When Manchester United put pieces of Old Trafford turf on sale for £125 a cube this week, the reaction across the country was the same eye roll and the same two words: “Game’s gone.” It has become the standard response to anything that makes modern football feel like a product rather than a sport, and I will admit I said it out loud when I saw the price.
But the phrase gets thrown around so much that it has started to lose meaning. Some of what fans complain about is a genuine problem. Some of it is just change. The international break is the perfect time to sort one from the other, so here is my honest verdict, grievance by grievance.
The Money Complaints Are the Ones That Matter
Start with the stuff that actually costs supporters real money, because this is where “Game’s gone” is completely justified.
Ticket prices have drifted so far out of reach that a matchday seat costing more than £30 feels normal now. The Premier League deserves credit for capping away tickets at £30, and I mean that, because it is one of the few decisions in recent years that put fans first. But the wider picture is bleak. This is a league swimming in television money and sponsorship deals, and yet it still squeezes supporters for every pound it can find.
The small insults hurt almost as much as the big ones. Norwich City recently advertised a season ticket holder discount on an away coach that saved fans exactly £1 on a £67 return fare. That is not a reward for loyalty. That is a marketing department pretending to care and hoping nobody does the maths.
Then there is the problem of getting home. Broadcasters move a Saturday night fixture for a northern club down to London, and suddenly nobody can catch the last train. Fans drive, book hotels or take the next day off work, while the same broadcaster runs an advert about how football is for the fans. I have done enough away days to know that the journey home is half the day, and taking it away is a real cost that never shows up in the ticket price.
Grounds With No Soul
I have a lot of sympathy for the complaint about stadiums that feel like retail parks. New grounds are almost always built on the edge of town, which means no pub nearby, no walk through terraced streets and no smell of onions from a burger van on the corner. You park, you go in, you leave. It works, but it feels like visiting an out of town furniture store with a pitch in the middle.
Selhurst Park has its flaws, and anyone who has queued for the toilets in the Holmesdale knows them well. But it has character, and character is the thing you cannot build into a new stadium no matter how much you spend. Give me a ground with a bit of history and a bit of inconvenience over a gleaming bowl with no atmosphere every time.
The FA Cup semi finals at Wembley belong in the same argument. Villa Park hosted the greatest semi final of them all in 1999, and dragging northern clubs down to London for the sake of filling a stadium that cost far too much to build takes something away from the final itself. Wembley should feel like a special occasion in May, not a place you have already been to three weeks earlier.
When Football Starts Looking Like a Catalogue
There is a broader complaint underneath all of this that I think is the most important one. Football is being smoothed out and packaged until every part of it looks the same.
The last World Cup is a good example. The television presentation was so uniform that it could have been staged in any country on the planet, and the tournament that produced a spectacular final between Spain and Argentina still felt oddly generic around the edges. Kits are the same story. Tottenham play in white and Liverpool play in red, and those two colours do not clash, yet Spurs turned up at Anfield in blue recently. Nobody needed that. It exists because a new shirt sells, and a new shirt is easier to sell if you can find a reason to wear it.
Football works because it is messy. It relies on mistakes, bad luck and moments of pure chaos, and the more it gets polished into a slick international brand, the more of that gets lost. The best afternoons I have spent in football were rarely the ones that looked perfect on television.
The On Pitch Habits That Genuinely Irritate Me
Some complaints are smaller but no less annoying, and I am going to be specific.
Players who win soft fouls by jumping into a defender or falling on top of the ball have turned a small dark art into an everyday tactic. It is desperate, everyone in the stadium can see it, and referees still award the free kick far too often. Gabriel at Arsenal is the name that comes up most, and he is far from the only one, but it is the kind of thing that needs a clear instruction to officials to stop rewarding it.
Cutting holes in socks is a fashion crime I will never understand. If the sock is too tight, buy a bigger sock. Thierry Henry wearing his socks pulled up over the knee looked cool. A row of players with scissor marks around their calves looks like a Year 9 art project.
And I cannot defend the mid shootout goalkeeper hug either. A player scores a penalty, sprints to his own goalkeeper for a high five, and then trots back to the halfway line. He has done his job. Nobody watching believes the goalkeeper needed the hug.
The Noise Around the Game
Some of the loudest frustrations are not really about football at all. They are about how much is written and said about it.
The transfer expert culture is a good example. A signing used to be a surprise, like Sol Campbell walking into Arsenal or Tevez and Mascherano arriving at West Ham. Now a deal is drip fed for weeks before anything happens, and by the time the player holds up the shirt there is nothing left to feel. We know too much, and it has taken the buzz out of the moment.
Footballers apologising on social media after a defeat is a similar kind of noise. If a player did not try, an apology is fair. If he played badly and his team lost, he does not need to post a statement about it. The habit has become a routine, and routine apologies mean nothing.
I will also say this about the word “pivot” being used to describe a holding midfielder. Rodri was the best holding midfielder in the world. He did not need a new name, and inventing terminology just to sound clever is not the same as understanding the game.
Where I Disagree With the Grumpy Consensus
Not every complaint deserves sympathy, and this is where I part company with the angriest voices.
The hysteria around VAR annoys me more than VAR itself. Before the technology arrived, fans were furious about refereeing errors and demanded that something be done. Now that something has been done, the same people complain constantly that it has ruined the game. Both cannot be true. VAR has flaws, and the way it is used still frustrates everybody, but the anger has become a permanent background noise that says more about us than about the system.
The pre match handshake is fair game for a moan, and I understand why some people find it forced. But I would keep it. It is a small ritual that reminds twenty two players who have just spent the week trying to kill each other’s confidence that they are still playing a game. If it looks insincere on television, that is a problem with the players, not the tradition.
And for balance, a couple of things have actually improved. The recent law tweaks have cut down the endless goalkeeper time wasting, and games feel quicker and cleaner because of it. That is one change I would defend as a genuine improvement.
My Verdict
If I had to rank all of this, the money complaints would sit at the top, followed by the loss of character in stadiums and fixtures, and then the pitch level irritations at the bottom. Football can survive silly socks. What it cannot survive is pricing out the people who fill the ground.
That is really what “Game’s gone” means when it is used properly. It is not nostalgia for a better past, because the past had plenty of its own problems. It is a warning that when a game loses touch with the people who love it, it loses the very thing that made it worth turning up for.
