YOU'RE OBSESSED
Simon Hattenstone in the Guardian:
Ah, the wonders of modern technology. Thanks to the internet the Guardian can monitor what you lot are actually reading these days - and, more alarmingly for hacks, what you can't be fagged with. It leads to a state of perma-paranoia for some of us and tempts a few of the more cynical perma-paranoid to cheat.
Look at the most popular stories at guardian.co.uk. Every day the five most popular stories on the website are listed. On a typical day the Guardian runs between 250 and 280 pieces in the paper - perhaps one is about United. Of 45 top-five stories over nine days, seven were about United. Only three other sports stories made the cut. So, assuming we run one story a day on United, roughly 0.4% of the paper is dedicated to them but 15% of our most popular stories are about the Reds.
Subjective analysis by United fans would doubtless lead to the conclusion that they are the most popular club in the world with an estimated 50m fans. More objective analysis reaches very different conclusions: (1) As most United fans live abroad and are unable to get the paper, they resort to the website; (2) these stories presage bad news for the club - Ferguson Bonkers, Keane Even More Bonkers etc - so they are read by the world's estimated 6,419,952,354 non-United fans with glee.
The other day I was having a drink with my good friend the Glaswegian miserablist Dave, who was in a strangely happy mood. Hearts were top of the league and it had lifted his spirits for some reason - he's a Rangers fan and my theory is that a good reason to be miserable cheers him up.
I told Dave about my discovery and he came up with a brilliant idea - cheat the system by putting a United headline on a piece about City. Then we could work out if people will read anything about United. If it didn't work (ie this column wasn't in the top five website reads) I'd be able to tell that I was an extremely unpopular columnist who should be sacked on the spot. That idea cheered him up even more.
I told Dave about my discovery and he came up with a brilliant idea - cheat the system by putting a United headline on a piece about City. Then we could work out if people will read anything about United. If it didn't work (ie this column wasn't in the top five website reads) I'd be able to tell that I was an extremely unpopular columnist who should be sacked on the spot. That idea cheered him up even more.
Dave and I cannot take all the credit for this scheme. Products have often been marketed disingenuously by irrelevant United references. Take the film Bend it Like Beckham - sod all to do with the then United star but who cares if it makes the movie a hit?
Perhaps the leading exponent of the spurious United association is Colin Shindler. He wrote a book about being a City fan called Manchester United Ruined My Life a few years ago. I can't speak for all City fans, but my City mates weren't impressed, largely because of its title - it wasn't United who ruined our lives, it was City, and Shindler should have said so even if it meant a fall in book sales.
He's been at it again recently, with his book about the 1964 FA Youth Cup semi-final between City and United called George Best and 21 Others. It just so happened that the legendary City hard man Mike Doyle (famous for hating United more than is humanly possible) was in that team. Doyle played 558 games for City, captained them through the glory years when they won the League Cup, was capped by England, and formed probably our greatest ever centre-back partnership with Dave Watson. So why couldn't Shindler call the book Mike Doyle and 21 Others. Or, if he was really worried about making ends meet, George Best, Mike Doyle and 20 Others? Because it wouldn't sell as well.
Anyway if this cheap trick is good enough for him, it's good enough for me and miserablist Dave. We considered suitable headlines for this column. "Ferguson takes own life after disastrous United run" was a sure-fire winner but we ruled it out as a cheat too far and in poor taste. We decided on "Nothing to do with United and Sir Alex", reasoning that we had managed to get Fergie and United into the headline while still being true to the idea that the piece had nothing to do with them. Unfortunately, by this point the column was all about United so we left it to the subeditors.
If this experiment is successful and more people read the column because of the United headline, we are going to extend the principle to areas of the paper that have a tough time getting themselves read. For example, last week's headline "Emap warns of slide in classified sales as NHS ads go online" will in future read "Ferguson and United struggle while Emap warns of slide in classified sales as NHS ads go online".