The end of 1990s nostalgia is here – it is time to talk noughties football

20 years or so gap from the start of the 2000s to now is, apparently, the sweet spot for reminiscence

We all lie to ourselves about what we want to consume and what we actually do. I know a dinner of salmon and bulgur wheat salad will make me feel better than what I ate last night: a salmon and bulgur wheat salad, some rice pudding, two mildly expired crumpets and a large number of tortilla chips which will stay between me and MyFitnessPal.
How we behave online is no different. Sure, we claim to want proper journalism, thoughtful long reads, hard-hitting reportage from wars but you can guarantee the most-read stories list of any website in the past 24 hours includes tittle-tattle about a rock star fathering a child with somebody who is not his wife. There goes my hero indeed.
And so, with regret, to x.com where this week my feed has been dominated by Barclaysmen, videos of footballers from the pre-HD Premier League set to contemporaneous music. Should I be keeping up to date with the American election? Absolutely yes. Did I scroll straight past some nuanced analysis just now and decide instead to press play on a video titled Steed Malbranque x Stereophonics? Also yes.
Steed Malbranque x Stereophonics#SAFC #Barclaysmen pic.twitter.com/PN2qqkOm9v
Once an organic trend like this emerges the official accounts soon follow. Some clubs have hit the spot with ease, Blackburn did Morten Gamst Pedersen and the Subways, Bolton paired Kevin Nolan with MGMT. Some have spectacularly missed the point, like Brentford nominating Yoane Wissa and Bryan Mbeumo (too current, too good) to the soundtrack of Dreaming by Smallpools, a song which came out in 2013 when they were in League One.
The term originated from the Cultras podcast which established an eligibility window of 2000-2014, roughly covering Barclays’ sponsorship of the top flight. Barclaysmen were described by Cultras presenter Fionn Viteža as “the antidote to modern system football. The Barclaysman serves as a reminder of a glorious past. They can be great players, they don’t have to be s—”. Producer Mike Wootton adds: “You don’t see many marauding, balding centre-backs scoring 40-yard screamers these days.”
Nostalgia, it turns out, is exactly what it used to be. A lament for lost innocence viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. Part of its purpose is to bond with others, but of course they tend to be the sorts you would usually bond with anyway. Who remembers footballer / TV show / song? Everyone who also was born in a similar year, area and class to you. It is also a potent waste of time, offers zero intellectual nourishment but remains utterly seductive. And yet the rise of the Barclaysmen represents a minor shift of an epoch. Finally we appear to be tiring of 1990s football nostalgia, which has been in vogue for at least 20 years.
Chris Scull was host of 1990s football podcast Quickly Kevin, Will He Score?, which concluded its run in May with a sold-out show at the London Palladium. He has now started an equivalent 2000s podcast called Let’s Be Having You and argues that 20 years is the activation zone for nostalgia. “It is enough time for the people involved to start telling you what actually happened.
“There’s a level of professionalism in football by the [20]00s, but there’s still quite a lot of unprofessional behaviour and a cast of characters ready to be explored. People are ready to talk about it.”
Are some eras just riper for fond memories, hence the long tail of the 1990s? “The temptation is to think the big 90s characters were unique to the 90s, but what you’re learning now is people you thought were robots like Wayne Rooney are complex, textured individuals. A decade ebbs and flows too, 1991-92 was not that memorable, Euro 92 was terrible.”
However atomised we become, the nostalgia industry will never truly die, reminiscing is an inescapable part of growing older. Those enjoying the Barclaysmen trend mostly feel misty-eyed for the first football they can remember around the turn of the century and are now nearing 30. Are the rest of us really ready to feel warm fuzzy feelings about Rory Delap’s long throws, Wigan’s Premier League spell or Fulham being sponsored by Pizza Hut? Apparently so, judging by the booming #barclaysmen hashtag. At last.