I play for a football club. Not a very good one, in fact we're in the lowest possible rung of the football pyramid, plying our trade in the (formerly) RT Harris & Sons Oxford City Football League. Our average age is about 36. We've won one game this season.

But if we suddenly got our act together (or signed some players born after 1987) we could feasibly get promoted to the Oxfordshire Senior League. And after a few more promotions, we'd could make it to the Hellenic League. THEN the glamour and glitz of the Hellenic Premier.

After that would come a couple of divisions of the Southern League, rubbing shoulders with the might of Didcot Town and Banbury United (I'd likely be in my late forties by this point but assuming our selection criteria remains the same would hope to still do a job on the wing)

Beyond the Southern (or Isthmian or Northern) leagues lies the promised land of the National League North/South, where we'd do battle with the Good People of Dulwich Hamlet and (let's assume) our fierce local rivals Oxford City. And beyond that...

The National League itself, home to a smorgasbord of sleeping giants. By this point we may have to improve our infrastructure a bit, given that our current home pitch is very much a field by the ringroad, from which I have successfully dispatched a penalty into a Tesco carpark.

Promotion from there is of course to the football league itself: 3 divisions, 70-odd clubs, 130+ years of shared history, accumulated grudges, cult heroes and batshit owners. Navigate that nonsense and we'd find ourselves ascending to Mike Dean's VAR Thunderdome aka the EPL

Obviously the Premier League itself has a billion-and-one things wrong with it, as indeed do so many mismanaged rungs of the long& imperfect ladder. But the key thing is that anyone can ultimately get to it and, if you lose enough football matches, anyone can also drop out of it.

That's the key thing: jeopardy. The second you remove that, the second you get to the top of the ladder and then kick it away from those below, you've terminally fucked it. And that's what the Wankers League idea does.

I need to know that the shambolic bunch of starry-eyed dreamers that is *my* club could *theoretically* get about 26 consecutive promotions, get to the Premier League, win it, and take our *rightful* place in the Champions League Final.

Where of course we would hopefully play an Italian former Sunday League side who have had a remarkably similar and perfectly synchronous rise through the divisions. We'd exchange homemade pennants before kick off. It would be lovely.

The idea of football as any kind of sporting meritocracy dissapears the moment you remove relegation, the moment you remove the sporting penalty for Not Actually Winning Enough Games. The idea that Spurs (or anyone) could secure a perennial seat at the top table for ever...

...on a such an arbitrary basis is just so completely at odds with eeeeeverything good about the sport, and I'm losing my mind typing this becase obviously you're a sensible human and you KNOW all this but sometimes you just want to get it out to stop yourself screaming?

On that note, Spurs have sacked Mourinho so the day isn't all bad. x

A wee adendum: obviously there is already mountains of stuff wrong with the status quo, but just because something is already grotesquely inequal and unfair doesn't lessen the scale of the shitshow being proposed :(

S T A Y
A N G R Y

Keep making noise. This can be stopped.

A TINY FOOTNOTE

Tonight we played a game. We chucked away a lead and lost 3-2. But our player Aiden, who has played for us for ELEVEN YEARS, scored his first ever goal for us. And I swear to god it meant more than any goal that could ever be scored in any flipping super league x

Our correspondent captures the mood perfectly https://twitter.com/joelatkin/status/1384982765825925125

We don’t ask for much but our good friend & teammate Aiden @aiden_china scored his first goal after ELEVEN AND A HALF YEARS and what’s more THERE IS FOOTAGE and it’s important the internet knows this so we are aiming for approx 6 million retweets

This is HAPPENING