Did Lionel Messi score football’s first ever goal? The Club World Cup means nothing without Liverpool anyway, not that it matters whether it works or not.
You might have to be over-fixated on football – it has been suggested to me – to watch an U19 tournament. But as someone who will watch a kickabout in a park, that man is me.
England played Norway in their Euros on Saturday. It’s on iPlayer with Nigel Adderley commentating really rather well in a crisp, occasionally excitable manner.
Mickey Moore plays for boss Will Antwi’s side and suffered a horrible ankle twist. It’s held in Romania. Really open and enjoyable. If you haven’t caught it yet, do so. It scratches your football itch very well. These players didn’t seem ‘tired after a long season’ either. Must only impact the first team, or is it all an exaggerated excuse repeated so often that it’s become a truth?
Superb game with Norway good on the counter. 2-2. Excellent entertainment. Better than 80% of Premier League games.
Then it was on to the U21 Euros and Spain v Romania in Bratislava on 4 Seven with two people I didn’t recognise, James Fielden and Dave Edwards, who played 280-odd games for Wolves between 2007 and 2018 and 180 or so for Shrewsbury.
Belting early goal from Romania but Spain made a late 2-1 comeback after 80 minutes of stout defending to qualify for the quarter-finals. Another engaging game.
Football doesn’t stop. Portugal U21 v Poland U21 at 8pm next with Ellen Ellard, who I’m sure I’ve heard as a 5 Live Sport reporter and was listed to be with North Shields’ Michael Bridges. I saw him playing for Sunderland as a boy in the mid-90s, y’know. He’s 46 now, but he’s not there. It’s Luke Chambers who played for four clubs, including 396 times in Ipswich’s defence.
Portugal cut through them with ease and won 5-0. Geovany Quenda scored twice and was outstanding. He unfortunately joins Chelsea’s clown car of ridiculousness in 2026 where he’ll doubtless be introduced to the concept of crapulence and end up failing a drugs test. He wouldn’t be the first.
Watching England Women U19 v Netherlands Women U19 from Poland on the iPlayer was interesting with Jonno Pearce handling comms. Very competitive. England won 2-1 from being one down.
Have you got your free DAZN account to watch the Club World Cup charade yet? It’s like entering an alternate reality where meaningless inventions are deemed the coming of a new age by people who haven’t got a reality interface. This nearly-football looks like the normal kicky kicky in the same way wood-look melamine looks like old oak. It requires imagination as outside on the streets, snatch squads are arresting and deporting people in just the kind of dystopian scenario Margaret Atwood foresaw.
Did you stay up to watch the 0-0 opening game? Of course you didn’t. Do you care? Not at all. What a state of affairs. I saw the first half of Bayern v Auckland City. It looked weird. Like football but everyone seemed to be acting. A Manuel Neuer was in goal for sure, but was he real or a creation of Hisense, ‘the official screen provider’? These are alien replicants who hadn’t quite got their football right.
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Why is it free on DAZN and 5? What does that achieve? Comms were also shared between both channels. Mike Minay and Anite Assante with James Richardson presenting. The pictures looked computerised, somehow like watching FIFA. Maybe we were. The crowd were entirely and eerily passive, like they were watching it on TV too.
Bayern were four up after 21 minutes and it made it all feel even more unreal. Of course, even as unable Auckland are to compete, they will still earn lots of money, further warping their domestic league in their favour. In this way, the game is being perverted worldwide. They look sub-Northern Premier standard.
It ended as a 10-0 farce. It’d be humiliating for Infantino if he had any shame. So in search of reality I turned to England U21 v Slovenia U21 on Channel 4 with Steve Bower and a very fast-talking Conor Coady, who needs to slow down and not speak in barely intelligible bursts because at the moment it sounds almost satirical. Steven Caulker was very deep voiced and spoke well. Coady’s voice drove my missus out of the room. Not as good this time, they drew 0-0.
Soccer Aid was on which seemed, from the bits I saw, an embarrassing illustration of the economic unfairness at the heart of football. Fair play to all involved for trying to make a difference to global inequality, but it was hard not to imagine the difference that donating 50% of Premier League salaries for a year (£2billion) would make to UNICEF. After all, how much money does anyone need? If you earned £50,000 £100,000 per week, would it really make any worthwhile difference to you? Only if you define yourself via ceaseless purchases, perhaps. Then again, this is true on many levels for many people who aren’t footballers. No-one is happier for hoarding wealth, despite it being the raison d’être of the modern age and plenty have convinced themselves it’s the path to contentment.
Wayne Rooney looked more at home on the pitch, where it still came easy to him, rather than in the dugout.
So I left that for Ben Andrew (who does 5 Live and BBC work too) and Dean Ashton commentating on the U21 game between Netherlands v Denmark because I’m not paying DAZN to see PSG v Athetico play fake football in the Club World Cup (it was another ludicrous 4-0 pish take) and I imagine I’m far from alone in that.
It was an open attacking game without decent striking; some shots were comically high and wide and were even booted out of the stadium. Denmark came from behind to win 2-1.
Monday saw Chelsea play Los Angeles FC and everyone spent an hour pretending it was real, treating this ludicrous spectacle seriously. Why didn’t they host games in smaller 25,000 seat stadiums so they’d be full? The games are often not at a work-friendly time and world support for many clubs can’t attend and even the ones who can, it’s not an event which attracts supporters of a nation but a club, which is always going to have a much smaller base.
Kelly Somers led the pretending with beige-dressed ageing and injured pundits Jon Obi Mikel and Callum Wilson, who the Guardian says ‘treated us to some exhibition reflexive pronoun abuse’. First, on Denis Bouanga, we were told that “this is a tremendous opportunity for himself,” and then talking about Reece James’ injuries: “Myself knows what that feels like.”
But it’s a presenting job for Kelly, I guess. Will it affect how they’re seen going forward? Maybe it shows they can bullsh*t about anything or will they lose credibility as a serious presenter and sentient human?
The stadium was sparsely attended. If no-one came, it wouldn’t matter. Saudi Arabia is now at the table and able to command clubs to play in their pathetic tournaments by waving money around. Of course it works. This is a long game being played over decades not years.
Anita Jones did reporting in an unfeasibly tight dress which looked a bit Hollywood red carpet and a lot sweaty. It looked like an audition for future work. They apparently couldn’t give away tickets for this as the choking fog of totalitarianism settles over America. It was probably an achievement to quarter fill it.
Rich Wolfenden and Michael Brown kept up the pretence in the commentary box. Honestly, it was sort of humiliating and debasing for everyone, as if they were all having the pish taken out of them. Brown seemed to have lost his mind, saying how much he was looking forward to it and talking like it wasn’t a 22,000-strong crowd rattling around in an over-optimistic 75,000 capacity stadium in some dystopian American hell hole. Keep your mind on the money, Michael, keep your eyes on the wall.
Of course it wasn’t even bad. It was..,nothing at all. Did it even happen? Adverts for PIF are all around the pitch. I’ll take a supersized salted caramel one please, with a helping of deep-fried deportation of anyone without due diligence.
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Half-time possession stats were given as 54/38. Who had the ball the other 8% of the time? Perhaps it was deported. Olivier Giroud appears comfortable wearing a sports bra like an extra from a porno shot in the San Fernando Valley. Or is it a hallucination? Then it stopped. They all agreed it had happened, but no-one knew why, though they all pretended they did. Callum confused tenses some more and displayed the obligatory aversion to using adverbs that comes with the ‘How to be a Footballer’ handbook. The programme then ended.
Some other matches happened later. No-one watched the TV. Did they even happen? No-one was sure.
What definitely did happen was England U19’s 5-5 draw with Germany on the iPlayer, coming back from 5-1 down in a remarkable game, and Spain v Italy U21 on Channel 4 with Glenn Murray alongside James Fielden. Always happy to hear Glenn’s Cumbrian tones. It was a game lacking tension but pleasant enough.
To the astonishment of my missus who thought the season was over, there was more England on Wednesday as the U21s took on Germany. But first Manchester City were playing in the Club World Cup against Wydad AC from the top tier of the Moroccan football league system. Not the winners mind, they finished third.
Don’t get excited. What do you think happened? That’s right, of course it did. Conor McNamara wasn’t at his enthusiastic best and Andros Townsend was just glad to be asked to sit on the, I presume, off-tube couch alongside him. A few people had wandered in for this one, even though it was a Tuesday lunchtime, though the seats are blue so they look like there are City fans in them, so perhaps not. The top tiers were closed.
Why did they have three pundits? Before the Madrid game Anita Jones was back talking to Robert Martinez pitch-side with her shirt looking like it had been stylishly half-pulled off by a particularly persistent wild dog, but the male pundits hadn’t done likewise. You don’t want to see a half-naked Shay Given, I suppose.
England U21 lost 2-0 to Germany. Joe Hart on co-comm is very serious and disappointed with England’s inability to score despite dominating possession. But they qualified anyway. They play Spain next. Good luck with that.
Madrid drew 1-1 and it seemed to excite people, as though it justified the whole tournament. DAZN’s discussion programme, The Press, with the in-danger-of-being-overexposed Julien Lauren, talked about the football as if it counted for anything or could even be accurately judged in normal terms, even to the extent of judging TAA’s numbers in his first Madrid game with past whole seasons at Liverpool. And it hadn’t got over ‘let’s go to the socials’ yet, 2011 style, quoting shallow, vacuous comments as though it’s insight.
For Inter Miami v Porto, Don Hutchison was pitch-side talking to Janine Anthony with amazing hair who at least didn’t look catwalk-bound. It’s a long way from Gateshead, eh, kidda. He looked pleased to be there, doing co-comm, a touch of cat-that-got-the-cream about him. Stadium far too big for a modest crowd on Thursday afternoon.
The Messi brown-nosing is ceaseless and tiresome and feels very ‘civilian’, never mentioning his mistakes so as not to put a skid mark on the pristine reputation. Javier Mascherano looks like the bag man for a Miami-organised crime family in an episode of Miami Vice, as does Luis Suarez who looks like he couldn’t bite a burger. Jose Fonte is a pundit with Shay and looks like an incarnation of late era Frank Zappa. The presenter takes a kids’ TV approach. There’s no gravitas given or required. They push the premium upgrade all the time, like they’re desperate. Who needs HD? It’s all clear enough.
The commentator with Don – didn’t catch his name – is super enthusiastic. Fair play to him for making the best of it, but there’s only so much Messi worship that you can tolerate. Especially when he scored. He’s not the only one ever to have scored but you’d never know it. This wasn’t for football fans, this was for tourists.
It’s been an odd week, a procession of comments saying ‘it’s all meaningless rubbish’ all the way to ‘it’s just new, don’t be so negative’.
I suggest the problems are existential:
There’s already too much football.
Because of that, quality inevitability suffers.
Any tournament that excludes the league winners from England, Spain and Italy destroys any credibility they hoped to have. It isn’t ‘the world’s greatest clubs,’ that’s a Trumpian lie.
Inclusion based (I think) on FIFA rankings over four years isn’t sufficiently transparent.
Huge financial rewards further warp domestic leagues, further distorting fairness.
It’s nakedly not about sport but politics and furthering the desires of a despotic regime, be it in the Middle East or America.
It’s often just too hot.
Most fans can’t practically travel there meaning crowds look like they’re at a Taylor Swift concert only less passionate.
Games are played at difficult, unpopular times to fit with European TV.
All of these points mean the football public doesn’t largely believe in it. And without that belief you have nothing.
It’ll only change if these points are comprehensively addressed but I don’t believe it matters how successful it is, anyway. It exists and that’s enough.
Games that didn’t really matter were treated like they did, even though they were played like a combination between exhibition and training matches. Overall, it felt like a mirage in the burning heat after eating tequila worms. Not that good actually.