Falling out of love with football: a fan’s lament

There is, in many ways, nothing new in what I’m about to write. Many football fans of a certain generation have trodden the same wearied, disenchanted route. What I’m about to discuss — the corrosion of Pele’s beautiful game into a monstrous, commercial behemoth, crushing anyone in its elephantine, bloated path — has been going on for over 30 years. But as someone who was once so in love with football, it was my biggest passion in life, it’s hard to take. Hard to deal with. All I know is: the dystopian, soulless, hollow ‘product’ available to football fans across the globe at the touch of a button (and the payment of a monthly ransom fee) is now entirely unrecognisable.

I was a child of the 1980s. Goodness knows, many things about football — especially English football — of that time needed to change. Stadiums were a dilapidated disgrace (including Wembley itself: once the most famous sporting arena in the world, it was the planet’s largest urinal by its final years); hooliganism was rife, so going to matches wasn’t at all safe; fans were treated by the police and government as though we were sub-human. In different ways, Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough were all inevitable consequences: lack of safety regulations, shockingly poor governance at domestic and continental level, the tabloid press all too quick to label football supporters as deranged, wild animals.

Things were so awful that the Thatcher government proposed an ID card scheme for all fans; while Ken Bates even came up with the idea of…