Sometimes I love football and sometimes I hate football. And I don’t just speak of my relationship with my team. Itself something of a unique relationship in its total and absolute one-way-ness. I give them love and loyalty and total dedication and they give me… basically contempt. I’m just a number on an email list of people who sometimes give them money for things. And if I don’t buy things, my data is there’s forever. A few bytes among the millions they hold.

But the current malaise is not just because ‘we blew it’ against Brentford on Saturday, much as we ‘blew it’ the previous weekend against Brighton. 200 minutes of football without a shot on target. From the team who’ve scored more goals in 2022 than any other. The team with the ‘best attack in the world’, possibly, as described only 3 weekends ago. By some pundit or other. I’m hoping that next weekend we’re not playing a team beginning with ‘B’. Yes, that’s what its come to. Wearing my socks which are unwashed from both legs (pun) of the 1981 Cup Final!

But the problem is money. Too much of the stuff in the game. So Paris St Germain are in pretty much a meltdown of discontent and unharmonious chaos borne of Qatari funding giving a sense of entitlement which requires IMMEDIATE satisfaction. Their current head coach, the wonderful and lovely Mauricio Pochettino, will be sacked this summer. The latest of 5 coaches who have delivered the French league title and then been sacked. Because of delivery failures on all other competitions. Which translates as ‘didn’t win the Champions League’. The Qataris, as we’ve learned at great cost (both in human lives and blatant corruption) like to spend their way out of a problem. If they throw enough cash around, then WHY CAN’T THEY GET WHAT THEY WANT????? The answer to which is actually ‘because they’re spoilt, entitled fuckers who need to grow up and the world don’t work like dat’. They bought Neymar, they bought Messi, FFS, and still their ultimate prize remains elusive. Their fans are up in arms about the owners, their best player, Killian Mbappe, is walking away in the summer, probably to the Bernabau where he’ll doubtless be paid several trillions of Euros, dollars, whatever, because Real Madrid don’t care and have seemingly no limits.

The irony is that probably the most successful, certainly the most enduring, manager of all time was Alex Ferguson. Manchester United were patient, allowed him a few fallow years to establish his own team, left him in control, and he returned them untold riches over the following decades of his stewardship.

That would never happen today. The Russians, Qataris, Americans and Emiratees who own our clubs have more money than patience, more greed for prestige than love for the game, more cash than class. So they get what they deserve. Mainly. Which is disappointment. Spurs fans get that for nothing. So whose laughing now???

Happy Monday

A xxxx