BfB

“What are you doing tonight?”
“I’m going to see Daniel Kitson.”
“What are you doing the next day?”
“I’m thinking about what he said to me.”
Daniel Kitson, Weltanschauung, 2006

Again

You get up, you go to the gym, you walk the dogs, you pick up poo, City lose at home, you go to work, you deal with more poo, you eat Mexican food, you have ice cream and the next day you tell yourself it is the sugar rush which has caused you anxieties.

You get up, you feed the cat tuna, you turn on the YouTubes, you look at the table and City are pushing for promotion again, Away at Barnsley, a card, a goal, a comeback, a gut punch.

You have bigger problems, so does the world, and you are able to put the machinations of football into context.

Bald

Manchester City beat Arsenal 2-1 to give them an advantage in the Premier League title race or so it is said by the bald men in black roll necks argue on Match of the Day and seem to have removed the word “Bottle” from their linguistics when talking about the team from North London.

Two weeks ago a man gained famefor drinking from a bottle labelled “Arsenal Tears” in a way which some found hilarious. Manchester City face 115 charges for breaking the rules which govern the Premier League they are trying to win. Manchester City – and the charges they face – are central to an oppressive regime washing their image and to creating a world where this man can drink from his bottle, and the multi-generational corrosive effect it has had on English football.

Schadenfreude is a tedious thing, schadenfreude when employed in favour of the regime which imprisoned Ahmed Mansoor for fifteen year defines the term lickspittle, and to see football supporters supporting regimes who would view them in contempt brings bile to my throat.

Simulacra

The sight of Arsenal Tears Man defines the era. In his work on Simulacra and Simulation Jean Baudrillard talked about how a representation of a thing can replace the thing itself building to a position of hyperrealism, where symbols are consumed, rather than the thing which the symbols signify. One does not go for a Coffee, one goes for a Starbucks, but Baudrillard notes on his thoughts on hyperrealism that there is an inequality between “Starbucks” and “Coffee” which lay in what they signify, not what they are.

So Arsenal Tears are the simulations of how it is thought football supporters should act, rather than an expression of how football supporters feel, and in their proposition so put distance between genuine expressions of emotion and the projection.

Lest this be considered an airy footnote Baudrillard warns against this kind of hyperreality as being the end of meaning, and leading to the end of history. When representation has replaced signified events, then the next events are represented as a representation of the representation and so on and so on. A copy of a copy of a copy and the original meaning is obscured, and lost. History is meaning, and football clubs are history, lest we all become as Manchester City are in 2026, an endless now happening over and over without reference to the conditions which created them or the impact that their creation has.

Meaning

“I have to admit it: I’m a perfectionist. For me, it’s the best or nothing at all. If things go badly, I can’t be bothered.” Spud’s Interview, Irving Welsh, Trainspotting, 1993

What does it mean to drink Arsenal Tears, what does it mean to say a team has “bottled”? What does it mean when the boos cascade from the Oakwell away end after City struggle to impact a ten-man Barnsley in the first half?

These ideas seem to come with an inherent suggestion not of schadenfreude, or even expectation, but rather than the problem lay in the attempt in the first place. Why do anything to change history when history has no meaning? The endless now has no need for progress, or regression. It is good to score and bad t…

And then there is a silence as Barnsley equalise six minutes into injury time and City’s hard work is for nothing, or for a point, and these feelings are hard to process. The home side played most of a game with ten men, and played well, and Conor Houlihan got his tactical response to the red card perfect, using the fact that his depleted team was not expected to attack to neuter the Bantams by compressing the lines leaving City’s front free stuck without angles to exploit.

The Bantams though had shown character to come back from one down and will not go quietly into that good night. There are tables and statistics that will tell you that from some arbitrary time or for some period of no significance City are a mid-table team, but Barnsley are a mid-table team, and would give much to have what City are fighting to keep and the difference between the two is not “Coffee” and “Starbucks”.

Achievement

“Hic Rhodus, hic salta” The Boasting Traveller, Aesop’s Fables

You get up again, you pick up poo, you go to the gym, you feel out of sorts, you fret about work, you worry about family, and you look at the Calendar and see Tuesday Night.

On Tuesday night, should City beat Plymouth Argyle then The Bantams secure a play off place. It will be the best back to back achievement in the club’s history in terms of League position, and will rival getting into and staying in the Premier League, but more so it will be an incredible achievement by a group of players constantly battling to stay above the grasping hands that would drag them into the morass.

Each game a chance to watch the toils of a group of players struggling against the gravity of football which pulls everyone back to the middle. Each week a temptation to forgo the pressure of enacting history and slip away into the warm embrace of meaninglessness, and to see that temptation pushed back for another seven days, or three days, or the thoughts or the whimsy.

Here

You feel out of sorts, you fret about work, you worry about family, and it feels wrong to admit that the knot in your stomach will be untied by a home victory on Tuesday night. Surely we are made of more complex stuff? Surely we adults have progressed beyond these things?

The cynical symbology of a Starbucks, or a meme of a man drinking from a humorous water bottle, or a situation which wants you to forget that there was a past and is a future? Is that what we progress to? Or to reading dead French men who explain that progression, as if knowing how to label it removes one from its effects?

These are days you will remember, while memory and history are functions of any importance, and the knot in your stomach is probably not work or family, and is probably about the emotional responses you have to the ongoing story of a group of people trying to kick a thing into another thing from all the way over there.

Here is Rhodes. Jump here.