The FA headquarters used to be at Soho Square and before that in Lancaster Gate but, since August 2009, it’s been at Wembley. It cost the FA £5 million to leave the eight-floor building at Lancaster Gate, a not insignificant sum given the £10 million it had already cost to relocate, and at a time when the FA was struggling to find a sponsor. But then the FA has always been very good at wasting money and ripping off football fans. Why else are the FA Cup semi-finals now played at Wembley? To make money for the FA, of course, and to hell with the cost and inconvenience for the fans. But they can’t even find a sponsor for the FA Cup since the Budweiser deal ended. For all the good these bastards do, the home of English football might as well still be the Freemasons Arms in Covent Garden. Very little seems to have changed since 1863 in the way these goons think. About the only way they’re better than FIFA is that they’re probably too dumb to be corrupt.
Wembley. Whenever I think of it now I think of Matt Drennan, who hanged himself on Wembley Way because he couldn’t bear to be out of the game. That and a whole lot of other things — booze, pills, depression, divorce. The trouble is that when we play football professionally we’re too young to know how lucky we are. Unfortunately by the time we know how lucky we are, it’s too late and we’re on the cusp of retirement. Football is the cruellest sport. I watched a telly programme about bees, and the way drones are kicked out of the hives at the end of the season reminded me of the way we treat footballers who are similarly considered to be past it. The drones fly off and try to figure out what to do with themselves but in the end the result is always the same; they die. Football is almost as bad as that.
I drove to Wembley in my Range Rover. You know what the outside of the place looks like: it’s a big, modern, overpriced stadium with a carrying handle like a shopping basket at your local Tesco. You’ve seen it often enough when England are scraping a 2–2 draw with Switzerland or 1–1 with the fucking Ukraine. Thank God for Frank Lampard. Not so much three lions that night as three pussies.
That’s not a joke I’d make on Twitter. I was glad I’d closed my Twitter account. I wish I’d done it sooner.
I nudged my way through the waiting newsmen and into the car park. It was a Friday and there wasn’t much to write about, obviously. A few die-hard feminists had rolled out the red carpet for me. Literally. On the carpet was written: This is what a real period looks like. And there were banners which I slowed down to read. It seemed the least I could do. MENstruation: as usual the problem begins with a Man. And You’d think a big c**t would understand about periods. I kind of liked that banner. I even winked at the cute girl holding it in front of my windscreen.
Wembley. Inside the offices of the Football Association, things are a mess — some wanker architect’s idea of what the future looks like, with the kind of brightly coloured, essentially uncomfortable furniture you might have expected to find in a Stanley Kubrick film of the early 1970s. Whenever I’m there I half expect to see Malcolm McDowell strolling around with a blackthorn stick in one hand and a bowler hat on his head. And without doubt I was expecting a solid kick in the balls. Not to mention a hefty fine.
Wembley. As if the place wasn’t already hopelessly opaque, all of the windows have ‘privacy panels’ made of frosted vinyl, presumably to stop disgruntled England fans with sniper rifles getting a bead on any of the cunts who work there; meanwhile the carpets in the so-called ‘breakout areas’ — I think I know what that is on a football pitch, I’m not so sure what one looks like in a suite of offices — are grey, red and green like some hideous piece of abstract art that’s been entered for the Turner Prize. And why not? A fucking carpet is no worse than any of the crap that wins the prize, year on year. Everything about the interior of the FA at Wembley jars like a bad LSD trip and seems to confirm exactly why England football is in such a parlous state; as you walk from one eyesore office to another, you tell yourself that if they can’t get something as simple as the interior decor right, how can they possibly expect to be any better with the management of English football?
Wembley. The wall in the tiny room where my barrister and I were asked to wait until the actual hearing began had a full-length picture of the England Ladies’ football number 10, Jodie Taylor. A nice-enough-looking girl if you like women in football kit but it was as if someone was trying to remind me that women play football too, and that a tasteless Twitter joke about a man who couldn’t stay on the pitch and finish the game because it was his period was not going to be tolerated. I pointed this out to Miss Shields, my brief.
‘I’m sorry some women were offended by my joke,’ I said. ‘In defence I should say that my social media offence was committed in Barcelona, where people have a sense of humour, and not in England, where apparently they don’t. But at least now I know why having a period is sometimes called the curse.’
‘An offence allegedly committed on social media renders all such national borders meaningless, I’m afraid,’ said Miss Shields, who’d been selected by my solicitors. ‘The fact remains that lots of women in the UK were offended. And that’s the substance of the FA’s charge against you, Mr Manson. You might almost say that it’s an offence of strict liability. You said something. Lots of people were offended by it. Therefore the comment brings the game into disrepute. It’s really that simple.’
‘They said they were offended. That’s not quite the same thing as being offended. Sometimes I think there’s a special Twitter feed that’s there to round up the kind of people who have a pitchfork handy so that they can go straight round to Frankenstein’s castle and burn it to the ground. There ought to be a special equation used to compute the speed with which people in Britain now take offence at almost anything. Like the hedge funders have, to calculate shit about financial futures. The Clarkson Ratio. Or the Rio Ferdinand Formula. Or the Ashley Cole Calculation.’
Miss Shields nodded patiently. ‘It’s best you get it all off your chest while you’re in here with me now, and not in there where you’ll only talk up the fine.’
‘I guess you’re right.’
‘Now then. You’ve been charged under the terms laid down in relation to media comments and social network in FA Rule E 3(1). In that you made a comment which was improper, which brings the game into disrepute, and which is insulting.’
‘I deleted the tweet,’ I said. ‘And closed my account. Doesn’t that count for anything?’
‘Sadly not. I have read the written observations you provided to explain the context of why you said what you said but I now think it’s best we don’t use those. Just in case we aggravate the original offence.’
I nodded. ‘You’re probably right.’
‘So,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Plead guilty. Offer some mitigation. You know the kind of thing. Take the fine.’ I shrugged. ‘They’ve got to raise the money for English football somehow. Sure as hell no one’s going to be interested in a friendly against the Republic of Ireland. The moth-eaten blazers at the FA don’t seem to understand that there’s no such thing as a friendly in football these days. Not at over a hundred quid a pop. There’s nothing friendly about England ticket prices. And no one gives a shit about an under-23s match between England and China. Or a disability eleven versus the Russian Blind.’