Should we all take a break from football?

By grvadmin

As I sit here typing, Sky Sports News is on in the background. The ‘BREAKING NEWS’ gold ticker runs across the screen, announcing that Raheem Sterling has just opened his Manchester City account inside three minutes against Roma.

There’s no mention of the Women’s Ashes series which started today. There’s no mention of the Tour De France. There’s no mention of Zach Johnson’s dramatic play-off Open Championship victory. All these marvellous sporting occasions are being neglected for the sake of a Mickey Mouse pre-season tournament in Australia.

You go to the back page of the majority of newspapers in this country and 99% of the time the main headline will be football related. Open it up and transfer rumours fill the pages. England’s crushing defeat in the second Ashes test gets a good deal of analysis granted, but not as much as it should.

We all seem to be football obsessed in this country, and the media coverage the game gets reflects that. But once the summer begins, shouldn’t we, like the players, have a break from it?

Shouldn’t we be embracing other sporting events that occur throughout the summer? As clubs jet off to all corners of the globe, why don’t we just leave them to it?

Clubs are flooding their social media pages with all the latest pictures, videos and information to make sure that we don’t miss a second of the action. But surely I’m not the only one who finds it all rather mundane? Trawling your way through YouTube to find highlights from your team’s latest meaningless friendly seems a rather pointless exercise if you ask me.

Flicking through the TV channels, I caught a few minutes of Everton against Stoke the other week. The game was played in Singapore and it was probably the dullest five minutes of football I’ve ever seen.

But it made me think; who is actually watching this at home? Even the most hardened of Evertoninans and Potters fans couldn’t have put themselves through ninety minutes of that.

I personally have tried my hardest throughout the summer to avoid as much football related stories as possible, and it’s been great. Being a huge cricket fan, I have really engaged with the Ashes and haven’t given football a second’s thought, and I feel so much better for it.

The game has gone mad now. Well, it’s been mad for a number of years, but when you see Man City paying £49 million for Sterling it just confirms how far the game has moved away from the working man.

A 20 year old worth £49m, this isn’t ‘the working man’s game’ anymore.

Back in the 1970’s and 80’s, fans on the terraces saw those playing football as equal to them. But now with the multimillionaire athletes that represent football clubs, and with the game driven by money with club’s operating as profit machines, it’s much harder for supporters to really connect with their clubs.

If you had asked me last year that I would go the whole summer without reading a single bit of transfer gossip I wouldn’t have believed you. But I’ve had a nice break from football, maybe you should try it.

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