This is a publication about young football players. As some of them will be wearing Nike’s new England home shirt this summer, I felt the topic falls under our purview. Also it’s our newsletter and we can write about whatever we want.
So here’s an Editor’s Take about the current insanity swallowing football discourse.
Twitter (now known for some reason as “x.com,” which to my knowledge is a failed rebrand of PayPal from the early 2000s that landed so badly with customers it got its brainchild, a precocious and balding venture capitalist, kicked out) has always felt a bit like stepping into an alternate reality. A reality in which rhetoric is squashed into a handful of characters and nuance flattened by the opaque impossibility of deciphering intent from text. It’s always been bad, but it’s become much, much worse since blue-checked nutjobs were gifted a financial incentive to be as loud and obnoxious as possible.
It’s ironic SCOUTED has built its reputation on such a platform - a reputation, we like to think, for well-reasoned analysis and thoughtful commentary. These days, such commentary is drowned in replies from porn bots and adverts for gambling. (It is illegal, by the way, for under-25’s to feature in gambling ads, but Twitter’s new ownership don’t seem to mind our youth-centric content being forcibly coerced to boost the shite these bots are pushing without our consent - but whatever).
My point is that Twitter has always been bad, but is uniquely bad today in new and excruciating ways. It’s now an anti-intellectual battleground that sucks in all comers. There is no reasoned discussion anymore, not even from those with reasoned discussion to offer. The ad economy has obliterated the usefulness of search engines and pushed conglomerate-owned publications into clickbait hell, and now we’ve introduced it to ‘the internet’s town square’. It has had exactly the effect you’d expect: idiots are amplified because they’re interesting to gawk at, stupid shit is somehow even louder, and even the best intentions are pulled into the vortex of nonsense and reshaped to fit much uglier vestiges.
And you can’t say it’s just Twitter anymore. It’s everything. It’s not the internet’s town square, but the world’s. We feed our thoughts into this bastardising machine, it twists and breaks them with its base incentives to be loud and stupid, and they pop out into the real world as malformed and grotesque abominations. Then they affect people’s lives.
The completely harmless, ‘playful’ update to St George’s Cross on the new England home shirt - similar in scope to many redesigns that have passed without comment in recent years - has been fed into this maelstrom and transformed by all its warring factions. And it took a while. Day one passed without incident, but Twitter’s incentives slowly took hold, feeding the image into all the places that might boost its reach no matter the reason. Then it took off. Now we’re here: stuck in a cacophony of jingoistic snowflakes furious because their wet dreams of Winston Churchill marching on V-Day don’t feature the colour purple, well-intentioned commenters pointing out those people are clinically insane, and (somehow) transphobia. Because this is England, baby, and we’ve got a grip on the real problems.
It’d be kinda funny in an exhausting way if it was contained. But it’s not. The machine spits this stuff out into the real world. And now politicians of all colours have latched onto it, desperate to take hold of any groundswell of energy, no matter the source. And what’s so uniquely worrying about this incident - and I don’t mean to catastrophise, but I can’t help myself - is that it’s election year in the UK.
Much has been written in the US press about Twitter’s relationship with politics, but the UK lacks much meaningful philosophising about tech’s interaction with humanities at all. Perhaps because we lack a Silicon Valley and the kind of technofuturist ego it engenders. So let me, an unqualified writer for a youth football publication, give it a shot: this is just the start and it’ll get much uglier yet.
We still don’t know when the General Election is going to be called. Smart money is on May, but it could be as late as next January. And between those two dates, England are going into a European Championship as joint favourites, and they’ll (probably, but who knows at this point) be wearing a colourful St George’s Cross.
Anyone with a brain understands football is a political vehicle. Always has been, always will be. And politicians fucking love football because it is a breeding ground for national pride and populist ideals. Since this current England camp began, Twitter has amplified racist notions that Black English players aren’t really English (again), which has led to weird eugenicist takes, which has snowballed into upset over some coloured threads, which has avalanched into actual serious political debate on the country’s biggest stages. And this is just a pre-tournament camp for some friendlies. We’re not even at the real thing yet.
I’m sorry to remind you, but last time England played at a European Championships it climaxed with a torrent of horrendous racist abuse aimed at a handful of young men, literal children among them. My worst concern is that this time, with the precedent of this stupid fucking flag set, such a moment will be weaponised by politicians pushed to desperation by the threat of defeat (or victory, because we know that guy is not beyond debasing himself). And I fear with Twitter being what it is, such a moment could be worse and more influential in the real world. It will all be fed into this machine and spat out again.
Because disguised among the racism and transphobia and all the other awful stuff is a basic populist take that will suck in all comers: Nike are charging £125 for the kit. People are worried about their bills. Energy prices are through the roof. Privatised water is pumping sewage into the sea. The trains are shit. Councils are going bankrupt. Libraries are dying. Public services are dying. Millions of children are growing up in abject poverty. And because of the colour of some stitching, we can turn all this angst onto marginalised groups already in danger. That’s how this works.
And the next few months are the perfect opportunity to disguise such rhetoric further, to obscure the real issue - the obliteration of collectivist attitudes by Thatcherist austerity - with whinging about wokeness or some other imagined threat.
I am worried this European Championship is set to become the worst kind of political battleground in the UK. I fear the coloured cross is just a precursor for what’s to come. I am concerned with what an unprecedented wave of national expectation and passion could be turned into by the machines we’ve built to harness it and the dystopian mess our politics has become.
But.
But.
As my defeatism takes hold, I have to remember what else happened after the European Championships last summer. Amidst all the madness, Manchester’s children plastered a mural of Marcus Rashford with their thoughts. Thoughts that had not yet been fed into the machine. Tweets as they might exist before we introduce them to the incentives our broken economy. And they looked a little like this:
I do not want to write a doomer piece about how fucked things are about to get. And I also don’t want to write some didactic call to arms crying it’ll all be fine if we stand together or some other trite rubbish. But I am perpetually anxious about the country and its direction and football’s role in all of it. It’s how I feel.
I would love to talk about solutions and I could. But I am still scared of sharing anything approaching political radicalism on the internet, because the machine will do its thing. Instead I just want to hold this image, of our player covered in the unblemished thoughts of real people, and remember what England can be.
We’re not all insane yet.