Hooligans and politicians I can endure, but goal music? No thanks

Over the years, my loyalty to this particular club has known many tests: the club’s reputation through the 1980s as the breeding ground for especially notorious hooligans; their subsequent association with ­variously disappointing Tory politicians; their ownership by someone allegedly on more than nodding terms with Vladimir Putin; and even their decision to appoint Rafael Benítez. Like I said, it’s not relevant which club this is.

And each time, somehow, my loyalty has smoothly, and even nonchalantly, survived.

Goal music, though… this might finally be where I have to say goodbye.

“Small hill to die on,” you might say. I disagree. Owners, politicians, Benítez – these things come and go. Goal music, though, is how you know your club are entirely off the rails.

We really shouldn’t have to go over this again. Football is an unusually low-scoring sport, and goals have a rarity value and are celebrated accordingly: with abandon, naturally, spontaneously, and sometimes in the arms of strangers. Goal music is offensive in its gross superfluity, plus its insulting insinuation that you’re not capable of getting excited enough about a goal on your own.

Of course, this precious moment of release is already under siege. As the commentators now casually say: “VAR will have a look at it, of course”. And thus does the video assistant referee introduce a sliver of hesitation into the celebration of even the most blindingly legitimate goal.

Perhaps, then, you could interpret my club’s new use of a head-emptying blast of yob-rock at that point as an attempt to re-promote forgetfulness. It can’t work though. Expansively ­celebrating a goal just before someone in a cupboard chalks it off on an invisible technicality is bad enough. Doing it to music is just embarrassing.

These are distressing times. Arsenal, I’m told, don’t have goal music yet, but their fans are now encouraged to join the PA announcer in a call-and-response routine in which they parrot the goal-scorer’s name three times. Is that worse? I can’t make up my mind.

It certainly shows the same lack of confidence in the moment’s own ­sufficiency. And it definitely kills all trace of abandon. It’s hard to lose yourself in the moment while someone is shouting at you to lose yourself in the moment.

Perhaps the game is going to go full baseball. Maybe the referee will soon be accompanied on his way to the pitchside screen by someone playing the Jaws theme on an organ. Or maybe by the “Tell me more, tell me more” bit from Summer Nights in Grease. Perhaps we’ll be given something to listen to while we’re waiting interminably for the remote officials to reach a verdict – maybe just some generic hold music.

And if we’re going to have music for our goals, shouldn’t we have some music for goals against us, too? A friend suggests Fuck You by Lily Allen. Or maybe they meant Fuck You by CeeLo Green. Good call either way. Both would work as accompaniment for provocative knee-slides towards the home end by visiting strikers.

Or maybe, in the spirit of a level playing field, their goals could get the same slice of music as our goals and we could all jig along together and do that alternating air-punch thing because… goals, right? Yay!

Let’s not, though. We know from baseball that those organ doodles are a cartoon duck waddling across a screen in musical form. They don’t enhance the spectacle, they mock it. And I’m afraid we can’t have that here. Football has found a hundred ways to tell me, as a paying customer, that I don’t matter. But with goal music, it’s telling me the game doesn’t matter, and I’m drawing the line there.

And yes, history indicates that I’ll eventually reach some kind of gutless compromise on this issue, like I did on all the other ones, and meekly carry on buying my ticket. That’s football fans, sadly. But right now, this feels like a fight worth having. I’m telling my club: either the goal music goes, or I don’t.

Photograph by Peacock/Universal Pictures via AP