Footballers With Boobs Is the Best Thing On the Internet

FootballersWithBoobs says: At Martin O'Neill's first press conference, he was asked if him and Roy were a good cop/bad cop team. O'Neill claimed that they were both good cop, and it's hard to argue after seeing this picture of Roy cupping Martin's boobs. Despite its popularity, nobody has commented on the lack of detail for Roy's body. Phew.

While parodic football Twitter accounts probably reached their nadir with Evil Kagawa, not everyone trying to combine football with social media is a humourless dickhead. 101ShitGoals, FootballBios and BestFootyTweets have all brought mirth to a subject which can too frequently be a wasteland of humour.

But then there are others, like FootballersWithBoobs, which just really make you think. Its bio states – accurately – that "it's footballers, but with boobs", but psychologically it feels like so much more than that. Sure, on the surface it's just a series of pretty well-done MS Paint drawings of players, managers and ex-players with breasts. But beneath the surface, it's a hot, bubbling mess of Freudian longing and latent homoeroticism. (Possibly).

Baines was quite an easy one. The face is quite cartoonish and exaggerated, his expression suggests that he may be doing this photo shoot against his will.

I got in touch with the auteur behind the account to ask, among other things, Why?

VICE: Your project is growing more popular by the day. Were you expecting this kind of – for want of a better word – success?
FootballersWithBoobs: Not really no, I'm not even sure it's a success. The general reaction is one of shock and horror; I feel like the retweets it gets are like when people retweet a picture of a missing child. People feel like there's something wrong, and they need to share it in the hope of a solution.

Perhaps the most sexual of all the drawings, and certainly one of the most popular. Zlatan poses with a finger delicately placed at the very edge of his mouth. His breasts succulent, ripe and ready for plucking. His hips suggest he is stood in quite a suggestive stance. His hair looks lovely.

Yeah, it's very obvious that most people who reply are just coming across the account for the first time. Does reaction differ for the different styles you've employed? How much is revulsion and how much is appreciation?
I've been trying to pinpoint a formula for a successful picture. Fat managers with very large boobs are popular, as are players replicating something of their own real-life character – Luis Suarez going to bite his nipple, for example – but I've not really been able to get an exact handle on what people want. Martin O'Neill and Roy Keane sparked a lot of interest, which leads me to believe people ultimately want hardcore full-on footballers-with-boobs pornography. And I won't do that.

The popularity of these pics somewhat confuses me. Here, Daniel Sturridge dances his little dance, which is fair enough, but look at those boobs. They are all over the place. I couldn't make up my mind on how they'd look so I just left them. I'm yet to receive any complaints.

I think the ones of managers – Steve Bruce, but also Tomas Brolin – were quite different in that they painted a sort of hyper-realistic, almost grotesque presentation of both the football manager and boobs. If you go down that route you're basically the Lucian Freud for the MariLADBantertelli generation. Which may be no bad thing.
This is it, it's hard to know where to go from here. Bigger? Weirder? More detail? Less detail may be even more subversive. There's only so many times you can draw a famous footballer with "normal" breasts. I can't help but feel in a few weeks' time I'll be sat alone, drunk, drawing tits on Gunnersaurus.

When watching The Football League Show one cold night, it struck me how pained Steve Claridge's expression was. As he smiled his coy smile, it looked like his entire body was creasing. Those muscles had not been used before. I tried to capture that here, but with boobs.

The Zlatan Ibrahimovic one perhaps has the power to make a few people question their sexuality. Were you ever going for that angle? Would you be delighted or horrified if you genuinely aroused somebody?
Oh, absolutely. For every fat one or weird one you need a few like Zlatan, like Adnan Januzaj, just to make people think twice. Arousing people when you're doing this kind of thing is inevitable, really. I doubt anyone is having an actual wank to it, though. Not yet.

As a Leeds fan, I couldn't not do Warnock. I did it quite quickly, as even looking at his face causes me to feel a bit ill. His face here is quite simplistic, just a couple of lines here or there, but it's Warnock. It's Neil Warnock. It's Colin Wanker. With tits.

Football is obviously a source of homoerotica to a lot of straight men. Is there any part of you that's attempting to hold a mirror up to society? What are the origins of FootballersWithBoobs?
The actual origins of FootballersWithBoobs go back many many years. Back when I was young. This kind of thing is acceptable when you're 21. Well, more acceptable. I remember a guy in school used to do drawings of a teacher we had, and one time he drew him as a woman. He didn't put make-up on him, just drew him as he was, but with tits. I was quite amused.

Phil Jones, doing his face. I'm still not sure I managed to quite capture the horror in his eyes.

Fast forward a few years and I'm drawing tits on Leeds players on a forum, I'm drawing tits on pro wrestlers on a wrestling forum and god knows what else. Then I stopped, obviously. Can't be doing that kind of thing forever. Not long ago, though, I stumbled across a few of the pics in a photobucket account, put a few on Twitter, got some retweets and before you know it I'm back in the saddle drawing tits on footballers like it's 2009.

So, to answer your question: no, the only mirror being held up is to myself, and I am very disappointed with what I can see in it.

Will we get a spinoff WrestlersWithBoobs?
It's possible, I didn't see this as some sort of empire with all sorts of offshoots. DartsPlayersWithBoobs is more likely.

FootballersWithBoobs, thank you very much.
Thank you and goodnight.

Follow FootballersWithBoobs on Twitter here.

Follow Callum on Twitter: @Caullum_TH

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