Falling Out Of Love With Football

I’m really struggling at the moment with the game I love. I have been playing football since I was 6, I’m now 31. I play every Saturday throughout the season, and when on rare occasions I don’t have a game I’m watching it.

However the last few seasons even prior to the FA cup final debacle I have really been struggling with my enjoyment of the game. I still enjoy playing it, and I still get a buzz when watford win but it’s nowhere near what it used to be like.

I blame a lot of this on the introduction of VAR, I think it has a lot to answer for and has really affected the game. Add onto that the appalling mismanagement of the club that I love over the past 24 months and I just really struggled to get excited about watching a watford game, or any football for that matter.

On the watford issue the owners and directors have a lot to answer for since the FA Cup final and have never given us any real answers. They have hired a manager who is clearly not up to the standard required, when there were other tried and tested managers available. Instead they went for the cheap option. Altogether this is obviously contributing to my lack of enjoyment.

Has anyone else ever had that feeling where they are falling out of love with the club and the game? How did you come through it?

 

I've stated in other threads I have. It accelerated greatly with what happened last season, but there was a lot of things happening in footy in the country and internationally that made me think this. Reading the Football Leaks book has also furthered this for me.

On a slightly different note, I remember when I first started supporting Watford as it's my hometown local club and was proud of my club for having faith in its academy and playing British players.

Even though I was younger back then (and it might very well have been a slightly jingoistic attitude to have), the sheer cognitive dissonance in my head from when the Pozzos took over and the disillusionment with footy since then is weird to process

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I am where you are. Can’t stand what our club has become under Pozzo and don’t watch any other football because the lack of crowds just turns me off. I couldn’t even tell you who won the champions league last season or how the British clubs are doing this year. Just don’t care.

 

Age..other priorities take precedence and a loss is not as important as it was
Covid.. just not the same watching it without being there
Pozzos...I hate the head coach merry go round but think I hate the toxic players even more. And it never changes (bar from the very odd season)
Lethargic...if the players can’t be arsed than neither can i

 

fallen

 

God only knows how PessimisticHornet is feeling then

 

I am with you on this. Granted Watford have just lost and it’s easy to get all sour grapes, but I have been feeling this for a while too. When Bury FC went out I think it was a sad reflection of the English game, considering just how much money is at the top.

I found our recent spell in Premier League was about certain clubs, with the focus increasingly on the worldwide audience. Looking back, all I really cared about was the FA Cup final and that really was heartbreaking to watch.

the COVID-19 response really highlighted to me that the game is no longer for the ‘man on the terrace’ (as GT said), but for the money driven worldwide audience. It was far more important to rush the games through without the fans than to replay the season or determine winners losers as with lower leagues (bearing in mind at the time no one knew how long games would be closed to fans)

Then it was little things like, for example, seeing the football players in and around the grounds without masks, because that’s ok and yet the background staff (who also get tested) having to wear masks. Maybe I’m overreacting, but made me feel like the players are treated unfairly superiorly

I won’t blame the Pozzos, I just think the game has become too far removed from the perceived working class game.

 

It’s simple for me, what’s the absolute most a Watford fan can hope for in a realistic world that would bring unbridled joy.

- FA Cup win
- League Cup win
- A fun uplifting Europa League run

Winning The Championship would be great just to have a title but even that we seem to be ruining this season.

We got within touching distance of a Championship title, shat the bed. We got a FA Cup final and totally humiliated ourselves in record breaking fashion.

So what next? Go up eventually, take a few beatings, beat a few big boys and finish 13th. It’s repetitive and not sure how to fully articulate how I feel maybe it’s part of growing up, it’s never going to feel the same or bring the same joy as it did when you were younger but yeah not being there won’t help the disconnect.


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I went and got my coaching badges so I could offer something else and to give myself a different outlook on the game we love. ( when I was 30) as I knew I wouldn’t be playing forever. But here I am in my 40’s still trying to play.

But back then I was slowly falling out with the game and the coaching certainly brightened it up. Now with work I prioritize coaching then watching then playing.


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Football has become like a weird addiction for me, like fags or something. I don’t actually like watching it but end up watching loads of it, then when it was the international break I missed it.

The main cause for that for me is there is basically **** all to do at the moment compared to normal life.

One thing is for sure though, the amount of games and the scheduling and obviously no fans has seriously devalued it for me. I watch loads of games but they’re just joyless affairs and most of the time I don’t actually watch them and I’m on my phone looking at other stuff.

As for Watford, it was fun at times being in the premier league, however you’re always expecting the wheels to come off at any moment which of course inevitably happened. I wasn’t that bothered about being relegated because I thought it might be quite fun to win more games and be the better team. Well that hasn’t happened has it. Today was the first game I haven’t watched in full, went to the pub and basically forgot about us and it was great. Got home at half time and couldn’t help but put the game on, it basically ruined my afternoon. I think until Ivic goes I’m just going to forget about us and check the results afterwards.

 

I agree matches were VAR is used are now unwatchable. But when it comes to supporting a club like Watford the misery is part of the fun. If it weren't for Covid fans would be in the pub now having a few scoops and the afternoon's purgatory would be forgotten.

 

This weirdly strongly sums up my own current mindset/experience - except for the final para about not being too bothered about relegation and thinking the Champ might be fun.

 

Fell out of love with football years ago.

Will always follow this club as it's in my DNA, just like everyone else on here.

Boxing is now my favourite sport and has been for a long time now.

Football is a joke.

PS, i'd have said this even if we were top of the Premier League and playing in Europe year in and year out.

 

Project big picture was also quite damaging. Sure, it didn’t fly, but the fact that two of the big clubs so brazenly wanted to grab more of the cash, make the premier league even more of a closed shop and eliminate other clubs from being able to challenge them left a sour taste for many. It’s really losing touch with what football is for and about. The vast majority of fans support a team based on a factor outside of that team being the most successful or the richest.

 

Wow. Nothing you don’t really know but reminds you of what the game was once like. Now it’s just a billionaires play thing / hobby. Where the rich get richer. The sad thing is we dream or dreamt of a cup final win and a European tour. That’s near enough now the ceiling for every club bar the big six.


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It's money ruining sport in the same way it ruins, corrupts and despoils everything else it touches.

The cheap, accessible working man's Saturday R&R has been siezed by the money men and turned into a whizz bang glamorous celebrity chase for filthy money from gambling and TV.

I wish that wimpy arse Nick Hornby had written his wistful whitey middle class book about bloody Rugby or Cricket instead. I'm sure we'd all be much better off today.

 

I totally concur. I realise I begin to sound like my dad did when I talk about my dislike of modern football but whilst it’s been going the way it has for some time, the last 5 or 10 years it has accelerated considerably. There is more I don’t like than do like about the modern game.

For what was a working men’s game it has become totally elitist and a closed shop, which means that for 86 clubs of the 92 they are all but locked out. In the last ten seasons the top 6 places in the premier league have been filled by the big 6 clubs 57 times out of the 60. The FA cup has been won by one of the big 6 nine out of the last ten seasons. So in the last ten years there have been 3 top 6 finishes and one FA cup win that have been won by one of the paupers. The Premier League is an utter bore fest and for 14 clubs success is nothing more than avoiding failure.

I have given up talking to mates of mine who aren’t regular match goers as what they see as a tv consumer is wildly different from the game. So many people will tell me stuff about Watford or other clubs that they pass off as gospel because they read it or heard it on sky. This might sound snobby but what I have realised through lockdown is that watching on tv gives a whole new perspective.

Style of football doesn’t help either. We are in a FIFA generation now where you are seen as anti football if you don’t tap it out from the back. Passing football can be great but a lot of it is passing for the sake of passing rather than effective or progressive passing.

The quantity and quality of pundits, the plethora of meaningless stats, the willingness to accept diving, players being out for weeks at a time with nothing more than a bruise...the game is becoming weaker in terms of out and out entertainment. And if you challenge that you are a dinosaur.

But so long as a spotty 17 year can go on Twitter and type furiously about someone’s expected goals x key passes + clubs net spend - average km covered by somebody playing as a 6 then they know far more than I do having watched a game with my own eyes.

Nurse, NURSE...

 

I sympathise.

It is easier for me, but you being less than half my age you havn't had the "benefit" of seeing us in far worse situations than we are now. Far worse owners, far worse financial situations, far less managers/coaches and players, and a ground that was a total embarrassment. Although I don't like the phrase as it is used far too often when excusing short term setbacks like losing a game, it really is a case of remembering "How far we've come".

Other than that, for me, looking ahead to the next success is 10 times better than worrying about the next failure. I don't need to work at thinking that way any more, it just happens naturally now - and I use a variation of that mindset in everything I do.

 

It’s not the Watford situation but that bothers me, as far as I’m concerned we are at our natural level. It’s football as a whole that is getting worse. From a Watford perspective this season is more enjoyable than last season.

 

Yes, I get that.

The money in the game is spoiling it to a degree and it certainly affects what we see on the pitch along with other changes in how people see the game.

I remember a while ago in the politics forum defending the earnings that the CEO of a large business may earn, by comparing it with some footballers. A CEO with 1,000's of employees and a heavy responsibility 24/7 may earn a £1m in a year, whereas a top footballer can earn that in a month or less. I was amazed when even the most fervent lefties defended footballers pay. But we are now in the situation where young men with no real experience of having a proper job are on so much money that they earn far more than their coaches. I am sure that in the back of their mind, when a coach tells them to "buck their ideas up" some will think, "Why should I listen to you?"

And to think that one of our useless forwards will earn in a week what an MP earns in a year.

So my pet hates in the game at the moment.
1. Players pay at the top. It will never happen, but it should be drastically capped and the money should be distributed further down the pyramid to the development and infrastructure. Players (a big generalisation here) are spoilt brats. Best facilities, best food, best hotels, flying everywhere instead of long coach journeys, several flash cars and houses and absolutely no incentive to try their best as they sit on their fat contracts, yet they moan and groan like
2. The cheating on the pitch where a referee gets the blame when a player successfully cheats his way to a decision, and the "he was touched, he's entitled to go over" attitude from those watching the game
4. The total lack of common sense surrounding VAR. Do away with it. Leave it to the referees and punish the players and the clubs for cheating, retrospectively if necessary.

 

Once the novelty of being in the premier league wore off half way through QSF first stint my love for football has been in free fall since. When Watford score these days I barely even flinch.

 

We’re about the same age. For me, the failure of the early 70s was a lot more fun that the success of recent times. Yes, part of that is the age you are when events happen, but more of it is because the game as a whole is now basically farked.

 

The premier league is a bit of curse for a club like us really. The money is a myth because every other club has it and you need to spend most, or all of it on wages and players if you want to try and stay there. Once you decide to do that and you want to try and stay there you put yourself in a hideously precarious position, being relegated will put you in a much worse position that when you went up if you don’t bounce back first time, and most don’t.

It’s a bit like having a very attractive money grabbing girlfriend with expensive tastes. Great while you’re with them but as soon as it’s over your life is ****ed.

I’m sure their fans hate it (the grass is always greener and all that) but it’s probably far better in the long run for a club like us to do a Norwich. The odd season of humiliation here and there but with a nice cash injection and otherwise fairly successful seasons.

 

A team like Watford should never be paying someone even £50k a week, as soon as a player gets to the level where they are asking for that they should be sold on probably for a massive profit and a young hungry much cheaper replacement should be brought in
Retrospectively can anyone say it has been a good idea to not sell say Deeney when Leicester were after him 3 or so years ago?
We needed a top to bottom rebalance of the squad in the summer but it didn’t happen so now if we don’t go up, next year we will be under real pressure, and may even go down.
Football like many have said is just a rich mans toy now, why play FM21 if you’re a billionaire when you can do it for real.
The quicker the top teams head out into some super, hyper European league turbo, special edition the better
I would love to see a team rise up from the depths with a young hungry team only paying them like £3k per week when they get to the championship, but it won’t happen. The fact that someone like Masina is probably on several million a year to play for Watford sickens me. Just as much as a CEO of a failing share plunging company talking about making staff redundant sickens me
I think football is just mirroring society as a whole, greedy, sick, with a questionable set of morals

 

I've always loved football, I'm over 60 and have been supporting Watford since the early '70's, played until I was mid 30's and my son (a Lincolnshire lad living in Manchester) plays and is a fanatical Hornet.

However I'm struggling to watch at the moment, I used to love the weekend either go the the Vic, or plan the 2 days around matches on Sky/BT and talk endlessly about it all week. I don't know what has happened but I can't be bothered to watch it on TV, it just seems so dull and lifeless, maybe it's no fans and a flat commentary? I watch the Watford games on Hive whilst looking at Facebook, Twitter and other stuff probably out of duty more than anything else. I also reel a touch of resentment that the multi billion industry can seemingly just carry on as normal with no regards for us little people

I'm hoping it'll all change when we can go back properly and enjoy the matchday experience with my lad, beer, McD, footy and a long drive home.

 

I’m a similar age with a similar experience to you and I absolutely agree that the match day experience is the thing that I love. Because of that I’ve always enjoyed away games more, even though the chance of a win is reduced. I’m afraid I still consider people who only watch on TV as not being ‘real fans’.

On another tack, it was stated on MotD last night that the Cup Final replay in 1970 was watched by 28 million people, which at the time was exactly half the population of the UK. Accepting that there were some other factors at play, it shows how drastically the popularity of the FA Cup in particular has plummeted as a result of all the influences on the game that have been highlighted in this thread.

 

Playing Football Manager brings me more joy that real football at the moment. Only have FM14 plus I am in eason 29/30 so there are no known players left playing. Having said that the Chelsea V Leeds game lastnight was quite entertaining.

 

A fascinating thread with some really interesting points of view. I feel like I've been here before. The Vialli revolution punctured my youthful bubble and I saw elements of the game for what they were. A less competitive top division dominated by a handful of clubs. The way they devalued the cups for the rest of us and the way the likes of Bolton couldn't help themselves but join in by resting their first team players for third round ties has had a huge, probably unintended consequence. It means that for 86 clubs the likelihood of achieving something magical is not just reduced but it is also devalued should it happen. Our 2019 cup run ended very badly, of course, but for me it was a magical reminder of what the game should be. I did shake my head a bit at those who felt the cup run was getting in the way of finishing 7th in the league. But then I also struggle with the idea that staying up in the Premier League, having those rare magical days, enjoying the thrill of an unexpected away win is not a worthwhile existence. It's much, much better than whatever *this* is, and it always will be.

Football is cyclical in so many ways. When we're in the Championship we desperately want promotion. When we're in the Premier League the slog to 40 points becomes boring pretty quickly, the rare wins over the top six sides are not seen as glorious David v Goliath victories but evidence that the team isn't consistent enough. What I liked about being in the Premier League and having a chance of staying up is that every game matters. In a way, Burnley at home became one of the most important games of the season even if it was one of the least attractive. But when we're up we get an uncomfortable look at the glass ceiling and we want to go down so we can come up again and repeat the whole cycle.

The media has played its part in stripping the game back to its basics. The coverage is binary, the focus is on the pounds and pence. Give a club another £10m and they'll give £9.5m of it straight to the players and their agents. So what's the point, other than football fulfilling the function of all big business, which is to gather money from the masses in order to enrich the few?

And when the game is stripped back to those basics the narratives become boring and repetitive. At the moment the 'story' is Ole Gunnar Solksjaer and whether Man U are going to get rid of him. When he's gone, the spotlight will switch to Arsenal and Arteta. Then it will switch to the next lumbering giant, and on it goes. There's no substance, just superficial drama.

Stats, whether it be possession, XG etc is a creation of the media, who have relatively little access, to explain the unexplainable. Football is a game of decisions, luck and mistakes, primarily. I had a conversation with a football obsessive the other day who didn't realise the possession stat is actually just a reflection of who has completed the most passes. He's always amazed when, say, Leicester have 35% possession but win 1-0. The penny dropped when he said: "So, if you pass the ball back and forwards in your own half for the first two minutes and the other team doesn't have a touch the possession stat would be 100% to 0%?" Yep, that's right. "But that's meaningless!" Yep, that's right.

As consumers we have evolved to expect the best to prevail – it probably says something about our flawed belief that society and the economy are meritocracies. Seeing the best win all the time is literally the last thing that attracted me to football. It was the idea that anything might be possible that got me hooked. There's nothing funnier than seeing a top side knocked out of the cup by a minnow. But the clubs, the media and the fans have devalued these achievements, robbing them of something magical, in order to preserve the inalienable right of 9th placed Crystal Palace v 11th placed Wolves to have all the spotlight.

The cup upsets, the seasons when the underdogs stun everyone are what give the game soul. Leicester gave us a glimpse of that but the pundits took the shine off it by telling us before the trophy was lifted that it was a fluke, it shouldn't have happened and it wouldn't happen again. It's very strange that the people who are employed to be salespeople for the sport often do the worst job of selling the sport's appeal.

Part of the problem is that the media is dominated by ex-players, many of whom are dulled by the cynical professionalism of the game. Their language and values are skewed by self-interest. "He's got every right to go down there," being one of many examples. It erodes what the game should be about and it seeps into everything. Then the journalists start speaking and thinking like them. Then the fans start thinking and speaking like them and suddenly, 'you've got to be better at game management in them situations' becomes a perfectly normal phrase for a normal fan to say in the pub (in normal times, of course).

Tl;DR – the game's gone, Clive. But it probably went 20 years ago.

 

One thing that has killed the game more than anything in recent times is the outrageous over analysis of every single decision on TV and radio. It all began when BT Sport first came on the scene and employed Howard Webb to analyse the referee’s decisions, this picked up traction in the media and the calls for VAR to be introduced got louder and louder. Now we have it, it’s an absolute shambles and destroyed the last remnants of what was still enjoyable about football I.e. scoring a goal. The second the ref blows for half time / full time the commentator says that there are some decisions that Jamie / Gary want to discuss and then they proceed to sit there for 15 - 30 mins going through each free kick in slow motion. Honestly who cares? The ref yesterday was sh**e but I haven’t lost any sleep over it, he made some howlers for both teams but it’s never going to be perfect and it’s not supposed to be either.

 

You should think about taking up writing for a living.

 

Honestly, the posts in this thread hit home for me so much and express it so much more eloquently than I could. I feel exactly the same.

While the decline of our clubs fortunes since the Wolves game can't be ignored, and a huge part of it is being unable to go to matches currently, but the toxic culture of football these days is genuinely horrible to behold and is partly what is causing it for me.

Social media is a huge part of that as its filled with wannabe pundits and ******* bloggers who are more interested in getting their own stupid faces on a screen than they are in the actual game.

I can't remember which match it was, but I genuinely saw a goal go in, and a guy in the crowd simply get his phone out, point it at himself, start recording, THEN celebrating!!! More interested in likes and views than watching the actual match. What's the point of being there, if you're just there to try and promote yourself?

The moronic pundits are the worst, I think. As has been said already, the whole "hes got a right to go down there", espoused by embittered old pundits (who are basically an old boys club of big 6 players) is just the tip of the iceberg. They literally encourage cheating, and if we're being honest, VAR doesn't really change all that much. Our penalty against Chelsea last season was a blatant dive by Geri, yet they spent 5 mins chewing over it before giving us a highly specious penalty. And even if its a dive, it seems there's rarely a real deterrent for it. Wasn't there meant to be a rule introduced that you could get a two game retrospective ban for it? What happened to that?

I know its about winning, but I find it really hard to get over the idea of a professional athlete, who possesses tremendous talent, has worked at it since a young age, has effectively dedicated their life to a gruelling and hugely difficult profession, can throw themselves over onto the turf at the merest touch of an opponent, and scream pretending they're injured. Embarrassing. I genuinely wonder how they can actually justify that to themselves.

Similar to many of you, I'm sure, I played Sunday league for about 10 years, and while I know its another planet in terms of how high the stakes are, I can honestly say that diving and gamesmanship never occurred to me. I'm not saying I'm a paragon of virtue (or that our team was particularly great), but it just strikes me as pointless if you can't win fairly. I would say maybe I'm getting too long in the tooth for this, but I'm only 30!

And as has been said in that sobering article Smudger linked, the less said about the hideous fat cats at the top, and the monstrous involvement of the scumbags at Chelsea, Man City, nearly Newcastle, and those pieces of **** at fifa who let ******* Qatar happen, the better. A moral vacuum and a worldwide disgrace.

Anyway, tedious rant over. Short version - the gig's ****ed.

Looking forward to Tuesday!!!!