Football is a glitch. We sit in the dark, bathed in the blue light of our OLEDs, waiting for twenty-two millionaires to justify the £15.99 monthly subscription we forgot to cancel. Everton versus Manchester United. It used to be a clash of cultures. Now, it’s just another data point in a broadcast rights package designed to bleed us dry one "exclusive" match at a time.

I’m staring at a buffering wheel. It’s 2026, and we still haven’t figured out how to stream a live event to three million people without the resolution dropping to a 1990s Minecraft aesthetic. The "Live" badge in the corner of the screen is a polite fiction. My phone buzzed five minutes ago with a goal alert from an app owned by a gambling conglomerate. On my TV, the ball hasn't even crossed the halfway line yet. We’re living in a staggered reality where the future happens on our smartphones and the present is a lagging artifact on the big screen.

The match starts with the usual corporate pageantry. The cameras zoom in on Erik ten Hag’s face, looking for a narrative. He looks like a man who has spent too much time looking at Excel spreadsheets and not enough time talking to human beings. United is less a football team these days and more a legacy tech brand—think IBM or Yahoo—relying on name recognition while the actual product remains fundamentally broken. They’ve spent billions on talent, yet they play with the cohesion of a Windows update that’s stuck at 94 percent.

Everton is the hardware startup that forgot to pivot. They’re gritty, they’re analog, and they’re currently being liquidated by the league’s financial fair play algorithms. The crowd at Goodison Park is loud, but the broadcast filters out the authentic vitriol, replacing it with a sanitized, compressed hum that won’t offend the sponsors. It’s football for people who think "atmosphere" is something you buy in a soundbar.

Then comes the VAR. The Video Assistant Referee. The ultimate tech-bro solution to a problem that didn't need solving. A goal is scored, but we don’t celebrate. We wait. We wait for a room full of guys in Stockley Park to draw lines on a screen like they’re playing a high-stakes game of Etch A Sketch. It’s supposed to be objective. It’s actually just theater. It turns the most visceral moment in sports into a legal deposition. We’ve traded the joy of the moment for the cold, clinical certainty of a pixel-perfect offside call that doesn't actually matter.

Look at the sidelines. The advertising boards are a seizure-inducing blur of crypto exchanges, betting apps, and logistics firms you’ve never heard of. The visual noise is constant. It’s a UI nightmare. You can’t just watch the game; you have to be sold a dream of financial independence through leveraged digital assets while a striker misses an open net from six yards.

The middle of the park is a mess of heavy touches and tactical rigidity. Modern football has become obsessed with "Expected Goals" (xG)—the ultimate tech-columnist metric. It’s a way of telling you that even though the game is boring, it was mathematically significant. United’s xG is high; their actual soul is low. They move the ball with a mechanical indifference, sticking to the "process" even when the process clearly doesn't work. It’s the "fail fast" mentality applied to a 4-3-3 formation, except they aren't learning from the failures. They're just repeating them in higher definition.

Between the halves, we get the analysis. Former players sit in a studio that looks like the bridge of a mid-budget sci-fi movie, pointing at touchscreens they clearly don't know how to use. They talk about "intensity" and "desire," ignoring the fact that the entire spectacle is being governed by data analysts in the basement who decided three weeks ago that this match was a "low-engagement risk."

By the eighty-fifth minute, I’m doomscrolling. The game is still happening, technically, but my attention has been harvested by better algorithms elsewhere. The score is almost irrelevant. Whether United wins or Everton survives, the house always wins. The broadcasters get their eyeballs, the betting sites get their parlays, and we get a slightly higher credit card bill and a headache from the HDR glare.

The final whistle blows. The screen flickers immediately to a promo for a documentary about a different team’s financial collapse. There’s no time to breathe, no time to process the ninety minutes of expensive mediocrity we just witnessed. The feed cuts, the pixels die, and I’m left staring at my own reflection in the black glass.

Is this actually entertainment, or are we just the cooling fans for a giant, overheating money machine?