It’s impossible not to be Romantic about football 

It’s impossible to not be romantic about football, and by that I mean Romantic with a capital R. Turns out the literary canon of the Romantics and the sporting world share an unexpected similarity: they’re both home to a unanimously agreed-upon Big Six. 

In this day and age being able to discuss both versions with an elementary level of proficiency grants you similar amounts of cultural capital (albeit in very different circles). Think football is the domain of the intellectually challenged? Could you recite the entire Premier League standings but not a single poem? Doesn’t matter – these parallels go either way, and hopefully at least one side of the equation will be recognisable. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Manchester City

Coleridge’s most famous work – ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – works best when read as a summary of City’s journey:

The titular mariner’s ship (Manchester City) gets stuck in the icy waters of the Antarctic (relegated in 2001). An albatross (the United Arab Emirates) appears and leads the ship out of the ice jam (provides an injection of money), into clearer waters and better winds (breaking the British transfer record and spending over £100 million pounds in a summer). Despite things going splendidly as the albatross is fed and loved by the crew (that Aguero goal), the mariner shoots the bird (for cohesion’s sake, read “With my cross-bow / I shot the Albatross” as “With my Abu Dhabi money / I breached the FFP rules” instead). 

To no one’s surprise, this brings down the wrath of spirits and supernatural forces, and the mariner is forced by his crew to wear the albatross’s dead body around his neck as a sign of the burden he must bear. The rest of his crew perish one by one, but the mariner is consigned to eternal life: though the albatross eventually falls from his neck, he’s still doomed to wander the earth, telling his story to those he meets. 

Like the mariner, a shadow the size of 115 charges hangs over City’s unprecedented success – the continental treble and four consecutive Premier League titles. An elephant in the room might as well be an albatross around the neck. One must imagine Pep Guardiola a mariner aboard the golden ship of his club’s crest. 

Percy Shelley – Manchester United 

This is the easiest comparison of all to make. Incredibly divisive among their peers, but indisputably influential in determining the landscape of the era: the man or the football club? Both have famously swung between extremes of ecstasy or despair and experienced prolonged periods of personal crisis: put being expelled from Oxford and eloping with 16-year-old Mary Shelley as a married man up there with paying Ruben Amorim 10 million Great British pounds to leave. 

But the thing that seals the deal is that they both share the same defining narrative: a tale of the ruins of a man who thought himself and his legacy eternal. It’s so fitting you could be forgiven for thinking Shelley predicted the trajectory of Manchester United with ‘Ozymandias’, written a solid 60 years before the club was even founded. I met a traveller from an antique land (apparently Manchester received city-status in March 1853, which places it quite firmly in the realm of antiquity) who told me about a statue with frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command (Ferguson was already rather old when they immortalised him in bronze, and his visage has a real degree of condescension to it.) 

My name is Sir Alex Ferguson, manager of managers. Look upon what my prodigal players have gone on to be, ye mighty, and despair. The Theatre of Dreams isn’t exactly a “colossal wreck” yet, but what with the well-known reports of rat infestations and waterfalls pouring down through the roof, they don’t seem to be too far off. 

Lord Byron – Arsenal

Cosmopolitan, rebellious, countercultural: Byron gained this reputation from scandals that ranged from bisexuality to a rumoured incestuous affair with his half-sister, Arsenal from being the first English top-flight team to field an all-foreign starting XI and becoming synonymous with a space for black cultural expression. 

It’s probably bold to compare a nobleman playboy who drank wine out of his ancestor’s skull to a white-haired bespectacled Frenchman who dressed like a stern professor, but Byron influenced European Romanticism in much the same way Wenger revolutionised the landscape of English football. Their lasting legacy has come to define them to the layman: Byron with the literary archetype of the Byronic hero – brooding, torn, romantic – and Arsenal with their Invincibles. 

Byron was a connoisseur of leaving and the difficulty and complexity of goodbyes recur again and again in his poetry; of Don Juan, leaving Spain, he wrote: “First partings form a lesson hard to learn […] there is a shock that sets one’s heart ajar”. What he would’ve written about Wenger’s departure. 

John Keats – Tottenham Hotspur

A questionable inclusion in the Big Six for some: during his lifetime Keats wouldn’t have been placed in the company of the others mentioned above. He had a relationship of mutual distaste with Byron in particular, who thought Keats an annoyance beneath his social and literary standing; in turn, Keats simultaneously envied and disliked Byron’s fame and aristocracy, and thought his literary prowess overrated (convinced yet?) Both have had a few distinctly memorable hits: Kane, Son, Ode on a Grecian Urn. 

Most fittingly, Keats coined the concept of “negative capability” – the ability to “be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any reaching after fact and reason”. Such a phrase has never captured Spurs better. While Keats originally envisioned it as a poet’s ability to sink into the objects or characters he was writing about without fitting them into rigid structures of logic, the absolute incomprehensibility of being Spursy is perhaps the prime example of modern negative capability. 

To be Spurs is to be negatively capable, to be negatively capable Spurs – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 

William Wordsworth – Chelsea

A clarity to the earlier years that has become compromised in later life. Wordsworth had a “Great Decade” of life in which he produced some era-defining works, chief among them the poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ (probably the bane of most GCSE students’ existence) and The Prelude, his great autobiographical work. There was something undeniably beautiful about Chelsea’s older days – their own Great Decade, if you will: Lampard, Terry, Mourinho’s 04-05 side whose record of 15 goals conceded in a season still stands unmatched. 

Every rise also has to have a fall. Later in his life Wordsworth’s decline is mostly attributed to his excessive self-editing; he transformed his lines, once famed for their simplicity, into something more affected, losing the core of his work. Todd Boehly’s Chelsea have spent ludicrous sums of money on squad-building to no avail and fired ten managers in the last ten years (interims generously excluded). Hopefully they can find a force to follow that might provide the same stability Christianity brought Wordsworth in his middle age. 

William Blake – Liverpool

Best known for ‘Tyger, Tyger’, Blake’s work carries a distinct feeling of mystical intensity, of seeing remarkable things in very ordinary places. A creative visionary who crafted a mythology of his own in his prophetic books, you can’t help but think he would have loved Anfield, the domain of a fervent working-class that has become imbued with a fervent mysticism all its own. (Blake should have spoken to Bill Shankly, who once reflected: “It’s a religion to them. The thousands who come here come to worship… it’s a sort of shrine.”) 

That aside, the experience of truly understanding Blake and of being a player under Jurgen Klopp’s gegenpressing system are about as similar as it gets: notoriously difficult to grapple with and incredibly tiring.