This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
It’s hardly unusual to see queues in the West End, although invariably they turn out to be for something or someone that is entirely mysterious to anyone aged over about 16. But if you walk past one shop on Regent Street now, you’ll see a permanent queue — and it’s for something which warms the heart.
Fanatics Collectibles has recently opened its first London shop. It’s about as old an idea as exists, selling cards and memorabilia of sporting heroes, from football to baseball to F1 to golf to … you get the picture. But it’s proof that at least some old ideas still have life in them. One of my most treasured possessions is my father’s 1930s album of cricketers’ cigarette cards, which he painstakingly assembled as a young boy.
I still have my own Panini collections somewhere. I started with the 1978 World Cup and still remember the thrill when I came across what my friends and I considered a rare card to add to the album. It’s rather uplifting to think that card trading is still a thing for kids.
Maybe we all turn more miserable as we age ,but one thing has definitely changed for me since my card collecting days. I still have my sporting heroes, even if many of them — such as Niki Lauda — are no longer with us. But whilst the natural cynicism that we all develop (it’s not just me, surely?) means that I have less of a penchant for hero-worship, I seem more prone than ever to the opposite.
We all have our hate figures. When I was young I loathed Don Revie with a passion that, had it come to the attention of the authorities, might have caused some issues. But I don’t think I have properly appreciated how essential this other side of the sporting hero coin is. We spend forever talking about those we admire and those we love, but not enough on those we loathe — those we want to see come a cropper, and humiliatingly so.
I used to joke that the two people I most hated in Britain were Edward Heath and Roy Keane. The former because … do I really have to explain? As for Keane, what really got me wasn’t that he was a thug on the pitch — that’s an under-appreciated skill — but that he was such an incredibly talented footballer who seemed to relish hiding that side of him, as if a thug was all he was. I still can’t quite get over thinking, “Oh, bloody hell, it’s Roy Keane” when I see him doing his punditry thing, but since he’s pretty good at it, I’ve come round to at least not hating him.
It’s rarely spelled out that there is almost as much enjoyment to be gained from hating some sportsmen and women as those we love. I don’t just mean the tribal element that’s so prevalent in football. As a Spurs fan, it’s not that I hate Arsenal; I don’t. They are our rivals and I want them to lose, always.
But rivalry is different from hate — which is how I feel about Chelsea. I once set a Twitter mob on me when I joked that an Arsenal v Chelsea match was like the Iran/Iraq war as you wanted both sides to lose (“Islamophobe!”).
But having just said I don’t hate Arsenal as such, I do hate their manager, Mikel Arteta. There’s that preening self-regard, the non-stop bleating when he loses, the idiotic claims (Arsenal were, apparently, the best team in Europe last season despite not managing to actually win anything) and the permanent sneer. I will smile a very big smile when the “Arteta project” collapses under the weight of its contradictions.
Sometimes you can realise that you were wrong to hate someone. I used to think Bryson DeChambeau represented everything wrong with a particular type of college jock US golfer. Always moaning, whether about his clubs, the wind, red ants (he once blamed a nearby anthill for his double bogey); he walked the course as if slow play were the aim, not the problem; he wore a stupid cap — oh, many were the reasons to hate DeChambeau. It added spice to tournaments hoping he would crash and burn, as he often did.
Except it turns out he is an exceptionally thoughtful man, in both senses, and was basically just doing his growing up in public. He set up his own YouTube channel specifically so he could change his image, and it worked. I now root for him.
There is, though, no changing my mind about the sporting figure most deserving of hatred at the moment: Max Verstappen. Yes, he is a brilliant driver. By far the best at the moment. Yet that’s one reason why he is so hate-worthy. He doesn’t need to be as vile as he is. He doesn’t need to push other drivers off the track or treat them all as if they are dirt. (He had the perfect foil for most of his career in Christian Horner, the equally hate-worthy Red Bull team boss, but he’s now had his comeuppance so let’s not waste our hate on him.)
Surely everyone also hates former Liverpool striker Luis Suárez, banned in September for spitting on a rival coach’s face, having previously served three bans for biting opponents and an eight-match ban for racism. Who doesn’t relish a proper pantomime villain?
