Present Day Football, Fans and Any Other Stuff You Hate About It!

Prestwich_Blue said:
Sorry if it looked like I was having a go. If people still get the buzz then that's fine. I tend to go straight to the stadium then straight back home again, so it's not like I have the craic of meeting up with friends in the pub.

The thing I will miss more than anything is the people around me. I've got to know them and their families over the years, seen kids grow up and even have kids of their own. I've seen old colleagues and other people I know from the outside world. And many on here of course who've become good friends.
Click to expand...

Not all, I understand completely.

It's not been the same for me since my Dad passed and no longer there with me having pints before and after. Lost some of the enthusiasm for it all.
 
Prestwich_Blue said:
We've been talking about these issues for quite a while though. Probably we've been prepared to overlook or accept them because of the success.

I know that's pretty well what the club have counted on, with their belief that we'll pay more and more, and put up with more obstacles and indignities, to watch the most successful club of the last decade. But when those successes don't continue, chickens will come home to roost. It's fans like you, who'll ignore all the shit we have to put up with, who are a large part of the problem. One day it'll be you they come after, or piss off, because you don't make them enough money.

I'll probably start taking my granddaughter to the women's games this season and if she likes it, will do it regularly next season.
Click to expand...
By way of preparation, Best get her to pretend she’s the goalie and then you can endlessly pass a tennis ball to her
 
I love football as a sport. I've learnt so much about it whilst Pep has been our manager and it's inspired me to understand the tactical nuances. The sporting side of the game is fascinating.

However, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to accept fans, particularly 'legacy' ones, shouldering the hyper-capitalism that the game has embraced. City are definitely a culprit, but the cost of watching games at any ground or on television, the price of replicas etc & the amount of people making a living from the game for producing banal 'content' is a real drag.

Every single penny is being wrenched out of football, it feels more like exploitation than ever and whilst I appreciate the complexities of the debate, sometimes you wonder if it will all fall apart.
 
TedofChume said:
When I go to see The Chameleons I film one song every year. I hold my phone low out of sight (the sound is often better). I do it because one day (soon) Mark Burgess won't be doing it anymore. I watch them occasionally and they're my memories of my favourite band.

I also film bits of City matches, the opposition fans, the light shows etc home and away and compile videos at the end of the season to remember it by.

I'm not at it all the time. Just a few moments, here and there. I guess when lots of us do that it probably looks horrendous. Again I do it discretely during the match.

My treble winning season video ended up being over 20 mins and yes I have watched it a lot.

My memories of the 80s, 90s and 00s are fading but I know when I'm too old to go anymore, I'll have these compilations to remember some of the best times of my life.
Click to expand...
Excellent taste in music, Ted.
 
Was sure a thread like this had been posted before, around the time the charges came out or maybe just a little afterwards, and thankfully my hunch was right. Fair play to Hart of the Matter as well - he logged out in February 2023 and has never come back.

forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk

Why I'm giving up on football, City and Bluemoon

So this is my last post. 55 years after my first match seeing City. 10 years a season ticket holder 1985 to 1995 until work and family took me too far away. I was there in 2012 and was there for that Tuart goal. Been to many but not all recent cup finals. I have been vocal about VAR, CAS and...
forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk

I made this post at the time.

Feel a similar way to OP but for different reasons. But unlike OP, I'm not gonna try giving it all up because I just can't. I love City, I love football, it's something I can share with my mum, I've grown up with it and it's always going to be there. But fuck me I'm tired. Just so, so tired.

I remember, up to about 2014, football was limited to weekends (or weeknights if we had Champions League games). If City won on a Saturday then your Sunday was made and you could walk into school/work with your head held high. When City won the title in 2012 it felt like time stood still, like we'd finally reached the top of the mountain and nobody was going to push us off, like my life had been building up to that specific moment. On the other hand, if City lost then the weekend was a bit shit and you had to deal with some stick on Monday from your friends/workmates. But that was it. There was a way to shut the noise out. You could ignore the radio, you could buy a different newspaper, you could flick over to a different channel, you could separate football from your everyday life and your other hobbies. By Tuesday the news cycle would have moved on. But these days it's just constant. Even if you win a league title, as soon as you get home Sky Sports are asking how the fuck you're gonna retain the title because Liverpool have spent £70m on a goalkeeper and United have signed Ronaldo again and Arsenal are trusting the process and Chelsea have spent the GDP of an eastern European country on a new winger.

Football has gone from being a weekend thing to being 24/7 chaos. A nightmare pantomime that just never fucking ends. You turn on the TV and it's a nauseating debate about FFP or whatever, you go on social media and fans are at each other's throats or TalkSport are trying to wind people up, you talk to your friends about football and they've watched all the videos you've tried to avoid. Even during the off-season or the World Cup it's all about who's signing the best players or "winning the transfer window". I have to debate with myself about geopolitics and social affairs before stepping into the Etihad. Pundits are fucking everywhere - on the telly, on social media, in the newspapers. Football journalists are almost fucking household names, for god's sake. They're on podcasts and doing radio interviews and sharing them all on Twitter. It's now crept into the stadium as well, with years of over-analysing and obsessing over slowed down camera footage on TV resulting in VAR, the absolute worst thing to ever happen to the sport. I'm not blaming the tech (it's just a monitor with footage on it) but the officials have lost the fucking plot with it. Every 6 months it feels like a major rule changes.

Another problem is that you can't just watch a game live and then look at the highlights later with a clear head anymore. The minutiae of every match is shoved in front of your face every time you look at your phone or turn on the TV. Sky are sending you notifications and asking you to "add your thoughts", Chris Sutton and Robbie Savage are winding people up on 606, TalkSport are after outrage content every hour of the day. There's a reason City fans have gone from holding up a JFT96 banner during a title race in 2014 to there being such bitter relations between us and Liverpool now, and it's because football fans just aren't allowed to calm down anymore. We're not allowed to forget things. We're not allowed to have a cool head, we're not allowed to get all our rage out at the match and then look at things with new eyes after we've cooled off. Losing a game or seeing empty seats in the Etihad, it becomes another argument to lose, another area where you might be inferior to another supporter or another club. You can't even celebrate a fucking goal anymore because you might look like a dickhead cheering a goal when VAR pops up on the screen and rules it out. The one joyous thing about football, knowing you've scored, taken away just like that.

If I was to give City up (which I nearly did during the Super League fiasco, until we pulled out again) I'd go and watch Stockport County. I've always lived a stone's throw from Edgeley Park, they were the first team I ever saw live, things are on the up for them and I get to about 5/6 games per season anyway. Plus, there's no fucking VAR down there. But even at that level, fucking League 2, they've got some mental social media rivalry with Wrexham because they were both going for promotion last season. So now every time County concede a goal and the official account posts it on Twitter, Wrexham fans are there in the replies with "Tinpot club', 'Thought you were getting promoted again?' etc. They've also got a running rivalry with Hartlepool because Dave Challinor moved from one club to the other. It is just inescapable. Drama, outrage, wind-up merchants, controversy.

I remember when supporting City was a case of turning up and just hoping they kicked the ball in the net more than the other team. Nowadays it seems a prerequisite to have a law degree to understand what the fuck is going on half the time. I've got to think about human rights abuses in Abu Dhabi before I step into the Etihad. I've got to fork out an extra £20 for my season ticket every year for no discernible reason. We've got lads collecting for a foodbank less than 100 yards from a club that can just drop £60m on a single player. The Pearce years were awful, miserable, draining, and I considered giving up my season ticket during the 06/07 season, but that was because the football was fucking rubbish and the club was in disarray. We've played the best football I've ever seen ever since Pep came in and yet my experience with City is just as draining these days. I've thought about not renewing on three separate occasions (2017, 2019 and again this week) despite us being the best team in the land. Why is that? I think it is just because I'm so, so tired of being at war with UEFA, the FA, the Premier League, or Miguel fucking Delaney, some rando on social media tweeting about "empty seats". And then you've got those cartoon fans who screech and scream on YouTube about anything and everything, and thousands of fucking idiots laugh at them every week, giving them what they want. This isn't supporting a football team anymore or following a sport, it's participating in a never-ending soap opera season finale that looks less and less like something human beings can deal with.

It's the same with politics and society. You can't turn around without being told to get mad at something Jordan Peterson said, or what transgender people are doing, or what new pronouns are apparently going to bring about the apocalypse, or what this band of gypsies on benefits is doing to the local park in a Norfolk village. "Get mad about it! The Earth's temperature is rising exponentially and everything costs more than it used to. Get mad about it! Your childhood heroes are paedophiles, and the ones who made TV like Father Ted and wrote stories like Harry Potter? They'd happily see your mates commit suicide and have given up their careers to pursue this problem. Get angry!" And all this shit translates over to football. "That handball decision wasn't given? Get angry! Marcus Rashford was offside? Well, here's that same clip, over and over and over again. And here's Dermot Gallagher to talk to you about it. And we're going to put it on YouTube and get the algorithm to suggest it to you. Oh, turning off YouTube are we? Not a problem, we can just send a little push notification to your phone to remind you instead! Have you seen Roy Keane and Gary Neville shouting at each other? It's well funny! Here's an Mbappe crying gif and a video of Darwin Nunez skying it from 6 yards. He's shit isn't he? Tell me, tell me, tell me what you think!"

And now I won't be able to walk down the street, or walk into a pub, with a City shirt on without someone questioning me about the Premier League allegations or dead slaves or financial doping or telling me how shit Grealish is. Yet I keep persisting. I keep going to City, I keep watching games on TV if I can't go. I keep caring. Because what the fuck would I do without it, really?
Click to expand...
 
Didsbury Dave said:
Young football "fans" who have never set foot in a stadium and think supporting a club is done by sending around memes mocking other clubs. Also the modern day obsession with size of crowds and "quality" of support. Fucking do my head in.

If you want to talk about fans being "great" then look at a Morecombe fan who travels to Slough on a Wednesday to see them lose, not a succesful club followed by thousands of detached glory hunters.
Click to expand...

Well said, the weird obsession with keeping score on everything that isn't the actual score. And it's always the people who don't go to games but just live on the social media spaces.
 
If I'm being completely honest, and I dare say someone will accuse me of xenophobia (I trust that I am not), but I could live without the international brigade of followers, by and large. I'm not interested in how many fans we have in the far East or Africa, the States or the Arctic, let them build and follow their own clubs and celebrate their successes as we all do. Of course I fully accept that people from wherever can follow whatever they like, and all power to them in that regard. But English football, for all it's many faults is (or was!), at heart a parochial game, where local identification and affiliations matter - we have had a cosmopolitan crowd for many years and that's fine by me, they were/are for the most part, Mancunian's or at least northern folk regardless of background. And frankly, to be honest, when the curtain does eventually fall on Peps reign and our dominance ends (and it may already be doing so!) how many of these overseas followers/'fans' will be with us when we face the mighty Stockport once again..? A wet Tuesday night in York..? I don't think so.

In a similar vain, I hate seeing kids in my local area wearing City shirts... just as I hated seeing them once of a day wearing rag, dipper, gooner or chelski shirts...
 
I'm 36.

Season ticket since 03 with a few years not able to go as I was banned for a number of years.

I have to say, I lost interest in football completely around 2010 to 2013 whilst I still had the other brain attracting me to football.

What really helped with my love of the game coming back was watching non-league football, so when I did come back to watching City my love was back.

The 115, no fans, no history crap we have to deal with certainly makes me not want to bother any more but generally, I'm still appreciative of the game.

Rarely watch us on tv, unless of course I'm with my father or friends, ticket prices and how fans are treated need to drop quick.
 
youngbob said:
Was sure a thread like this had been posted before, around the time the charges came out or maybe just a little afterwards, and thankfully my hunch was right. Fair play to Hart of the Matter as well - he logged out in February 2023 and has never come back.

forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk

Why I'm giving up on football, City and Bluemoon

So this is my last post. 55 years after my first match seeing City. 10 years a season ticket holder 1985 to 1995 until work and family took me too far away. I was there in 2012 and was there for that Tuart goal. Been to many but not all recent cup finals. I have been vocal about VAR, CAS and...
forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk

I made this post at the time.
Click to expand...
Magnificently put. Of course everything you say is done so that more and more income is generated for everyone involved in the gravy train. Income seems to be the holy grail.
What I also hate from all this media shit, mostly redshirt shit, is that they render other clubs almost meaningless and even more so when they go on about ‘istree’. All clubs, have histories and all deserve respect but to the media only 4/clubs matter - why? - because they generate the cash for them. They are not interested in greater appreciation of the game, they want to divide and conquer. It’s a real joy to have a chat with another fan away from the media bias and lies and manufactured agendas and share each others experiences and views but that’s becoming more difficult for City fans these days.
 
leithblue said:
I wonder if there’s a thing in attention spans too.

Without going into the early leavers black hole (but I still don’t believe 25,000 people walking out on Sunday evening had a longer drive home then we did) but I just don’t get leaving early at all.

20/30/40 years ago you’d stay. You’d definitely not be going when it’s close, yet thousands do. Are they bored? Is their boredom threshold that low that the prospect of waiting 20 minutes for a tram/bus without entertainment is just anathema and they need to get out to prevent that happening?

Maybe it’s that modern (if that’s a thing) fans are only after entertainment and support is a different thing.

So that. That’s what I don’t like.
Click to expand...
Supporters have always left early
Maine road in the 70's was notorious for it as supporters wanted to be first on the bus
 
It’s more about the social element for me now

The match can get in the way of a good day especially on Europe trips

I run a bus to all home games and quite a few away games and it is all about meeting the people who come on those.

Have a drink and a chat, help each other out if required.

My son and his mates are in their mid 20s, they have grown up going on these buses. A good 8 of them regularly on the trips. Season ticket holders since the age of 5 in the main. We did that in Middleton when you could, got your kid a season ticket asap to ensure they a blue. Much more difficult if nigh impossible now. That is a disgrace.

Seeing them grow up has been great, obviously there the occasional fall out or whatever but it keeps me young I think.

What I do hate is seeing these local lads struggle at times to get tickets for the big games and you then see what we did at Clanfield and will see at OT.

Anyway on to Villa.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Unread Posts

Don't have an account? Register now and see fewer ads!

SIGN UP
Back
Top