Manchester United versus Liverpool. The biggest game in English football on the pitch. And also the biggest battle between the two largest groups of one-eyed tribal fans that English football has to offer. Put your tin hat on and take cover.
Whatever the result is Sunday, one thing you can be certain of: there are a swathe of fans of each club that will accuse everyone of being biased against them regardless. Both sides think everyone hates them, seemingly so absorbed by their own exceptionalism that they’re unable to imagine anyone might just be indifferent.
The media are all in on one big conspiracy against Manchester United, if you’re a fan of Manchester United and one big conspiracy against Liverpool, if you’re a fan of Liverpool. While this is obviously impossible, they really, really believe it.
Oh and did I mention, the referee? Yeah, biased. As is the Video Assisted Referee and probably the VAR machinery too. All biased.
Every club has a minority of tribal monsters; people for whom the club is always right, is always being unfairly treated, is always getting the dirty end of the stick, is always being persecuted in some way and most certainly being discredited when they deserve praise.
This means they have to defend the club and its players at all costs, at all times, especially on social media. But the numbers supporting these two big clubs means their fanatics are everywhere and very dominant and it rises to a peak every time they play each other.
They patrol TV, press and social media for those who are not sucking on the teat of the One Truth Faith looking to dish out a kicking to anyone perceived to have transgressed their orthodoxy.
This is so much the case that over the last 20 years I’ve known more than one writer who won’t write anything critical of either club, feeling that they are not being paid enough to have to endure the grief that will be visited upon their heads as a result.
For the tribalist, any criticism of club or players is immediately painted as that most hoary old thing, bias, and is conclusive proof that their club’s players and performance is being unfairly treated. They will man the social media and phone-in barricades and begin berating whoever they feel has committed this crime against all that is decent. This poor sod is usually one of football’s Holy Trinity: pundit, commentator or journalist. Go to any of their timelines and you’ll see some terrible abuse.
It doesn’t stop there, of course. Each club’s players get it in the neck all the time. Manchester United are actually taking expert advice about how to deal with the negative impact of social media on the club’s players because they’re so concerned by the potential psychological strain generated by hostility and criticism on Twitter and Instagram. And you can bet plenty of players on both sides will not be turning on their phones after tomorrow’s game for that reason as the tribal monsters vent their anger for something trivial.
This isn’t new. Even in pre-digital days, the amount of letters written in the infamous green ink that would arrive at any newspaper offices the week after a big game attested to the obsession some fans had with finding fault with the paper’s coverage.
In Glasgow, there are many stories of Celtic or Rangers fans calling newspaper offices to complain that the paper had committed 897 words to their side but 956 to the other and thus this was conclusive proof they were biased in favour of the opposition and it was an absolute disgrace, pal.
There would occasionally even be threats. Imagine sitting there, counting the number of words in a report, seething that the number is not the same for both sides. It’s bizarre.
So when it comes to tribalism, we have not recently fallen from grace. The crazy people have always been out there. But since 1992 when Sky put football behind a paywall, rebranded the First Division as the Premier League, largely so that it could be trademarked and marketed as premium product that was worth paying a subscription for, they spotted early on that any derby game could be massively inflated with limitless hyperbole, often to such an extent that the game itself could never hope to live up to their hype. And so the winding up of tribal fans began to be monetised.
They feed Liverpool and United tribalism with a rich diet because broadcasters employ so many former Liverpool and Manchester United players as pundits, almost to the exclusion of anyone else, which in turn allows supporters of either team to foam at the mouth at their “clearly biased” words or nod sagely at their wisdom.
Indeed, it seems as though this is exactly why these former players are employed in the first place.
Without naming names, some are hardly high-flying members of football’s brain’s trust and surely would not be employed to try (and often fail) to cohere a sentence in return for cold hard cash unless they had played for United of Liverpool. Is that being too cynical? I don’t think so, nuance is the enemy of so much modern football media. You’re either on the bus or off the bus. No other forms of transport are available.
Match days on Sky usually feature Jamie Carragher, Gary Neville, Graeme Souness and Jamie Redknapp. Sometimes Patrice Evra has a go, as does Robbie Fowler. BT Sport regulars are Rio Ferdinand, Michael Owen, Steve McManaman, Owen Hargreaves and Paul Scholes. On the subs bench, they’ve got Paul Ince. United and Liverpool dominate football’s commentariat.
The broadcasters get a double hit out of these pundits. They can be accused of bias if they’re complimentary about their former club, or if critical of their ex-employer, they can agitate the fanbase with their “disloyalty.” Either way, positive or negative, they encourage engagement, at least with the fans whose emotions are forever on the verge of boiling over. The rest of us just roll our eyes.
Club TV stations and social media posts do not help the situation. All week long before this big game they’re putting fuel in the tribalist boiler.
They are not informational so much as corporate propaganda tools, often supplicating themselves at the feet of the players, fawning about them like a teenager with a crush on a puppy. Then in the next breath they’re using their expensive assets to push the latest 100-years-in-a-landfill-wouldn’t-rot-it nightmarish third away strip available to you, the “ultimate” fan. A mere £65 proves your loyalty to your revenue-generating sporting facility of choice as a unit of profit. Again, to the more rational outsider, this looks ludicrous but it is meat and drink to the tribal monster who you may see out in town dressed in the full kit, despite being 46 years old.
The irony of all of this is that these fevered fans seem to labour under a delusion that they are objective and impartial; the standard against which all other media output should be judged. It’s laughable and most of us see it as absurd, but they do not seem to grasp that we think they’re absurd, nor that we can see that they are obviously the most biased one in the room. Love is blind.
And yet they aggrandise their anger as that most ubiquitous of football qualities — ‘passion’.
Passion for their club. This is further confirmation that they are A Real Fan. Because you don’t really support a club until you’ve issued a death threat to a pundit or called a journalist a f***** **** on Twitter. That proves you care. And nobody cares quite like a furious United or Liverpool fan, it seems as they go ballistic on Twitter about how their club or one of their players has been “insulted” or god forbid, “disrespected” (a favourite grievance) by a pundit’s comments, as though their precious club isn’t merely an investment opportunity in the financial portfolio of cold-hearted international capitalists to grow ever richer on the back of, but actually their mother.
At the heart of the complaints is a basic mindset that they’re not being treated fairly. There is ongoing paranoia that papers, websites, or TV channels all live in one big house and agree before the game, over breakfast, a line to take. They think we operate as an amorphous whole and refer to “the media” as though it is a single entity.
But it isn’t clear why the vast number of United and Liverpool fans from all over the world care so much what anyone in the press or on TV or radio says about their club. Considering they think critics are idiots, why care? It’s like telling someone you hate them and then berating them for not loving you. It makes no sense.
The only people to escape their one-eyed tribal evisceration are those who basically say nice things about the club, are sympathetic, and, most importantly, are not critical. These pundits as ‘well-balanced and intelligent’, in contrast to everyone else who definitely hates them and will never “give us any credit” (another famous grievance).
If you’re not a tribal whack job, the idea that you might get into a lather about what, say, Owen Hargreaves, has to say about your team is plain daft. Save your emotions for something that really matters, like getting rid of VAR.
I’m a Boro fan and Owen is welcome to say anything he likes about Middlesbrough FC, as far as I’m concerned. He can even criticise the nutritional value of our parmos if he wants and it wouldn’t stir my emotions at all. I just don’t care that much what anyone says about the club. Why should I? And most fans of most clubs are like that. We have perspective. We know whatever Graeme Souness says about our team is not the worst thing we’ll read or hear that day, or possibly even that hour, given the state of the world at the moment. We know it isn’t, at heart, important. But blind tribal fans really think it is.
Manchester United and Liverpool have the two largest fan bases in English football, possibly in world football, so even if only one percent are one-eyed tribal crazies, that is still a lot of people. Whatever the result this weekend you can be sure that for the blinkered supporters of each club, the media and all other football fans were biased against them. Again.
Battle of the pundits
MANCHESTER UNITED
PAUL SCHOLES:
For fans of misery, grumpiness and a brooding sort of contempt, Scholesy is a hero. He wears the permanently disappointed expression of a thirsty man who has just found out the pub is shut. Has the disposition of a figure in a Lowry painting trudging to work in the mill through stair rods of rain.
Paul is really only happy when he’s unhappy and he’s likely to be very unhappy about pretty much everything. Even if United are top of the league, nothing is ever as good as it used to be for Paul, the future is uncertain, and the end is always near.
ROY KEANE: When bearded, Roy looks like an Old Testament prophet. Always tremendous value for fans of barely repressed rage, at times Roy seems to have evolved into a Roy tribute act, acting more like Roy than Roy.
This largely means scowling a lot, looking with such contempt at everyone else present that you fear/ hope he’s going to stick a right-hander on someone. Absolutely fierce in excoriating players for their flaws, and fearlessly sticking it to all and sundry in the sure knowledge that no-one would dare to complain. Has yet to say “you can stick it up yer bollix” live on TV, but we live in hope.
GARY NEVILLE: Everyone’s favourite socially responsible capitalist. Often credited for revolutionising punditry and co-commentary, when instead of relying on football’s hive mind and a book of football cliches to pass for wisdom, he just did some research to back up what he was saying. Hello professor.
He is so aware of being accused of United bias that he even takes off his Red Devils onesie before going on air. Somehow appears to always have one of those ‘my first moustache’ moustaches even when he doesn’t.
LIVERPOOL
JAMIE CARRAGHER: The authentic voice of Liverpool and Olympic standard projectile spitter, praising a good Manchester United showing must bring him out in hives, but if Liverpool win, they’ll have to knock him down off the ceiling with a brush.
Easily one of the most engaging and articulate pundits on the circuit despite having an accent that sounds as though he is inhaling a pigeon. If Michael Owen is very much the plain Rich Tea in the box of football pundit biscuits, Carra is the chocolate Hobnob.
GRAEME SOUNESS: As a player, Souey would take it as an insult if you bled onto his boots after he’d removed one of your vital organs with a single kick.
He was an absolute ball of molten fury back in the day.
Now he’s a somewhat calmer older chap, but there’s still a glint in his eye when talking about a robust challenge which breaks a nose and there’s still a swish of the old warhorse’s tail whenever he has to talk about his spiritual nemesis, Paul Pogba. Most likely to say: “The attack of the Capitol building in Washington was shocking but you’ve got to ask, what was Paul Pogba doing to stop it?”
MARK LAWRENSON: A less prominent member of the punditocracy these days, he tends to work on radio, nevertheless when he’s wheeled out (possibly in an actual wheel-barrow), the former Liverpool defender has a distinctive grumpy old-uncle style which often involves withering one-word answers, terrible jokes, nuclear-level cynicism and yet a vaguely camp “ooh matron, you don’t get many of them to the pound” sort of style that feels more musical hall than Premier League.
As a man from a wholly different — and many might say better — football era, you won’t find him on Twitter, or even saying the word Twitter, fearing it is somehow emasculating. And in that, he speaks for many men of a certain age.
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