I think about football a lot – little moments I drift off and think about players like Dion Dublin or John Beresford. It’s just a little obsession. What’s Roberto Baggio doing now? Is Perry Groves bald now? Has Gazza’s face got even weirder again? Did Gianluigi Lentini ever fully recover mentally? What did Craig Bellamy do during lockdown? Where the fuck is David Batty?
The strange thing is I have more access now to football than ever and I’ve still prefer the football of days gone by – it seemed much more exclusive when all we had was a bit of Match of the Day, The Big Match, Sportsnight and some Transworld Sports highlights.
I often drift off into the 1990s when things seemd more innocent – I used to run little fantasy leagues in my head with the shoot match tables to bastardise and recreate my imaginary League positions – great fun, in my silly little ginger noggin.
Now the real football is non-stop. It’s hard to keep up with it all – you can spend hundreds of pounds a month keeping up and absorbing it, never really having time to reflect on it and fully take it in before you’re onto the next tournament, same players, all exhausted, and it just keeps rolling forwards and crushing everything in its path.
Gone are the days when we would see players we’d never heard of before at World Cups – these silky skills, these exotic names and stadiums we’d never heard of – those days are gone now. We’ve seen everything. It’s 24/7 now. It’s totally unstoppable.
No wonder some of us want to wallow in the football of the past with our rose-cunted glasses on.
Okay then – a little bit about me. Hi, I’m Mark – I’m a freelance writer and artist, carpenter and a mental health worker. I’m in my early 40s and married, no kids. I’ve got three cats and I live in Leeds.
I always dreamed of being a writer and an artist from a young age. I loved writing stories, drawing cartoons, making up absurd situations. That never really changed.
For the past three years I’ve been working non-stop an incredibly stupid idea for Scraplets – an idea that came to me at the start of lockdown and I ran with purely as a way of making money and surviving the pandemic. It served me pretty well. By the way if you want to help and support me and this page then head over the Scraplets website and buy a box of stupid wood robots. It would really help.
That’s the bio done – mic drop.
Let’s look at some ground rules:
1) This is for me not for you.
2) I’m a terrible artist but I love making art deal with it.
3) I do not take criticism well.
Okay, let’s carry on.
To be honest the name football karaoke for the website is a bit of a misnomer. Nowadays because it’s about so much more than that. It started off with me just making football karaoke videos on Instagram to amuse myself during the pandemic – using old Panini albums to create stupid videos. It was a joy.
I pondered making this website for a long time. I never had the confidence to do so previously. I asked myself, who would want to read my writing? What do I know about football? Would it be worth the effort?
The answer I now realise is that it doesn’t matter – I honestly couldn’t give a fuck if anyone reads this (ever!) This is just for me. It’s a vanity project because I love football. don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I know more about football than most people, I probably know less than the next man on the street. But that’s not going to stop me – football in my blood. I used to spend hours reading old football magazines that my dad got in a box from an auction one day: all the old issues of Goal, World Soccer and Shoot from the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. I’d be happily reading about players I’d rarely had the chance to see play, enjoying the magazines themselves and the stories of exotic sounding clubs and lands. Then I got to spend all my pocket money on the magazines of the 90’s … This is my homage to that.
This site has become a bit of a personal football archive now. It’s not what I intended it to be at all – it was just meant to be about footballers singing karaoke on old Panini stickers. Now it’s about everything that I can remember about football. I also realised that there’s a very good chance one day I’ll go senile and demented – probably soon enough. I’ll forget myself and get everything confused, forgetting all of my football memories. So it would be nice to have somewhere to look at and pop those incredible memories back into my demented brain. That’s pretty much what this site is for.
Again, all I can do is apologise for the Middlesbrough based content – Middlesbrough is my Club, unfortunately, and so a lot of my football memories are Middlesbrough based – but this website is all about me, so I don’t really care.
There will also be lots of stupid FootballKaraoke videos for you to enjoy, or ignore. I find them funny, and that’s all that matters.
Enjoy!
MR