If you have any involvement in junior football in England – coaching, parenting, standing around feeling sad and stricken – you will be familiar with The Respect Barrier. A flimsy, hopeful plastic awning pegged out along the touchline, the Respect Barrier is part of a long-standing Football Association campaign to improve the touchline “behaviour” of those who watch. It’s there every week up and down the country: a suggestion, a reminder, the stewarding equivalent of standing around in your pyjamas politely clearing your throat while the local tearaways buzz around doing wheelies on your front lawn.
“Fuck off back behind the fucking Respect Barrier!”: this, offered up by the coach of an under-11 team, is the best, and indeed only, acknowledgement of the Respect Barrier’s existence I’ve heard during the last couple of years of watching my sons play junior football, a world that seems both very familiar and profoundly altered since my own days playing in the same south London leagues.
As ever there are only two things wrong with junior football: the coaches and the parents. Actually that’s not fair. The huge majority of coaches are genuinely inspiring, quietly heroic people who do a chasteningly brilliant job keeping this whole glorious business going. But like a pot of glue poured into the works one bad one tends to stick to everything, to induce a kind of hive‑mind idiocy in those around them.
In particular park football’s chief villain and bogeyman is still very much with us. You know who I’m talking about. Bad Angry Shouting Football Man, one of the English game’s great toxic archetypes. He’s still out there. Here he comes now. Professionally tracksuited, sombre, spam-faced, with an oddly studied and convincing “managerial” range of gestures, an early hint of the fully rounded fantasy life all set to be enacted in the howls and yells and whirling gestures of injustice to come.
On the face of it the story here remains pretty much the same. The most recent FA study of county associations revealed 3,731 cases of misconduct by adults at under-18 matches in a 15-month period. And while junior football is less feral than it was in the 1980s – when dads really did fight in the carpark, when there was a side of the pitch as a player you’d stay away from out of sheer terror: that smear of scowling faces, jabbing elbows, raw adult rage – there is still a genuine bleakness out there at times.
It is such a familiar story that this has in itself become a bit of a cliche, a customary note in the usual run-through of All The Things Wrong With English Football. And yet look a little closer and structurally this is a very different place now. The major change is the sense of disconnect. Twenty years ago Bad Angry Shouting Football Man, for all his faults and madness and projected frustrations, at least had something to do with the wider sporting world. No wonder we can’t play football, people said. Look at Bad Angry Shouting Football Man over there scaring everyone and offering terrible advice at an impressionable age. When it came to the reasons why England underachieve, Bad Angry Shouting Football Man was up there. He was a player.
He isn’t now. Bad Angry Shouting Football Man doesn’t speak to anything other than ruining a few people’s weekends. He’s been de-skilled, hived off, disenfranchised. What happens in park football now is pretty much irrelevant to the top tiers of the professional game at a time when academies take the best kids from the age of six, then again at the age of eight and nine. For the chosen ones contact with anything beyond the controlled environment – park football, “bad habits”, bad shouting men – is minimised progressively as they move through the age groups, to the extent that the best are often forbidden even from playing school football.
As as result there are essentially two forms of football in England now. The professional game, which stretches its fingernails right down to the youngest age groups. And the rest, the civilians, those left behind in the mess of decaying municipal infrastructure. Previously there was at least the sense of some greater lurking superstructure. The best players your age played in the best teams your age. Going for trials with local clubs, being “spotted” out of the blue, was still a distant promise even as a teenager. Bad Angry Shouting Football Man was at least shouting at kids who still had a minuscule chance of being footballers one day.
Plenty of English players still carry the mark of this. Look at Jamie Vardy, a footballer who has, very clearly, been shouted at a great deal, hard-wired to run and harry and whirl about like a man being chased by a swarm of bees. Try that at a proper level these days and you’ll be lifted up by the armpits and shown the door. Witness, for example, the story of the Arsenal starlet Ainsley Naitland-Niles’s mum, who managed to get herself excluded from the club training ground for indulging in some pretty regular, standard Bad Angry Shouting Touchline Parent stuff, while watching – gulp – Arsenal’s Under-21 team.
What next, then, for Angry Shouting Football Man? There is almost a kind of sadness about them, these clanking old relics, last redoubt of something old and deep and horribly toxic, still shouting at each other from their receding desert islands, forgotten villains of a forgotten war.
And really, Bad Angry Shouting Football Man is doomed for other reasons too. Other forces are at work here. The middle classes, for example. Respect Barriers. People who don’t like being shouted at. Political correctness (regular and gone mad). Like the professional game, grassroots football is being gentrified bit by bit. Increasingly those who play are those who can afford it, those who can travel, those who can organise. In London at least these costly, scarce facilities are being retaken, cleansed, a different set of values imposed.
So much so that from here it seems safe to say there will not be another generation of Bad Angry Shouting Football Men. This is a dying line. Just as parks and grounds are being pressed thin, prices hiked, gates made ever more inaccessible, so these sad, pouchy old dogs with their deep rage, their shouts of NO! and REF! and CALLUM NO GET UP SON CALLUM NO! will disappear too. Look closely and they’re already fading, a little more transparent and ghostly every week, stalking, swearing, leaping, moving further out: waving goodbye, good riddance, farewell.
- This article was amended on 27 November 2015 to correct a spelling error.
