This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/soccer by /u/Sparky-moon on 2026-01-20 10:04:06+00:00.
Line between former players and raging bloke in replica kit continues to blur as punditry plumbs new depths in search of content
Sky Sports Premier League has been trying out a new gimmick called In The Box. Superfans of the teams in TV action are locked in a room for the duration of the match and are only told the score at full time by Dave Jones. The fans of the losing side are then savagely but clinically mowed down in a hail of automatic gunfire, like in Squid Game. No, wait. Sorry, must have drifted off there. That’s right: the fans of the losing side and the winning side alike react with All Of Their Feelings because they are passionate fans of football and we all love to see their passion for football. Needless to say, it all feels weird and sad and performative, like they are am-dram actors playing the part of “triumphant Man United fan” or “disappointed City supporter”.
How long before they start doing this with your Roy Keanes, Nicholas Butts and Paul Scholeses?
The line between furious middle-aged 606 phone-in bloke in full replica kit who has made supporting his “big six” football team his entire personality and the ex-players wheeled out to talk about their beleaguered former clubs is being blurred with every passing weekend. And United are absolutely the worst of it. Scholes and Butt caused a stir recently when they mocked centre-half Lisandro Martínez on the podcast they make with the comedian Paddy McGuinness. The podcast is called The Good, The Bad and The Football and it’s every bit as smart and sophisticated as that title suggests. McGuinness is the brains of the outfit, if you can imagine such a thing, and there’s something especially unedifying about Scholes, who had zero interest in the media when he was playing, now reinventing himself as a windbag for hire to mock the current team.
Anyway, the Brothers Dim sneered at Martínez, who they said would be over-matched “like a little toddler” (Butt) by Erling Haaland on Saturday, and that Haaland would “score and then throw him in the net” (Scholes), all of which turned out to be nonsense as Martínez played the City forward brilliantly by all accounts. Martínez took the high road in response, saying that former United players “talk on television” but “when you see them here face to face, no one says anything”. Who knows, but it certainly has the ring of truth. The Argentine further invited Scholes round to his house to straighten things out. Maybe Martínez could show the perennial international disappointment his World Cup winner’s medal?
Gary Neville and Keane also have previous here, of course, and Keane lowered the tone again recently on the Stick to Football podcast when he said that Michael Carrick’s “wife can always come in [if Carrick doesn’t do well], because she’s got a bit of a big mouth sometimes. She’s probably doing the team talk”. A low blow. Keeping up with every bitter grudge held by the former United captain would be a full-time job in itself, but Keanologists apparently date this back to an incident just 12 short years ago when the aforementioned Mrs Carrick took up the cudgels with Roy on social media because he slagged off her husband on ITV for a “flat interview”. Keane recently said of Sir Alex Ferguson that he’s hanging around Old Trafford “like a bad smell” and making things harder for his successors. A fair point in and of itself. But, boy: does that remind you of anyone?