Supermassive black hole

2-2, Manchester City, Etihad Stadium, 23rd September 2024

You set my soul alight
glaciers melting in the dead of night

In football, the feeling is always the point.

Our sport’s history is no romance. Like so much of England’s tapestry of national pride, football’s story is inextricably tied to empire and colonialism, to class politics and religious fervour. But the game we love today inarguably exploded into public consciousness because it grew, like a plant reaching for the sun, from shared, communal, working experience.

In October 1886, workers at a munitions factory in Woolwich, south London, bandied together to form Dial Square. They later became Royal Arsenal, the first professional football club in the city. You know this story. The Arsenal we know so many decades later, the €2.26bn global juggernaut, bloomed from the pride a group of engineers felt in their shared labour. Dial Square was the name of the workshop they spent so much of their lives packed into, together.

Around the time of Dial Square’s inception, a church in Manchester - St Mark’s - founded their own football team. St Mark’s accepted players irregardless of religion; the point was to get young men off the streets. Gangs called the scuttlers - named after the distinctive sound their brass-tipped clogs made against cobblestone - were at war, and the violence drove many to the bottle. Others, thanks to the outreach of two wardens at St Mark’s, chose football. Both wardens worked at Union Iron Works, West Gorton.

It did not take long, of course, for these organisations to become something else entirely. The tide of industrial capitalism came for everything. In 1913, Royal Arsenal moved north and settled in Holloway. Success bought popularity, popularity bought ticket sales, and by the intra-war years Arsenal were denoted a ‘Bank of England’ club. Whatever class solidarity was used to build the institution had long since disappeared, wrapped up in plastic and sold back to those the engineers in 1886 might have called colleagues.

By that time, the little church team at St Mark’s had become Manchester City. Men saved from alcoholism and turf wars had become professional athletes. And those professional athletes had, in turn, become embroiled in all the vices of such a lifestyle, in a whirlwind of fame and bloodied cash.

Are you listening closely?

In 1905, City’s captain Billy Meredith was accused of attempting to bribe Aston Villa’s Alexander Leake. On the final day of the season, City needed to beat Villa to secure the title. Leake refused, Villa won 3-1, and the title went to Newcastle United. Leake was subsequently wrapped up in a fistfight with his furious opponents. The violence triggered an FA investigation, and the attempted bribe was discovered.

Lean in, now.

Billy Meredith, pleading innocence in all this, turned on his club. He’d been banned by the FA and so, almost as if they were covering up something larger, City refused to pay him and further stir the pot. He snapped.

In 1901, the FA had set a wage cap of £4 a week for all clubs in the First Division. Meredith revealed Manchester City had routinely and systematically broken this cap and made extra payments to their players. This, he claimed, was key to their recent success. The order to bribe Leake, he also claimed, had come from the very top.

Another investigation followed. It revealed Meredith was telling the truth. City had financially doped their way into title contention over the course of years.

The FA brought the hammer down. City’s manager, Tom Maley, was banned for life (this ban was later reversed). 17 players were suspended. An auction was held for City’s best talent - four players, including Meredith, were bought by Manchester United, who stomped to the title two years later.

It should be noted this source claims financial doping of this kind was not just common among First Division clubs at the time, but ubiquitous. Everyone was doing it; City, being from the north, were simply made an example. With more time I’d dig into this, but for the purposes of this newsletter I will instead bend to the temptation of this delicious dramatic irony.

In football, the feeling is always the point. Over time, that feeling is warped, twisted, repackaged and resold. It tumbles across the event horizon and has unimaginable forces applied to it, but it always re-emerges - or has, so far, always re-emerged - ready to be sold again. It looks a little different every time, has new stickers and paint, but the feeling always survives. Home, community, pride. Whatever inspired the workers at Dial Square to band together, whatever those young men felt as they turned from gang war and towards St Mark’s Church of England - it’s that feeling that remains, that draws people towards football, that is packaged and sold by the Premier League today, and has been sold, by somebody or another, for 150 years. It is eternal. Because we must speak about everything in these terms, that feeling is among the most successful and enduring products ever brought to market.

And 120 years after their first financial scandal, Manchester City are back at it. This time, they’ve put the feeling on the line.

You’re the queen of superficial
how long before you tell the truth?

There is no more damning indictment of modern Manchester City than the complete void of feeling they operate in. They have turned the Premier League into what English fans once sneered at - a farmer’s league routinely run over by a totally unmatched financial powerhouse. But nobody seems to care. Fans are too wrapped up in tribalism to notice, too busy scoring points on Twitter, too overwhelmed by the feeling to notice it’s being slowly sucked away from them.

Look, that last-minute equaliser stung, and you can accuse me of bitterness if you like, it’s certainly there. But I’ve wanted to write about City for years now. Here’s my excuse. Apologies, but I’m going in.

City are a black hole threatening to go supermassive. They are a festering tumor on the Premier League and organised football in England as a whole. Everyone who has ever loved football has felt a shade of the same feeling, and City represent that feeling’s perfect antithesis - a cold, empty nothing. They are a mechanical shrug of the shoulders, a twitch of a Boston Dynamics robot meant to represent some human response but plunging instead deep into the uncanny valley; a simulacrum, a voodoo doll, a YouTube thumbnail from a 3am haze. I cannot be more clear: Fuck Manchester City.

Why? It’s not just the (alleged) cheating, although that is key. I don’t know how to neatly untangle my feelings on this, so let me use a juxtaposition: a football club designed by church wardens to keep local factory workers from falling into alcoholism and gang violence is now the sportswashing face of a trillion-dollar petrostate.

This is not unique to City. Arsenal wear the name of a state once in partnership with the British government to systematically breach the human rights of refugees. Newcastle United are owned entirely by another foreign state, with its own horrendous record of human rights offences. Fake gambling fronts, dodgy billionaires, oligarchs and despots - engaging in the international web of capital at this scale exposes you to the absolute impossibility of keeping your moral sheets clean. The Premier League’s position as footballing hegemon has only deepened the desire to accept money no matter its source. And every single club has something.

But (alleged) cheating at scale is, this time, unique to City. Their funders have (allegedly) lied, concealed and cheated their way to a footballing dynasty. They have stolen an historic era from Liverpool and are now doing so to Arsenal. They have proven the feeling football has provided for 150 years can be claimed by whoever bids the highest. It wasn’t enough to have the weight of an entire nation-state behind them. They had to find back doors to pump their money in.

Worst of all, they’re just the beginning. My point here is not that City’s funding is unique in its immorality - it isn’t, really - or necessarily illegal - that remains to be proved, though I’m sure it will - but that they are representative, to me, of a phenomenon that is slowly destroying everything I love.

I dreamed, as a boy, of making art, of writing novels and films, a dream I still keep tucked in my back pocket as I knock out increasingly demented newsletters about football. I have been told, for years now, that dream is no longer worth holding. I have watched publications I love replace real writers with AI chatbots to pump out plagiarised slop. I have been sat at tables with experienced finance guys who have confidently told me the future of football magazines like mine lies in the metaverse, a technological flop so extraordinary it cost Meta €46b to make and is still no more sophisticated a product than Roblox. I have watched as art is churned out from generative machines by losers too lazy to put in the thousands of hours it takes to become an artist but think they’re owed that title anyway. I have watched and I believe I am watching the same thing come for football.

The 2020’s, so far, have been defined in large part by the attempted eradication of meaning from art by people who don’t understand it. Thankfully, I think this is doomed to fail. These people are idiots who don’t understand any of the markets they’re trying to disrupt; generative AI is yet to prove a path to profitability or a product worth the groundbreaking levels of investment it’s forced to raise to stay afloat; generative AI requires unprecedented and incredibly destructive amounts of natural resource to work; the metaverse is dogshit and nobody cares. I hope AI is eventually good and helps people in the places they need help. But art only has meaning when it’s an attempt at communication between an artist and an audience, at bridging that invisible gap between. It only has meaning, feeling, when it is produced by a human being.

Football, dare I say, is similar. The feeling is the point. Football without feeling - football existing in the vacuous black hole of Manchester City’s creation, football in apathy, football without soul, football that exists only to be sold - is nothing. Heads are not turning towards the Saudi Pro League because they are fielding washed teams of once-superstars. Heads are turning towards Asian markets because they’re investing in their grassroots and bringing through talent genuinely worth caring about.

Of course, extracting feeling for profit is much easier in football than in art. It goes largely unnoticed, if you’re winning. It goes totally unnoticed if, as in Manchester City’s case, the people you’re selling to are still getting their feeling from other sources. Liverpool and Arsenal fans will still bicker in the chasm you’ve left. They’ll still get their fill.

But is an utterly poisonous precedent. The game is already long ‘gone’, but a league of outfits as openly soulless and (allegedly) corrupt as Manchester City - a Super League, perhaps - would see it slide off a cliff. There are reasons to be hopeful, of course: fans shouted down the European Super League in two days. But the spread of City-ism is much smarter, quieter and more insidious.

Which is why they bring me to such anger. Reject apathy - in football it means death. Shout, scream, hate. Bring them the feeling. Fill their nothingness with ugly colour.

If the Premier League has any interest in defending - and here most would write ‘the integrity of the competition’, but to me that is a secondary concern, honestly, so I will write instead: the soul of our sport, they must be serious about putting a stop to this spreading miasma now. As in 1905, the hammer must come down hard. Relations with the United Arab Emirates may be hurt - a sentence so absurd to write about dealings with a football club in Manchester it physically pains me to write - but they should never be tied up in football anyway. Draw the line here. We’ll deal with what’s coming when it comes.

@Arsenal

And the superstars sucked into the supermassive…
…you set my soul alight!

Ah yeah, a football game happened. That’s why I’m writing this!

I have lots to say but no energy or desire to say it. I loved that Arsenal brought the feeling, finally, to Manchester City. They couldn’t cope. City and their players have become so accustomed to winning without feeling - a blistering, robotic stomping of every side unwilling or unable to engage in a decade of (alleged) cheating - they seem to have forgotten what football with feeling is. Arsenal, to my great pride, reminded them.

I just remembered Michael Oliver took money from the United Arab Emirates just last year. I certainly don’t have enough time for that rabbit hole. Christ.

I would love Arsenal to beat this (allegedly) doped-up black hole on sporting merit alone. But honestly? I don’t mind if we win it because City have been relegated to the Vanarama North, either. This is bigger than just my club - everything we love about football is on the line. I hope and pray Manchester City have the book blasted into their face so ferociously it reshapes Erling Haaland’s stupid nose.

Football will never return to its roots. I’m under no illusions. Romanticising church teams and worker unions is little more than vapid gesturing at an imagined past. But it can’t become…this. It can’t become a product so watered down and devoid of meaning it might as well have emerged from ChatGPT. We have to draw the line somewhere - I suggest it’s when a nation state (allegedly) breaches financial regulations 115 times.

That’d be a good start.

Grok, generate me a football rivalry, red versus blue, they hate each other, someone gets a red card, fans are angry, 120 years of history, bad blood…

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Postcards from N5

• Manchester City players don’t get to talk about conduct, sportsmanship, staying humble or anything of the sort until the body that pays their staggering wages is exonerated on all 115 charges. Shut the fuck up.

• Myles Lewis-Skelly, my small adult son. Being booked before your debut is very funny and endearing. Squaring up to a giant man-child who throws his toys out the pram when he doesn’t win is funnier and more endearing. I love you. Start this Wednesday, please.

• Rodri is all-but-confirmed to be out for the rest of this season. City’s form without him will not win them a title. Time to go to work.

• I fucking love my football club. They make me feel things I will never forget. I wouldn’t sell that for all the oil in the UAE.

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