A brief introduction to the 2024/25 club football season
There are plenty of reasons to feel pessimistic ahead of the new season, but there do remain plenty to feel optimistic, too.
The tweet came through in such a matter-of-fact manner that it was easy to led it slide under the radar. “Goal, Rosenborg take the lead late on. 1-0.”
Well hello, Manchester United. Plus ça change. On this evidence, the spirit of 2023/24 hasn’t quite escaped Old Trafford just yet.
There is one obvious and fair disclaimer to the low comedy provided by this tweet. This was obviously nothing like a full-strength Manchester United team, though Casemiro, Marcus Rashford, Jonny Evans, Mason Mount and Aaron Wan-Bissaka all played the first half.
But if you do believe in the (debatable) theory that clubs carry a distinct ‘personality’, it did hit quite hard, as well as also acting as a timely reminder that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, as my man George Santayana liked to say.
Beyond another new slate of increasingly displeasing kits, few Premier League leopards are likely to have changed their spots ahead of the new season. International tournaments are a relative oasis in comparison to the domestic season, and new cycles of spin, derision and accusations won’t take long to start spinning again. And we all know what’s waiting ahead.
The culture wars will continue to hum in the background. Vulnerable people and marginalised groups will continue to be targeted with hate, which will continue to generate clicks because we cannot remember the past. The involvement of women in the game will continue to be treated as an imposition by an ever-shrinking but still noisy sub-section of us, while the world keeps on turning. We all know that fresh horrors are a-coming. We just don’t yet quite know what they will be.
The rich will get richer. The poor will get poorer. And we will continue to be okay with this because we’d like to imagine ourselves one day being one of them, even though we never will be. Fans will continue to act as the attack dog/PR departments for their clubs, who ideally would like to buy success in perpetuity. Critical thinking will continue to be pushed aside when it becomes inconvenient in the pursuit of silverware.
The Premier League is under threat on several fronts at the moment, and there’s every possibility that we’re going to reach a snapping point in the I just don’t recognise this any more barometer in the foreseeable future.
Oh yes, and remember who exhausted the players all looked during the Euros? Well, they’ve increased the number of Champions League ‘group’ matches from 125 to 189, which means an extra four group matches per team and the extremely flawed ‘Swiss model’ league table to decide it all. It’s a halfway house to a European Super League; surely everybody knows that by now, don’t they? Can they not just… get on with it?
Those who watch EFL football in part because it’s on at 3pm on a Saturday are in for a shock, if they haven’t seen the fixtures already. A new television deal is prioritising television audiences over match-going supporters, which seems like a risky move for a level of football the importance of which could be diminished by the final form of that very European Super League.
Even if you drop another level to the National League, you see that they’re jumping into bed with the Premier League over some sort of Papa John’s 2: This Time There’s No Need For a Formal Boycott Because Seriously, Who Needs This Shit? competition. For a country that likes to rark on about football coming home, we sure can do a good job of smearing shit all over its walls at times. Oh yes, and then there’s the FA and their negligent-looking handling of the FA Cup. Oh yes, and then there’s VAR.
Regulation will continue to be pushed back against. It seems inconceivable that the Premier League hasn’t been throwing everything it can at the new government while we were all getting distracted by Mister Gawuff and co. The Manchester City legal case may go a step closer to resolution, though this remains unlikely in anything like a definitive sense for a multitude of different reasons. If you do believe that a land-grab is currently taking place before our very eyes at the moment, nothing will disavow you of that notion.
Doesn’t sound very optimistic, does it, any of this? You might even be tempted to wonder why I don’t just jack it all in and take up crochet or disco dancing instead. But we all know the answer to that, which is that the above is the most negative way of explaining the condition of professional football in this country for which I have the time.
Because the very fact that it would not and could not enter my head to just chuck this all in and spend Saturday afternoons making a lovely sweater or practising my Travolta moves says something in itself, doesn’t it? What keeps us coming back must be pretty powerful stuff.
I can think of no other cultural moment in England that carries more weight than an international tournament final with England in it, beyond a royal wedding or funeral. This has been the case with the men’s team for years, and is increasingly so for the Lionesses, as well.
Television is simply not the same shared experience any more because we can stream what we want, when we want. But we watch football on it because it’s live and because of the increasingly quaint notion that some parts of the game should be kept outside of a £90 a month paywall (and on ‘the television’). By definition, it is a shared experience.
And while we can argue about how close to the top of this list of cultural significance the game is, draw the lens back slightly and it feels both extraordinary and absurd that this one game should have this pull. I mean, it’s only a game, right? Quite asides from anything else, the above applies primarily to the top six divisions.
I’ve talked about this before so many times that I do occasionally feel like a bit of a stuck record, but there’s plenty of football below the National League. I go to a match at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon every week throughout the season. I very seldom have to buy a ticket in advance, though there is often an option to do so. I can usually stand to watch and move freely around the ground. I can have a pint while I’m watching. There’s no VAR. Oh yeah, and it’s a lot cheaper.
(Note: it can also be spoiled by money, trouble isn’t quite completely unheard of, the football is a little more rustic, etc etc etc.)
But football at all levels comes with so much to recommend it that banging on about state-controlled petroclubs and the like to the exclusion of anything else feels like missing the point. Football is something that the overwhelming majority of us do for fun. So if I’m going to mention the downsides, the rewards that we get from it all have to be taken into account as well.
The swelling of a crowd walking to a ground, whether it builds to dozens or thousands. The shouts of programme and raffle-ticket sellers, and the sound of a crackly jukebox blastin’ out your favourite song. The smell of tea, the colour of which indicates that it’s been sitting in its urn since the days of black and white television. The sound of the crowd, from pre-match chatter to the quarter-second moment of silence before all hell breaks loose when a goal is scored.
It’s about getting a train to a town you’ve never been to before, and that you would have literally no other reason to visit were it not for The Football. It’s about getting lost on (what looked on Google Maps like) the simplest of journeys and seeing things that surprise you, no matter how mundane they may be.
It’s about weird loyalty and tribalism, it’s about piss-taking and, when we all lower our masks and drop our personae for a moment, no small amount of love. It can bridge generations as a common language and its power can be used for good, for equality and for justice, if we collectively want it to.
And yes, of course it’s about Manchester United tweeting, “Goal, Rosenborg take the lead late on. 1-0.” It’s the sort of tweet that isn’t just becoming part of our football culture, but increasingly part of our football heritage.
Welcome back, club football. It hasn’t been that long, but it does feel like an age.