All Aboard The Football Apocalypse
Football's future will be played out in empty stadia. Its superstars will be clones shorn of personality who go through a succession of computer-simulated motions in readiness for the stack of cash that awaits them at the end of the match. The individual who was once referred to as the 'supporter' but has since been branded the 'consumer' will half-heartedly flick his/her attention-frazzled eyes from a high definition big screen and back towards the scrolling, smudgy small screen stuck to his/her palm, umming and ahhing over the next witty response that can be furiously pinged into the webby void before anybody else gets there first. Inevitably, goals will be missed. Who cares? He/she will replay it later when it's snapshatted into an easily digestible fifteen-second clipette. Why bother sitting through 90 minutes anyway when you've got whatever it is that you do to do?
We will do (are doing) this willingly and cough up another subscription fee for the pleasure. And we'll marvel at it for good measure. I know all this to be true because Nike told me it would be like this in their fabric-hawking extravaganza before the last World Cup. Clever, eh? If you strained your ears enough, you could faintly hear the hacking cackles of the advertising executives coughing tarry phlegm into their caffeine-substitute beverages backslapping themselves over the genius high concept that these simpletons would lap up their manufactured dystopia with all the enthusiasm of innocent babes walking blindly into a den of ravenous wolves. "Ha! They can't even tell it's the world we've created for them! The fools! How much are we fleecing them for the latest Brazil jersey, Erroll?"
Are we really doing this again? Sitting back and watching the season morph into yet another vintage mass of gloopy and sticky overblown, diversionary hysteria? Another nine months of re-packaged, reformed and reconstituted horseshit served up to us on a platter of sneering disregard by people who clearly hold us in the very utmost of contempt whilst happily counting the cash we voluntarily bolster their off-shore accounts with.
Aren't you bored of all this by now? Roy Keane's flogging bitterness and retribution for twenty quid a pop for a second time, even going so far as to mock us with his unoriginality by calling his book 'The Second Half' – more of the same but, y'know different, with added Roddy Doyle. Ha ha ha. Is Harry Redknapp talking up that great bloke, Harry Redknapp again? Carry on as you are. Here's a shocker! Players don't want to play for England any more. Has anyone mentioned the German model yet?
Meanwhile, the Premier League stealthily re-introduces the idea of an overseas fixture and this time around we're all too
