How To Slow The F*ck Down

Or how not to live your life like a greedy football club

When I was 15 I cried into my dinner while watching West Ham get beaten six nil by Oldham Athletic in the first leg of a league cup semi final. It was such a traumatic experience that I can remember the exact meal my tears dripped into: a bowl of Findus Lean Cuisine meatballs in sauce. It was as gross as it sounds - and mixed with my salty tears it looked and tasted even worse than it should have done.

I remember my mum saying “Don’t cry. After all, it would be boring if you won every week wouldn’t it?”

My mum knows fuck all about football. Of course it wouldn’t be boring if your team won every week. But here we were losing six nil. Six fucking nil! To fucking Oldham! I mean COME ON!

Sorry, I’m getting emotional all over again here, thirty-one years later. Football really gets under your skin. And even when you think you’ve grown out of investing all of that emotional energy into what is basically a stupid child’s game, it creeps back into your life and breaks your heart all over again.

Now I’m 46 and like to think that I am way past giving too much of a shit about football either way.

But the Super League farrago really got inside my nut this week.

I was quite disappointed with myself for caring so much. I mean, a bunch of billion pound football clubs governed by psychopaths forming an elitist cabal in the pursuit of infinite profit should not have been a surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the sport. It was the logical endgame of modern football, which has been hurtling headfirst towards total financial inebriation for the past few decades.

The big clubs have spent wildly beyond their means for so long that many now find themselves on the verge of collapse. A sane organisation might consider the flaws in their own demented business model and scale things down a bit. But football, like so much else in the world, is simply addicted to constant growth. So rather than work out how to make the sport more sustainable (and maybe recapturing a bit of the Corinthian spirit that made it so popular in the first place), the madmen in charge decided it was better to just double down on their excesses.

They’ve pressed pause on the whole barmy scheme for now but they will no doubt try again soon. They cannot stop. It is pathological. They are like Tony Montana in the final scenes of Scarface - head ploughed into a mountain of coke, clutching a machine gun, convinced they can shoot their way out of trouble.

The world is a mad fucking place.

The pace and greed of it all can sometimes seem suffocating. There have been times in my life where my own grandiose dreams, volatile ego and preposterous obsession with status have got the better of me. In my late thirties I went from using drink and drugs just for fun into using them as fuel for the unsustainable lifestyle I had created for myself

I wanted more than was plausible. There weren’t enough hours in the day to be all the different people I wanted to be. Cocaine seemed to help me fit more into the day and alcohol provided a fast-track means of switching off. It all made sense and seemed to work, for about a week. What followed was a couple of years of despair and misery. The only escape from the shame and anxiety caused by yesterday’s booze and drug binge was another booze and drug binge.

Like an elite football club, I couldn’t contemplate slowing down or scaling back. Although that’s where the parallels between bloated, piss-head me and elite sporting organisations ended.

What saved me was desperation.

I didn’t each rock bottom but I could certainly see it on the horizon and knew I had to take action before it was too late. In recovery they call desperation a gift because it forces you to confront your troubles and honestly assess your own role in them.

At that point you can choose to change your ways, reset your priorities, find meaning and fulfilment in simpler things in life and just try to be a better person. Or you can say ‘fuck it,’ go down the pub, WhatsApp your dealer and charge headlong into oblivion. I chose the former and am eternally grateful for the people around me who gave me the incentive, encouragement and love to do so. But it looks like football is choosing the latter. The proprietors of Europe’s top footballing brands are basically in the boozer now, calling in an eight-ball and boshing another round of shots.

I honestly hoped that the world would learn to slow down a bit after the pandemic.

Lock down forced so many of us to simplify our lives - and realise the benefits that brought to our state of mind (not to mention the planet). I thought maybe the human race would finally realise that growth for growth’s sake is pointless, destructive and mental. But it hasn’t. The world is batshit all over again, with football leading the way.

All we can do as individuals is try to live our own lives in a more humble way if we can. As they say in AA, keep your own side of the street tidy and don’t worry too much about what the other dickheads are up to (I’m paraphrasing). I try my best. My motto is ‘progress not perfection.’ I know I will never be perfect. But at least I’m better than Real Madrid.

Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times

https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123

@calm 0800 58 58 58

@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138

@ChairtySane 0300 304 7000

https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/