The Premier League is a desolate place for the football
hipster. Everything about it is just too
damn.. mainstream. Where’s the joy in
pledging allegiance to Arsenal say when even your Mum knows who Mesut Ozil
is? What you need is a team just left of
centre enough to make following them cool while not being in any danger of
actually winning anything (and no, Arsenal don’t count). For this, Southampton are the only choice.
They’re perfect really.
Their current identity is based around them developing their own players
and a bright young manager who insists on a style of football based around
pressing the opposition. They’re like Dortmund but without the reduction
in cachet that actually winning
stuff brings. They’re just on the edge of being too mainstream, like a
band just before their song is used on a Vodaphone advert.
Manuel Pochettino’s commitment to making Southampton the league’s
coolest club even stretches to insisting on still using a post-match
interpreter when he can obviously speak excellent English (as opposed to Pepe
Mel, who instantly ruined his air of Spanish mystery by proving he’d learnt our
language). Manuel knows that nothing removes your carefully cultivated aloofness
faster than looking like you’re trying too hard.
Southampton stand out in a Premier League increasingly
measured in money first and football second with their focus on bringing young
players through. Football hipsters love both developing youth and getting
to complain when said youth is sold early for a profit. Theo Walcott, Gareth Bale, Alex
Oxlaide-Chamberlain, Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana, James Ward-Prowse and Calum
Chambers are just some of the players to have come through their rightly lauded
academy in the last ten years. This is good news. Follow them and you can smugly recount how different
your club is; we make players, we don’t buy them you can say. Now that Barcelona have turned evil we’re the
only bastions of club morals left.
Their playing style could have been designed with appealing
to a better quality of fan in mind. Possession football is so 2009, never
mind Pep Guardiola and his Bayern side’s attempts to bring it back.
Pressing the ball when out of possession is what’s in now, winning it high up
the field and counteracting quickly, distilling football down into a game of
sprints. To the level they do it they’re unique in the Premier
League. There’s only Chelsea who get close to their pressure on the ball
and they tend to do it about twenty metres closer to their own goal line. And who cares because they’re Chelsea.
There’s a real catch them while they’re here feel about
them. Bigger clubs are actively circling their talent. Lallana is
in line to be in the first team for England at the World Cup. Luke Shaw
apparently has to choose between Man Utd and Chelsea. Hipsters should
rush to follow them now, before they sell out and move to one of the big boys.
Following Southampton also allows you to ponder the bigger
questions of football fandom, namely what is a modern football club actually
for? If it’s to win things then Pochettino’s decision to rest players
from an entirely winnable 5th Round
FA Cup tie is indefensible. If it’s to bring the kids through while
finishing in the top half of the table then they’re golden. You’ll be too busy coming across as cool and
mysterious to care.
Basically Southampton are really the only choice for a
football hipster looking at English clubs.
And really isn’t all this following European teams becoming a bit
passé? Liking Dortmund was fine when no
one had heard of Shinji Kagawa and Robert Lewandowski’s FIFA stats were
stupidly low. After the Champions League
Final and people remembering the Bundesliga highlights isn’t it all a bit
played? Braver to pick the one English
team cool enough then. Unless Marcelo
Bielsa ever gets a job over here. Then
hipsters worldwide will be frantically ordering shirts online before he even
gets off the plane.
No comments:
Post a Comment