Remembering the Wild West that was ‘Football Twitter’ in the early 2010s

The whole ‘football was better in my day’ argument will rage ad infinitum.

Depending on when you were born, football was better before (delete as applicable) VAR/it was saturated by TV coverage/the Premier League/money started flowing in/tackling was outlawed/Dixie Dean retired.

But surely one thing we can all agree on is that Twitter was better ‘back in the day’ — ie, its early, unvarnished days.

In the early 2010s, there was no such thing as a social media manager, everyone was using their own account, players used it to exchange real-life ‘banter’ without fear of reproach, rival fans could genuinely enjoy reasonable debates and clubs were, well, interesting.

Imagine Arsenal tweeting that Bukayo Saka should really have done better with that last chance and then posting that their own team’s defending was pathetic. Imagine Harry Kane calling Piers Morgan an egg.

Join The Athletic in the heady days of yore (2014). This was ‘Football Twitter’ — no filter.

I mean, how would you like to be introduced to your club’s new head coach? Like this? Official picture, bland announcement?

Or like this?

One of the quirks of the early days of Twitter (we will not be calling it X at any point in this article) is that, while most clubs took it pretty seriously and used social media as an official means of communicating with fans — like a levelled-up matchday programme, or the old phone service ClubCall — it was, of all clubs, Manchester City who were one of the few to have a bit of fun with Twitter.

Some would use it purely to post links to the club’s website. Some did “Follow Friday”, a temporary fad where users would post the handles of other Twitter accounts that people could then choose to follow, as the social media community continued to grow. See? People used to be nice!

Some clubs did not do in-game tweets at all. They would just post the team news and then maybe the full-time result, with a link to a match report a few minutes later. It was more akin to teletext than social media.

This, from Sheffield United, was a fairly typical matchday timeline. Not much info, no fancy graphics, not even any photos (Twitter only launched the ability to post pictures in mid-2011 and they took a while to catch on).

Or this, from Arsenal, for a Champions League tie away to Partizan Belgrade.

City, though, were a bit different. They had their tongue in their cheek, they were very relatable, they were funny, they even took the p**s out of their own players.

These tweets are from a 4-0 victory over Aston Villa 13 years ago this week.

The Joe Hart tweet has been picked up retrospectively, hence the 2,200 likes. But back then, there was barely any engagement from other Twitter users because the platform was still so new. There were simply not many people using Twitter.

For example, this next tweet did not get a single retweet or like, even though it was posted during a match that saw City go top of the whole damned Premier League.

City were just a bit less, shall we say, corporate back then…

It was all just a bit less, well, official…

Imagine this happening now. Criticism of their own players, no matter how factual it may be, would never be allowed from an official account at somewhere like City.

Wolverhampton Wanderers were similarly cavalier, by modern standards. They would post musings about Match of the Day, for example (“Jarvo” in this instance being their winger Matt Jarvis and Fabio being then-England manager Fabio Capello).

Or they might call out Piers Morgan on why he had written an article calling for manager Mick McCarthy to be sacked for fielding a weakened team in a game at Manchester United.

Or just relaxed updates from the training ground. They would also interact regularly with fans by replying to their tweets (a lot), or they might quote-tweet journalists, or publish links to Wolves-related articles that were not just from their own website.

It was a different time – and a strategic approach that worked for Wolves and their fanbase, who loved the personal nature of the account.

There was a lot of informality in those days…

Even this, from Southampton, feels like the tone of tweet you just would not find now, with the club questioning the decision to call a game off.

David Wilding, a former director of planning at Twitter UK, worked with the company for eight years and saw the evolution of the site firsthand. He says when Twitter was new, it felt like a small, private space with relatively few people on it, hence the informality.

“Twitter had some unique features that, in the beginning, meant sending tweets felt quite a lot like sending text messages to a group of mates,” he says. “Twitter then felt like WhatsApp now.

“It was quick, ephemeral, conversational and text-based, and, of course, there was a character limit (of 140).

“The other weird feature was that it wasn’t a very intuitive product to use and this could lead to accidents. I remember (British politician) Ed Balls telling me that he sent his ‘Ed Balls’ tweet in Asda, where he was doing some shopping before Kate and William’s (royal) wedding, and an aide texted him to say to search his name on Twitter and he ended up putting it into the ‘compose Tweet’ section instead.

“But what people didn’t realise at the beginning was that while it felt quite private, it was actually the most public social media platform going. And as the wider media started to take notice and report on what was being said on Twitter, it logically evolved to be much more controlled by comms, PR and media teams.”

It seems pretty remarkable now that Manchester United, the self-styled biggest club in the world, were the final Premier League team to join Twitter.

And yet the launch date of the United account — July 2013 — also reflects how the club changed that summer. Sir Alex Ferguson was notoriously sceptical of social media, saying a couple of years earlier that it was a “waste of time”, that he did not understand it and that “there are a million things you can do in your life without that… get yourself down to the library and read a book”.

Lo and behold, just two months after Ferguson’s retirement as their manager, along came the United Twitter account.

United’s account was polished, clean and corporate. It ‘broke’ team and injury news, it was a one-stop shop for club-related stories and represented a coming age of social media, where everything appearing on official accounts would be sanitised and beyond reproach.

Well, almost everything…

GO DEEPER

The Moyes tweet, 10 years on: Did United improve their ‘passing, creating chances, defending’?

United managing director Richard Arnold said upon the launch that the club would use Twitter as a way of garnering feedback from their supporters, comparing it to a discussion in a pub.

“Some of the views we get will be really helpful and we will be able to learn from them,” he said. “Some will be part of a balanced view we take.”

Still a work in progress, then.

In the years that followed, clubs evolved much further on social media when they worked out how to monetise their accounts.

It was not until later in the decade, with the rise of announcement videos, or Bristol City’s goal celebration GIFs or Roma’s hilarious English language account, that clubs began to be smart, funny and still be on brand.

OK, that’s the clubs dealt with. But they had absolutely nothing on the players. Welcome to the real Wild West of Twitter.

It was a bygone era.

They would deliver breaking news.

Or give completely banal updates.

Sometimes they were intentionally funny.

Sometimes the humour was unintentional.

And sometimes you just weren’t really sure.

Everyone was just more… open. Even the chairmen.

As Wilding says, it was basically used like WhatsApp, this being before WhatsApp had become a thing and at a time when people still sent text/SMS messages, which cost money.

Sorry to pick on Harry Kane, but these (to his now wife, when he was 18) are quite cute.

These were great days. No PR nonsense. This is before players knew they were being funny, or before they were trying too hard. It is the banality and mundaneness that appeals so much.

And along those lines, to be honest, this entire article could have been devoted to the account of Michael Owen…

Or Wayne Rooney…

I mean, you know how with some players you can’t quite tell if the accounts are actually the players themselves tweeting, or if they are being run for them by a media manager?

Yeah, it is not quite as ambiguous with Rooney.

Not much ambiguity with Owen either, whose tweets are almost impossible to read in anyone’s voice but his.

What is great about these Owen and Rooney tweets is that they are still on Twitter for the world to find, undeleted. They are presumably not ashamed of, or embarrassed by, the above missives, however boring or ridiculous, and possibly because they seem to be a fairly accurate reflection of their personalities.

It is when Twitter goes wrong — or when the person in question perhaps, in hindsight, regrets what they posted — that the delete button comes to the fore. Or maybe whole accounts have been deleted. Thankfully, there are always screenshots.

Romelu Lukaku is no longer on Twitter.

And FIFA does not really tweet like this anymore either, to be honest.

Ryan Babel was one of the first players to be punished by the FA for something he had posted on Twitter.

Playing for Liverpool at the time, Babel was annoyed at Howard Webb’s refereeing during a 1-0 FA Cup defeat to Manchester United at Old Trafford (Webb awarded United a penalty in the first minute and later sent off Steven Gerrard). Babel posted a mocked-up picture of Webb in a United shirt and was fined £10,000 ($12,750 by today’s rates) for doing so.

That was in 2011. By October 2014, UK newspaper The Guardian reported that the FA had collected £350,000 for fining players and/or football staff for social media misdemeanours, most of them on Twitter.

Rio Ferdinand paid a decent amount of that, with a £25,000 fine (and a three-game ban) for referring to someone as “sket”, a Caribbean slang term and £45,000 for effectively endorsing a tweet that called Ashley Cole a “choc ice” (a term that implies someone is black on the outside and white on the inside) when the former England left-back gave evidence in support of John Terry at his trial after being accused of racially abusing Ferdinand’s brother Anton during a match.

When the FA later questioned Cole’s evidence, suggesting he was an unreliable witness, he decided to call them a “bunch of tw**s” on Twitter and was fined £90,000.

Earn the wrath of your club via Twitter and the fines would generally be larger, such as when Darren Bent was reportedly fined £120,000 by Tottenham Hotspur for very publicly showing his frustration at a transfer to Sunderland not going through: “Do I wanna go Hull City NO. Do I wanna go Stoke NO do I wanna go Sunderland YES so stop f****** around levy.”

Footballers today are generally far more sensible on social media — they are given social media training by their clubs, they have a code of conduct to adhere to and/or they do not even manage the accounts themselves. The higher up the league pyramid you go, the less likely you are to find a footballer actually using social media. It is people from their ‘team’, as opposed to their club, doing it instead.

Wilding adds: “There were a couple of other factors, too, which really changed how footballers used Twitter.

“The first was the growth of other social platforms, like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, which were primarily image or video-led. This led to more and more images and videos being produced. So, for a lot of players, social media became a multi-media platform where the same images and videos were pushed out across all platforms.

“Some of the things that made interactivity on Twitter unique — particularly the conversation part — became more time-consuming and less attractive.

“And of course, the other factor related to that is the rise in abuse. Social media companies were slow to realise that footballers’ — especially high-profile footballers — experience on their platforms wasn’t typical and were slow to give them the tools to protect themselves. It’s not surprising that many players decided it just wasn’t worth it.

“There are still examples of footballers who use Twitter really well to do something that normal people can’t — Marcus Rashford using his Twitter account to organise food bank donations, or (former Everton and Wales goalkeeper) Neville Southall giving his over to underrepresented voices — but these are increasingly rare and often involve a player putting his or her head above the parapet, which itself brings with it the potential for a lot of hassle or abuse.

“It can still be a really good place for football. But people seem to have concluded that it’s not a good place for footballers.”

Yep, it is all different now.

Which means those “Someone hacked my phone” tweets are increasingly rare, be it Joleon Lescott tweeting a picture of a Mercedes after a 6-0 defeat, or Samir Nasri’s very eventful day in 2016…

Instead, you will get a PR person taking a picture of footballers and their families in matching Christmas pyjamas.

Or, after a defeat, that same PR person will tweet something like, “Unbelievable support yesterday and great effort by the lads! Hard result to take! But we go again!”

Yep, those were the days.

(Top photos: Getty Images)