Mo Memes Ranked the 7 Levels of Career Descent and I'm Stuck on Level 8: Watching Football Get Ranked by a Child

Right. So Mo Memes wrote a piece ranking the "seven levels" of Christian Fuchs's career descent from Premier League champion to League Two relegation battler, complete with skull emojis and the phrase "this is cinema." Cinema. A 40 year old man playing professional football is cinema. I've had kidney stones more cinematic than that article.

But here's the thing. And I say this with genuine fury in my heart. Mo Memes isn't wrong. Not entirely. The Fuchs story is mad. Absolutely barking. But ranking it into seven levels like it's some sort of video game? That's the problem with modern football culture right there. Everything has to be content. Everything has to be a list. Everything has to be a meme.

You know what Christian Fuchs is? He's a bloke who loves football. Full stop. He's 40 years old. He could be sat on a beach in Austria counting his Premier League money. Instead he's turning up to Rodney Parade on a Tuesday night in the rain to try and keep Newport County in the Football League. That's not a meme. That's a footballer.

I managed lads like that. Proper pros. Lads who'd run through walls for you on a freezing Wednesday in Hartlepool. Lads who didn't care if there were 80,000 watching or 800. They played because they loved it. Now apparently that makes you a punchline.

And don't get me started on this "where are they now" nonsense. Where is he now? He's playing professional football! He's not missing! He's not vanished into thin air! He's literally on a team sheet every Saturday! You can find him! He's at Newport bloody County!

Back in my day, players moved down the leagues and nobody batted an eyelid. It was called a career. Peter Beardsley did it. Kevin Phillips did it. Teddy Sheringham was playing until he was about 97. Nobody made a ranked list about it. Nobody called it "the pipeline." They just got on with it.

The real descent, the real "where are they now" that should worry people, is what's happened to football journalism. We've gone from proper match reports to ranked lists with fire emojis. That's the seven levels of hell right there.

Level one: actual analysis. Level seven: "No caption needed" followed by a skull emoji.

Guess where we are.

And you know what VAR would do in this situation? Nothing useful. Same as always. Some bloke in Stockley Park would look at Fuchs's career on a monitor for four minutes and then decide he was actually offside when he lifted the trophy in 2016. Wouldn't put it past them.

Fair play to Fuchs. Genuinely. The man is out there doing a job. Fighting relegation at 40 is harder than winning the league at 30. Trust me on that. I've seen the inside of enough dressing rooms to know.

Mo Memes says the memes write themselves. Course they do. That's the problem. Nobody's actually writing anything anymore. The memes are doing all the work and the rest of us are just watching football disappear up its own hashtag.

Forty years old. Still lacing his boots. Still fighting. That's not a ranked list. That's a man. Show some respect.