The one thing worse than Man Utd
Thinking about it, I never really lost sleep over that third-in-a-row Premier League title.
Manchester United make me a bit sick, and I can’t say why. It’s in my blood. It’s all I’ve known. I can look at Bruno Fernandes and think, ‘good football player, good person’. But I can never like him because of the hostility I've seen shown toward those folk by fellow Leeds United fans since I was a wee young thing.
Given that, walking around Leeds city centre waving around a Manchester United badge might feel like bad idea. But that's what I did on Saturday.
I was participating in an anti-fascist rally, organised by the Leeds branch of Stand Up to Racism, because I wanted to show that multiculturalism is an English value that I wouldn’t do without. “One island, many peoples,” the slogan read, against a St George’s flag formed of red images cut out from magazines I’ve been hoarding for years — Stylist, When Saturday Comes, endless, endless copies of the Metro.
A strawberry, an expensive-looking crimson kettle. A sign selling scarves for Leyton Orient. The sleeve of Jacinda Ardern’s blouse.
Pasting in the top half of Alejandro Garnacho’s shirt, featuring that badge, was a way of saying ‘everyone is welcome, yes - even them’.
“I left the room, and locking the door, made a solemn vow in my own heart never to resume my labours,” Victor Frankenstein said upon looking at his famous creation, brought to life for the first time. Mary Shelley had spent a touch too long reviewing her own first drafts that morning, I guess.
If you too enjoy creativity but feel repulsed by your own creations: try collage! Assemble things that other people have made — headlines, photographs, drawings etc — then put them together in ways that are pleasing to you. Sure, it involves some creative choices, but you can never spoil it all with clumsy shading or a misplaced pas-de-chat.
Victor Frankenstein just chose the wrong project — you can’t just bin a living thing when you find it embarrassing. A collage, however, is a self-proclaimed mess which promises nothing; a placard, a message for a moment which won't live forever, clinging to a piece of cardboard by only a few swipes of a gluestick.
Short of self-hatred, the worst frustration arising from the art of collage is the desperate search for that one thing that you need to make the piece feel complete. It might be a tiara, it might be something-you’re-not-sure-what, or it could be as simple as a letter ‘P’ more than 2cm big.
The hunt for red was easy. When you start to look for it, red is everywhere. Shoes, handbags, calls-to-action. Lipstick, fingernails and adverts for no-win-no-fee. Something to do with sex, psychologists will tell you. No wonder the nationalists are finding her so irresistible at the moment.
Th crimson kettle I found though, that was the best. In a time when the definition of Englishness is being revised and reclaimed by someone, somewhere on an hourly basis, MPs snapping themselves seated next to a greasy fry in the hopes of being seen as someone who gets ‘it’ — the kettle, obviously, had to make the cut.
Shall we all have a cuppa, then, and calm down? At a time when we really need it, we have seem to have forgotten the use of our national icon.
Former Man Utd defender Gary Neville made an effort to pour cold water on rampant nationalism last week. Delivering a chilled out piece-to-camera on his morning stroll down some ordinary Manchester street, he told his LinkedIn followers that he didn’t like the flags going up everywhere because they were being used “in a negative fashion”.
“It needs to stop now,” he says. “I played in a football team with a group of people from Manchester.
“From Ireland, Wales, Scotland. But also people from Africa, from Asia, from America and Europe. And we were a beautiful team. United as one.”
It’s heart-warming stuff. And it gives me hope, watching it, as someone who once hated the rat-faced scumchester knobhead, because if Englishness is going to be defined once and for all, it’ll be defined by a rich white straight man – and thankfully it looks like this one's image for the future of the country doesn’t differ wildly from mine.
Elsewhere in football, there was backlash when the England men's manager was both German and critical of fans of England men in the same breath, after Thomas Tuchel’s side played out a friendly to a “silent” Wembley stadium.
But it wasn’t the peaceful night that one fan called Kian had hoped for, who took to Twitter with his own complaints about the performance of the home support. He reported that in as many as a hundred visits to Wembley, he had never received so much homophobic abuse as he did last Thursday, when England played Wales.
His tweet was, obviously, overwhelmed with horrific replies from England fans denying his experience, accusing him of attention-seeking and looking for problems which aren’t there.
It’s shocking. So much abuse by so many different users. There has always been this kind of response to such posts, but not on this scale.
And what I find particularly disturbing is the sense that, while people have been radicalised by their conditions, lately, it’s not as though hundreds of thousands of prejudiced people have been born overnight — those views have existed all my life, it is only that now people are emboldened to express hatred because, suddenly, it’s not shameful to say discriminatory things any more. Look, they’re doing it on TV! And in the newspapers.
This naivety is a privilege, having not required an acute awareness of racism to survive, though I have felt something like it at men's football games before.
When I walk into a stadium like Elland Road looking like a lesbian, my body takes subconscious note of everything — gestures, energies, glances. No one has ever been direct in their response to my queer appearance, but you sense it, animalistic, in your bones.
There are a lot of people in the world who cannot imagine what this feels like.
On those trips to football when I have felt persistently alert, I have wondered whether homophobia would be easier to take if it was spoken, out loud, rather than communicated implicitly, constantly, in ways that make you paranoid and unable to relax. In recent weeks, videos of flagrant, unchecked aggression by British men claiming to defend their country have been shared online and I'm realising that the concrete prospect of violence is far worse than a nagging uncertainty.
Among the many usernames with union flags which commented on Kian’s tweet about homophobia at Wembley, there was “Reece” who basically said (classic) that if people didn’t tweet stuff like this, there wouldn’t be any homophobia at all. “Try being gay in the 80s, they are the real victims of inequality,” he said.
I came off Twitter about six months ago because it was making me feel bad. Lately, I logged on again for work reasons and wondered ‘where have I been all this time?’ because the content makes me laugh and helps me to understand what makes people tick.
Clicking onto Reece’s profile, I found that his homophobic tweet followed about six posts about men’s mental health and a walk that he and his friends had completed to fundraise for charity.
‘It’s ok to talk’ with one hand, punching down with the other. The hypocrisy makes me feel hateful, which is what Elon Musk wants, and exactly why I deleted Twitter in the first place. In seeking information which enriches my understanding, too often my sense that someone else is utterly different from me is deepened and hardened.
Then, scrolling further down, I find that Reece has attached a photo of a giant breakfast sandwich he ate to fuel up for this charity stroll. What a feeling that would be. Tucking into a greasy roll with your mates before you set off for a long walk, having some jokes and some fresh air, then feeling at the end of it like you’ve done something really good for the world.
Me and Reece probably have a few things in common. We’ve grown up on different sides of the country but we both love football and I too would’ve relished that frankly quite gnarly-looking fried egg. But I don’t understand why he’s upset by fans sharing their experience of homophobia and he doesn’t understand why being gay in 2025 is nothing like getting “special treatment”, as he says it is.
If we passed each other in the street, I might imagine he looked a bit too 'Stone Island' to hear me out as I would appear to him too 'facial piercings' to have any appreciation for his point of view. We look the other way.
For years my gay haircut and my gay dress sense have been a political statement, of sorts. But you can hide behind a suggestion, whereas spelling out my point of view with a placard made me vulnerable because it was an invitation to engage.
I’m often hesitant to be direct and outspoken about issues that are important to me for fear of coming off too virtuous or earnest, as well as the threat of aggression from someone like Reece.
Perhaps procrastinating on getting over myself has been a luxury and, had my issues been so grave that they demanded it sooner, then I would have. I don’t know if I have time to put my ego first any more.
Thinking about it, I never really lost sleep over Manchester United winning that third Premier League title in a row.
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