Football is, at best, a trivial game. This is obvious to me but it wasn't always so.
Until my first football game I had little appreciation for team sports. Perhaps that's why the team ethic at work is important to me...perhaps like Albert Camus, French philosopher, substantial parts of my education is owed to football - or, as he put it:
"what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport"
As Wikipedia states, "Camus was referring to a sort of simplistic morality he wrote about in his early essays, the principle of sticking up for your friends, of valuing bravery and fair-play."
Yes, precisely that.
However, for me football is dying. It has been for a while but it's taken Facebook and Twitter to demonstrate it.
Let's start with Twitter. Everyone knows that Match of the Day is terrible. The pundits are overpaid and incapable of basic communication. Their insights are insipid and unremarkable to start with, perhaps due to a preoccupation with employing ex-footballers, so they suffer terribly from being reheated every week. Sky is a bit better but not a great deal. As a result the focus shifts away from analysis to comment - at which point, football is lost.
Because that's where Twitter takes off; comments drive more comments but very little analysis or insight. The coverage often gets an almighty kicking on Twitter. As do the players. And the officials. (Amusingly, when referee Chris Foy was confused with cyclist Chris Hoy.)
The Twitter action demonstrates that the football itself isn't the focus anymore. It could be any sport. In fact it could be anything. Wound up fans wind each other up more, as they do on non-football or non-sport messageboards the world over. Fans even wind up their own clubs - which demonstrates the sport's obsession with the media, but also shows how the unique qualities of football that made it important to Camus have been lost in the barrage of irrelevant commentary. Sure, there are pearls of wisdom in there somewhere but they're cast before swine.
Perhaps more serious is what I see in Facebook. Inevitably feelings run high after a match and everyone piles in with vitriolic comments which always look more serious in print, without facial expressions to mitigate delivery, or the chance to buy a reconciliatory pint. People defend the indefensible (cf. recent high profile racist abuse cases) and it all gets a bit nasty.
These days I watch football at home. Really, there's nothing at the match I need to see, though there's much to be missed. Most importantly, the TV goes off when the half-cocked opinions come out. I avoid the Facebook threads and trending Twitter topics where football is driving people mad.
Perhaps social media is just exposing what had been there all along. Idiot footballers with little to say have historically been in luck as they weren't required and had limited platforms for saying what little they did. Now we all get to listen to them.
And everybody else.
