THE Saturday morning routine was always the same.
“You awake?”
“Aye.”
“Set up Champ.”
Champ was Championship Manager. Strictly the 2001/02 version, no matter what year it was.
There were weekends you got out of bed at half 8 to fire up the PC and you didn’t put socks on your feet ‘til 11.
Not a bite passed your lips until lunch, every morsel swallowed whole because you have Middlesborough away next, your lead at the top is down to three points and Eldar Hadzimehmedovic has just broken his leg.
The game’s successor, Football Manager, turns 20 this year, putting it slap-bang in the middle of its own target market.
There is no let-up in its success.
Last year’s edition sold six million copies worldwide, generating over £300m for the developers.
But as it has evolved, it’s become hugely complicated. To play it now, you’d nearly need your UEFA ‘B’ Licence.
Its original beauty was in its simplicity.
Football management was presented as this fast-paced rollercoaster that anyone could step on to.
Pick the team, play the game, over and over as if Ed Sheeran had set the loop-pedal on your weekends.
Its evolution is a good metaphor for the general change in actual sport.
It’s infinitely more detailed and more technical, but that doesn’t mean it’s any more enjoyable.
As a spectator sport, Premier League football nowadays is borderline unwatchable.
Manchester City have won nine of their first eleven games this season.
Their last 15 games in any season are almost always flawless.
City are the problem, not because of their money.
Everyone in England has money. They’ve spent theirs better, built a better academy, bought the best players, hired the best manager and he brought the most imposing style of play.
It is their style that makes them hateful to watch. It’s brilliant but brutal all at once.
They destroy almost every game they play as a sporting spectacle because of their control over it.
Football doesn’t suffer the same dysmorphia as other sports because they have broadcast partners overpaying for the rights to such a degree that they can’t turn around to the viewers and tell them that Fulham v Crystal Palace is the dog turd their own eyes would tell them it is.
So they glam it up and make Monday Night Football feel as though we’ve all been granted access to some intellectual sports cult.
The gap between individuality and off-the-shelf has had its margins cut.
There’s only so good the greats can be, but the middle-of-the-road lads are finding their extra 10 per cent in the science.
When everyone is brilliant, nobody is. Problem then is the sport itself ceases to find its moments of elevation.
Just this morning, I introduced the wife’s nephews to the joys of the December 2006 Goal of the Month competition, a never-to-be-repeated compilation of crossbar-breaking, stanchion-shaking worldies.
How many of those shots would ever be attempted now? The percentages say bad idea, so the coaches say bad idea, and the players eventually get the message that bad ideas are a bad idea.
We are in this cycle now in Gaelic football.
Dublin famously won the 2018 All-Ireland without having taken a single shot from outside the 45’ in a whole season.
That was a brilliant team right at its peak.
Athletically, tactically, skilfully, nothing has ever come close to them.
But the very essence of the game itself is being strangled by the endless pursuit of such perfection.
It is difficult to separate brilliant footballers from brilliant football.
So we continually grapple with rule changes, poking and prodding at the game like it’s some kind of weird experiment and not a national treasure.
What we must learn from other sports is that Gaelic football will not naturally evolve naturally out of the place it finds itself in now.
100 years ago, the standard tactic in soccer was to play with “two or three backs and eight or nine forwards”, Jonathan Wilson wrote in Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.
Two backs became three became four. Now five is the fashionable number, disguised as a three.
Soccer was a game of such genuine excitement in the '90s but that owed to its last remaining imperfections.
Players absorb the science because it’s great for them.
It would go against the very nature of ambition if sport hadn’t kept on evolving, especially with the sums of money being invested.
Sport, like humanity itself in the face of AI, is threatening to evolve itself to a point beyond relevance.
Adapt or die, goes the saying, but there’s only so much adapting you can do until you cause your own death.
In sporting terms, what’s good for the player isn’t necessarily good for the game.
That is exactly where we stand right now in terms of Gaelic football.
Go back to Fermanagh’s famous 2004 All-Ireland quarter-final win over Armagh.
Tom Brewster drew the Ernemen level at 0-11 apiece after 62 minutes. It was another eleven minutes before he kicked the game’s next score, the winner.
In between times, there was no sense that anyone had any control over proceedings. The two teams kicked the ball up and down the field, searching desperately for a winner. Joe Kernan and Charlie Mulgrew were helpless spectators on the sideline.
It felt like sunny Croke Park was about to be lifted from its concrete bed by the squealing excitement visited upon it for those eleven minutes.
And it was precisely because there was a lack of control.
I’m not sure we can ever get that back.
All the rule changing feels all a bit like Fr Ted tapping at the car with the tiny hammer.
You won't fix it and there's a good chance you'll make it worse.
The history of sport tells us that once a game evolves past that zenith, it never returns.
That’s quite depressing, isn’t it?
Sports science has ruined sport.
