Pre-season: Cold Turkey or Dead Cat?

My earliest memories of the offseason - late 80s, early 90s - are of football simply

stopping. Not slowing down, not shifting tone, but stopping. The back pages filled with Test

matches, Wimbledon, the British Grand Prix. Maybe the odd rumour tucked beneath a story

about Nigel Mansell or Boris Becker, but the offseason was exactly that: off. Football

disappeared. It left you alone. And because newspapers and teletext were all we had,

because Shoot!, Match and 90 Minutes were the only weekly reminders that football still

existed, we learned to cope without it. We learned to live in the gap even if I craved for it to

return!

Of course, the machinery was still turning in the background - agents hawking players,

managers whispering to journalists, tabloids enjoying their titillation - but it never felt like

noise. It never felt constant. It never felt like something you had to keep up with. Which is

why the shocks landed so hard. Lineker arriving in 1989: not totally out of the blue but still a

thrill equivalent to a late minute winner. Waddle sold to Marseille a week later: a genuine

gut punch, the kind of news that travelled by word of mouth. And then the big one -

Klinsmann in 1994, discovered on Teletext, page 302, yellow letters on blue. The most

significant transfer of the decade appearing without ceremony, without hype, without the

endless speculation that now surrounds everything.

But these were outliers. Lightning strikes in summers defined by stillness. Most off-seasons

drifted by quietly, football happening somewhere out of sight, somewhere behind closed

doors. And maybe that’s why preseason used to matter so much. It wasn’t competing with

anything. It wasn’t drowned out. It wasn’t part of a content cycle. It was the first flicker of

football returning after months of silence.

During the 90s you’d get a few lines in the newspaper about a friendly result. Very little

opinion or analysis – just a few lines about Teddy Sheringham scoring twice in a 4-2 win at

Peterborough.

By the early 2000s, when Spurs routinely played a home friendly at White Hart Lane the

week before the season, I realised I needed that game. Not for jeopardy - friendlies never

had any - but for rhythm. For calibration. For the act of walking down the High Road again,

seeing the new kit for the first time, casting an eye over a new signing, reacquainting myself

with the sounds and smells of the Lane. It was stretching before a run, tuning an instrument

before playing. A ritual that made the season feel imminent.

And then came the summers that dragged - especially the non-tournament ones. I think of

2008, that first Saturday in July when TalkSport, in its absolute heyday, dedicated an entire

afternoon to preseason friendlies. Goal updates from random grounds, reports from places

you’d never think about again. It was ridiculous, but it got me through the summer. It

mattered because football had been gone, because silence had existed, because preseason

was the bridge back to the real thing.

But football doesn’t disappear anymore. It’s all-consuming, and the horrible truth is that it’s

led by consortia motivated almost entirely by money. Not just FIFA - though they sit

proudly at the top - but the whole ecosystem. Football is business, and business doesn’t do

silence. Why unplug a free-flowing source of income on 30 May and wait until midAugust?

Football can be monetised twelve months a year, so football is monetised twelve months a

year. Preseason tours become branding exercises. Training clips become marketing assets.

Friendlies become content. Even the absence of news becomes content.

And I’m pretty sure that if you asked all twenty Premier League coaches to design their

perfect summer, they’d choose something simple: three to five weeks off, six or seven

weeks of controlled training, maybe a short-haul trip to Scandinavia or La Manga. No 24 hour

flights. No sponsor events. No televised friendlies followed by forensic analysis. Just

preparation. Just football. Preseason, in its purest form, is a coaching tool - not a spectacle.

But there’s a dilemma, because our overseas fans are brilliant. Their commitment is

extraordinary - once-in-a-lifetime trips to London, 2am kick-offs, huge financial and emotional investment. They deserve the chance to see the team, to welcome the players, to feel that connection. And preseason is the only feasible time to do it. Clubs have obligations that stretch far beyond the training ground, and it isn’t simple or binary.

Still, this summer I’ve felt the fatigue. I’ve followed games when I could, listened to podcasts

dissecting tactical tweaks, debating the significance of Manor Solomon starting three

matches or Maddison being left out of one. I’ve found it tiresome - not because the

analysis is bad, but because it feels like a performance we’ve been conditioned to

participate in. And the absurdity of it all was summed up perfectly by that training ground

game against MK Dons - a match so tinpot that their players didn’t have numbers on their

shirts and their goalkeeper wore broadly the same colour - yet demand to watch it was so

high that SpursPlay crashed repeatedly. A glorified fitness exercise became a must see event

because modern football insists that everything must be consumed.

So I’ve stepped back. Cut down Sky Sports News. Removed TalkSport from the car presets.

Reduced my podcast diet from six to two or three. And next summer - a non-tournament

year - I’ve vowed to go cold turkey from 1 June until a week before the season begins. It’s

an Ashes summer, which might help, but mostly it’s a desire to reclaim silence.

Because the truth is simple: preseason isn’t for us - and in all honesty, it shouldn’t be. It

should be for coaches. For fitness. For rhythm. For preparation. Not for fans. Not for content

producers. Not for the machine.

Preseason is Schrödinger’s Cat. The team exists in a sealed box - preparing, training,

building fitness - and nothing we watch, analyse or speculate about changes what’s inside.

When we open the box on the first day of the season, the cat will be alive or dead regardless

of how obsessively we followed July.

Sometimes less is more. Sometimes silence is healthier. Sometimes the best way to love

football is to leave the box closed until August - and let the real thing return on its own

terms.

(Editor's note: if, like me, you're not an expert in quantum physics and didn't have a clue what Gareth was talking about when it came to the cat, see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkVpMAbNOAo)

Gareth Dace is the author of "Hot Shot Tottenham" and "Is Gascoigne Going To Have a Crack?"