‘He’s 28 until he’s 29’: A dummies’ guide to the insane world of Football Twitter
If hell on earth exists, it is Football Twitter.
(For the record, “Football Twitter”, or FT, is just a catchy but slightly inaccurate term. The phenomenon isn’t restricted to one social media platform. It’s an ancient, worldwide guerrilla movement with bureaus and back-offices in all corners of the internet.)
The Origins
Football fans are simpletons. We don’t have a very evolved thought process. All we ask for is that our team wins. Big. And that the other team loses badly. We hope that our rivals are thrashed. We want the players we like to do well; we want the ones we hate to be humiliated routinely. Simple, really. It’s rooted in tribalism and persecution. The whole world is against us — even teams whose countries are ravaged by, like, war, famine, poverty or whatever have it better — and yet we will defy the odds and rub your face in it. Joy for us, misery for you.
Other things pop up periodically, like technique and style of play, a sense of community especially, fairness and sportsmanship. But those are secondary concerns at best. Ultimately, our demands are limited. We don’t think we’re asking for too much. And when we don’t get what we want, we become very angry.
And the thing is, we all think we’re not like that. Every single football fan believes themselves to be smarter, wiser than the ‘average’ fan. That my interests are loftier. That while others may have a simplistic view of sport and, indeed, life, I on the other hand am not like that. I see the game for what it is, not what I want it to be. It’s bullshit though. All of us are idiots. Consistently if not equally. We only seek the adrenaline, the thrill, the excitement, and above all the reflected glory of being associated with a winner.
That, in essence, explains why we behave the way we do on the internet. The tribalism at the heart of sporting fandom dictates our actions. It began on the Old Internet: on message boards and forums. Slowly, it switched to blogs and the Below The Line comment sections under articles. YouTube comments have been a particular goldmine. Early social media, too, was a great aggregator of all this misplaced angst. And then Twitter happened, so it all went down there, since it served as a kind of centralised townhall with immediacy and direct access. So that’s where we spread our filth now.
Goliath vs Goliath — the great goat war of the 2010s
Who is Pendu? What on earth does it mean? Upon further investigation of a tweet ribbing on a player named “Pendu”, I discovered that it’s actually a (non) affectionate nickname for Penaldo. Who is Penaldo now? That’s the crown Cristiano Ronaldo has been burdened with for years by fans of Lionel Messi, his great rival. It suggests that Ronaldo, one of football’s greatest goalscorers, has padded his formidable record by scoring loads of penalties — cheap goals that require little effort. Penaldo fans, though, disagree. Calmly and rationally, you wonder? No, don’t be silly. They get hysterical about it. And then they level the exact same accusations at Lionel Pessi. (Who’s Pessi? Please, it’s basic maths; you know who Pessi is.)
Old farts trying to fly against the wind — still pungent, but not nearly as putrid. Time waits for none, not even goats.
Anytime one of Ronaldo or Messi is mentioned in any tweet, or any article on the internet, the comments section is filled with passionate fans of both players, fighting till the bitter end over who the better player is, goading each other on.
“Messi is goated,” one child will say. Goated, as it happens, is the verb form of ‘goat’ — GOAT, the greatest of all time.
Pat comes the reply from a rival child: “Pessi is an overrated fraud midget who played for VARcelona and cried little bitch tears when he left. Ronaldo is the 🐐” (It’s tough to translate that sentence to normal English but I think the sentiment carries through regardless.)
“NO,” is the seething response. “Something something your mom something something Padrid something something flukey c*nt.”
[Padrid here is a derogatory term used for the Spanish city of Madrid by football fans. I think it means that Real Madrid, the team where Ronaldo used to play and win at a lot, score only penalties — hence ‘Padrid’.]
There’s really no end to this. It goes on forever, expanding in size as fellow gang members of the two warring factions join in. It becomes progressively more hostile, increasingly more incomprehensible. The insults and allegations, juvenile to begin with, turn to gibberish.
This began sometime in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The first half of the decade, and a couple of years after, were dominated by the great rivalry between these two players. Young, impressionable fans fell into the trap of embracing one cult or the other. Ronaldo’s machine-like output, his superhuman physicality and productivity, or Messi’s more cultured, more artsy-fartsy stylings. Either way, fans picked a guy. And made him their god. And they refused to listen to any dissenting opinion, instead choosing to flood the internet with playground insults and circular arguments for years.
Today, both players are, well, they’re over the hill. They’re still excellent at some things, but the sands of time have caught up with both Penaldo and Pessi. Old farts trying to fly against the wind — still pungent, but not nearly as putrid. Time waits for none, not even goats. Younger, fitter, more exciting lambs have taken their place as the best of the current lot.
They’ve both been found guilty of tax fraud. Ronaldo has had credible allegations of rape made against him. None of that matters. The fans, who probably began this generational family feud as pimply teenagers seeking an identity, seeking shelter in a community that accepts them, are now in their late 20s or 30s and still making the same zealous arguments, picking the exact same fights every day. It’s worrying but also, in some way, comforting.
The wild wild west Of FT
What isn’t comforting is how this trend of myopic hyperloyalism — where you put down the achievements of one to prop up the other; where you constantly pit teams and players against each other to the point of brain rot, bereft of sense, logic, or perspective — has infiltrated general discussions around the sport. The juvenile back-and-forth has become the defining trait, the blueprint, of football fandom. Frustration gives way to rage, leading to everyday farce.
Any player who doesn’t play for your team but does well is a “tap-in merchant” or a “statpadder” or a “fraud” or a “diver” or a whole range of more colourful taunts. (“Bruno Penandes of Penchester United” is one literary gem I’ve seen often. Chelsea’s Christian Pulisic is “Christian Pulishit”.)
Your own players, naturally, are goated. Unless they suck, in which case they’re “not fit to wear the shirt” because “they don’t care”. There are no permanent friends or enemies in football. World Cup winner Paul Pogba, now again at Juventus after a mixed spell at Manchester United, is known fondly as “Jogba” for his perceived inability to care for the club paying his wages. He doesn’t run, he jogs, apparently. Because Pogba don’t care. If they do happen to care, and show that trait on the field, then they’re just “passion merchants”.
It's fine — just about — till here. Within reason, the world of Football Twitter can be hilarious and even a great outlet for the powerlessness, the impotency, that all sports fans feel — a total lack of control over the thing they love most. With some demented absurdism thrown in from time to time…
In fact, a big reason why regular people — civilians with no interest in the incessant volleying of insults online — get sucked into the FT vortex of shame is the humour. There’s a spirit of gallows humour to fan behaviour in sport, especially football. The ‘woe is me’, the feeling of persecution, the despair, the exceptionalism that every fan feels — it sometimes manifests itself as self-deprecation. Or the most withering attacks delivered with the cool panache of a seasoned comic. The term used most is ‘banter’, as maligned as that concept is, for reasons both valid and not.
And it’s a very specific kind of humour, from out of context clips to parodies, satire, good natured (or vicious) ridicule, to brutally effective slapstick. This photo, for instance, kept us entertained for days when it first happened. Or like Boring James Milner, a reimagining of the footballer James Milner as a totally square loser with not a single interesting thing to say (as the name suggests). The mild-mannered and unassuming Shinji Kagawa transforming, via a parody Twitter alter-ego, into a malicious villain out to set the world on fire — Evil Kagawa. At its best, FT can be the funniest place on the internet, with the most ridiculous mishmash of contrasting comedic styles and devices. Nothing, though, can quite top this.
The underbelly
But one (of many) major thing fans lack is a sense of perspective, a sense of proportionality. They’re unable to understand, or choose not to, that sport is not real life. It looks and feels and sounds like it, and it invokes passions and emotions in the real world, but ultimately it’s all made up. An arbitrary set of rules you must follow to “win” and make fully grown adults ugly-blubber at their TV screens.
They can’t temper their reactions, and they throw that famous quote, that “football is not about life and death, it’s much more important than that” as a clinching argument. You can’t really argue against rhetoric.
So real-life incidents are conflated with sporting incidents as gotchas, for one-upmanship. Lines are constantly crossed in the most rancid manner. I saw this exchange on Twitter recently: one guy pointed out an incident of racist language used by a player, suggesting that he’s perfect for a club like Chelsea, which has had its share of problems with racism in the past (as have plenty of other clubs). A Chelsea fan responded to the first guy, reminding him that his team’s best midfielder is (allegedly) a rapist. A third guy, supporting an entirely different team, pointed out that one Chelsea player literally killed a person (in a car accident). These real-life crimes with real victims were being treated as barbs, convenient ‘dunks’, to put down a club and a rival fan, with no regard to the actual consequences of the actions. The de-sensitisation is flagrant. The dehumanisation of anyone not on my team is complete.
Every time a player is accused of violence against women — which sadly happens a lot — that player gets outsize fan support from loyalists willing to overlook the worst human actions by their heroes. Charges of racism? No biggie. Assault? Meh. Someone died tragically? Let’s mock that person’s team and fans, it’ll be so funny.
The legal, but not always moral, dictum of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, even in the face of mounting evidence, a broken system, and a clear power imbalance, is issued as a blanket whitewashing statement. The latest trend is invoking Amber Heard as some kind of cautionary tale thanks to the weird media blitz against her.
There’s also random abuse at players at odd times. This one footballer the other day posted something about offering to sign his shirt for a young girl who idolised him and wanted to become a goalkeeper just like him. It’s a sweet thing to do — PR or otherwise — but the replies were filled with fans calling him a moron for not having played all that well in the previous match. Some, like Phil Jones, have eschewed social media entirely, following a barrage of abuse and being caricatured and memed and ridiculed by tens of thousands of fans for the crime of having an expressive face during matches.
Like, I see how toxic and vile people can get when it comes to politics. Then I do a quick scan of Football Twitter and I realise that not even the worst kind of angry clueless unemployed right wingers can match up to the level of vitriol that exists here.
The tacticos and nerds
One place that isn’t as violent, as hostile, though just as smug and self-righteous, is Tactics Twitter. This is where a bunch of journalists, analysts, bloggers, data scientists, “spreadsheet nerds and losers” hang out. A few years ago, there was a mainstream attempt to understand the technical side of the game better. Data analytics, which had become ever more sophisticated, infiltrated the public consciousness through “xG” or expected goals (let’s not get into that whole thing here though).
Managers and coaches started to speak more freely about the tactics and systems they’d employed. It caused a bitter split in the football fandom world, as some believed in the sacred “eye test” — where you trust what you see — while others believed that data revealed things that a casual watch may not. At the time, both sides refused to acknowledge that sports happens in the grey area between these two, in the middle ground. Things have become slightly better now, as the anti-xG people will use data if it serves their point. Even the nerds have expanded their approach to incorporate the remote possibility of intangibles. They call it the “dawg”. The dawg has even united the two factions on occasion. But there’s still a divide, with both sides scoffing contemptuously at the other. “I’m better than you,” they each hiss in unison.
Transfer Twitter
Much of that pales in comparison to the madness, though, that is the Transfer Window. This is the three month period in the year where clubs can buy players from other clubs. For many, this part of the game has become almost more important than the actual on-pitch thing with the ball and the nets and stuff. You have ITK accounts, dispassionate analysts, gossip mongers, clout chasers, anarchists, people talking shit just to kickstart their podcasts, journalists making stuff up for engagement and clicks, desperate fans drooling at the most outlandish reports in the press. It’s a beautiful circus.
Fans have no coping mechanisms, and the dawning realisation that they will not get all the best toys in the world to see them through the next year makes them lash out. In the most insane ways possible. There’s like this constant simmer of rage and intensity that runs through the fallow off-season months, before it explodes into a full on blazing forest fire as the season starts and the end of the transfer window approaches. Words that have no right to exist in society are flung with disdain at players who’re just trying to do their jobs, at rival fans, at club executives. Even the poor journalists who report on these stories aren’t immune from the 24/7 churn.
Fabrizio Romano, an Italian transfer journalist, has arguably redefined the genre through his constant (and mostly reliable) reporting on social media, offering a kind of accessibility that other journalists didn’t. He puts himself out there a lot more, and provides frequent updates on the same developing story, coining his own catchphrase that’s now synonymous with football transfers— “here we go”.
Now that Romano is a legitimate big deal, FT must bring him down a peg (that’s how the world works). So he’s accused of being a “tap-in merchant” of football transfer reporting. He only scores the easy goals, only reporting transfers once they’re almost done so that he can’t be proved wrong. “Tapinrizio Romano,” he’s called in some quarters. Not “Taprizio Romano”, which would work just fine. But “Tapinrizio” (in fairness, I’ve seen “Fabrizio Tapinho” used too). And then his supporters get upset and stick up for him. “Fab is goated,” they shoot back. It’s all very strange.
Epilogue
The truth is, though, that other than the really bad stuff — the defending of the indefensible; the racism and sexism and homophobia and all the other -isms; the constant personal abuse; the threats; the bullying; the violence; you know, keeping all of that aside for a second — Football Twitter is actually just a whole lot of fun. It can be cathartic, educational, hilarious. It’s a faceless community of long-suffering fans who seek solace in numbers. Everyone’s just trying their best. And everyone’s hopelessly addicted.
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Photo by Sơn Bờm: https://www.pexels.com/photo/selective-focus-beige-and-brown-goat-1773181/