In December 2023, I wrote a blog entitled In a SpIn, which was an exploration of my oldest and deepest Special Interest (or SpIn for short). Yet over the summer, I decided that I had completely fallen out of love with football, ending an involvement with the sport which has lasted more than three quarters of my life. So all-consuming was my passion for football I even worked in the sport for six years after joining the staff of the Middlesex FA.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, especially to non-autistic readers, walking away from football felt like a bereavement. Which, in some ways, it was. Over eight months, I went from football (and especially non-League football) being intrinsic to my identity to total indifference to it.
Why? Let’s find out.
If you’ve read the original piece, you’ll know that at the time I wrote it, I was attending Prescot Cables home matches in the company of my teenage daughter and we were both volunteers within the club’s Media Team. I said at the time that:
“Win, lose or draw, we both get huge joy from matchdays, with the added bonus of getting out of the house for some fresh air.”
For me, the joy was the first thing to go and it started to ebb away not long after I published In a SpIn. Attendances at Cables games were exploding, because the team was challenging for promotion, to the point where the lowest crowd at a game where my daughter was pitchside was 638, while our last match – the promotion play-off Final – was watched by 2,070 people. While I never felt that she was at risk of harm, because of steps taken by the club to ensure a safe environment for everyone, Saturdays became almost intolerable for my wife. Like any mum, she constantly worries about her children and the size of the crowds made her understandably twitchy about our eldest’s safety. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that our going to games left her without any support when it came to our son, who has really complex needs, or by the fact that she was pregnant.
The stress carried over to me and while I always kept a very close eye on our girl from my perch at the top of the Main Stand, as the season went on and the crowds got bigger it became harder to carry out radio commentary or stadium announcements because I was distracted. That wasn’t my wife’s fault. It would have happened anyway because almost every Dad wants to protect his daughter from any potential harm. But it did make watching games both more difficult and less enjoyable.
An added source of tension – albeit of a ‘good’ kind – was the club’s success on the pitch. With Prescot Cables always in the play-off places, the question of whether the Pesky Bulls could get promoted was on everyone’s mind. For most football fans, the state of mind described by Brian Stimpson (played by Jonh Cleese in the film Clockwise) is their ‘default setting:
“It’s not the despair. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”
We didn’t just hope, we expected to win at home. Before each and every match the air crackled with nervous energy. It was quite hard to process. This was especially true of the Play-Off Final, which was a home match against local rivals City of Liverpool for which tickets had sold out in an hour. Prescot won the game and I had been asked to do the announcements, due to being the most experienced Tannoy operator at the club. I completed the task, staying in the Press Box while practically everyone else streamed onto the pitch and delaying my own celebrations as I did so. When everything was finished, I felt a weird mixture of elation and relief.
Fast forward a couple of months and all hell breaks loose. The manager, his assistant and seven players all signed new contracts before it became apparent that the budget demanded by the gaffer in May (and agreed by the Directors of the club) was too high and couldn’t be met. When told this, the manager resigned and within twenty-four hours, seven players had announced their own departures. A new boss was appointed, but left within 72 hours, describing the task as “impossible” which, at that stage, it probably was.
You see, the incoming gaffer wasn’t the only person who walked away. Both the Chairman and a friend of mine who served on the Board were threatened with violence by ‘supporters’. My friend lives in Prescot, his wife and children were all part of the football club. If the threats were real, then their day-to-day lives would be impacted. And why? Because of mistakes made in the running of a semi-professional football club? Ridiculous. As soon as I heard that volunteers were potentially unsafe, I knew that I wanted nothing more to do with Prescot Cables.
I was dealing with some low-level trolling on social media when all this was happening which was upsetting, although I was never threatened with physical harm. My ‘favourite’ troll was the Twitter account ‘Purple Pravda’ which suddenly came back to life after three years of inactivity to have a pop at me (presumably as a form of schadenfreude-based retribution for a blog I wrote in February 2024), then didn’t tweet again between July and the deactivation of my Twitter account in late October. Getting grief online got under my skin, but so did a minority of the fanbase at Cables.
Over the eight years I was involved with the club, the average crowd at Prescot’s home games more or less quadrupled (from 272 in 2016-17 to 885 last season). The more people you attract to your matches, the greater chance there is that some of them will be utter numpties. And some of them were. The number of incidents of anti-social behaviour at matches and the severity of those incidents increased dramatically, especially after the Covid Lockdowns and this was the opposite of why I got involved in non-League football. I started going to games at Egham Town precisely because there was no violence at lower level matches, while professional football had a massive problem with hooliganism and violent disorder, all happening in grounds which were essentially death traps. My Mum was a massive Chelsea fan but wouldn’t entertain the idea of taking me to Stamford Bridge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was just too dangerous.
The threats and abuse my friend had to put up with were the final straw for me, but there had been problems before. A midweek match at home to Widnes in October 2021 ranks among the worst nights of my footballing life. The visitors were managed by a former Prescot player who had been overlooked for the manager’s job a few months earlier; the candidate who got the job ahead of him had just been sacked. Widnes included James McCulloch in their line-up, a player with more than 400 matches for Cables under his belt who had left under a cloud at the behest of the now dismissed manager the previous week. The atmosphere was vile, the football terrible. When Widnes scored the only goal of the match, their manager cavorted up and down the touchline like he’d won the Champions League, causing pints of beer to fly towards his dugout. When the match ended in defeat for Prescot, there was a pitch invasion including, bizarrely, a teenager on a pushbike.
Cables were forced to condemn the actions of supporters who abused the City of Liverpool manager, his wife and children at a game in November 2022, which I didn’t attend. This led to changes to matchday arrangements. In November 2023, the club again promised action following a match against Trafford which was marred by “several instances of anti-social behaviour within the stadium… from younger spectators congregating without adults”. Cables won that one 5-1 and there were more than 1,000 people watching. What was that I was saying about bigger crowds including more numpties?
The thing is, my daughter was pitchside at that last one, so what might have happened if “anti-social behaviour” had escalated?
Like many autistic folks, I have a strong set of principles and every time trouble flared I asked myself the same question: ‘do I really want to be associated with this stuff?’ Eventually, it became obvious that the answer was ‘no’.
So, that was that. Without an active involvement in non-League, I have almost nothing to draw me back to the sport. Professional football is virtually unwatchable these days thanks to VAR, interminable amounts of stoppage time at the end of each half and the fact that, to see a match you either have to pay through the nose to be there or pay through the nose for a subscription (or six) to a sports channel. Even if these were options for me (and I’m an unpaid carer, so they’re not), neither strikes me as especially attractive.
And, do you know what? I don’t really miss it. My eldest daughter does, which makes me feel guilty, but taking a step back has been liberating in some respects. We have a new baby at home who keeps us on our toes and not having football in my head all day, every day has cleared some space for other things.
Meanwhile, Prescot Cables reappointed the manager who walked out in July, elected a new Chairman and are doing alright at the higher level. At the time of writing they are twelfth in the League Table and their average attendance of 823 is the fourth highest in their division. I wish them well, but I won’t be popping down to take in a game any time soon.