The Athletic's Football Clichés: an appreciation

Thoughts on my favourite podcast at a moment of transition

Although I consider myself a sort of intellectual – my recent-ish output includes articles about the Oxford Classics faculty and Yale deconstruction – I have to acknowledge that the only regular staple of my cultural diet is a podcast put out by the sports website the Athletic entitled Football Clichés. I am rarely to be found, say, reading a sonnet, but twice a week, usually on a Tuesday and Thursday morning while jogging or cooking or driving, I listen to the presenter Adam Hurrey, the author of the 2014 book from which the podcast grew, and two guests dissect audio clips of hapless football commentary and adjudicate on matters of usage – did Leicester “sleepwalk” towards relegation? – along with instances of football-adjacent language being used in discussion of subjects such as horse-training and appointing Cressida Dick’s successor at the Metropolitan Police.

There have been 262 episodes, but for a show that’s clearly about a single – one might say, insignificant – thing, it displays a great deal of variety and invention. It would be only a mild exaggeration to say that it always feels fresh. Now and again a special guest will come on to identify their three ‘loves’ and ‘hates’ of football, a strand called “Mesut Haaland Dicks,” a play – Hurrey was recently keen to clarify – on Desert Island Discs. (Sir Jonathan Van-Tam made an especially memorable appearance.) The tendency of TV game-show contestants to say “for my sins” after identifying their football team yielded a feature called “For My Sins Corner” in which Hurrey requires his panellists to guess when the phrase is about to be uttered. As often as possible – basically every other episode – Hurrey will also offer a “Keys and Gray Corner,” devoted to Richard Keys and Andy Gray, the duo who resigned from Sky in 2011 over sexist remarks, and now of the Qatari BeIn sports, where they talk with awe-inspiring certitude, unabashed conservatism, and near-total disregard for the guest pundits on topics ranging from what Harry Kane’s wife would make of living in Manchester to the best historic “kits.”

It seems clear that Hurrey, who was born in 1983, and the two most regular panellists, Charlie Eccleshare and David Walker, both slightly younger, have been influenced by modern British comedy – The Office, Peep Show, Alan Partridge, maybe Stewart Lee, possibly ironic quiz shows. The podcast proceeds from an implicit normative sense of what constitutes the haughty, humourless, or otherwise unself-aware. (Hurrey was the first person to identify the “Lampardian transition” – Frank Lampard’s habit of going from po-faced to manic levity and back to po-faced in the matter of seconds.) The genre might be characterised as meta-banter. There are certainly times when I have thought that the analysis is so shrewd because of a profound kinship with what is being discussed. Eccleshare occasionally has cause to reflect on his own verbal crutches, as the Athletic’s Tottenham Hotspur reporter, and one cannot help noticing that clips of commentators or Keys and Gray chuckling along to their own chatter resembles what one hears at times on the Football Clichés podcast. There was a fantastic moment earlier this year when Eccleshare wondered whether Erik Ten Hag, the Manchester United manager whom Keys had nicknamed “Erik Ten Months,” had yet exceeded this deadline, only to discover that he would do so on the day the podcast was broadcast. The sense of delight on the Zoom call – or equivalent technology – was palpable.

Though it could hardly be more English or millennial, I often find myself comparing Football Clichés to the greatest of all sitcoms, Seinfeld. (It’s actually had far more episodes.) Hurrey fills the roles of both Jerry, centrepiece and straight man, the one steering things and steadying them, and also Kramer, due to his tendency to get into goofy scrapes, such as his mispronunciation of words (“segue” was one) and his insistence that the phrase “cometh the hour, cometh the man” refers to the 60-minute mark of a match. Eccleshare is Elaine, the savviest and sassiest, the closest to winking at the audience, the best-educated and cleverest – he cites the names of rhetorical devices and exhibits preposterous powers of recall – and seemingly most au fait with metropolitan opinion. (I should say that Eccleshare and I know each other vaguely from school and that he endures my occasional bulletins about the podcast with good humour.) And David Walker is a kind of George figure, the amiable side of George, shorn of ruthlessness, the one who seems to get into the most personal scrapes (albeit he gets invited on far more stag weekends than George ever would), the one who went to a hockey match when there was no football on, the one who recurrently tells stories against himself, an endearing underdog type. (I was strangely disappointed to learn that Walker is very tall.) Just as it’s impossible to choose a favourite Seinfeld character, so Hurrey, Eccleshare, and Walker are equally indispensable to the format. The analogy breaks down fairly quickly in that the podcast is dependent on the trio being brilliantly astute, quick-witted, and, in their different ways, eloquent virtually all the time, which is, of course, not how Seinfeld works. (Perhaps I should try to assign each of them a member of the early-twentieth-century Oxford classics faculty and the Yale school of deconstruction. Hurrey, the trailblazing visionary hereabouts, would be the Murray and the Derrida. That’s as far as I can get.)

Sadly the occasion for this post – though I had been vaguely intending to express my general sense of gratitude at the hundreds of hours of joy the podcast has brought me – was the shock announcement on yesterday’s episode that Walker was leaving his role as senior audio producer at the Athletic and would therefore no longer be appearing on Football Clichés – which, in other unwelcome news, is taking a summer hiatus. (Hurrey unnervingly said they’d be back “somehow, somewhere.”) Thinking back on Walker’s 129 ‘caps’ – “a living legend of the Clichés pod,” Hurrey called him – I recall in particular a passage of analysis of Graeme Souness’s comments in February 2022 on the scandal involving Kurt Zouma’s mistreatment of his cat.

Souness: “West Ham’s roots are in the East End of London, the salt of the earth people, the vast majority would not be accepting what they saw on a TikTok or whatever it was… I’ve got major problems with this. Have we got time to talk about it?”

Dave Jones (presenter): “Just quickly yeah.”

Souness: “For me looking at that video, that cat hadn’t done anything wrong… It was abused for entertainment. Then they decide to put it on… is it ‘TikTok’ again? Not a big social media person.”

Micah Richards: “Social media, yeah.”

Hurrey makes it clear that he agrees with Souness’s “sentiment” – “at no point during this brief discussion do any of us want to utter the words, ‘now we all know that cruelty to animals is not acceptable’” – and asks Walker for reflections.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it, really? … It’s almost like he’s talking about something completely different. He could be talking about anything happening here. ‘As far as I can see that cat hadn’t done anything wrong’ – what would the threshold have been? What would the cat have had to have done? ‘The salt of the earth people… the West Ham fans.’ Implying that… I’m trying to think: which is the club that has the least salty-of-the-earth people? Fulham? Are they okay with it?”

These quotations, like this entire post, carry a strong element of ‘you had to be there,’ but thanks to Spotify (“or wherever you get your podcasts”) you can be, twice a week, not to mention an enormous back-catalogue. I always loved Walker’s contributions to the Football Clichés podcast, and though his fizzing intelligence and wry worldview provided a reliable source of joy, what I shall miss most of all is his chuckle.