da cassino： By rights it should be Manchester United. They should have the most annoying fan-base on social media and by some distance too.
da roleta： After all, they’re Manchester United aren’t they: by far and away the biggest club in the country and the dominant force in English football for most of the Premier League era. Those two incontestable truths not only accumulates a huge number of fair-weather supporters along the way but bores deep an ingrained superiority complex too and when that ignorance and that arrogance collide in 280 characters it leads to surreal instances that can only be described as Peak Twitter.
Want an example? Here’s one. How about the time a guy called ‘Devon Red’- who happily admitted that he’s never been to Old Trafford – took the mickey out of a season ticket holding City fan for the ‘Emptyhad’. Peak Twitter.
Throw in some recent lean years – that in real life humbles a person down to size but not so online where defiance and saving face is everything, meaning that a dose of hard times only propagates an unentitled sense of entitlement – and couple that with the long-standing reality that their club is vehemently disliked by a great amount of people and what we have is a perfect virtual storm that should have the rest of us praying for a Trump-triggered Armageddon.
Except that’s not the case. Not really.
Who has the loudest fans in Europe? PSG certainly state their claim in the video below…
Earlier this week I asked Twitter who was the fan-base that irritated, irked and infuriated the most; I asked forums too and spoke with friends and while Manchester United was name-checked often that was all it amounted to: a name-check. This is hardly a surprise given their prominence and if I was to ask you to put forward the best person to politically lead the UK all manner of unsuitable individuals would pop up in your head. Why? Because they’re in the news and in your face.
No, United fans aren’t the most annoying, for all of their self-importance and love of emojis. It is Liverpool and Arsenal who equally grind the gears of a timeline scroll and though granted they too are huge clubs who come easily to mind in these instances there were stories to back up the claim; reasons and explanations as to why they are universally abhorred in the universe of Twitter.
Their hyper-sensitivity and propensity to respond en masse to criticism quickly came to the fore, with worrying tales surfacing of individuals crossing an ethical line when taking offence at a tweet and digging into personal lives. Contacting employers. Unearthing addresses. These are not normal responses when the person in question is ‘guilty’ only of online tribalism.
Elsewhere each club’s proclivity to petition was mentioned more than once – the one demanding punishment for Sergio Ramos that reached half a million signatures still astounds – while generally speaking Liverpool fans’ exceptionalism is nothing short of exceptional. It can exasperate or have you howling with laughter depending on your mood.
As for Gooners, should you be clinically insane and populate your timeline entirely with their opinion it wouldn’t be long before you believed them to be wholly made up of hormonally imbalanced tweens. Their widespread lack of self-awareness also stands out.
It should be admitted at this point that this is hardly a comprehensive and conclusive study. Yet it’s also pertinent to state that several responders to the question – ‘Which fan-base is the most annoying on Twitter and why? – believed that I was trolling Liverpool and Arsenal supporters. Surely that speaks volumes.
Beyond those pair Burnley are surprisingly rated highly, while Portsmouth seem to be especially unpopular for their obsession with crowd sizes and inability to acknowledge their lower standing these days.
Leeds and Newcastle also feature though personally I find them both to be insular and that is absolutely meant as a positive because returning to Liverpool, their biggest charge is the attention they demand.
Win and everybody knows it while being force-fed the errant viewpoint that Player X is the greatest thing since sliced bread as demonstrated by numerous three second gifs of ordinary passages of play. There is a very good reason why so many neutrals are presently dreading the Reds breaking their Premier League duck and that reason is Liverpool Twitter.
Perhaps though that also takes us back to an earlier assertion: that United, Liverpool and Arsenal annoy the most simply because they are larger in number. Surely there is something in this and surely too we must ultimately accept that every fan-base has its share of online agitators and delusional twerps.
Accepting this is easy when it’s considered what Twitter is in actuality. It’s a playground that affords anonymity. And the subject matter is tribal and fierce and passionate. Little wonder then that it drives us so wild.