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12 hours ago
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There’s a good advert right now on the rolling TV sports news channels. It starts with a rush of beeps and plinks and flashing symbols, generating instantly the flat, glazed, hungry quality of the online casino. A well-groomed middle-aged woman is shown sitting in an armchair in a suburban living room. It’s a jarring tonal shift, but we’re still in that same space, betting graphics dancing around her head.
The middle-aged woman turns to the camera and says: “The games are all different … It never gets boring,” eyes gleaming strangely, hands gripping the struts of her chair. Here is a person who is not just pleased, but uncontrollably energised by the prospect of WowBet.com’s 10bn mildly divergent AI-generated gambling patterns. At this point the words “Sandra Frottwangle, funeral director” appear on the screen.
By now it’s just an overload of feelings. The first thought is about transgression. Sandra Frottwangle’s job is to curate death. She spends her days managing the nobility of human flesh. She stands at the far edge of existence creating ritual and comfort, a timeless figure, the eternal footman, the director of last things. But she also gets bored easily and prefers stuff with flashing lights.
Is this OK? Would you want Sandra Frottwangle to direct your funeral? Death is repetitive. Mortality is tedious. What if she decides this is all really dull and needs more beeping noises, less weeping and organ music? The ferryman is at the door. He’s unsheathing his scythe. He’s also got 400 free online spins at GambleDick.com.
The second thought is a rush of tenderness. Yes, Sandra Frottwangle’s life is spent in that liminal space. She stares into the void. She sees the weakness of the flesh, fish-grey monkey-brown. But even here she is still hungry for life, still craving that wild human energy. Eyes gleaming like opals, casino chips circling her head, she looks like one of those renaissance friezes expressing the glory and brevity of human life, the globe, the skull, the bowl of rotting fruit.
Only now we’re strapped into a velour armchair, drooling down our necks, being force-fed endless brain-shredding content and just wanting to feel something. I … love her. I love Sandra Frottwangle (funeral director). And she’s right. All the games are the same. But we still want the games.
Either all of that stuff, or the people who make daytime TV adverts are bored twentysomething creatives who just thought it would be funny to put the words “funeral director” over shots of an actor pretending to be really into gambling websites. Probably it’s one or the other.
And yes, this is supposed to be about the Scottish Premiership title race, which enters its spring ignition phase this weekend, and which is now arguably the most interesting title race in Europe.
Either way Sunday’s Old Firm derby at Ibrox is a genuinely rare thing. For once this is not a title decider. It could be a title eliminator. It could be a step towards neither of Celtic or Rangers winning the league for the first time in 41 years. A draw in Glasgow could leave Hearts six points clear at the top. But by now it is a startling transformation whatever the outcome.
Hearts finished 40 points behind Celtic last year. The great clanking hand of Tony Bloom and his big data hive-brain robots has been on site for only eight months. The word “disruption” is usually shorthand for tech bro types in $4,000 Japanese trainers working out new ways to fire people. This is actual, good disruption. A three-way title race isn’t just deeply un-Scotland, it’s deeply un-anywhere these days.
In the major European leagues only Greece, Denmark and Poland have something this close. The trend is towards stratification, dead air after Christmas, a single basking giant or a two-way chase energetically spun by the broadcasters. Money has made this happen. The Premier League in particular has harvested talent, turning previously robust leagues into clearing houses, exit lounges to the life-altering four-year deal.
This is perhaps partly the case in Scotland. But there is also a sense of useful incompetence in play, accidental competitiveness. The Glasgow clubs have spent decades trying to sustain a place in the roided-up Euro elite, taking it in turns to fall over their feet. Now we have this, a perfect storm of super-smart newcomer and a pair of sleepwalking giants.
There are other places for proper chapter and verse on whether Hearts can sustain this. The key aspect at this stage is that this title race has taken on a sense of outside life. My own kids follow every Hearts game with a rare sense of urgency, despite being fully TikTok-brained, zombified by reel culture.
It is, of course, only one season. It could all fall away quite rapidly. But there is also a lesson here, perhaps even a control experiment. Because big football is often boring now. The direction of travel is fewer meaningful matches, a cartel of mega-clubs resting on the ropes, a Champions League group stage that feels like an autumn exhibition tour.
The idea is out there that younger people will be happy with this, will feast instead on clips, screengrabs, parasocial celebrity worship; that young people are essentially industrialised idiots who have for the first time in all human existence lost the craving for actual narrative.
The reality is this culture creates a yearning for something else. Marketing people will assume hate clicks, or boredom clicks, or any kind of clicks represent actual value and desire. But young people also like real things.
Finding interest in a competitive football league is a bit like getting into vinyl, or books made from paper, or the revelation, usually via an American man on YouTube who looks as if he keeps a collection of children’s dolls in a shed, that food can actually be made from ingredients.
Perhaps Scottish football has fallen into a less globalist version of how to thrive. Tend to the soil. Build it and they will come. The league has plenty that can be weaponised: deep history, heritage value, the same authenticity that made it so moreish back in the days when Old Firm games were basically catharsis, insanity, people at the edge of their own emotions colliding for 90 minutes.
Why do sporting leagues roll over so willingly? Why do they turn themselves inside out, shred the basis of their own value – English cricket: we see you – in order to chase those precarious streams of macro-money? What if you just stopped trying to expand outward in every direction? What if the guiding principle is: what will make the thing we have right here in front of us better? Why not go hyper-local?
There is an argument that Hearts winning would be better for Rangers and Celtic. It energises the league, supercharges the brand, speaks to the desire for sporting tension among those bored by the drift of big football.
We have replaced a great deal that was valuable with generalised digital noise. In a sense we are all strapped into our armchairs now, craving a place where the games are different, anything with heart and life to distract us from the grey, out there staring into the void with Sandra Frottwangle eyes.
