Sports subscription usually gives you the enthralling match-up of West Ham against Ipswich Town. Now that’s bang for your buck. Oh, and if you want to watch the midweek Champions League games, that’s a different streaming service.
And if you’re really bored, at half time you get to listen to Roy Keane moan about people not doing their jobs like he’s a Karen at a restaurant who messed up his order. Either that or you’ll have to endure Gary Neville or Jamie Carragher saying something controversial with a smug look on their face, just so they can remain relevant. The managers and players are media trained now, so you can forget about them showing any personality in their interviews. Bring back Kevin Keegan.
With watching the game on TV out of the question, the next option is to buy a ticket to watch the game in the stadium. But how do you do that? These days, you have to pay for a membership package with money that goes straight into the chairman’s pocket, before you can even see the prices of the standard seats. Those seats are so high up that if your eyesight is any worse than exceptional, you’ll need binoculars just to see which team has control of the ball.
The kids who would play football for hours at the local field in whatever weather are now choosing to stay at home instead. So their options for enjoying the football are either, watch the two-minute highlight videos on YouTube, or don’t. The majority of them choose the latter option.
How do you resurrect a dying sport?
The financial side of football needs to be re-evaluated. For too long, the richest team in the league has usually been the team that wins the league title. This then creates a thirst for other competing clubs to make as much revenue as possible to bridge the gap. This structure only punishes the fans who pay their own money just to witness the same headlines every season. Adjusting the Financial Fair Play rules appropriately would release the chokehold that clubs are forced to operate under, leading to healthier competition and different styles of play other than the tried and tested.
The most important issue to address is finding a way to get the younger generation interested in football again. To start with, a new philosophy which prioritises showmanship over results would generate more excitement in fans. Nobody wants to watch highlight reels of tap-ins. Watching Neymar humiliate his opponent with a skill no one has seen before will inspire kids to get out and try the move themselves. Then you have kids playing football on the fields with their friends again.
Unlike Warzone, the football industry hasn’t had a major drop in revenue. This means that football is safe, for now, and that no drastic changes will be made in the short term. As fans who long for the excitement of the glory days again, it seems our only option is to watch the sport we love slowly decline into obscurity.
The World Cup in America next year is the perfect opportunity to reignite the fire that burned so brightly for so many years. While the previous European Championships created a stench of vulgarity, which probably put a lot of fans off the sport. The World Cup next year has the potential to be magical, if some of the issues I’ve highlighted are addressed beforehand.
Either way, I’m sure I’ll be invested by the time the tournament comes around, but I don’t know whether I’ll watch the games live or just catch the highlights afterwards.
