Content machine

Part 45 in a series of pointless barely structured rants pissing into the bleak death rattle wind of modern football. There is no whimsical CJ Hamilton based slapstick capers in here. Clear? Ok. Lets go. Don't say I didn't give you fair warning. 

This season is conspiring against me. Home games are comfortable,slightly fuzzy ambles to straightforward victories. Every time I go away in search of the slightly more edgy, electricity charged buzz of a crowd on its toes, we're completely shite. 

The dwindling magic of the cup has offered itself up, a tempting drink of hedonistic football bliss sipped from the bowl of the trophy itself. 

Best Forest and get Wet Spam away. Lovely. A trip to savour. A trip to anticipate. A day in the metaphorical sunshine of a us against them, all together in the battle, forget everything else, pent up tension, death or glory, tangerine noise everywhere around me, under my skin and vibrating to the very core of my being. 

Fucking ITV. FUCKING TV. I cannot go. I cannot even watch it on telly. It is not an option. It is physically impossible. I hate this season. The Forest game now feels less exciting to me. I'm selfish. I know. But the prize is not mine any more. It belongs to others. Fuck you TV. Fuck you Winter Hill transmission tower. Fuck you Midsummer Murders and fuck you Lord Reith. 

The manner in which TV has stretched the times when you need to be aware that you might need to make space in your life to watch your football team to 'basically any time you aren't working and some times when you are' is shite. I'd hate to support a Premier League team. Having a season ticket is essentially akin to saying to your friends and family 'nah, I can't arrange anything ever more than about 4 weeks into the future' because I have to be free Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday. I've got Thursdays now, but we're in the Europa League qualifying positions so don't rely on that next year' 

That's not healthy. League 1 might be largely bobbins, but at least I can usually say 'yeah, lets do that on Monday' or 'Thursdays or Fridays are good for me' and 'Sunday? Definitely' and even 'Wednesday, more than likely' if I have the temerity to want to do something other than watch the Mighty Tangerine Wizards in action. 

No fan in their right mind can think it's good to have games kicking of on Friday, Saturday and Monday nights. Much has been said, fuck all has been done. We just moan a bit and move on. The money you see. It's all about the money. The content machine consumes football, the content machine churns up football culture and smashes habits, patterns and behaviours of fans and spits filthy cash out the other end like a giant king kong type thing with a TV in its belly, eating people and shitting out pound notes. 

Now. Let me get on to VAR. (That's a shift isn't it? No, not really. Let me explain...) The idea of moving cup games to Friday night is a clear example of how those that run the game don't really care in any way, shape or form about the experience  of legacy fans such as myself and, I presume you. The inconvenience to us is justifiable because a TV slot brings in income and that is that. It doesn't matter that I or anyone else now can't go - the draw of the TV money is more important than my ticket revenue. 

VAR is, I am increasingly convinced, all part of the same thing. 

I don't need to write loads paragraphs about how it's crap if you're at the game because the moment of a goal (the very point of being at the game) is spoiled. We all know that. Anyone who in anyway understands what it is to be at a game as a fan knows that the tumbling chaos of spontaneous release is infinitely preferable to a cautious, polite applause and a wait to see if it is or isn't a goal. Everyone knows that already. It's so obvious it's painful. Pissing about with video replays fucks up the atmosphere and the atmosphere is the best thing about football. Loads of sports have skills. Almost no sports have the spectacle of a football crowd. 

It's not about crowds though. We're just background. We built the game, but we no longer own the game. It's owned by TV companies and they give a platform to nation states washing their hands of blood and laundering their reputations, global financiers, oligarchs and mentalist egotists. They own the game and we're just huddled in the stands, happy not to have been barred yet for a transgression of whatever the latest ground rule they've dreamt up to ensure the 'matchday consumer experience' is 'on brand' and 'consistent with the values of the club/league/football family' 

I'm getting carried away a bit, so the essential point I want to make is that VAR is perfect for the TV machine. The outrage from within it about VAR is faux or superficial. Why do I think this? 

Most people watching at home aren't like you or I. They haven't given up a day to go to the game. They haven't got cold. They haven't spent hundreds of pounds to tramp across the country. That's ok. I'm not critical of them. I watch football on telly too sometimes. It's allowed. It's an important distinction though. You and them. The fan who only consumes the game via TV in the cosy warm of their own home and you, the idiot, locked in to punishing schedule of trudging about watching your (often shit) team in the rain, wind and cold. 

Your TV fan can switch off much more easily. Ok, you can leave the game too, but as you've spent a bunch of money getting there and getting in, it's not such an easy thing to do and besides, if you've bought your ticket and had your pre match pie/pint, it's no skin off football's nose if you do fuck off early. You'll turn up again next week though. It's a routine, you see mates, you get to chant, shout, moan, barrack and from time to time, feel a kind of collective joy and belonging that you don't really find anywhere else. 

Football is often boring. I've been bored in quite a few games this season but I'm an idiot so I don't care. It is what it is. Shovel more boring gruel in my mouth. Next week/season/decade will be better. For the more casual TV supporter though, we need *incident* and *narrative* to keep them engaged and we need it now. Football itself is not enough. They have none of the incidental benefits of attending the game to keep them hooked. If they switch off though, it's one less viewer seeing the adverts and a blow to 'the global reach' of the game. 

Think about TV. 99% of football is broadcast on commercial channels. Eyes on the channel means eyes on adverts. Adverts means money. Adverts mean lucrative TV deals. Are we getting there yet? This is a conspiracy theory. It's all the rage. Call me Joey Trump and get me a tinfoil hat. 

Think about how football is presented these days. Hours of pre and post match coverage. Post mortems later in the week. Previews from several days before kick off. All of this is part of the media machine and all of this costs money. All of this requires content to churn through and the quality (i.e. the spiciness) of that content dictates whether people watch it. 

This is where VAR comes in. The poorest of games can become the hottest of talking points. The moments that define the season can be those which happen at Stockley Park and it is the TV viewer who is the prime position to witness them. Take any famous game of a pre VAR era and you'd say being at the ground gave you a privileged insight - in the post VAR era we could say that the TV viewer is actually, in some meaningful way, closer to at least one element of the game than the spectator on the terrace as their view of a VAR decision, the juddering, rewinding analysis and the frantic interpretation by pundits, is closer to what is happening in the VAR van (I know it's not a van but it sounds good) than squinting at a big screen or more likely, standing there in mute confusion and just waiting. 

Football is boring sometimes. There's not much you can do about that. Unless you inject some kind of system of officiating into it that heightens otherwise routine moments by subjecting them to the kind of ridiculous scrutiny that is almost guaranteed to create some kind of 'incident' where there wasn't previously one.  

Then, once we've had the moment of controversy, there's the fuel it brings to the endless round of post match debate, discussion and analysis. There's the decision itself, the role of the various officials, comparing it to previous decisions, decrying standards, consistency, rules, rules changes and so on. Then there's the potential for the heated debate about VAR itself which can be repeated and infinitum whenever we're lacking a bit of content. 

In other words VAR plays the role of some villainous character in a narrative. It is there to shock. To create moments of controversy. To outrage and provoke. Far from 'accidentally' ruining the ebb and flow of a game, it is an opportunity to fuel the ever more hungry fire of media attention. It is the talk in the talk show. It is the clip in the social media post. It is the opinion in the pundits mouth. It is the shot in the arm that brings something new to the ever increasing, attention colonising impact of football on our airwaves. 

Football itself has only so much space for ad breaks. The more the game gives the media outlets to dissect, the more ads they can show. The more ads they show, the more valuable the product is to them, the more they'll pay the authorities for the rights to show it. Who cares if it results in a shit experience for the actual fans. They don't pay for the clubs any more. TV does. Who cares if the game is reshaped and defenders have to run like penguins to try and accommodate rule changes every 6 months. It's just another talking point. It's just another 'debate' and debate means another show, another sponsor, another set of packaged clips banged out to provoke debate. Who cares if VAR hasn't actually sorted anything out and in fact, created a culture where everyone is now paranoid and talking of 'Stockley Park conspiracy' because actually, every fucker knows that anger equals eyes, clicks and replies and if football becomes another platform for one eyed rants and wild polarised takes, then great!

It's all so much better for the money people if we spend every fucking day of the week on this shit and if we're angry whilst we're doing it. Who wants to go back to the days when you could shrug along with 5 minutes of post game analysis that said 'these things even themselves out' and 'probably too close to call Clive, you could give it either way' and then get on with your life?

Where's the social media metrics in that? Where's the hype? Where's the fucking CONTROVERSY? 

The VAR genie is a malevolent one. It won't go back into the bottle because it fuels the machine. 

In other words. Fuck TV. Fuck football authorities and fuck VAR. Fuck the world where the actual quality and experience of anything is secondary to it's 'marketability' and nothing has any value beyond some distant balance sheet. 

Everything is synthetic. Nothing is real. Reality is far too chaotic. Synthesised controversy orchestrated for attention. Piles of filthy cash.

Lets talk about it. Lets have a debate. Lets have some callers. Lets spin up some clips and see both sides. On the radio, Robbie Savage and Chris Sutton actually kill each other. Their pretended matey passive aggression turns into a violent hate fuelled fight. You can hear the sound of their skulls caving in as they beat each other with their microphones, fuelled by the whole pointless emptiness of everything they are. It's better than the usual 606 to be fair. 

In the TV studio Gary Neville is making noises but it's just a kind of scratching and honking, like the sound of a dying seal. He's trying to vomit out some kind of pseudo moral statement but he just can't cough out anything that sounds like a word. Micah Richards can't stop laughing. He really can't stop. He's laughing himself to death on life TV. Roy Keane looks unsympathetic. That's his job. He says it over and over and over, like a robot stuck on a setting as Micah gasps hopelessly for air. He's drowning in his own hilarity.

Everything is on fire. It's all melting. Robbie and Chris and Micah and the Garys and Roy and everything. Your TV is heating up, it's shimmering there, a haze of heat and you're just rooted to the spot and there's a giant flash of light and now... 

There's nothing. Just silence. Everything is gone. 

ONWARD