I didn’t watch ‘the football’ on telly last night, despite there being an awful lot of it. In fact, there’s never been more football on telly and I am less interested in watching it than ever before. Sky offered all the games in the Championship, TNT showed all the UEFA Champions League and not one of them appealed to me in the slightest. When it comes to football on telly, more is less.
On Tuesday, I watched Liverpool’s grim match in Galatasaray, in which the home team won by playing the only way they can – and who can blame them? The game was a litany of diving, feigning injury, ‘tactical fouls’, open dissent and time-wasting and Liverpool’s expensive team of misfits didn’t have the nous to break them down. That and the incessant, migraine-inducing crowd noise made it as unenjoyable experience as one can get. I was so pissed off afterwards, I went straight to bed, angry with myself that I’d wasted another evening when I could have been doing something/anything else.
Most of the top games are attack versus defence. Against the big clubs, the idea is survival. A low block, as the pundits call it, or parking the bus as I call it and that, my friends, is what is laughably known as Super Sunday. Perhaps it is not just my only club, Bristol Rovers, I have fallen out of love with: perhaps it’s football full stop?
European football has become oh so predictable. The usual clubs – Barcelona, Read Madrid, Bayern Munich, PSG, plus an increasing number of ‘English’ clubs – dominate because of their financial clout and the depth of that financial clout, where even teams outside the top six can buy up the best talent in the world, Premier League clubs are more likely to win the Europa League and the Europa Conference League, or whatever it is called this week.
Even tonight, I have the less than tempting prospect of a huge programme of European games, as well as the League One ‘clash’ between Rotherham United and Bradford City. Someone somewhere must be watching Raków Częstochowa v Universitatea Craiova. I can tell you now, it won’t be me.
Even the glory-hunting armchair Liverpool ‘fan’ in me is fed up now. Not because Arne Slot’s boys have started losing games – honest, guv – but because every game is exactly the same. I never thought I would say that but football has become boring.
I am not interested in any other matches because I have no dog in any of the fights. Why would I watch Abu Dhabi’s finest, Manchester City, draw with Russian oligarch and billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev’s Monaco? Where is the heart and soul in that? Watching it would be pure schadenfreude, hoping that Pep Guardiola’s store-bought robots lose embarrassingly, but even then, schadenfreude isn’t real happiness. That’s why I didn’t watch Arsenal beat the modestly talented Olympiakos. I don’t give a toss about the latter, I’m afraid I actively dislike the former so why make the depressed me even more depressed? There was only one thing to do and that was to not watch any of it.
People used to say: there’s far too much football on telly these days and people will get bored with it. And that was when there were just games on a Sunday, with the odd evening game. But now football is everywhere, with added overseas leagues and the increasingly successful women’s leagues and tournaments all over the world. It feels almost impossible to turn on the telly and not find football, even if some it is is recorded. If Sky and TNT isn’t enough for you, then there are numerous other channels offering everything from La Liga to the National League, at a cost of course.
So, what is the point of me carrying on with my overpriced subscription when it is clear I don’t want to watch nearly everything that’s on? Well, I’m more likely to watch Rugby League, Cricket, Darts or even, if I am really desperate, Rugby Union than football so that’s it.
My heart doesn’t appear to be in it when it comes to football these days, whether it’s because of over-exposure or my dislike of how the game is going, with even my old club being owned by a Kuwaiti businessman.
Almost everyone I know watches football on telly via a firestick or a dodgy box and I reckon they are far more invested in what I am paying a large fortune to not watch.
The only game I’ll watch tonight will be my son’s five-a-side, just a bunch of lads who love football and pay to play. I’ll get more pleasure out of that than I would a season’s worth of professional football and it will only cost me the petrol to do it. That will be my only match of the day. Football on telly can wait, quite possibly forever, as far as I am concerned.
