I love football, but some of the language, habits and nonsense surrounding the modern game make me want to put my head through a wall.
Before anyone gets excited, this isn’t going to be a rant about expected goals or an appeal to return to the days when tactical instruction amounted to telling someone to get stuck in. I know my xG from my PPDA, and my low block from my high press. Football has been studied and broken down because there is value in understanding how it works, and I’ll happily defend that.
However, useful analysis exists alongside an awful lot of repetitive rubbish. Some of these are sayings, some are attitudes, and some are things that probably shouldn’t annoy me anywhere near as much as they do.
In no particular order, here are my ten.
10. People getting angry about the word ‘soccer’
Few things bring out football’s self-appointed guardians quite like someone calling it soccer. Out comes the indignation, usually accompanied by a lecture about Americans ruining our game, delivered by someone who appears to believe the word arrived here with satellite television.
Except it didn’t. Soccer is part of our own football vocabulary, whether people like it or not, and you don’t have to go particularly far back through the Lincolnshire Echo to find City described as a soccer club. The great Maurice Burton used it, and I’d suggest his contribution to Lincoln City’s history stands up fairly well against someone shouting at an American on Facebook.
When Harvey Jabara first invested in the club, he was careful to call it football. I understood why, but the fact he needed to be conscious of it says something about how precious we can become over a tradition we haven’t properly understood.
Call it football, by all means. That’s what I call it, but getting furious about soccer doesn’t make you a custodian of the game’s heritage. It just means you’ve decided to defend that heritage without reading much of it.
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