Farewell My First Love

If you’ve started reading this on the hope it’s a sordid expose on my first root, you’re going to be out of luck. It’s more important than that and besides, who hasn’t seen my interpretive dance dramatisation of that on Youchube yet?



Football is my first love and after 25 years of lusting over it each season – or to be specific the English Premier League – I think I’m done and I'm pretty sure I know why; money.



There has always been a lot of money in football, ridiculous money. The buying of good and selling of shit players has always been almost as exciting as the football itself and pre-season wet dreams were made on some of those transfers, like the time Spurs signed both Gazza and Gary Lineker in the same season.



Then there was Jurgen. Oh Jurgen. Never has another man created such a tingle in my gooch quite like Jurgen did.



Spurs have always been big spenders with very little to show for it. If you trace the club back to its roots (no pun intended) you’ll find that it is a Jewish club by foundation and that leads, apparently, to all sort of generalisations about how tight they should be with money. There is then, keeping that in mind, a certain amount of irony on where we get to now in this particular story.



Spurs have never been tight with their money and infact have wasted it many millions over on crap footballers. The good ones have generally been sold, for sizeable amounts which have been promptly wasted on – wait for it – crap footballers, give or take a Gareth Bale or Rafael Van der Vaart.



These days football is all about money. It is a means for very rich men to generate even more millions than they already possess and that means they’re prepared to spend a little to make a lot. Only they’re spending lots, far too much for even a Jewish club with an ironic inability to be frugal to keep up.



So this season, Spurs have no money to spend. And because we’ve got crap players, no one to sell to make any. That in itself wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the world but the clubs we were getting close to competing with do have money to burn, have now gone and bought themselves Playstation line ups and pretty much fucked it up for everyone else.



It’s hard to get excited about that really. Unless you’re a fan of one of those clubs, which I ain’t. Some people are very excited, like this guy who just two games in is using phrases like “The season is bubbling nicely, but yet to really explode”. What a peen-arse.



So two weeks in and I haven’t even watched so much as part of a game. No fantasy football, no weekend debriefs with Stu or AJ and no banter with the boys at practice about who beat who. I’m not even biting at the throwaway comments mates are making on Facebook. That’s what the de-friend button is for.



And all this apathy after my awesome niece (she the football prodigy) just gave me the most awesome birthday present; a framed, signed team shirt. She’s awesome.



She’s the reason I won’t give up on all football just yet.

Gazza, Gaz and good times.