Things That Need to Change in English Football

That joke isn't funny any more – but that doesn't seem to put off Twitter's giggling dullards.

As a game, football is near perfect. When Americans want to play their favourite sport in a park, they have to opt for a watered down "touch" version of it, but with football, you could feasibly play an eleven-a-side with four rocks and anything slightly softer than a rock. Famously, several of the game's greatest practitioners learnt to play with melons. Pele honed his skills with a grapefruit and some bits of newspaper stuffed in a sock. A young Scott Parker developed his touch by booting a burger around his back garden. This sense of youthful initiative is lost on American sports, where you need a college grant and a shoe endorsement before you're even allowed on the field.

Alas, it's not enough to merely compare football to inferior competitive pursuits. This is not how perfection is arrived at. The game must shine the interrogation lamp upon its own soul if it's to continue improving, so, in honour of the new season, I decided to pick out a few of the bugs in the football machine.

STOP BORING TWITTER JOKES

Wayne Rooney is all set to join Chelsea after I agreed personal terms with his wife Coleen last night… And this morning too #john terry

— Kd hottest prospect (@bonedflesh1) August 3, 2013

We're told most weeks by over-earnest Sky Sports idents that football is the working man's ballet, but at its best the culture is more like the working man's open mic night; a comedy forum for people who weren't allowed into the Cambridge Footlights. Maybe it happens less than it used to, but a football match is still a place where an utterly talentless man who spends most of his time drunk or asleep can make hundreds of people laugh with a well-timed jibe aimed at someone who's dedicated years of his life to becoming a professional athlete.

The problem with football humour lies in repetition and thus the problem with football humour lies in the invention of the internet. Repetition probably wasn't too much of a problem when you were on the terraces once a fortnight, but being a football fan on Twitter's like being trapped on the terraces 24/7, surrounded by a crowd of morons all re-telling the same jokes to each other again and again and again and again.

Take, for instance:

My room is as Dusty as Arsenal's Trophy Cabinet.

— Kashif (@TheRealSnorky) August 5, 2013

#BREAKING Suarez has failed a medical at Arsenal after having a sudden asthma attack by opening Arsenals long forgotten dusty trophy cabinet

— david hughes (@DavidHughesd24) July 24, 2013

There's nothing I love more than listening to Adrian Durham infuriate self-righteous Arsenal fans, but no one's coming out of this gag well. It's one that even people who don't like football would groan at. It's football's "What's the deal with airline food?" It makes A Question of Sport look like a groundbreaking Edinburgh Fringe production.

The second one doesn't even make sense. Medicals are carried out at training grounds and hospitals, not club museums. And even if Suarez did suffer from a dust allergy, presumably it wouldn't cause him to faint.

These need to go before all football humour is reduced to sub-Christmas cracker level, before FourFourTom gets so many RTs he starts thinking he's Peter Cook. Yes, we know Arsenal don't spend money, Gareth Bale dives, John Terry puts it about and Luis Suarez bit someone once. We know Wayne Rooney looks like Shrek. We don't need 200 variations on the form.

SCRAP THE ENGLISH NATIONAL TEAM

Alright, England's never gonna be a Samba football nation. You aren't going to suddenly see those ashen-faced patriots who follow the national side paint themselves yellow and start throwing confetti at opposition fans. It's always more likely to be plastic chairs. As an idea, Team England is always going to be a bit more Jimmy Bullard than Jairzinho.

But why does it have to be so po-faced, so stiff, so boring? Instead of being the wondrous showcase of the nation's best that most national teams aspire to be, England seem to play like they're on community service. It's become a cliche, but look at Germany. I mean, they're German, and it still looks like it might be a laugh to play for them.

Just get rid of it for a generation or so, let league football take absolute precedent and we can learn from what we see in this new era and apply it to some kind of England 2.0. A brave new world in which men as charismatically unimpressive as Tom Cleverley and James Milner aren't forced to shoulder the heavy hopes of a population that constantly talks about football but doesn't really understand it. Because right now, England is starting to look like a rotary club rather than a football club: a bunch of miserable bastards singing the national anthem and shagging each other's wives.

STOP THE BORING DEBATES

Every time David de Gea is bullied into fumbling a ball over the line only for a sympathetic linesman to disallow it, or a young Honduran winger takes an easy fall in the penalty area, or a temperamental Italian goalkeeper waves an imaginary card, or any time anything ever happens, basically, a slew of professionally and non-professionally outraged rent-a-gobshites climb out of the woodwork to have their say.

Much of what is wrong with football today is based around this idea that everyone is entitled to Have Their Say. Have your say, they say. They've had their say, so have your say. Did you hear what he said today? Have your say on what he said because everyone else is having their say, they say. This is a confusing message to send to a football-loving public that is 85 percent idiot.

What is it that drives somebody to reignite the diving debate in 2013? To spend a pound a minute calling Stan Collymore to tell him that you think the player in question should have been sent off? Is it idiocy, autism or just being boring? Let's find something new to moan about before all football discussions hit the levels of cyclical tedium usually associated with rural council meetings.

MORE CARE FOR EX-PROS

Football was once again reminded of its darker side, and its responsibilities to those who make it to the top of the sport, when Kenny Sansom's demise was reported a few weeks back. Sansom, a former England and Arsenal full back who would rank highly on most fans' "best ever" lists for club and country in his position, has quietly fallen into homelessness and alcoholism. The PFA are looking after him now, but surely there were those within the game who could see that Sansom was headed for trouble?

Footballers are taken out of society at an age when most of us are still learning how to cope with and behave within it. It should be no surprise that many are ill equipped to deal with the gradual absorption back into normality that comes at career's end. Yes, there are some success stories. But how many punditry and coaching jobs are there, really? One hundred and fifty ex-professional footballers currently reside in British prisons; countless more are probably broke and drunk.

Much like the army, football needs to understand that it's thrown these people's lives off course for its own gain, and thus has an obligation to help them cope when their skills are deemed surplus.

BAN MEDIA TRAINING

The worst thing to happen to football in recent years isn't Sunday Supplement, or BT Sport, or Championship sides that play "Chase the Sun" by Planet Funk whenever a home goal goes in. It's media training, the bland brainwash formula that takes snarling, grunting pigs of men who've spent 90 minutes battling in mud and turns them into robotically objective cliche merchants.

Once upon a time, footballers were charmers, rogues, thugs, dandies and sociopaths. I don't doubt that many of them still are these things, but media training has meant that, to the casual post-match viewer, they're all kind of the same person. To truly understand them, we either have to gaze deep into their eyes to see the chaos that engulfs their souls, or read about them trashing VIP areas in Manchester superclubs.

Even a man as unhinged as Mario Balotelli speaks like a surly sports shop employee in interviews. Let's ban media training, and let them speak for themselves, let them be funny and controversial and offensive. It's a game; it's not meant to be dull.

LET'S NOT GET CARRIED AWAY WITH STATS

It's just boring, isn't it? I understand the role they play in betting, but come on, they're for Americans.

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive

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