Julie Burchill

The irritating rise of the bourgeois footie fan

They don’t understand the working-class game

  • From Spectator Life
(Getty)

The day after the Serbia vs England match, while sunbathing on my balcony, I espied an interesting vignette taking place on the lawns beneath my apartment block. A little boy was playing football with a man I took to be his father, who looked like a hipster of the kind you can see by the score in Brighton and Hove; goatee, vintage t-shirt, Converse sneakers and a facial expression strongly implying that he’d been to places which made Planet Earth look like a one-horse town. 

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The little lad was having the time of his life, kicking the ball at his dad. He was totally living in the moment. The dad? Not so much. In one hand he held a mobile phone which made him a poor goalie. Whenever he stopped the ball, he threw it as far away as he could, so the little lad had to chase it – and every single time this happened, he checked his phone.

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