The football side of social media can be pretty grim, with a mixture of rival fans and bots peddling some absolutely dreadful takes and ‘banter’ at times.
One of the most pointless, petty and childish bits of ‘banter’ (I use that term very lightly) is this whole rhetoric around policing attendances.
Pages and accounts exist on Facebook and X with seemingly the main role of taking pictures of stadiums with empty seats and posting utter shite in the hope of getting some clicks and reactions – which they
inevitably do, because that’s just what some corners of social media are like now.
We’ve been on the wrong end of plenty of this over the years, with supporters of that last-16 Carabao Cup side up the road pissing themselves with excitement for a Sunderland cup game, just so they can leap onto social media and type those infamous words: ‘EMPTY SEATS’.
Our 3-2 win over Brentford in midweek saw an attendance of around 24,000 at the SoL. The ground being half full for a last-16 cup game isn’t bad at all, especially considering we’ve just had three long trips, including two in Europe, and have only our second-ever home European game coming up.
The result also saw some of these ‘footie banter’ pages resort to straight-up lying to satisfy their craving for clicks and engagement. A graphic was shared showing the attendance at the SoL as being around 7,000 – more than three times lower than the actual figure.
Whether this is done by AI or some old-fashioned manual photoshopping, it’s so sad that whoever has done this feels the need to do so. But, without getting too deep into it, it’s a mark of an epidemic of terminally online football fans who have likely never been to, or rarely go to, football matches in the flesh.
The worrying thing is that if you saw photos of the SoL crowd on Wednesday night and actually believed there were only 7,000 in the ground, then you need to give your head a shake.
This need to jump online and document anything in football, putting out the most ridiculous viewpoints in a clear attempt to ‘engagement bait’, has been creeping into the sport for many years, but now it feels as though we’ve passed the point of no return.
There are too many faceless pages who love being able to chuck out any old shite, and because they have enough faceless accounts hanging on their every word now, they will only keep on doing it.
I’ve removed the X app from my phone, primarily because I couldn’t stomach the overwhelming wave of negativity about Sunderland, but also because – no matter how much you do to block these ‘footie banter’ pages, they find a way of slithering back onto your feed, with a crap click-farming angle worse than the last time you saw one.
Social media does, of course, have its perks, but one of the worst things it’s done is create an echo chamber of ‘footie banter’ which is cringey, bordering on the moronic. Sadly, it isn’t going to go anywhere soon; it’s just going to get worse, and my God, it’s going to be tedious…
