Newcastle United’s Sela Cup win is a reminder that pre-season tournaments are downright silly

How ironic that the inaugural Sela Cup was won by a club who are going to be buying more than their fair share of silverware in the coming years. This, then, was the first trophy of the new Newcastle United era, a pre-season Saudi-sponsored weekend bazaar that was played entirely on home turf and meant absolutely nothing whatsoever. It brings to mind how Goosebumps author R.L. Stine founded the R.L. Stine Creative Writing Award to honour writers named R.L. Stine. As of 2020, he had won it three years running.

In fairness to the Magpies’ squad, unlike the bird with which they share a moniker, they seemed to understand that this particular trinket was entirely pointless. Jacob Murphy’s performative hoisting of the cup itself was the kind of keenly-observed satirical wink that many had assumed to be extinct in a post-Trumpian world, and even those Toon supporters who lionised the victory did so with their tongues wedged firmly in their cheeks.

It begs the question, therefore, as to where the value in any of this lies. If the players know it’s nonsense, and the fans also have their suspicions, then why do we all engage in this self-aggrandising charade? It’s pageantry for the sake of pageantry - participation certificates for fully grown men and busy work for the custom celebratory hoarding industry.

Of course, by no means are Newcastle and their Saudi paymasters the only offenders in this regard. All throughout a July swelter, English clubs found themselves sweating it out in hastily-converted baseball stadiums under the guise of a Premier League Summer Series that swept the USA like a swarm of merch-hawking locusts Then there are the sojourns to the Far East, played at a purgatorial half-pace for shiny trophies that almost certainly won’t set off any airport metal detectors on the return flight home. Hell, let’s not forget the Community Shield either, a Wembley showpiece that tells us as much about the likely trajectory of the looming campaign as the final of Crufts does about the probable winner of the English Greyhound Derby.

The only people who put any kind of creedence into the outcome of such pre-season follies are six-year-olds and egomaniacs. (Presumably egomaniacal six-year-olds are, therefore, in their element around this point in the calendar.)

Obviously, friendlies and preparatory fixtures of a decently full-blooded standard - I’m looking at you here, Bayern Munich - have their worth. They act as opportunities to get vital minutes into the legs, and for managers to guinea pig their wildest tactical whims in low stakes dummy runs. But dolling them up in the finery of meaningful competition is downright silly. It’s about one step removed from LARPing. Or laser tag.

By all means, clubs should play these matches and gain what they can from them, but when the final whistle goes, instead of priming the confetti cannons and burning the commemorative DVDs, how about everybody just shakes hands and gets on with the things that actually matter? Like sportswashing your way to actual, proper, momentous silverware. Like the Carabao Cup.