Excerpts from ‘The yob game’ by A.N.Wilson The Daily Telegraph 7/8/97
Earwig O, Earwig O Earwig O. The new football season is upon us. If….you have never played…watched the game, it may be a matter of supreme indifference.
Football, of course, is an English invention. It is our National game. It is possible that, once upon a time, it was an innocent, if idiotic, occupation. It is just possible that this innocent state of things survived into our own times, in spite of the corrupting effects of the football pools and the commercialisation of the game. Everyone seems to be agreed that mid-20th century heroes, such as Stanley Matthews, and Bobby Charlton, were the best of eggs, nature’s gentlemen and incorruptible. Let us assume this is true. It sure as hell isn’t true of today’s pathetic young men who have been driven mad by the ludicrous sums of money they are paid in " transfers", and even more by the yobbishness of their worshippers.
For, make no mistake football [the professional game..gejw] is an essentially yobbish activity. The advertisers cannot be blamed, entirely, for exploiting something that is already the case. Look at all the posters now appearing all over our cities. The "joke" behind them is that men are obsessed by football to the exclusion of everything else. They are ‘married’ to eleven men in their favourite team. Their life isn’t worth living when the "season" is not operating. With childish obedience, they hero-worship their favourite stars and blindly "follow" their favourite teams.
…………football is a form of collective yobbery, which appeals just as much to the bourgeois as to the working class. The yuppy, even the young gent, the barrister or the don, or the twenty something or thirtysomething, is made to feel a bit of a wimp if he does not love the prevailing footer culture, the awful oafish tone of voice, the crowd mentality, the noise, the language of violence.
David Mellor, an oik if ever there was one, has been appointed by our footer-loving Prime Minister as a sort of Soccer Supremo. We had to see pictures of his ugly mug, together with that of his fellow Chelsea supporter, Tony Banks, holding leather balls above their heads, at the Charlton ground and promising to improve the standard of the game. The suggested making the seats at games even cheaper, while adding pretty implausibly, that they wanted to improve the behaviour of fans. Yobbishness, racialism, violence, and drunkenness were to be excluded, they claimed because these qualities spoilt the pure enjoyment of the game for the others. What rubbish.
If you build a big stadium, fill it with young men of the sort I have described and whip up a (largely spurious) espirit de corps about their favourite teams, you have created a mini-Nuremburg in every corner of England. How can you then be surprised, if, drunk on the frenzy of mob excitement (which is far more intoxicating than lager), they turn their attention, on the way home, to slashing train seats.
Football is the deliberate, commercial exploitation of the nastiest, lowest, most yobbish elements in our society – the side which if concentrated, rather than dissipated, leads to squaddies beating up tourists in Cyprus, to gang violence in the inner cities, and to racialism. It teaches its followers to think of themselves as part of a mob, and to behave and speak like mindless yahoos. It is not an essentially decent activity that is occasionally spoilt by commercialism or violence.
It is an essential foul activity, one of the clearest symptoms, to anyone with eyes and brains in their head, that European civilisation is tottering to its close. (see Sovereign Individual—gejw).
The English have a natural tendency towards yobbishness. Ally this to collectivity and you have a very nasty mixture. All the most enobling strands in our tradition teach us to regard one another as individuals, not as "packs", "squads", or crowds. The advertisers want us to think that football mania is sweeping the country. Like hogs, they gobble up more and more airtime. But it is only their money doing this, not a widespread national interest. It still remains true that fewer people go to football matches than to church. Long may that remain.