It’s a widely adopted strategy on The Athletic’s podcasts to ensure every listener can choose to despise at least one of the voices selected to condescend at them. Because, of course, as much as anyone might hope to be patronised by a supercilious public schoolboy masquerading his ill-considered opinion as accepted wisdom, we plebes will greedily guzzle whatever gavage we’re proffered so long as the emetic dilutes the ficus.
What’s somewhat different with the Tifo Football podcast is that all its primary contributors are simultaneously capable and contemptible. As if they’ve been specifically charged with demonstrating a craven disregard of their own sense of self for the opportunity to regurgitate whatever tired narrative is assumed most expedient.
And so we’re shown a near flawless diorama: a collective of entirely competent individuals always less than the sum of its parts. Not through any lack of diligence, but because each occasional concession to ego only serves to highlight the artifice of their coalition.
Yet because it doesn’t work very well—and more specifically, because we all think it kinda should*—steadily it has also drifted into something else as well… A Beckettian expression of self-subjugation in the futile pursuit of a goal not one of them ever took aim at…
Sometimes there’s beauty in sadness; sometimes there’s sadness in beauty.
The Tifo Football Podcast. Tragicomic, if obnoxious…
*maybe try moving one of them out left and draft in Owen Hargreaves..?
