The Joys of YouTube Football Compilations Soundtracked by Shit House Music

I am a man of simple pleasures. I like house music and chips and fizzy drinks and football and I like watching video compilations of goals soundtracked by house music which I watch while shoving crinkle cut after crinkle cut into my gaping maw and washing down that half-masticated wodge of potato byproduct down with a litre or two of intensely sugary water.

Football doesn't have the same hold over me that it once did. I no longer find myself sat alone in a stupor on a Saturday night with a nearly-finished can and Manish Bhasin for company, idly watching Stockport grind out another home draw, perking up at the quiet hum of the crowd at Weston Homes Community Stadium as another goal trickles dismally over the line. I've stopped immediately flicking to the back of papers. I don't find 606 as interesting as I once used to. I am now, sadly, regrettably, ashamedly, a fairweather fan, the kind of person who looks out for a particular score on a Saturday teatime and then gets back to reality. I no longer find Chris Kamara funny.

Since I stepped off the managerial merry-go-round, I've sated my still-there appetite for 30 yard screamers and bobbled-in dribblers with compilations on YouTube. Most of them are soundtracked by indie so dirgy it wouldn't even scrape into the cheapest landfill indie comp littering the floors of abandoned HMVs in towns where lads grow into feathercuts and Ocean Colour Scene. There, are, happily, outliers.

The video above is a perfect demonstration of the immense joy to be found in the classic combination of football and dance music. Ever since New Order laced up their boots and took us to Italy via the Hacienda back in 1990 the two worlds have lived in a kind of occasionally happy unison. Basically dance music and football are your mum and dad. "Gabriel Batistuta's 20 best goals ever" would be a seminal work in and of itself minus the soundtrack — it's eight minutes of a bloke who was good at football scoring really good goals. Headers, volleys, it's all in here. The audio accompaniment takes it to new levels.

In the same way that low budget driving games use a certain kind of dance music to create the illusion of speed in the mind of the player, these calcio-collections employ a particular sonic palette to accentuate the sheer joy of watching goal after goal. "Gabriel Batistuta's 20 best goals ever" is not uncommon in its use of a kind of perfectly generic thudding eurotrance that makes everything feel slightly more intense than it should. Each kick, each stab, each snare and roll becomes of gargantuan importance.

It's not just Batitusta fans who are at it and it's not just Wagnerian trance that's used to soundtrack pointless penalties in meaningless friendlies. The video below — which, again, is a masterpiece even if you mute it — captures Ronaldo (the real Ronaldo? the fat Ronaldo? Brazillian Ronaldo?) in all his glory, banging them in and in and in and….he scores 150 goals in the clip so I'll stop there.

The soundtrack is something very special, traversing from faux-Bond soundtrack string sessions to balearic-ly chilled downtempo noodling to orchestral metal to…what sounds like a Robert Hood pumper, some Swedish skwee, and some…HAPPY HARDCORE-CUM-POP-PUNK? Its like the most eclectic mixtape you've never made and it is sublime in it's charming shittiness.

Every so often, in your online life, you'll stumble across content that feels like it was made especially for you. This video is one of those things:

"Best Soccer Goals with Dirty House Drops!" does exactly what it says on the tin and it's a tin I could dip in and out of for all eternity. Firstly, it isn't just goals — it's the best goals. Secondly, it isn't just house drops — it's dirty house drops. Thirdly, I don't need a thirdly because honest to god, how could a video called "Best Soccer Goals with Dirty House Drops!" be anything but brilliant. I watch it over and over, revelling in my own pig ignorance, ignoring all those books I meant to read and films I meant to watch, fucking off trips to the theatre, pretending I'm sick when I'm meant to be at the club, leaving crosswords half-finished, never to be touched again. I'm just sat there, scratching myself and eating chips and drinking fizzy drinks and watching this.

Life'd be so much easier, so much more bearable, so much more fun if we just let ourselves be happy with keeping things easy and simple. Imagine a world where you could eat beans on toast night after night without feeling Nigel Slater looking down on you from his vegetable patch on high. Think about how much better you'd feel about it all if you could put down that book on Palestine you bought because you wanted to look clever in the Wolverhampton train station WH Smith and got back to reading Barbara Cartland novels. Don't we all dream of binning those Autechre albums and sticking on Now That's What I Call Dance Music instead? Wouldn't life be great if we could all just sit around in our pants watching football videos on YouTube all day.

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