Footurology: Dispatches from the future of The Beautiful Game, Part V

Injury-prone keepy-uppie merchant, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior enters dispute with his employers, Anzhi Makhachkala, over a clause in his contract stipulating that his weekly salary should equal that of the annual GDP of the world’s poorest nation. Neymar claims to have been misled by the club, who failed to inform him that when such a figure dropped below whatever his current wage happened to be – which happened earlier in the year, when several African arms markets nation-states went bankrupt, so the IMF told them – then his wages would fall in step. A spokesperson for the Brazilian, suppressing the permanent Cheshire Cat grin induced by his ludicrous sinecure, said: “All Neymar knows is football. Football and giving joy. Football creates joy. What creates joy also creates profit. So, to those people who say Neymar is just chasing after a pig’s bladder, an activity which has no intrinsic worth, I say this – the Marxist theory of use-value is obsolete, you fucks. Wake up!”

14 October, 2024

Nigel Clough – yes, still sporting that Lego haircut – is arrested for fulfilling his job description: “bringing the European Cup back to Nottingham Forest”. Unfortunately, Clough’s hyper-literalism led him to misunderstand that this simply meant through the regular channels of qualification for, and victory in, the UEFA Champions League. Instead, Clough spent the first two months in the job plotting a daring raid on the Inter Milan trophy room at San Siro (Javier Zanetti having hoisted it aloft in his 1500th game for the club). The gaffer’s consequent loss of focus was considered by many to be behind the run of nine straight defeats with which he started in the job, from the honeymoon-period 0-2ers right up to the 0-11 humiliation at the hands of Derby County, the majority of which Clough spent practising his abseiling down the back of the stand bearing his father’s name.

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