A FIFA You Can't Sweat Out
I can't claim to have come up with this title myself, it was generously (and perhaps drunkenly) gifted to me by Twitter's own Tom Victor in the midst of a karaoke and bao night and it just felt right to use it now, possibly a week late but still, when recent FIFA fuckery has been in the headlines.
The Week In Ball
Another busy week. The football never stops. The bullshit around football seemingly never takes a break either.
The best news of the week slipped in quietly on Thursday when FIFA announced that they were ditching plans for a biennial World Cup. Lots of things in football need reforming but having the World Cup every four years is not one of them. It works. All federations have their own competitions in between, we're not being starved of competitive international football and amazingly FIFA have decided they agree.
Next we move on to the FA Cup. All the games seemed to go as expected (the Premier League teams prevailed where they played lower league opponents and the other games went on form), except Middlesbrough v Spurs.
It's difficult to know what to say about Spurs, especially as an Arsenal fan who has to fight against their instinct to mock, they're so up and down lately and it seems puzzling to see Conte failing, while also sometimes massively succeeding. They're an enigma. However, let's not take away from Middlesbrough who were brilliant. Apart from the sound issues experienced by the BBC it was a fantastic game.
So to the Premier League. The weekend started with a Leeds loss to out of form Leicester, although the team did play better than they did at the end of Bielsa's tenure and created a number of chances that they just couldn't finish off.
In the Midlands, Aston Villa overcame Southampton with some utterly glorious play from Coutinho. After a quiet few games he's back and he means business, though let's also take a moment for Callum Chamber's pass. A thing of true beauty.
Chelsea also won 0-4 against Burnley who look to be in real trouble now. Palace beat Wolves who are experiencing a wobble right now and Newcastle won against Brighton despite, yes, Brighton winning the xG battle. Liverpool scraped past West Ham who were unlucky not to convert their many chances but a win is a win and the battle for the League is really hotting up.
It was also clear to see just what a wonderful fit Luis Diaz is to the Liverpool team. His play is effortless and attractive and exciting and on a personal level you'd never guess he was a new signing, he's just one of the gang now. A real joy to watch.
However the best moment of the Saturday games and perhaps the weekend, came in the Norwich v. Brentford game. It was Christian Eriksen's first start since the Euros, in a game officiated by Anthony Taylor, who was on duty during the game against Finland. Brentford prevailed with a hat-trick from Ivan Toney and some awful defending by Norwich. But in the course of the play there was a tussle between Eriksen and Brandon Williams which, well, if you haven't seen it just watch... very sweet and very wholesome.
Onto Sunday and Arsenal kept up their charge for the Top 4 with a spirited display against Watford. After a thankfully offside goal from Dennis after only 16 seconds Arsenal went on to take control of the game and eventually were rewarded with a truly beautiful goal from Martin Ødegaard. Watford equalised with a fabulous bicycle kick and it felt for a while like maybe it was going to be one of those days. Luckily the lads rallied and a second goal was scored by Saka, yet another thing of beauty. It's so good seeing Arsenal score Arsenal goals. The Gooner Goals were rounded off by a rocket of a shot from Martinelli following a cheeky pre-assist from Mikel Arteta himself.
Watford did manage to get one back to make it 2-3 and give me a nervo for the last eight minutes, showing that there's still some room for improvement when it comes to game management and keeping things tight but overall it was a good performance. And for what it's worth, I liked the red shorts! Lots of players were wearing turquoise blue boots and they looked really good with the full red!
So to the big ticket fixture of Sunday's Premier League: the Manchester Derby. A derby is a wild and unpredictable thing that doesn't follow the form book or work under any normal set of rules that football is supposed to follow so it was interesting to think about how this was going to go.
The first big news of the day was that Cristiano Ronaldo had an injury so wasn't in the squad. Or was that the full story?? Twitter lit up with the news that his sister had liked a post on instagram that claimed there was nothing wrong with him and he had in fact just been dropped by Rangnick.
Obviously we can't really take that kind of thing as some kind of well of truth and indeed it may have literally no basis in truth, but per the gif, we do love the drama don't we girlies?
It turned out that Rangnick had indeed left Ronaldo out of the squad, because of an injury (or was it?!?) and he went for a Pogba/Fernandes front line. We also saw Telles and Wan Bissaka in on the back line which anyone could have told you probably wasn't the wisest choice against City.
And indeed it wasn't. City naturally took the lead via KDB only for Sancho to score a great goal to equalise. City got another one to retake the lead and to be honest, that was pretty much it. They didn't really need the further two goals they scored in the second half as United simply capitulated; rolling over and exposing their soft underbelly, letting City know they were no threat and they were happy for them to do what they wanted. At one point they had less than 10% possession and while we all know Roy Keane is prone to hyperbole, it was, as he put it "unforgivable".
On a personal note this was a great result for Arsenal's top four hopes but it's not great when you live with someone who supports Liverpool and was hoping for City to be pegged back...
On the Continent, Nice managed to beat PSG 1-0 but in all honesty it was pretty inconsequential as although it put them into second after Marseille lost to Monaco, it still leaves them 13 points behind PSG in the title race. I really haven't watched enough Ligue 1 this year to comment on whether there's anything especially interesting happening in other parts of the table but I also think the fact I haven't watched much is a sign there hasn't been. I'd definitely have been on it if I'd heard there was a story developing.
Next door in Germany Dortmund had their fixture with Mainz postponed after a rash of Covid cases in players and staff at Mainz, sparing me the weekly rollercoaster of the Dortmund match notifications.
Augsburg scraped a win against Arminia Bielefeld lifting them out of the relegation zone (hooray, you know I have an affection for Augsburg!), Eintracht finally got a convincing win, beating Hertha 1-4, Stuttgart pulled it back after going 0-2 down to Gladbach to win 3-2 (there have been reports of steward violence at the game, the same weekend that saw many injuries and the suspension of the Liga MX after violence in the Queretaro stadium) while at the top of the table Bayern were held 1-1 by Leverkusen. Not much, then, has really changed in the Bundesliga.
In La Liga, Barcelona came back from 1-0 down to win 2-1 at Elche, they are now third in the league. This means, as you may have seen me tweet, that I have a full top four of teams: Milan (top), Dortmund (second), Barcelona (third) and Arsenal (fourth). This is pretty pleasing! Now imagine they were all top...
In other results, La Liga was on a par with the Premier League for a high scoring weekend. Not only did Real beat Sociedad 4-1, Valencia and Atletico also won 3-1 and Celta scored a dramatic stoppage time penalty to win 4-3 in a game with two sendings off. Atleti's win pushed them up to 4th and Betis down to 5th. For me, I hope Betis climb back up but not above Barça and I'll happily see Sevilla drop down a few places. I feel like Real have it sewn up so how about Barça second and Betis third? Yes? Yes.
Finally we take a trip to Italy (please) and visit Serie A. 2021/22's Most Fun League™.
Inter, Lazio and Sassuolo jumped on the high scoring bandwagon, winning 5-0, 1-3 and 1-4 respectively. Elsewhere though we had to accept a series of 0-0 draws and 1-0 victories (Udinese bucking the trend and winning 2-1 however).
The most important of the 1-0s was the Sunday evening game between Napoli and Milan, two fierce rivals for the Scudetto. I know I've been going on about this but I didn't watch it because it was The Great Pottery Throwdown final (my favourite won, I cried) and I was guided by a tweet calling the Atleti Betis game 'breathless' so chose that for my second half viewing. However, I was delighted to receive a notification that one of my greatest loves, Olivier Giroud, had scored for the Rosseneri. Look at him go [Patrick from Spongebob laying on his tummy and looking lovingly dot gif]. If you fancy, here is a lovely article about the game by the wonderful Nicky Bandini.
So that's it for the games played so far. There's Monday Night Football between Everton and Spurs tonight as well as some midweek Premier League games. Don't forget there's also the second leg of the round of 16 of the Champions League and the Europa Cup proper starts with early kick offs on Wednesday. Don't miss it, the spiciest of the European competitions!
Kick Off
This week I want to talk about footballers on social media: the good, the bad and the ugly.
It should be obvious that many footballers don't do their own social media, or if they do they probably don't do all of it. It's a shame because when it feels like someone is being themselves online it makes them much more appealing and, to coin an overused modern phrase, relatable.
However I also understand why they don't. Think about if you've ever had a tweet go viral or maybe you're just reasonably popular online and how exhausting it is seeing all the notifications and how unusable your account can become (irrespective of the content of those notifications). Now imagine that happening whatever you post, be it "hi" or a photo from a game you've just played in, a cute picture of your girlfriend, or some corporate spiel you've been told to boost.
You're bombarded with Likes, RTs, Reactions, whatever it is on whatever platform you're on. People make the same comment over and over again, be it a string of heart emojis or an insult. Thousands of people demand you follow them back. Fans of rival teams make jokes at your expense, fights break out in your mentions because nobody thinks to untag you (or they've tagged you in their own post/you've been tagged by your team's Twitter/by a journalist/Amazon, BT or Sky) and that's just on the most neutral, inoffensive posts. What if you decide to post an anti-racism message or support gay rights. How about those days when you've had a terrible game and your team lost, you might not even have posted in weeks but they will find you...
Last Thursday I attended the Arsenal Supporters Trust's online meeting whose main event of the evening was the attendance of Dan Tolhurst and Rob Fawdon from the Arsenal communication team and Jonathan Hirshler, CEO of Signify, who are a company that helps clubs identify people sending abusive tweets and instagram posts/messages and also looks at the trends of the abuse. It was rounded off with a pre-recorded chat with Granit Xhaka about how he deals with the attention he gets on social media.
Let's start with the basics, what Arsenal are doing to support their players and staff when it comes to their social media experience.
Firstly, they have training with all players, Men, Women and Academy, about what to do and how to deal with abuse if they get it. They're taught essentially, how to use social media tools to tune their feeds and how to block and mute, simple stuff but essential. They employ legal experts who can advise on the content of the messages and psychologists a player can speak to privately if they need help with how certain interactions have made them feel.
Stadium guidance which has been in effect for years, about how to deal with abusive fans, has been updated to include social media and this is taken mainly from Premier League guidance so is generally uniform across all teams in the league.
With the younger, perhaps more vulnerable players they try to keep them away from the media where possible (e.g. post match interviews etc.) while they're still up and coming and doing their media training. They also do a general housekeeping exercise on their social media accounts to ensure that nothing in their historic posts could be used against them, while also talking to them about such things as their profile picture and the image this is portraying.
There's also pastoral care and getting to know the players to understand who enjoys the media spotlight and who hates it and working with those players accordingly.
In terms of what the company Signify does to help, they use AI to look through millions of tweets and instagram comments to find the ones that are deemed offensive. From here they filter the accounts into three streams: identifiable poster, might be identifiable and impossible to identify. At this point they can pass the details on to the clubs who take over the investigation, seeing if for example the poster is on their database as a season ticket holder or member or in any other way affiliated with the club and from there they can involve the police, take the poster's season ticket away or pursue any other relevant action. Jonathan was keen to impress that at no point do they do anything to reveal information that isn't easily obtained and will break any privacy regulations in place. Indeed many of the accounts posting abuse do so under real names with extremely specific information in their bios, such as proudly detailing their seat number in the stadium of their chosen club.
What was really interesting to me was the scope of the abuse. For example around the end of January the amount of 'violence' based tweets rocketed. This was explained by threats against Edu due to the transfer policy. Around the North London Derby antisemitism spikes.
However what has been getting consistently worse and worse is homophobia. Yes it will spike when anything to do with LGBTQ+ rights is specifically mentioned, a notable example of this was when Hector Bellerin supported the cause, but the abuse is increasing generally and the figures back that up. So don't let anyone tell you it would be easy for a player to come out or that it's all just fine and dandy being a lesbian in the women's game.
Which brings me to WSL players. Jonathan explained that of all the abuse, which peaks and troughs based on various factors (even the homophobia, it's the amount of it that's increasing), the only consistent, non stop, daily abuse is that towards WSL players. The abuse is, as expected, misogynistic, homophobic and sexually abusive.
To round off I wanted to briefly share some of what Granit Xhaka said in his chat with Akhil Vyas. The chat is included in the video below but you can also watch it separately here.
Asked for his general experience of social media he said that the abuse does affect the players, understandably, and that "we are human beings too". I think the state of things, in football and with respect to online abuse, at the moment was reflected by the fact he said that "in 2022 you have to be very strong, in your head, mentally" and that there are occasions where the messages will stay in their heads.
He also spoke about how there may be things going on with a player that you, or indeed anyone else, may not know about that could affect their play and cause them to have a bad game, yet he can handle criticism but not the abuse, particularly when it involves his family. He asked, how would you feel if you made a mistake in your job and someone messaged you to say they wished your child or your parents would die?
However he also talked about how he posts because he wants to and loves it and he never thinks twice about it and that nothing the trolls say would ever influence any of the decisions he makes about his career; they're his and his alone.
There is still a long way to go to protect players and fans from the kind of personal attacks we're no doubt all seen and read about. It's up to everyone who believes this game is for everyone to keep speaking up, keep campaigning and keep being visible.
If you did fancy watching the whole discussion, which is genuinely extremely interesting, it starts at around 35 minutes or you can listen to a compressed version, sans Granit's interview and without visuals, on the AST podcast. I appreciate this section seems extremely Arsenal-centric but I have no doubt many other teams also have these measures in place as it is, unfortunately, a universal problem.
A quick content warning if you do watch the video, there are some slides shown with examples of abuse received by Granit Xhaka and Hector Bellerin which express islamophobia, violence, ableism, racism, homophobia and use bad language, these appear at 39 and 41 minutes.
Football 'eritage
We've done the serious stuff about footballers online so a very brief but very important swerve to the humorous for this section.
I've previously done a round up of Wayne Rooney's tweets here which we all know and love (and do seem to have been sent by the man himself), however this week I want to remind you all of this classic from Victor Anichebe, iconic enough that it's become a meme and a benchmark for footballers not tweeting their own tweets.
At least this was probably him pressing the buttons and doing the copy and pasting, unlike when "Bernd Leno" tweeted while he was in goal in a cup game...
The {Offside} Thirst Trap
This week it's Alex Telles because Alex Telles drives me wild. I think he's so hot and he seems like a cool guy and yeah, that's all I have to say about that, just a big long hnnnnnngh.
So listen, I hadn't clocked it was the Manchester Derby on Sunday when I chose this Thirst Trap and I know a lot of people simply don't rate him as a footballer and will criticise his performance yesterday but I don't care. He's smoking hot and that's all we care about in this section!
Merch Stand
As everyone knows I’m firmly in the camp of making football more inclusive and safe and fun for all which is why I’m fully behind the Football v Transphobia Week of Action at the end of the month, 24 - 31 March.
If you too want to show your support why not join me in buying one of these cute pin badges, as I said on Twitter I’m a sucker for a pin badge! I will literally buy any pin badge put in front of me
You may also have read about the attack on trans rights in the US and the regressive laws and policies certain states are trying to enact.
Grays Lake FC in Iowa have produced this stunning trans flag shirt in support of trans kids.
Also this week Nike released the ball for the final third of the Premier League season, which I guess means Winter is over. I like it! I'm a fan of contrasting a strong, fluoro colour with a pale or grubby colour, I think it works really well, as it does here. Anyway, this is in this section as no doubt you'll be able to buy it eventually.
Lastly, Milan have jumped on the Arsenal bandwagon (even down to the rotary phone and strong block pastel set styling!) and released a 1996 retro collection
Extra Time
Flagrantly using this newsletter as an excuse to promote my own jokes
After the brief stoppage in the Derby yesterday this is a great read about the seeming rise in medical emergencies at grounds. Thanks to Sarah for alerting me to it.
It's always a good time to look at Baloo, Sergi Roberto's nonsense dog.
OK, it's been a hefty one this week so let's end on this. Should Archie's Dad be sent to prison or should statues be built in his honour? You decide!
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