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?
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