I keep hearing it - football is the new pop. This is obviously both patent rubbish and frighteningly true. I attended one of the last-ever Steps concerts last year. The crowd (consisting of eight-year-old girls wearing glowing plastic devil horns and 21 year-old gay blokes in cowboy hats) saved their most feverish screams for the moments when craven images of David Beckham and Michael Owen were flashed on the giant screen at the side of the stage.
And get this - the slightly box-faced Mike got MORE screams than super-pretty Dave. Possibly because Dave is a) rilly rilly rilly old, b) married to someone in a band that mum used to quite like, and c) definitely heterosexual.
I wanted them to put a picture of Joe Cole up - just to see if he'd dampen a single seat. Because, let's face it, in the box-faced stakes, Joe's got Mike well beat. In fact he's three-quarters of the way towards becoming that racing car driver who looks like Kryton out of Red Dwarf.
And what about jug-eared Jeffers? Or Wayne Bridge? Seems to me that if football is the new pop, the soccer svengalis need to pull their socks up a bit on the recruitment front. I mean, there was no way Simon Fuller was gonna let a jumbo-eared, box-faced, Gazza-fat minger into the Spice Girls, was there? So surely England need to take the same approach and only hire pretty boys (it seems to work for Italy).
So just how pop is soccer? Well obviously Manchester United's legendary youth squad (with its Scholesy, Bex, Giggsy, Nevilley Ugh and Nevilley-not-so-Ugh axis) was soccer's first manufactured boy band. With Beckham as Robbie Williams. And Robbie Savage as Pete Best.
But what does that make the Busby Babes? They were football's Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper - the young rock'n'roll legends who died in a 1959 plane crash, almost EXACTLY a year after the Munich disaster. And George Best was obviously the Beatles (duh!) - uncannily paralleling the Fab Four's descent from cuddly cuteness into substance-abusing beardie-weirdieness. (Except that George copped off with a string of Miss Worlds while the Beatles married Yoko and Linda.)
But if Beckham is the new Best - which he is - then that must also make him the new new Beatles. Which means that Posh is the new new Yoko. My God! The parallels are uncanny!
But IF Best was the Beatles, who were the Rolling Stones? Chopper Harris? Norman Hunter? Jimmy Greaves was obviously Keith Richards. So Pele must be Jimi Hendrix. Stuart Pearce was The Stranglers. And the Wimbledon Crazy Gang were Sham 69. Or possibly The Baha Men - authors of Who Let The Dogs Out. Or maybe the So Solid Crew.
Which makes Robbie Savage football's Rod Stewart. Or it would if Rod Stewart wasn't already pop's Robbie Savage. And Robbie Savage wasn't already football's Pete Best. So we'd better scrub that and make Robbie Savage football's Darius: slung out of the Man United fame academy, the lank-haired battler swears to make it on his own. Yes, that works. Sort of.
And Alan Hansen is Simon Cowell, Sir Alex Ferguson is Pete Waterman and Real Madrid are obviously Cream - football's first supergroup. Which would make Chelsea, er, Crosby Stills Nash and Young. Gianfranco Zola is Kylie - excuse me, I need to pause and revel in my own genius for a second - and Mr Abramovich is cat's-arse-mouthed singer Damon Albarn out of Blur. Because he looks EXACTLY like him. And may well actually BE him. SCOOP!
Wolverhampton Wanderers are Ned's Atomic Dustbin. And the 1970s Leeds squad were The Glitter Band - because they looked like them. And the spitting, snarling 1966 Argentinian World Cup team were The Sex Pistols. Obviously. Which makes Manchester City The Smiths - but only because they're shit and come from Manchester.
But what of the likes of Dixie Dean and Sir Stanley Matthews? Ah, well, you see they're Robert Johnson and Betty Smith. Legends, gods even. But nobody under the age of 75 knows this for a fact - given that the recording facilities available in their heyday were scratched-to-crap cack cubed on a shit stick.
Arsene Wenger is Gary Numan. Gerard Houlier is Dido. Gazza is Elvis. Graham Taylor is Slaughter & The Dogs. Tord Grip and Svengali-Goran Eriksson (see what I did there?) are Bjorn and Benny from Abba. Pavel Nedved is that bloke out of Bucks Fizz (cos he's the dead spit). Which makes Freddie Ljungberg the puffin-munching, journo-twatting, pixie-faced Icelandic diva Bjork.
No, hang on. That's wrong. Freddie is Stinky Turner, lead singer of The Cockney Rejects and author of the ridiculously prophetic lyric: "Was a punk / Oi! Oi! / Was a mod / Oi! Oi! / But you're a skin'ead underpants model nah!"
And Thierry Henry is PJ Harvey. Which means that the Arsenal side of the 1980s and 90s were Genesis - technically brilliant, extremely clever but really, really boring. Which makes the current Arsenal team Radiohead - technically brilliant and extremely clever but totally up their own arse and utterly depressing.
Football's Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle are, bizarrely, pop's Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle. And Gary Lineker and Ron Atkinson are, of course, The Cheeky Girls. Which makes Des Lynam Des O'Connor. Birmingham City are The Darkness. Swindon Town are The Troggs. Bristol Rovers are The Wurzels. Bradford City are Smokie. And the current Wimbledon team are obviously Bucks Fizz - but the one without ANY of the original members in its line-up (one of whom is now playing for Juventus).
Paradoxically, given that the Gallagher brothers are both huge Manchester City fans, Noel Gallagher once confessed to me that if Oasis were a football team then they'd be Manchester United. Which presumably makes Leeds United the Oasis tribute band Nowaysis. But then again the crisis-stricken period that Manchester United stumbled through at the beginning of last season had uncanny parallels in the Crazee World of Pop. Here a whole slew of toothless Manc has-beens (Morrissey, Mick Hucknall, Ian Brown, Dick Ashcroft and John Squire) all tarnished their former glories by releasing abysmally bad solo records. Or, in Morrissey's case, by just being Morrissey.
Which begs the obvious question: if Morrissey is pop's Voldemort (which he is), then who is football's Morrissey? That's easy, it's Don Revie - the bequiffed, duck-faced and frighteningly sinister mastermind whose cynical, fouling and fundamentally evil Leeds United team corrupted football in the 1970s just as surely as The Smiths destroyed British rock music a decade later.
To conclude. Football IS the new pop. Fame Academy IS the new Fantasy Football. Harry Redknapp IS the new Malcolm McLaren. Articles which end with a string of crass statements with the word "is" in the middle of them are the new investigative journalism. I AM the new Julie Burchill. Julie Burchill IS the new John Pilger. John Pilger IS the new Arsene Wenger. Arsene Wenger IS the new John Major. John Major lost the 1996 general election because his grey-shirted players couldn't see each other. Grey is the new red. Red is a mean, mean colour. My name is Steven Wells. You've been a fantastic audience. GOODNIGHT!