Manchester United being bad is now its own self-sustaining media industry

Gary’s rant. Micah’s laugh. Scholesy’s pucker of disdain. This is where the eyeballs are now, the clicks, the money.

GRIM-FACED: Roy Keane

WHAT if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?” 

Yes, I would. I would probably do that. It becomes easier to say this with certainty, to agree with Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence – which might previously have seemed a little lateral, lacking in, say, the directness that makes the Premier League so special – having watched Sky Sports coverage of Sunday’s Manchester derby; and having seen Dave Jones turn to Roy Keane at the final whistle, with a sense even here of basic existence-fatigue and ask: “Roy. How would you sum up that half?”