Gavin Cooney

A PREOCCUPYING THOUGHT for many of us. Modern football: what the hell is this thing now? 

It has long since ceased to be an expression of the nation’s working class, while Danny Blanchflower’s creed that the game is “about glory…about doing things in style, with a flourish” has been irredeemably traduced by decades of cheating, rancour and ugliness on and off the pitch. 

Various executives will say football is now a jewel in the entertainment industry, and match-going fans who have been priced out and alienated will agree that the sport is becoming just a reality TV show. 

There’s something to that, but to my mind the most fundamental truth about the game today was articulated last year by Adam Crafton of The Athletic.

“Football is just such relentlessly camp melodrama and none of them realise it,” he posted on X Formerly Twitter. 

The brilliance of the insight is only underlined when you subject it to the rigour of the best analysis of the notion of ‘camp’, written by top, top cultural critic Susan Sontag. 

Sontag wrote a short essay, “Notes on Camp”, in 1964, but its themes neatly overlay today’s Premier League.

Camp, she theorises, relishes character, but does not allow for it to be developed. So to misquote the Sopranos – if you’re looking for an arc, go read about Noah. 

“To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role”, wrote Sontag. “What Camp taste responds to is ‘instant character’ and conversely, what it is not stirred by is the sense of development of a character. Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence – a person being one, very intense thing.”

A person being one, very intense thing is the fate of all of the Premier League’s favourites. 

Pep Guardiola: obsessive and maniacal genius-brain from the continent into new-fangled ideas but doesn’t like it Up ‘Im. 

Sam Allardyce, Sean Dyche, Tony Pulis, David Moyes: long-ball merchants defending both their penalty area and an uncompromising but threatened British identity.

Richarlison, Jamie Vardy: shithouses. 

These characters won’t be developed but will always be subject to any flimsy claim which might reinforce their established image. This is how grown journalists came to ask Dyche for clarity as to whether he actually eats worms. 

It may be possible for a handful of Premier League characters to dramatically jacknife into different roles: Mikel Arteta is currently being assessed for recasting from the Guardiola archetype to the Allardyce/Dyche/Pulis/Moyes archetype. 

Another of Sontag’s key tenets of camp is its lack of self-awareness. Anything or anybody too self-aware risks lapsing into self-parody.

Camp, she wrote, proposes itself as serious but “cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’” While camp’s “essential element is seriousness”, it is a “seriousness that fails.” 

Read these lines and it’s difficult not to think of Chris Wilder bewailing the disrespect of a linesman for eating a sandwich in front of him. Or Sam Allardyce calling for FA disciplinary action to be launched against Harry the Hornet. Or Cesc Fabregas throwing pizza at Alex Ferguson. Or Thomas Tuchel and Antonio Conte squabbling with a handshake. Or Alex Ferguson claiming a stray ball could have killed Robin Van Persie. Or Jurgen Klopp pulling a hamstring while celebrating in an official’s face. 

Man City/Arsenal was another superb act in the league’s camp drama, filled as it was with theatrical and earnestly ridiculous behaviour. We had Guardiola furiously kicking his chair, Arsenal’s second-half commitment to the defensive bit, and Erling Haaland popping the ball off Gabriel’s head before taking all comers at the full-time whistle. 

The sport and its outcome obviously means a great deal to respective sets of supporters involved, but as Oscar Wilde told us, there’s a difference between treating something as important and taking it seriously.

And too many people are now taking the Premier League too seriously. Recent years has seen a new “Being-as-Playing-a-Role” established in the league, that of the Very Online Angry Fan. 

The Very Online Angry Fan sees it as their role to defend their club at all times and at all costs, and it has led to the flourishing of conspiracy theories online. For those of us whose algorithms still point largely toward football, Sunday’s game at the Etihad has clogged our timelines with Arsenal fans pointing to videos of Jeremy Doku, Dominik Szoboszlai, and any other player not being booked for kicking the ball away recently, and of any and all past decisions made by Michael Oliver that appear to favour Manchester City. 

The general point being made: this is all a conspiracy against my club, and it’s my job to stand against it as the mainstream media refuse to.

This is not just unique to Arsenal fans, obviously, but they are the fanbase feeling most aggrieved from the most recent Premier League game.

Conspiratorial thinking and partisanship is rewarded on social media – that’s what does the numbers – while conspiracy thinking in football has also been seeded by VAR. Referees still make mistakes, occasionally bewildering mistakes, despite the technology available to them. The VAR monitor makes officials’ error and occasional incompetence less explicable, but it hasn’t eliminated it.  

These factors have collided to produce a torrent of whataboutery and whinging online, and this endless complaint and counter-claim seeps into TV coverage of matches – pundits, journalists and TV producers are among the last class of people left on X Formerly Twitter – while making referees’ actual lives difficult. 

But above all this whole thing is exhausting, and is becoming a barrier to just sitting down and enjoying this absurd drama for the soaring achievement of camp it is. 

Sontag’s vision of camp relies on the detachment of its audience, who have to be able to judge that the actors’ seriousness has failed. But venting conspiracy on behalf of your team is to assume a role in the melodrama, and completely lose sight of why it was worth watching in the first place.