In outward appearances I seemed a fairly football-obsessed child. But, in truth, I must have got quite bored of it very soon. I was always daydreaming, drawing and writing of changes, improvements, implausibilities. Ranging from statistically anal fan fiction about goalmachines plucked from non-league obscurity to re-imaginings of the rules of the game, at the tender age of maybe 10 years I was already dissatisfied with the real-world limitations of the game (but clearly utterly enamoured with an essense of its form).

One of my idle fantasies was imagining a three-sided version of the game. I pictured this being played on a triangular football pitch, with goals on each equilateral side, with thrilling match-ups like Manchester United versus Sheffield Wednesday versus Wimbledon FC. I thought this could replace the much maligned League Cup! It was only the realisation that stadiums couldn’t be moved around for a midweek triangular game that killed the idea for me (yes, at that tender age my imagination was stuck with pre-existing organisations and a desire to make the fans pay…  a capitalist realist…)

Nearly two decades later, I have stumbled upon a three sided game that actually exists (as in, it is played by real life people).

It’s not a triangle, it’s a hexogon – as soon as my eyes fell upon the image, I realised the foolishness of the three sided pitch.

It’s not a new game either, and in fact existed whilst I idly daydreamed something very akin to it. Asger Jorn, the Danish situationist, apparently invented it (presumably before he died in 1973), to explain his trilectics (an upgrade of Marxian dialectics) and generally oooh-errr people’s view of football.

As a result, it seems to be mainly played by philosophy students, situationists, psychogeographers, lefties without too much of a stick up their arse et al. The Luther Blissett lot are involved. As is Stewart Home. But I have also heard mention of it being used as a training game for young players.

Interestingly it is the team that concedes the least goals that wins. Whilst in regular binary rectangular football that would probably lead to a horrifically negative game, in heterodox trinary hexagonal football it leads to (distrustful) alliances, i.e. the two teams losing (or likely to lose) can team-up against the superior team with a double man advantage – whilst it suits them.

I really want to play a game. Not really because of the intellectualism surrounding it, though that does indeed whet the appetite, but because I still have that greedy maximalism of childhood. I wasn’t daydreaming of three-sided football at the age of 10 to challenge the role of proletariat and bourgeoisie or the fucker and the fucked. I was doing it because, wow, an extra team, that would be amazing!

But, sadly, attempts to contact people involved with it have been unanswered. It’s as if I’m tring to blag my way into a situationist freemasonry lodge…

If you know of a game, or would like to set one up with me in sunny South London, get in touch. (Warning: I am rubbish.)

(Here’s Sid Lowe writing for Sports Illustrated about it…)

I want to play it oh-so-much…

Why do so many atheists and agnostics demand rationality of the religious, but not of themselves? Why do they not apply cool logic to their romantic relationships, their proclamations of pop star genius and their sport loyalties?

Sport. And particularly fandom. Here we have something that fits so well with Durkheim’s elementary forms of religious (and, therefore, social) life that I see football fans like myself as inseparable from the dancing naked pagan. An ecstatic, orgiastic ritual. Totemic worship. Blind faith.

Football as the new religion was quite a fashionable line in the 1990s, purely as a hyperbolic catchphrase, something for a twat to blurb out at an advertising meeting (or whatever those shits do). I want to distance myself from that. I think sports were always rich in religiosity, or to give it a truer label, ritualism.

The big difference in Britain is that god has lost its authenticity for most, but sport hasn’t, as the Olympic state of exception we’ll collectively embrace later this year will show.

But the church buggers children senseless… Yes, very true in far too many cases, too much even for my debauched tastes… But in Britain today, based on my harrowing anecdotal experiences of aggressive fantasist football parents screaming in the faces of their children (in public, fuck knows what happens at home), I’d wager more children are abused under the unchallenged umbrella of sporting ‘authenticity’ than in the now-moribund religious sector.

Not that I’m particularly concerned, of course. I don’t actually want you to all necessarily see the (en)light(enment) and fuck off, leaving me the alone in the irrationality arena of the football stadium. The crowd dynamic, the ranting, the screaming, the caring about something not worth caring about – it’s a lot of fun, my head might know it’s meaningless but my viscera certainly don’t feel the same, and it might just be the essence of our social existence.

So why am I writing this? Perhaps I’m compelling you to be like me, embrace the knowingly-comfortable-with-one’s-own-irrationality position. It certainly sounds good doesn’t it? In fact I must sound like a smug self-congratulatory git. No, no, no. The trouble is, once it’s gone, that belief, that faith, it’s never quite the same. I haven’t felt the same about football since that bastard Sport & Society (SOC3052) module started in room 301 of Bastard Building in the Streatham Campus of the University of Exeter. I enjoy football still. Get happy. Get pissed off. But… there’s a gap. Something profound – sublime even – is missing. So don’t do what I’ve done (though obviously I’m playfully risking it, just to spitefully drag you down to my level).

I think what I am saying is… allow the loose-jointed Church of England wankers, at least. All they do is drink tea! (And I find it far more difficult to imagine a CEO of a corporation – a far more ‘rational’ set-up – doing what Giles Fraser did.) Honour killings are bad, viciously awful, but so will be the first under 8s poor performance familial killing when it comes. And it probably will.

(PS: just noticed retired referee and self-styled controversial talking head Jeff Winter has gone bonkers at the Catholic Church, though in more of a UDA manner than an Enlightenment one.)

The corruption, the stink, the melodrama! The teetering real politic tower of FIFA is wobbling to a newsworthy degree.

Indeed it is a rotten representative for a rotten borough. Er, I mean, “The Football Family”.

But if it goes, what replaces it?

I fear it would be the further control of elite clubs, who have long collectively recognised international football as an inconvenience to their ability to strengthen their growing monopolisation of the sport.

I’m sure whatever takeover or propping up of FIFA would be dressed up in the finest hyperbolically altruistic aesthetics. For the good of the game… But in truth it would facilitate the further privatisation of the game.

FIFA is an utter mess which well deserves bloody execution. But, like revolutions before it, it will not be us without trousers who would take control but our new masters.

To use the language of sociologist Anthony King, this undead relic of the international era of football/capitalism would be removed and replaced by an evermore victorious transnational power bloc.

Expect a European League.

I like to disagree.

But consider this weekend:

AFC Wimbledon, a democratically run fan-owned football club born of a bizarre, clumsy & ultimately capitalist injustice, win promotion to football league… but low brow gossip and awful Twitter jokes about Ryan Giggs’ naughties continue to dominate the agenda.
Sure, there are principled nuances to the Giggs story in the ethical & legal debates surrounding the use of super-injunctions by the rich. But in AFC Wimbledon there is case study in people organising themselves, successfully so. But what reports of the Dons’ success I have seen have been so simplistic and unquestioning they may as well have not bothered.

Tittilation has won.

This is reason no. 1,527 why the miserable old lefties think football fans are dismissable cunts, and they are right.

A campaign in which, consistently competitive in a national league for the first time in decades (an incarnation ago), the Dons (re)gained Football League status through their play-off final victory over Luton Town.

Indeed, if it hadn’t been for Crawley Town being the Met Police FC of the division, the Dons would surely have walked automatic promotion.

And I was there, at the beginning.

Starting the season living on South London’s historic Garratt Lane, and ignoring the existence of clubs like Fulham on the other side of my other side of the river, and given the recent move of Tooting & Mitcham FC from the former to neither, AFC Wimbledon were my local club. (They would have been my huperlocal club if they still played at Plough Lane, but oh well…)

As documented previously, I had started seeing the Dons in January 2010, taking in the second half of their debut Conference season in which they ultimately fell shy of the play-offs.

The new season, however, started brilliantly. The Dons looked bolt-on for a special year – a season of Excalibur proportions with the modern mythology round these Wombling parts: AFC were going to get their league status back.

But as the football (which of course never stops) learched to one of its annual business ends I moved eastwards from Garratt Lane to the Dog Kennel Hill Estate. And the Dons were no longer my local club. I now live three minutes’ walk from Dulwich Hamlet.

And this came at a time when I had been thinking a lot about locality, and it’s relationship to football…

I’m not interested in bullshit notions of ‘authenticity’ regarding “support your local team”. Rather, it had occurred to me that a basic foundation in the inequality of the football economy was how acceptable it is to not support your local football club. Now, obviously, this process is multiplied at a geometric rate by the technological possibilities of television, computing etc. and the regulatory liberalisation of globalisation, but its founding stone lies in the simple act of a sepia-tinged flatcap’d man walking past one football ground to go to another, more popular.

Indeed, a massive contributing factor in Wimbledon FC’s original (and still continuing) problems of place was that swathes of matchgoing southwest London handily ignored them to support other ‘local’ clubs such as Chelsea, Fulham, Arsenal. The Dons were dismissable. And even now, with the Milton Keynes move widely derided and now firmly institutionalized against, Merton council are still seemingly disinterested in the club, who – as they did throughout the ’90s – have to make do playing miles from anything like a ‘spiritual’ home, groundsharing again (though this time as dominant partners) in the relative backwater of Norbiton.

For these reasons, combined with the difficulty of fitting travel to Norbiton around work, I stopped going to AFC Wimbledon.

I could have chosen to have enjoyed the glory, and it was exquisitely tempting. But I felt to carry on at Kingsmeadow, an approx. 80 minute trans-transpontine journey rather than the hop, skip & a jump to Dulwich Hamlet’s Champion Hill, would be to play my small role in the contemporary capitalist logic of consumption that was itself the breeding ground of the madcap move to Milton Keynes.

I did it for you, Dons…

Thinking Points

1) The Status Quo Returns? For many, Wimbledon’s return to the Football League just that, but it simply isn’t the case. The past decade has made the Dons everyone’s second favourite club (particular fans of big Champions League level teams – like an anti-guilt mechanism) rather than the inconvenience many regarded them as previously.

Wimbledon, having spent years as a gigantic whale in a garden pond, now view themselves as synonymous with ‘good’ football, short passing rather than desperate long hoofing of their days in the top tier of English football.

2) Arrogance & Oddity There was certainly a feeling amongst some fans that rising through the non-league pyramid was an absolute inconvenience as they approached that which they were righteously owed. And sometimes this arrogance grated on non-league fans. But others, both Dons & (blown away) rivals, embraced the oddity of it all, particularly in the first few years where thousands would invade afterthoughts of pitches more used to the proverbial two men and a dog.

3) The Power of a Creation Myth AFC Wimbledon have the most powerful facilitator in the development of a strong fan culture: a sense of profound injustice at the heart of their foundation. The Milton Keynes mockery unites ALL football fans more than anything I’ve ever come across, thus allowing the Dons a position of unequaled righteousness. It is another reason why they are culturally a far stronger unit than ever before.

4) A Political Act? Well, of course, in a world where everything is political, of course the formation of AFC Wimbledon is. Even an idiot could apply new social movement theory to it. But for me, it wasn’t outright ‘political’ enough. It was, after all, the richest (in terms of average salary) matchgoers of the late ’90s Premier League setting about bringing back the status quo.

Don’t get me wrong, the move to Milton Keynes was ridiculous. I have no time for anything surrounding a subterfugeous redevelopment scheme (which is in essence what was going on in Milton Keynes. Ask Asda.)

What was noteworthy about Milton Keynes wasn’t that it heralded the invasion of capitalism into our sacred and unspoilt football, but that it was done so cackhandidly that people were appauled by it rather than lapping hungrily from the bowl as they usually do with, for example, the restructuring of the Champions League to facilitate monopolisation by big clubs.

AFC Wimbledon do not challenge this.

I think – or hope – football can go deeper as a canvass for cultural resistance.  FC United are a ‘reformed’ club who take the idea of footballing rebellion an ideological step further into the abstract, responding instead to a change of ownership at the ‘parent’ club. But I’d like to explore even more possibilities. Why form clubs in the idealized image of the ancien regime? Why adhere to the footballing aesthetics & values that now seem so distant, so privatised, so globalized?

We should form a truly new club for all London’s discontented football fan. And groundshare somewhere other than bloody Norbiton. If the club was truly rebellious I would get off my arse and travel. As it stands, football clubs seem so homodox that to visit any other than your nearest one is frankly a waste of effort.

But we know it’s all horseshit, don’t we Dear Readers?

Every football match is, in essence, the same. Deep Play may sway, but do you & I want to be so dominated by the herd mentality of idiots that we embody the consumer victim?!

THE SEASON IS OVER.

But, indeed, the football goes on forever. So I ask you, will you come to Champion Hill in August to see The Dulwich Hamlet & take ecstasy with me?

I didn’t go. I had planned to. But I slept through it. Yes, I slept through a 3 o’clock kick off, like a total wastrel.

And I feel guilty. Very guilty! Which is absurd, and counter to much of this blog’s attempts to meander towards a more rationally aware controlled-irrational sporting consumption. I’m sat here wondering – could they have held on the few extra minutes with my voice joining the chorus of what I assume were increasingly desperate howls of “C’MON DULWICH!!”?

(I am aware that the most basic Beginner’s Guide To Chaos Theory suggests that the merest act of me waking up at midday, never mind catching the train, turning up at the match etc. would have altered the course of events and Hamlet could have been 5-o down at half-time whilst a tsunami destroyed Bognor Regis…)

I have clearly got myself a bit caught up with Dulwich Hamlet. I was warned about this, but I worried not. Me? The undercover researcher? A charmingly aloof football flâneur? What chance I’m going to get bogged down in what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz would no doubt label shallow play, in a regional sub-section of the 8th tier of English football?

Well, I seem to have. Bugger. And, indeed, it makes a silly sense that I should be feeling guilty.

But there is a limit to my guilt.

You see, football is not the ultimate ritual to me. There is one that I so adore, I so worship that even admitting it MIGHT be a sociologically definable language game is tantamount to stamping on a little deer’s face, repeatedly, whilst dressed like a Nazi stormtrooper…

Ladies, gentlemen & everyone else – I believe in Love! Courtly Love. Romantic Love. Heart-and-stomach-overflowing-with-aggghhhhh Love. I am told that reading Roland Barthes’ (whose Mythologies was a great influence on me starting this blog) A Lover’s Discourse can make someone stop using the phrase “I Love You.” Fuck that! I’m terrified of such a book! Bring me a copy of it and I shall bring you a glorious bookburning.

The reason I slept all of yesterday was because Seaneen, my girlfriend, and I had one of our impromptu all nighters of drink and fags and conversation. For about 12 hours we sat around, dreamily each others’, eyes burning madly at each other, hearts straining at ribcages. I don’t believe in Love so much as I believe in Seaneen. She is a magical goddess of a woman. Rationalism can go fuck itself. Religious nutters can blow up as many people as they like. Just let me and Seaneen survive. Thank you.

When it comes to Love I am as rabidly, simplistically, uneducatedly partizan as the average football forum user. And proudly so.

I feel almost dirty for mentioning Seaneen on a blog about sport. She is above it. And I certainly won’t be making any bloody football analogies*. I will not compare her smile (which is beautiful) to a not-forgotten moment from whichever World Cup is currently nostalgically fashionable. I will not compare her eyes (gorgeous, big, blue) with a monolith of a football stadium. I will not compare her intellect (quick, aggressive) with a deep lying foot-on-the-ball playmaker. None of it!

But I will tell you that, with the morning sun pouring down and Dog Kennel Hill Estate waking up, Seaneen walked out onto our walkway/balcony outside our flat. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to do.” She smiled, and pulled off her purple nightdress, and shook her knickers down. She turned slowly – vividly, perfectly naked. I melted inside. And now consist of 76% molten myself.

When we retired to bed at around 11am I had earnest but implausible notions of awaking an hour later to travel Surreywards for the Leatherhead game. I eventually got up about ten hours later. I missed the match. I possibly even cost Dulwich Hamlet promotion. But I woke up in the same bed as Seaneen (this name sends shivers down my spine) Molloy.

Oh, and she can write a bit too.

* – Apart from the title of this post. Ooops.

Until very recently a works team, they have – according to Wikipedia – relaxed the rule on eligibility and signed non-cop players. And I have heard talk of their “big wallet”, which makes them sound like a Crawley Town with the added PR disaster of kettling teenagers.

According to the statistics, they approximately average attendances of a mere 80 for home games. Bognor Regis Town, who they pipped to the title on goal difference, were getting 1,300-ish at the end of the season. Which doesn’t seem very utilitarian… or even meritocratic.

And, as a result, Dulwich Hamlet – whose late surge I am (subjectively) very pleased to say saw them reach the final play-off place – will play the unfortunate Bognor Regis this coming Tuesday in the play-off semi-final.

I have to say I would have preferred them to play the Repressive State Apparatus instead, and not only because I can’t afford the travel to the south coast, but because I think singing We All Live In A Fascist Regime would have been rather appropriate…

If the tourist-friendly sterility of the Royal Wedding – or indeed a routine, incident free, overpowering, freescoring win for either Spanish giant in a regular Liga match – is the world’s best then I am happy to slink into my stinking underworld of sporting deviance. As the Notorious B.I.G. once said, It don’t make sense going to heaven with the goodie goodies… no sleeping all day, no getting my dick licked. That is how I view football, music, art. And I like it. Welcome to hell!

But in-between the songs playing on my girlfriend’s Spotify playlist, in the moments of fade in/out quiet, it sounds like an orgy is going on up there. A man-on-man orgy. A grunting, wild, and – in ways metaphorically so – utterly utterly penetrating orgiastic ritual.

Either Clifford Geertz‘s “deep play” of important sporting rituals has transfered to the simulacrum of digital football simulation, or one of them has got a really big, hard cock.

That is all.