I've spent the morning digesting and enjoying the result yesterday. But I've also been thinking in a wider kind of way about football in general.
Is anyone as concerned as I am about the state of the game currently. When I was a kid and went the game and even as a young adult fans got behind their team and for the most part that was it. Yes it's never been nice where utd are concerned. But they seem to instigate that and sing their 'songs' about us every week.
But these days there seems to be so much nastiness about. On the terraces it just seems to be getting worse at all levels of the game. Outside the ground can be just as bad before and after games. My son is 6 and to be honest ... the behaviour that goes on at football matches these days I'd have to think long and hard about actually putting him in that environment. The authorities don't seem to clamp down on it.
There's a culture of 'but you did this and that' etc and an all around blame game that borders on tiresome. The likes of sly sports etc don't help the situation with their endless analysis. Var is just as bad.
Yesterday its all about vile chanting, the city manager inciting the crowd constantly, coins, buses , disgusting graffiti. None of it about football. Its just disgusting.
I fear it won't be long before something really major happens as its out of control.
I share your concern. I dont claim I have a full answer to your questions, but I think part of the problem is social media. Fans come to the game pumped by vile stuff and logics they see on platforms where there is no responsibility to be taken for saying the most outrageous and false things.
The whole debacle after the game on Sunday is a perfect example. Every club seems to have a group of 20+ fans accounts that seem, without any exaggeration, to be run by 12 year olds and those accounts have a pretty sizeable following (you have to remember their following does not stop at their followers count, thats just the inner followers circles. So when an account run by a 12yo has 200k followers, think more like 700k people seeing that crap). These accounts constantly post some of the most childish, false and hateful stuff and it only gets worse after a defeat. If you've noticed, those accounts survive solely on some type of negativity/fighting. When there is no football games and crap to be stirred between fanbases they will have a go at their own players, club owners or other parts of the club in an overly negative way or simply create an artificial fight with another fanbase.
I know we value free speech, but it seems that our societies have not adapted to the reality of that free speech on social media. It seems that there is an incredibly large chunk of the population that has no critical thinking abilities whatsoever. I'm not saying we should limit what people can say on social media, but we should definitely, as a society, teach people from a young age how to think critically so that an account seemingly run by a 12yo can't enflame a sizeable slice of a fanbase and dictate patterns of thinking and ways of acting in the real world.
On the other hand I also must touch upon our good ol journalists. It seems that a lot of them are too busy trying to get likes and followers to stop for a second and do their job properly by posting sensible stuff instead of subtly pouring oil on the fire. Wether its on social media or on TV, there seems to be a lack of professionalism in the way some issues are covered. Managers words taken out of contexts and then used on social media to get likes and comments, subtle animosity creation to once again generate likes and comments.
One has to wonder if something has to be done about social media and the constant search for likes and comments that then leads to clickbait tittles, using words out of contexts, etc. It is problematic when random people do it, but its catastrophic when its done by news outlets (official accounts) and their journalists (and they do it all the time).
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