The Last Defender: That club tat time of year

The Last Defender: That club tat time of year

We’re just around the corner from those ever-so-hilarious round-ups of all the most wacky and outrageous football merch. Christmas cards depicting the birth of Baby Jesus Navas! A device to keep your mouth wired open at all times so you look like Gary Taylor-Fletcher! A toilet seat featuring Aitor Karanka’s receptive face! They’re so crazy.

Everyone agrees these trinkets are the naffest of the naff, reaching levels of naff so naff that the word naff is isn’t naff enough to accurately describe how naff they are, but as such they fill the highly lucrative and life-saving “f**k it, that’ll do” Christmas gift niche perfectly. Naff.

The wacky teapot in the shape of Steve Bruce’s head only comes around once a year to get the club logo onto Soccer AM and the like, but club shop tat is available all year round. I once decided to buy a nice polo shirt from every stadium I reported at, but got as far as Huddersfield Town before realising the casual clothes football clubs sell are almost exclusively awful. Who’s going to wear this catastrophe in neon? And this effort brings nothing to mind so much as the image of an idiothole staggering around Ashton-Under-Lyne on a Tuesday night bellowing “the champions!” at passers-by.

In my book – and I can hear Daniel Storey tutting at me from across the city as I write this – anyone over the age of 15 who wears a football shirt for anything other than playing football cannot possibly think themselves any different from the strange men who go around dressed in accurate Starfleet uniform. I’m aware that I sound like a massive snob, which is a bit rich considering that I chose to leave the house on Saturday morning dressed like this:

Fashion pic.twitter.com/iZZ04VzcV9

— Steven Chicken (@StevenChicken) November 26, 2016

But although I get that fans and especially parents feel exploited by the existence and incredible markup on crest-bearing merchandise, it’s worth remembering that clubs would be in a bind of their own even if the landscape were free of sheer money-grubbing greed (which is a big ask, I realise, but bear with me), and it’s this that makes me want to defend their position a little bit.

Imagine a burglar breaks into your home armed with a baseball bat. You grab your own baseball bat from your bedside (taking a moment to smile in satisfaction that you can rub this in your partner’s face…and they called you paranoid all these years!), and catch him on the landing making off with your newly-received Steven Pienaar: Ten Years in English Football commemorative plate.

The best result for both of you (and Steven Pienaar’s fragile porcelain face) is to lower your weapons and allow the burglar to leave with no violence from either side…but neither of you can be sure that the other won’t bash them over the head the moment you do. This means that the most rational course of action is to maintain the threat of violence, even though it is worse for both of you, and given the tension involved there’s a good chance both of you will end up with shards of Sunderland midfielder sticking in your eye socket by the end of the night.

This is known as a Hobbesian trap, and is the situation football clubs find themselves in. Although every club would benefit from greater fan goodwill, none of them wants to risk losing a competitive advantage to a rival by turning their noses up at selling an Eau de Pardew body odour range. Fans might be annoyed at the existence of David Seaman Sings: Pirate Shanties CDs, but they’d be a heck of a lot angrier if the club suffer relegation because they couldn’t afford the extra £200,000 that would have secured that game-changing signing.

This is exactly why organisations like the FSF are so important – it’s only through collective action and immensely difficult co-ordination that supporters can effectively bring prices down for fans of all clubs.

In the meantime, stay strong. Don’t collapse to the pressure. Your Coventry-obsessed nephew can live without An Audience with David Speedie on DVD this Christmas.

Later today you’re going to use the word ‘naff’ without thinking about it and think of Steven Chicken. Tweet him when you do