It’s money month, the time of year when the season sort of starts again with friendlies and fake tournaments, but not really. It’s also a despicable time when the ugliness of top-flight football arrogantly bestrides the world in pursuit of tiny amounts of extra money.
If your side does well, it cheers you for the new campaign; a few poor results and everyone is disgruntled. And it usually proves no guide to what happens in the season.
ITV even showed Preston v Liverpool. It still seemed more significant than the CWC obviously, but I seriously wonder about the fitness of footballers who last played internationals a month ago. We’re familiar with player burn-out as a concept, though it’s usually only used as an excuse for defeat, not a reason for victory. You’ve been playing for the best part of 11 months; you’re not going to lose anything in a month that a friendly against Preston would revive. Surely light training is all that’s needed.
Back in the day, the time off would last from mid-May until mid-August, a time which would be spent drinking and eating gravy dinners, so players would need to run up sand dunes – vomiting as Big Jack shouted profanities – to get fit again, but I doubt that’s the case now that they measure everything all the time and they live off chicken and pasta.
I watched Middlesbrough play and lose to Port Clarence Reserves in the 70s, but clubs have now realised there’s money in pre-season games and pretending they’re competitive. So this Saturday you could watch Gateshead v Sunderland or Matlock v Derby or Dartford v Charlton amongst others. I’m not sure anyone except the most loyal obsessive bothered, but it’s a part of a great tradition. And of course bigger clubs are playing in fake tournaments all across the world so they can earn enough to pay for a reserve full-back from Austria.
But then Premier League clubs are different, moral-free beasts with no conscience. The Guardian reckons the 20 clubs are unconscionably taking a planet-breaking 175,000 summer air miles in just a few weeks, the idiots. Manchester United are flying 24,000 miles to show off their mediocrity and are even playing Leeds in Stockholm. City are spending 15,000 miles in the air and face Palermo in Sicily to contest the inaugural Anglo Palermitan Trophy which commemorates the Sicilian club’s maiden fixture against a team of British sailors in 1900. At least they’re used to wasting energy competing in insignificant tournaments. You’re playing for fans in the country you’re flying to, are you? As they die in the heat or are swept away in floods, I’m sure they’ll appreciate it..
Time was they’d play a relatively near lower-league side to help them earn much-needed money from the gate receipts for games that were much in demand. Games like the one v Preston are rare. You can see Liverpool play Milan in Hong Kong though. Or Newcastle play Arsenal in Singapore. No game against Blyth Spartans in Blyth, then? Nah, that’s just legacy thinking.
Personally I loved the pre-season friendly. Boro went through a phase of playing Hibs thanks to Tony Mowbray’s connections and they were always great pish-ups that Hibs certainly took seriously.
There is a better solution, though it would deny these clubs money to fritter away. Scottish football, which I know most of you don’t care about, and to be fair does have the tradition of terrible decisions by the SFA, got it right for once and has had a much better idea with the Premier Sports Cup. The group stage involves 40 clubs – the 37 SPFL clubs for 2025/26 who are not involved in European competition plus Bonnyrigg Rose (relegated to Lowland League), Brora Rangers (Highland League winners) and Brechin City (Highland League runners-up).
Teams are drawn into eight groups of five based on final league positions in 2024/25 and it fires the starting gun on the new season this weekend. They realised that the League Cup retains some credibility so they set up a league stage, where they get to play actual competitive games instead of friendlies and football-starved fans lap it up in the ‘foreign’ July heat, heading towards a final in December.
It is often the one trophy that the Glasgow big two don’t actually always win, though Celtic are the current holders and it has value because of that alone. The CWC has shown the pointlessness of playing in tournaments no one believes in.
Why doesn’t England swallow its ego and copy Scotland instead of treating it like a poor, pish-stinking old relation? It’d get the competition done earlier, providing an early meaningful start to the season. They’re obviously not opposed to playing in July. However, the gate receipts are probably dwarfed by money gained playing in these fake overseas tournaments. So once again, we see how local, domestic football suffers because of the insatiable lust for money, no matter how small, in a way it once never was.
Pre-season pulls back the curtain and shows the most important thing to top clubs. It’s not football or even fitness. It’s just money. Nothing else. The hateful club execs, desperate to justify their lavish wages, just care about money. 175,000 miles. Climate change doesn’t discriminate in favour of football clubs, y’now. You die too. Good luck paying to offset that. And more to the point, you’re effectively killing and ruining the lives of your own fans. Yeah, that makes good economic, if not moral, sense.
Even that doesn’t stop the stupids or deniers. More money, more money, more money. Stop buying players! We’d rather see a local kid come through. No? They’re all crap? Well, that’s down to you. But you’d rather fry in 33 degrees of heat to get one place higher in the league? Morons. It’s 27 degrees here on the west coast of Scotland, it’s unnatural. And when you get skin cancer you can thank the Premier League for not giving a shit and putting a few quid above the health of the planet and its people. F*cking idiots.
So craven for a little bit more money, they are even prepared to exploit not just the Earth but their own assets to the maximum and then some, even at the risk of breaking those same assets, the way they’re breaking the planet. To a rational mind it makes zero sense and is the economics of the madhouse. Protest this obscene situation because they are willingly blind to it. On the contrary, they think they’re clever.
Further down the pyramid, it’s still as it ever was as your local centre-half takes a break from laying bricks to kick your fancy striker up in the air, but it’d be nice if it actually mattered and since they’re already playing, why not? Keep pre-season local.
Does the environment not matter? Obviously not. What a terrible example to future generations who will have to live with and combat their selfishness, if they live at all.
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