| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? 13:32 - May 11 with 2958 views | Steve_M |
Is this article as bad as the first line suggests?
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 13:43 - May 11 with 2916 views | CaptainObvious |
Ctrl-A.
Ctrl-C
notepad.exe
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 13:48 - May 11 with 2896 views | Steve_M |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 13:43 - May 11 by CaptainObvious |
Ctrl-A.
Ctrl-C
notepad.exe
Ctrl-V |
Ta.
It doesn't get much better, a few halfway pertinent points contained in a load of waffly prose. All written by someone without a clue as to why people watch football. | |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 13:50 - May 11 with 2888 views | GeoffSentence |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 13:43 - May 11 by CaptainObvious |
Ctrl-A.
Ctrl-C
notepad.exe
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or
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 14:13 - May 11 with 2843 views | homer_123 |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 13:48 - May 11 by Steve_M |
Ta.
It doesn't get much better, a few halfway pertinent points contained in a load of waffly prose. All written by someone without a clue as to why people watch football. |
It's written by FIFA isn't it? |  |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 14:17 - May 11 with 2834 views | Swansea_Blue |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 13:48 - May 11 by Steve_M |
Ta.
It doesn't get much better, a few halfway pertinent points contained in a load of waffly prose. All written by someone without a clue as to why people watch football. |
"a few halfway pertinent points contained in a load of waffly prose. All written by someone without a clue"
That's the Spectator for you. Although I hadn't realised Boris had gone back to them  |  |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 14:23 - May 11 with 2822 views | Steve_M |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 14:17 - May 11 by Swansea_Blue |
"a few halfway pertinent points contained in a load of waffly prose. All written by someone without a clue"
That's the Spectator for you. Although I hadn't realised Boris had gone back to them |
They do publish Nick Cohen, probably just to get the numbers of irate comments up. | |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 14:31 - May 11 with 2803 views | C_HealyIsAPleasure |
You can see the best bits in F365's excellent Mediawatch...
(In summary - yes, yes it is) |  |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 14:46 - May 11 with 2787 views | GlasgowBlue |
I do. Ill copy and paste it for you. Not read the article yet. |  |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 14:47 - May 11 with 2785 views | GlasgowBlue |
I had 20 good years supporting Manchester United but now I follow Arsenal, and I find the treatment of the magnificent Arsène Wenger by large sections of my fellow fans mystifying and depressing. I supported Manchester United because when Rupert Murdoch bought top-tier English football in the early 1990s and started marketing it aggressively at the middle classes – who, like me, had previously had no interest in the sport – United were the only logical choice. They played pulsating, swaggering football and often scored thrilling wins from seemingly impossible situations. The young men who made up the spine of the team had grown up together in a boys’ own story and – most importantly – they had a manager in Sir Alex Ferguson who was a high priest of romance.
But then he left. And what followed has been very dull. So I stopped supporting United and started following Arsenal. Chiefly out of admiration for their dignified and daring French manager
What I like most about supporting Arsenal is the football. The club win most of their games but never sacrifice style and flair for the deadening pragmatism of results. Wenger wants only to play and to win beautifully, and in an ugly world that is something I find uplifting. ‘I am a facilitator of what is beautiful in man,’ is how he once described his football philosophy. ‘I define myself as an optimist. My never-ending struggle in this business is to release what is beautiful in man.’ To my mind, this could only be improved if it was delivered in iambic pentameter.
What I most dislike about supporting Arsenal is the fans, or at least the thousands of them who kvetch and moan endlessly about the manager, as if they were somehow indentured to a hated boss. I also dislike the all-pervading sense of entitlement they exude at every opportunity. The loathing these people feel towards a decent man like Wenger has become so vicious and twisted that this season they have taken to punching fellow Arsenal supporters at matches. Someone even paid to have an aircraft flown over the stadium trailing a banner with the cringe-inducingly impolite message: ‘Wenger out.’ The argument for defenestrating the team’s greatest—ever manager (based on trophies won) is that Arsenal have not won the league recently. The team were last crowned English champions in 2004 – Liverpool, by way of comparison, have not won it for 27 years and Newcastle for 90 years. The fact that Arsenal finished second last year and third the year before that makes no odds. Wenger has become public enemy No. 1 for failing to win the league for 13 years.
This season, the Wenger debate seems to have reached a crescendo. There is a good chance the club might finish outside the top four in the league for the first time since he became manager. Doing so would mean not qualifying for the immensely lucrative European Champions League – grist to the mill for those who want him gone. Maddeningly, he won’t say if he’ll stay.
The anger directed at Wenger is as idiotic as it is unfair and goes to the heart of a boorish culture that encourages people, men particularly, to tie up a large portion of their self-worth in the fortunes of a football team made up of people they’ve never met. In this respect, the rage at coming second is a form of self-hatred. It’s not enough any more to follow a team and to take an interest, to enjoy the ups and downs. Thanks to relentless marketing campaigns that have cynically persuaded us we must live and die by the fortunes of our team, we’re no longer mere spectators. Instead, we are our team.
You hear it endlessly on the football phone-in radio shows. Every caller speaks as if he or she had been on the pitch, orchestrating play from the centre of midfield. It’s all ‘we’ and ‘our’, never ‘they’ and ‘their’. Debbie from Bromley says: ‘We just wanted it more – we played for each other.’
We’re often told football is a religion. That’s a fine metaphor for an afternoon. It’s fun to feel a part of something bigger than ourselves, to lose our identity in the passionate mass for a little while. But the inescapable problem is that football is not really a religion. Far from it. It’s a game and also a multi-billion-pound product.
These sentiments, along with my own supporting history, are heresy in football. You cannot switch allegiance. You cannot support just for the fun of the game. Because an entire industry is geared toward suppressing objectivity and encouraging fans to feel they are members of something they can never leave, no matter how grindingly unhappy they might become with the product.
It’s an incredible feat of marketing: brand loyalty any CEO would kill for. You might buy Heinz baked beans but I suspect doing so does not make you think you are a member of the Heinz organisation. If Heinz changed the recipe and you no longer liked it, you would buy another brand of beans. But football does not work this way. Why not?
Arsène Wenger would do well to tell the so-called Arsenal supporters who daily hound him and the team he has created to go and support someone else. This would make sense, for them and for him. If fans started leaving in large numbers, perhaps he would lose his job. Conversely, in the absence of their vocal negativity, his team would likely fare better.
Arsenal have won the league 13 times in 124 years. Wenger has won it three times in 20 years, along with six FA Cups. For that, and everything he has done for the club, supporters should not be trying to get him out. Instead they should focus their energies on erecting a statue of him that will be visible from space.
Subscribe to The Spectator today for a quality of argument not found in any other publication. Get more Spectator for less — just £12 for 12 issues. | |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 15:06 - May 11 with 2744 views | WeWereZombies |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 14:47 - May 11 by GlasgowBlue |
I had 20 good years supporting Manchester United but now I follow Arsenal, and I find the treatment of the magnificent Arsène Wenger by large sections of my fellow fans mystifying and depressing. I supported Manchester United because when Rupert Murdoch bought top-tier English football in the early 1990s and started marketing it aggressively at the middle classes – who, like me, had previously had no interest in the sport – United were the only logical choice. They played pulsating, swaggering football and often scored thrilling wins from seemingly impossible situations. The young men who made up the spine of the team had grown up together in a boys’ own story and – most importantly – they had a manager in Sir Alex Ferguson who was a high priest of romance.
But then he left. And what followed has been very dull. So I stopped supporting United and started following Arsenal. Chiefly out of admiration for their dignified and daring French manager
What I like most about supporting Arsenal is the football. The club win most of their games but never sacrifice style and flair for the deadening pragmatism of results. Wenger wants only to play and to win beautifully, and in an ugly world that is something I find uplifting. ‘I am a facilitator of what is beautiful in man,’ is how he once described his football philosophy. ‘I define myself as an optimist. My never-ending struggle in this business is to release what is beautiful in man.’ To my mind, this could only be improved if it was delivered in iambic pentameter.
What I most dislike about supporting Arsenal is the fans, or at least the thousands of them who kvetch and moan endlessly about the manager, as if they were somehow indentured to a hated boss. I also dislike the all-pervading sense of entitlement they exude at every opportunity. The loathing these people feel towards a decent man like Wenger has become so vicious and twisted that this season they have taken to punching fellow Arsenal supporters at matches. Someone even paid to have an aircraft flown over the stadium trailing a banner with the cringe-inducingly impolite message: ‘Wenger out.’ The argument for defenestrating the team’s greatest—ever manager (based on trophies won) is that Arsenal have not won the league recently. The team were last crowned English champions in 2004 – Liverpool, by way of comparison, have not won it for 27 years and Newcastle for 90 years. The fact that Arsenal finished second last year and third the year before that makes no odds. Wenger has become public enemy No. 1 for failing to win the league for 13 years.
This season, the Wenger debate seems to have reached a crescendo. There is a good chance the club might finish outside the top four in the league for the first time since he became manager. Doing so would mean not qualifying for the immensely lucrative European Champions League – grist to the mill for those who want him gone. Maddeningly, he won’t say if he’ll stay.
The anger directed at Wenger is as idiotic as it is unfair and goes to the heart of a boorish culture that encourages people, men particularly, to tie up a large portion of their self-worth in the fortunes of a football team made up of people they’ve never met. In this respect, the rage at coming second is a form of self-hatred. It’s not enough any more to follow a team and to take an interest, to enjoy the ups and downs. Thanks to relentless marketing campaigns that have cynically persuaded us we must live and die by the fortunes of our team, we’re no longer mere spectators. Instead, we are our team.
You hear it endlessly on the football phone-in radio shows. Every caller speaks as if he or she had been on the pitch, orchestrating play from the centre of midfield. It’s all ‘we’ and ‘our’, never ‘they’ and ‘their’. Debbie from Bromley says: ‘We just wanted it more – we played for each other.’
We’re often told football is a religion. That’s a fine metaphor for an afternoon. It’s fun to feel a part of something bigger than ourselves, to lose our identity in the passionate mass for a little while. But the inescapable problem is that football is not really a religion. Far from it. It’s a game and also a multi-billion-pound product.
These sentiments, along with my own supporting history, are heresy in football. You cannot switch allegiance. You cannot support just for the fun of the game. Because an entire industry is geared toward suppressing objectivity and encouraging fans to feel they are members of something they can never leave, no matter how grindingly unhappy they might become with the product.
It’s an incredible feat of marketing: brand loyalty any CEO would kill for. You might buy Heinz baked beans but I suspect doing so does not make you think you are a member of the Heinz organisation. If Heinz changed the recipe and you no longer liked it, you would buy another brand of beans. But football does not work this way. Why not?
Arsène Wenger would do well to tell the so-called Arsenal supporters who daily hound him and the team he has created to go and support someone else. This would make sense, for them and for him. If fans started leaving in large numbers, perhaps he would lose his job. Conversely, in the absence of their vocal negativity, his team would likely fare better.
Arsenal have won the league 13 times in 124 years. Wenger has won it three times in 20 years, along with six FA Cups. For that, and everything he has done for the club, supporters should not be trying to get him out. Instead they should focus their energies on erecting a statue of him that will be visible from space.
Subscribe to The Spectator today for a quality of argument not found in any other publication. Get more Spectator for less — just £12 for 12 issues. |
Perhaps it is because I do not read many of such articles but I quite enjoyed that, especially:
'You cannot support just for the fun of the game. Because an entire industry is geared toward suppressing objectivity and encouraging fans to feel they are members of something they can never leave, no matter how grindingly unhappy they might become with the product. '
Sound familiar? |  |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 10:09 - May 14 with 2634 views | GlasgowBlue |
He's written a follow up piece
I have been called every name under the sun by a great many people since my defence of Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger was published in the Spectator on Thursday.
Naturally, most of the abuse has been online, but a little came my way on more traditional media. A caller to BBC Radio Ulster, for example, branded me ‘disgusting’.
My favourite insult came from Piers Morgan, whom I admire tremendously. Without any trace of irony, he dismissed me to his six million Twitter followers as an ‘agent provocateur’. But perhaps, coming from him, this wasn’t really an insult.
According to the vast majority of my abusers, my crime was not my support for the embattled Wenger, although it must be said not everyone agreed with my position. Instead, my crime was switching allegiance from supporting Manchester United to supporting Arsenal. Or, at least, admitting to it.
The concept of doing such a thing was, and continues to be, mind-blowing for the Twitter intelligentsia. Unthinkable. The rage I encountered made that obvious. But maddeningly, for me, not one single person of the thousands who took the time to send vitriol my way explained why what I had done was so bad. No one bothered to tell me why it is not alright to choose to change the football team you support. I’d genuinely love to know.
The more I think about it, the more obvious it seems football clubs in this country and around the world are pulling off the greatest legal con job in the history of commerce.
Fans, all too easily made idiotic with love for their team, are being bled dry by clubs that care not one jot for them beyond their ability to keep unquestioningly stumping up increasingly large amounts of money, no matter what product is delivered on the pitch.
They can do this thanks to a culture they and broadcasters have cynically propagated that tells fans they can never change allegiance, that they are part of something, without ever explaining why or exactly what. Nothing else in life inspires this unthinking, expensive and pitiful loyalty. It’s insane.
I’ve also discovered through the abuse I have received that fans, like ecstatic cuckolds, wear the misery inflicted on them by their beloved clubs as a badge of honour. There is competitiveness in their despair and devotion. Who loves the club the most? Who has suffered the most and is therefore the most ‘real’?
The romance that surrounds football is utterly one sided and it makes fans horribly vulnerable to being taken advantage of, which is what is happening. Football clubs are not in any way romantic. Like drug dealers, they are hard-eyed, commercially-minded and out for everything they can get. Luckily for them, they have literally millions of doped-out patsies to fleece week after week after week, year after year after year.
The abuse I received was mostly very funny, but also enlightening. There is a cultural message so constant it’s become like the car alarm we’ve stopped hearing, despite its immense volume and clarity: your football club does not love you, no matter how much you love it. It has only contempt for you.
Shoot the messenger all you like. That’s the truth.
This is us isn't it
"The more I think about it, the more obvious it seems football clubs in this country and around the world are pulling off the greatest legal con job in the history of commerce.
Fans, all too easily made idiotic with love for their team, are being bled dry by clubs that care not one jot for them beyond their ability to keep unquestioningly stumping up increasingly large amounts of money, no matter what product is delivered on the pitch." | |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 10:49 - May 14 with 2578 views | WD19 |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 15:06 - May 11 by WeWereZombies |
Perhaps it is because I do not read many of such articles but I quite enjoyed that, especially:
'You cannot support just for the fun of the game. Because an entire industry is geared toward suppressing objectivity and encouraging fans to feel they are members of something they can never leave, no matter how grindingly unhappy they might become with the product. '
Sound familiar? |
The whole piece is Trolltastic. |  | | |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 13:28 - May 14 with 2505 views | LankHenners |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 10:09 - May 14 by GlasgowBlue |
He's written a follow up piece
I have been called every name under the sun by a great many people since my defence of Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger was published in the Spectator on Thursday.
Naturally, most of the abuse has been online, but a little came my way on more traditional media. A caller to BBC Radio Ulster, for example, branded me ‘disgusting’.
My favourite insult came from Piers Morgan, whom I admire tremendously. Without any trace of irony, he dismissed me to his six million Twitter followers as an ‘agent provocateur’. But perhaps, coming from him, this wasn’t really an insult.
According to the vast majority of my abusers, my crime was not my support for the embattled Wenger, although it must be said not everyone agreed with my position. Instead, my crime was switching allegiance from supporting Manchester United to supporting Arsenal. Or, at least, admitting to it.
The concept of doing such a thing was, and continues to be, mind-blowing for the Twitter intelligentsia. Unthinkable. The rage I encountered made that obvious. But maddeningly, for me, not one single person of the thousands who took the time to send vitriol my way explained why what I had done was so bad. No one bothered to tell me why it is not alright to choose to change the football team you support. I’d genuinely love to know.
The more I think about it, the more obvious it seems football clubs in this country and around the world are pulling off the greatest legal con job in the history of commerce.
Fans, all too easily made idiotic with love for their team, are being bled dry by clubs that care not one jot for them beyond their ability to keep unquestioningly stumping up increasingly large amounts of money, no matter what product is delivered on the pitch.
They can do this thanks to a culture they and broadcasters have cynically propagated that tells fans they can never change allegiance, that they are part of something, without ever explaining why or exactly what. Nothing else in life inspires this unthinking, expensive and pitiful loyalty. It’s insane.
I’ve also discovered through the abuse I have received that fans, like ecstatic cuckolds, wear the misery inflicted on them by their beloved clubs as a badge of honour. There is competitiveness in their despair and devotion. Who loves the club the most? Who has suffered the most and is therefore the most ‘real’?
The romance that surrounds football is utterly one sided and it makes fans horribly vulnerable to being taken advantage of, which is what is happening. Football clubs are not in any way romantic. Like drug dealers, they are hard-eyed, commercially-minded and out for everything they can get. Luckily for them, they have literally millions of doped-out patsies to fleece week after week after week, year after year after year.
The abuse I received was mostly very funny, but also enlightening. There is a cultural message so constant it’s become like the car alarm we’ve stopped hearing, despite its immense volume and clarity: your football club does not love you, no matter how much you love it. It has only contempt for you.
Shoot the messenger all you like. That’s the truth.
This is us isn't it
"The more I think about it, the more obvious it seems football clubs in this country and around the world are pulling off the greatest legal con job in the history of commerce.
Fans, all too easily made idiotic with love for their team, are being bled dry by clubs that care not one jot for them beyond their ability to keep unquestioningly stumping up increasingly large amounts of money, no matter what product is delivered on the pitch." |
"Piers Morgan, whom I admire tremendously"
Certified wrong'un confirmed. |  |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 15:02 - May 14 with 2453 views | WeWereZombies |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 13:28 - May 14 by LankHenners |
"Piers Morgan, whom I admire tremendously"
Certified wrong'un confirmed. |
Yep, my opinion of the first piece has been turned 180 degrees by that endorsement. His is a city boy viewpoint, not realising that if you come from a footballing Town you will support only one team for all your life. Still, the assertions about the manipulative, uncaring and Machiavellian nature of the business operations of all clubs still rings true. And it has been said many times before and we all know it but carry on looking at the world through blue tinted glasses. | |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 16:59 - May 14 with 2396 views | J2BLUE |
There's only one thing that pisses me off more than people switching teams and that is switching teams and then attacking people who give them stick for it.
If you swap teams after the age of 13 you are a c#nt who should be hung. End of. |  |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 05:23 - May 15 with 2294 views | Johnhoz |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 10:49 - May 14 by WD19 |
The whole piece is Trolltastic. |
Yes. It really is splendid work.
"Nothing else in life inspires this unthinking, expensive and pitiful loyalty. It’s insane." |  |
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| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 07:46 - May 15 with 2251 views | hoppy |
| Anyone have a Spectator subscription? on 13:28 - May 14 by LankHenners |
"Piers Morgan, whom I admire tremendously"
Certified wrong'un confirmed. |
He's probably also got a Man Utd/Arsenal half and half scarf too... |  |
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