Mo Memes Ranked Farewell Announcements and Somehow Made Me Miss the Days When Players Just Got on the Bus

Right. Mo Memes wrote that Kieran Trippier "speedran every retirement cliché in one interview" and then ranked the ten most iconic types of footballer farewell announcements. And I read every word of it. Twice. Not because I enjoyed it. Because I was trying to work out when exactly football lost the plot.

Trippier says leaving Newcastle will be "emotional." Emotional! Mate, you're moving clubs, not burying a family pet. When I managed, if a player wanted to leave, he knocked on my office door, I said "fine, don't let it hit you on the way out," and that was the farewell announcement. Took nine seconds. No one cried. No one posted a black and white photo of themselves staring out a window.

But Mo's right about one thing. The footballer farewell IS its own art form now. And that's precisely the problem. These lads have got social media teams, videographers, and probably a creative director called Jasper who studied film at Bristol. A player can't leave Burnley without it looking like the final scene of Gladiator.

Remember when Sol Campbell left Spurs? Just walked out the door and turned up at Arsenal. No essay. No "journey." No drone footage of him walking through an empty stadium at sunset. He just did it. Chaos? Absolutely. But at least it was honest.

Now you get a 47 paragraph Instagram essay at 2am. WHO is writing these at 2am? What are you doing up at that hour? In my day, 2am was for worrying about set pieces and whether your centre half had been spotted in a kebab shop. Not for composing War and Peace with a crying emoji at the end.

And the video announcements. Good grief. Player sits in an empty changing room. Camera slowly zooms in. Piano music. Cut to training ground footage from 2019. Cut to a goal. Cut to the player hugging a child in the crowd. Cut to the player looking at the pitch one last time. Roll credits. BAFTA nomination pending. You're leaving Crystal Palace, son. Not liberating France.

The worst bit? VAR has made all of this worse. Oh yes. Don't look at me like that. When every goal gets checked for nineteen minutes, every moment becomes "content." Every celebration becomes a potential highlight reel for the farewell package three years later. The whole sport is just generating footage for future goodbye videos now. That's what we have become.

I managed for decades. Players came and went. Good ones. Bad ones. One who I genuinely think was three kids in a trench coat. Not one of them needed a ranking list for how they said cheerio. You shook hands. You moved on. Maybe you got a mention in the matchday programme. Maybe.

Trippier's had a good career. Done well at Newcastle. Served England brilliantly. He deserves respect. But he does not need a cinematic universe. He does not need a farewell tour. He needs to pack his boots, say thanks to the kitman, and get on with it.

Football farewells should be like football itself used to be. Quick. Honest. Slightly muddy. No piano music required.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to write my own 47 paragraph essay about why everything was better before social media. At 2am, obviously. That's apparently when we do these things now.