An interesting read

From a football forum:


This and more is precisely why I no longer watch Reading. Nearly thirty years of season ticket attendance and away games, and for all the reasons you've stated and many more, I couldn't give a flying f*ck if I never see another 'professional' football match again.

Every time I'm drawn back for any reason, I feel almost sick. However, the game now has the fans it deserves. A set of true idiots whose idolisation of 'players' as they watch them flounce around in silk or get on and off air-conditioned coaches wearing earphones while sulking borders on cretinism.

I can just about stomach an away game watching Reading now, preferably in London, so you can disappear and do something else completely removed from football or even pretend you hadn't gone to the game at all, or somewhere distant and shabby in the North, so that one sense of abject misery might outdo the other. Either occasion doused in alcohol so not much of it all filters in.

Each time I remember the days of my football youth it seems that the game was at the very least reflective of a more mature society and life. Players were men, and looked like men. Now they are either metrosexual or so far up their arses and financially cushioned and protected you'd think they were mincing Berlin pouves. Fans were ribald, great fun and were held in some regard, if not respect. Now it's a crock of manufactured and over-priced sh*t.

The dearth of talent on the pitch is in direct comparison to the steroid world of money perpetuated by the behemoths of 'entertainment' such as Sky and is only a step away from the same gibbering mentality of sh*t like the X-Factor, a true emblem of how infantilised and f*cking weak-minded the general populace of this blighted country has become.

The money men know this and love the 'new audience' with its desire for enforced drama, play-offs, phone-ins, and laugh at all those that still fork out the best part or more of thirty quid to get into a plastic, homogenous sh*t-house of a stadium that was always previously called a ground, knowing what simple-minded, consumer fodder they are. The fact that these idiots compound that with paying the rest of the exorbitant rip-off that goes with it either confirms they are truly thick, or like the preening ****s who ply their trade as footballers these days, they've just got too much money.

The same goes for Sky, who have single-handedly ruined the game in this country with money. Their executives will, I am pretty certain, rub their hands and laugh at the thick wad of proles who sign up to their 'services' gated on to the back of the lure of watching 'footy' from your armchair listening to barely literate mongols try to string sentences together about 'games' taking place in places that now resemble outdoor equivalents of 'Gladiators', whose sponge-handed audience used to have an average age of five, which is about the average mental age of the modern day football fan. Going to the Madejski resembles an open-day at Fairmile.

I look at players now and know that a lot of them remind me of the wannabe rock stars in John Niven's wonderful book about the music industry 'Kill Your Friends'. If some of today's pampered footballing nonces weren't earning sums of money that make them supremely rich in obscenely short spaces of time they'd be back on the estates breaking into cars or selling crack or running in gangs.

Everything about modern football is wrong. Everything. Not just a little bit. I don't buy the 'benefits for the younger fan or family' bit. What was once a passionate and brilliant sport played out in thrilling, slightly dangerous arenas is now an 'experience' leached of meaning of any kind at all. It's absolute, utter garbage and I do not miss it one iota at all.

I used to love my club and I used to love the 'sport' of football. But it truly does not exist, just as the rest don't any more. They sold themselves, ****d themselves out and became what ****s are, badly dressed, far too expensive for what they are, soul-less plastic voids to spunk your money on.

The people who run football now have no perception or conception of what once made the sport as a professional spectacle great. None. And they never will have. It is f*cked, forever, and always will be.

Stick your jester hat up your rectum, football, is what I say.