By Celine Dion
February 27 2026
There I’ve said it. I am bored of football. Lots of people find football boring, to be fair. But in my experience, these people have always found it boring. They like gardening, or horse racing. Or even rugby (sigh). We have all met someone, or in my case married one, who says ‘Well it’s just some men running round trying to kick a ball into a net, isn’t it’. I was always aghast at this idea. Until recently, that is, when I have felt myself susceptible to the creeping realisation that these people might have a point.
As an example of my boredom with it all, I have a DAZN subscription, which means I can watch Serie A games, Spanish Highlights, all kinds of football features really. Do I watch them? Never. I’ll stick the Italian football on nowadays and find myself glazing over. I’ll be back watching ‘Four in a Bed’ within about ten minutes (it’s a programme about bed and breakfasts on channel 4, before any of you make any childish jokes). I have all the Sky subscriptions. Do I watch Premier League football, apart from Arsenal games? Not really. I’ll watch a Tottenham game if I think there’s a strong chance of them losing (I’ve been watching a few lately, to be fair), but that’s about it.
Now, there’s nothing unusual about someone finding football boring. But I’ve been to hundreds of Arsenal games, well over a hundred Exeter City games, plus internationals and various random grounds. I’ve been to around 40 stadiums in the UK. I once thought nothing of getting up at 5am and driving to Scunthorpe. From Exeter. To watch a League Two game.
I wonder why this is. Let’s try and explore the reasons shall we? If we can be bothered..
It’s the Money (Again)
First of all, there’s the money thing. Let’s get that out of the way first, because it’s not hugely interesting anymore. I used to bang on about the money aspect ruining Arsenal on here about 15 years ago. I wrote some truly excellent articles. Obviously, it hasn’t improved, and everything else has caught up now. It costs about £50 to go to the cinema, and about £100 to take a few people out for a pizza. About a grand to go to an Oasis concert. Basically, if it’s fun, some nasty people in a skyscraper are in charge of it now and determined to rinse you for every penny they can get. Because if you can’t afford their prices, someone else will pay anyway.
Clearly, it distorts and corrupts the game. Most of the European leagues are extremely predictable now. It’s a wonder why they bother even playing some of them, Domestic leagues across Europe have become exercises in predictability. In France, Paris Saint-Germain have dominated the modern era. In Germany, Bayern Munich hoovered up titles for over a decade before Bayer Leverkusen briefly broke the pattern. In Spain, it remains largely a duopoly between Real Madrid and Barcelona, with Atlético Madrid occasionally interrupting.
Here, Manchester City have set new standards for sustained dominance.
City fans insist it’s all organic excellence. Chelsea fans once said the same. Perhaps they have to believe that. Otherwise, it must feel faintly hollow. I don’t remember City winning four in a row in the days of Paulo Wanchope and Joey Barton though. Or Chelsea winning three titles on the trot with Kerry Dixon and Speedie up front.
Football has been corrupted by money beyond the same teams winning everything all the time. We could all probably write a book about FIFA, and all the ridiculous things they have done. We all know about silly home kick off times that mean away fans can’t get a train home until the following day. We all know about needing about 10 TV subscriptions to be able to watch all the leagues and competitions you want to. Nobody’s in charge you see. Well, except money.
And then there’s VAR.
Supporters at top-level games will tell you there is no point properly celebrating a goal anymore. Someone in a remote office must first decide whether a toenail was fractionally offside.
Celebrating a goal used to be one of the most exhilarating experiences in everyday life. I’ve celebrated goals by falling down steps, losing trainers, being crushed by large gentlemen, and — perhaps most memorably — being dragged out from under a row of seats with a young Son of Dion after a late Exeter winner at Newport.
You won’t convince me VAR is about fairness. If football’s powerbrokers were truly interested in fairness, they might have addressed structural financial imbalance before introducing forensic geometry.
No — this is about legal insulation. In a world where elite clubs deploy battalions of lawyers over financial regulations, it was only a matter of time before refereeing decisions became litigable events.
Too Much Football
Another reason why I am bored of football is that there is simply too much of it, and it is too hyped. There is a wonderful Mitchell and Webb sketch which you have probably seen, where David Mitchell takes the p*ss out of football by walking round Loftus Road pretending to be a football pundit and hyping games like Macclesfield v Bolton. ‘CATCH ALL OF THE FOOTBALL, ALL OF THE TIME. EVERY MATCH MORE CLIMACTIC THAN THE LAST’. It’s absolutely bang on. I listen to Talk Sport, which has become an absolute parody of itself, and where the pundits discuss the minutest details of football on a 24-hour loop. People ring up to talk about corners. In the summer, when there isn’t any football, they don’t really talk about cricket or athletics, they still talk about football, but they talk about transfer rumours, because there is no football. They talk about rumours about transfers which, in general, never actually happen. And everyone still rings up. Call me a conspiracy theorist, Sometimes I half-suspect the endless football noise is convenient. If Colin is on hold waiting to debate set-piece zonal marking, he’s perhaps less likely to organise a residents’ association about his rising council tax.
During lockdown, I remember watching early-return Bundesliga games in empty stadiums and feeling — irrationally — that things were normal again. Football as anaesthetic. Football as reassurance.
I get it. I bought into it.
But stand back from it and there’s something gently absurd. People spending huge portions of their leisure time and disposable income travelling to watch a game their team will probably lose in a half-empty identikit stadium.
If you’ve ever read Albert Camus, you might think of The Myth of Sisyphus. Eternal repetition. Eternal struggle. Eternal return.
The Death of Spontaneity
Next, the game itself, has become so sanitised. Top level football is choreographed, data-analysed, and coached to such an extent that is a mistake, not flair, that wins a top game nowadays. I have a suspicion that the likes of Bergkamp and Henry would be seen by modern coaches as rebellious mavericks nowadays – dangerously unreliable. Jack Grealish I think is my favourite illustration of this point. Indeed, a maverick player in his days at Villa, but a player who was snapped up by Manchester City and then regarded as increasingly undesirable, apparently due to his penchant for not doing exactly what the data driven coaches told him to, and was eventually moved on, with his best years wasted. Think about when you last saw a goal from a mazy dribble in a top-level game in recent years. It’s hard work, because nowadays your mazy dribblers have been coached to lay the ball off back into midfield or to an overlapping full back, long before any mazy dribble could be attempted. The patterns of football itself have become predictable and boring. And that is indeed what they are, patterns, it’s not a game anymore, it’s a pattern.
Retreat to Verdi
So, what can be done?
Well, nothing really.
When I was younger, I felt energised by injustices — in football and elsewhere. Now I mostly feel tired by it.
You should all watch the current channel 4 series ‘Dirty Business’, about UK river pollution, its excellent. It’s about two campaigners who make it their life’s work to confront the UK water industry because sewage is being poured, with total impunity, into the nation's seas and rivers. But there’s a very prescient moment at the end where Jason Watkin’s character suddenly loses heart with it all. ‘Nothing will happen’. He says, realising suddenly that the little man now has no power in a commercial world, now totally under the eternal control of the people in skyscrapers.
And it’s also probably my age. I think I might have seen all the different types of goals that it’s possible to see. A 30-yard screamer into the top corner of the net isn’treally‘ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE’, because thinking about it, I saw a similar goal last week. And the week before that. I’ve seen all the possible combinations of football results that I can possibly see. The Champions League is just a blur of the same teams doing the same things season after season, several times. Bayern Madrid against Inter St Germain, Borussia City against Athletico Milan. I just don’t CARE.
I’ve retreated to other pastimes. Things embedded in culture and history. Art. Classical music. Human creations that still feel largely untouched by hedge funds and commercial lawyers.
Instead of driving to Scunthorpe and Carlisle, I now find myself buying tickets to Giuseppe Verdi and Mozart. You can still wear full CP Company to the Royal Opera House if you wish. The beer is cheaper. The police don’t keep you in afterwards.
You can’t celebrate a fine aria by launching yourself across the seats in front of you — that’s frowned upon. But it’s a small price to pay.
I still watch Arsenal on television. I still appreciate the social ritual of a matchday - catching up with decent people and enjoying a drink
But live and breathe football? Kick the metaphorical cat across the room because Arsenal have conceded in the 93rd minute at Wolves?
Not anymore.
It all feels slightly absurd.
And, if I’m honest,
a bit boring.
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FOOTBALL IS BORING
Discussion started by Arsenal Times , 27/02/2026 11:33
Arsenal Times
27/02/2026 11:33
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