There are de facto derbies all over England’s top flight this season
Alexander Isak of Newcastle United shoots to score the second goal during the Carabao Cup final against Liverpool. Photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images
This weekend is morphing into the Premier League’s own ‘Two Days Hate’, a swirling maelstrom of bitterness and cattiness and outright vengefulness, a summer of fear and loathing manifest.
We begin with Crystal Palace v Nottingham Forest, normally just another game. Yet throughout the first major European fixture in their 119-year history, Thursday’s 1-0 victory over Fredrikstad, Palace fans largely used their air and energy to curse one, or all three, of Uefa, former shareholder John Textor or Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis. The club have requested increased police provision for Forest’s visit, such is the supposed rabid threat from their own fanbase.
One newspaper even asked whether Marinakis — a multi-billionaire with his own security detail used to football in a country where an owner once took a gun onto the pitch, who looks and acts like a medieval king — will even have the bottle to step foot in the nice bit of Croydon. At 2pm! On a Sunday!
For anyone wanting a recap: having won the FA Cup, Palace were granted automatic Europa League qualification, then demoted to the Conference League after Lyon, owned by Textor, also qualified, meaning they breached Uefa’s multi-club ownership (MCO) rules. Yet given these rules had never previously been enforced, there was little cause for concern, until Uefa realised they could demonstrate their regulation’s effectiveness without upsetting a superclub. Take that Drogheda, Slovakia’s DAC 1904 and Crystal Palace.
As the team to benefit from Palace’s demotion, Forest first asked Uefa to “clarify their position” in Europe, considered an overt act of war, then were called to give evidence in the case. Palace’s appeal was heard in Lausanne’s Court for Arbitration in Sport (CAS), hence the new nickname, El Casico.
It is worth noting that through a series of transfers from Lyon and Botafogo, Forest arguably gained far more from Textor’s MCO than Palace. Well done boys, good process.
And six months ago, Liverpool and Newcastle enjoyed a cordial afternoon in the Wembley sunshine. Yet in recent days some Newcastle fans have taken to theorising which Liverpool player’s career Joelinton will destroy, the appointed executor of some perverse footballing system of talion law. An eye for an eye, an ACL for having the temerity to bid for a £150m wantaway striker.
We have reached a stage in the interminable Alexander Isak saga where if he wore red at St James’ Park tomorrow evening, it would not only risk his safety, but wider public order and health and sanity. The prevailing drama is no longer about actively keeping him, but more about not letting him leave, a metaphor for the pride and dignity of a club, of a city and its people, the ultimate justification for selling their soul.
These fresh schisms each reveal an agonisingly modern facet of football fandom. El Casico is the derby football’s legal era deserves, built on bureaucratic farce and the vicissitudes of regulatory minutiae, forged in courtrooms and boardrooms and social media threads, deepened by the infernal high pettiness and lingering incompetence of impossibly wealthy men.
But what really makes this the archetype for rivalry in 2025 is the sense of confected rage, of empty and misguided feeling. There is every chance this ends up being not so much tepid as downright normal. These are not natural enemies, rather similar clubs forced together by a system which doesn’t work, existing to provide the facade of regulation without actually stopping anything. Forest fans simply have no reason to care about this. They won. At best, they pity Palace, as Nuno Espirito Santo said last week.
For all Steve Parish’s proclamations of Marinakis’ malevolence — he told Gary Lineker “if there wasn’t someone who wanted to get in as a consequence, then there wouldn’t be a problem” — if it weren’t Forest, it would be another club.
Palace’s anger is really at Uefa, but how do you exhort that in a meaningful fashion? What power do they have here? The Holmesdale Fanatics, their ultras faction, sent a “delegation” to Uefa’s headquarters in Nyon, and dumped a briefcase stuffed with fake cash on the front desk, which has to be a Uefa receptionist’s bread and butter. Stick it on the pile with the hate mail and the anthrax.
And Newcastle’s anger is not just at Liverpool, but at the Premier League, at the idea PSR forces them to sell Isak to progress, and then at the man himself for daring to disrespect the sanctity of their Saudi-owned club, for having self-interest in a self-interested world, for contributing his own perspective to an already long-ongoing public cacophony around him.
Liverpool are just a convenient straw man, an accessible foe along traditional, comprehensible lines. This has been the very worst of the transfer as constant content, a live-action soap opera, information and disinformation not so much allies as imperceptible from each other.
Nick Hornby wrote 32 years ago that “the natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment”. Yet increasingly for most it is simmering anger, perpetual injustice searching for direction. Since winning their first major trophy, Palace have spent just £3m, been demoted in Europe and Oliver Glasner is seemingly agitating to leave. Their first European campaign will be freighted with bittersweet caveats.
Newcastle’s summer has been dominated by confusion and rage against various machines. Even if Isak never played for them again, you sense the popular play would be him wasting his career in exile, maybe with a Truman Show-style camera fixed on his miserable face and atrophying potential. Reports have emerged that Marinakis is considering sacking Nuno over an “irreparable” rift with head of football Edu Gaspar, spite deluxe.
Earlier this summer, Parish said “football has to take a look at itself and decide what it wants”, but it has already decided. It wants this. Governing bodies are happy for their clubs to blame each other for problems they cause, plus rage is great for engagement, anything to make people care more, watch more, pay more, hook them in even further.
Maybe every game can be a grudge match, Sky Sports airing 215 derbies per season. Even the traditional derby is enjoying something of a renaissance, courtesy of Eberechi Eze’s last-minute north London switcheroo, of Leeds and Sunderland’s promotions, perhaps even a re-emerging Manchester United, everyone’s favourite cartoon villains. Spite is in the air. Can you feel it?
Observer
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