There has been a worrying silence this week around A$AP Rocky’s plans to buy Tranmere Rovers. A co-investor has dropped out. Further finance is being urgently sought. Given the Tranmere consortium also currently features Matthew Bevilaqua from The Sopranos – a bit random, but, hey, it’s just good to see the Bevilaqua kid doing OK – it seems fair to say the field is pretty open here. What’s Badger from Breaking Bad up to these days?
For those who don’t know, A$AP Rocky is a musical superstar, retailer of four million albums, famous for his association with Rihanna. For those who don’t know from the other side, Tranmere are the 1990 Football League Trophy winners, famous for their association with Elton Welsby.
At first glance this might seem an unlikely meeting of interests. But it does also look like it could be real. This type of takeover, the MC-Hammer-buys-Lincoln-City dynamic, is common now in football. The purchase model says this is all in the end just engagement, eyeballs, product-hunger. A famous face leverages the brand, even when that brand is currently a worried-looking Nigel Adkins and Mike Dean throwing limbs in a puffa coat.
It is also a good fit in a wider sense. Merseyside and New York, where A$AP Rocky is from, have their own well-seasoned links. He makes hugely popular, soulful music that connects with people. He recorded L$D, one of the most amazing love songs of all time. Rap music and football are a good fit generally, as evidenced by pictures this week of Cole Palmer looking genuinely excited to launch a new Chelsea charity alongside the London grime/drill MC Central Cee (best Central Cee- centred football lyric: Dave on Trojan Horse, “Black Brit in Italian kit, I feel like Tammy in Roma”).
At which point two questions present themselves. Why are you going on about this, grandad? And why do you have so many opinions on Central Cee and A$AP Rocky? Go and listen to a podcast on the unification of Italy or something.
Answering this presents an obvious opportunity to self-cancel, to be transformed into a living embodiment of the Steve Buscemi “hello, fellow kids” skateboarding meme, and also to Get Music Wrong and annoy people (men). But sod it, this is football and words and music and no one has a monopoly on those things, and the fact is UK rap is just brilliant, addictive super-smart music.
My kids listened to it, then left me with it, so I’m kind of stuck in a particular period. But what a period. Dave, J Hus, Stormzy, Central Cee, Headie One. These are sublime creative people, not just brilliant recording artists, but also nice, wise and really funny. You will like them. It’s high art too, in my opinion. Dave is a mainstream megastar, but also just a flat-out genius with words.
At which point, football comes back in. Listening to this music will make you love and crave football, all the more so if you belong even tangentially to the alienated, game’s-gone demographic. Basically there are just constant, really good references. The obvious start point is Thiago Silva, Dave and AJ Tracey’s self-published track from 2016. The title comes from a bit where Dave describes blocking a romantic interest on his phone in the all-business style of Thiago Silva, who was at Paris Saint-Germain at the time, and in his elegant, long-striding pomp – so yes, good ref, works, scans.
Beyond this the football stuff is everywhere. Most common are random funny nods to unexpected players. Some examples:
“I’m Victor Wanyama defending that fixture.”
“I chase cheques like Aubameyang.”
“I still wonder why we had burners from young, like Alexandre Pato.”
“Loose grip on the glass/El Shaarawy man skip, then blast.”
“Didn’t wanna see me blow/So she let my talent go to waste like Robinho.”
And a favourite, from Dave: “I’m a ronin Blaszczykowski, I’m trying to score with the Polish.”
Even these simple ones are well chosen. Pato (Dave on JKYL+HYD) expresses speed, wealth and tarnished promise perfectly. In 2019’s Audacity, Stormzy is coming “off the wing like Andros Townsend”. Not the more triumphant Mo Salah or Riyad Mahrez, but with a sense he is instead trapped in certain behaviours, always moving into trouble, stepping inside not outside.
Too much? I don’t think so. These words are not chosen idly. How else to explain Kamakaze on Warm-Up Sessions, who was at the time playing for Woking while doing music shows later the same day. Or as he puts it, “doing gigs after games like his sister-in-law”, which is just triple-sided genius.
AJ Tracey in The Lane is “Controlling the game like Sepp Blatter” (grand, doomed, no regrets). Then there’s this, Stormzy saying on Know Me From: “Bare pagan boys / I come to your team and I fuck shit up, I’m David Moyes.” It’s just really funny. A few years later he’s recording the most moving, tender, uplifting song about surviving depression and wrapping it around the line “every Hendo needs a Stevie G”, which just totally makes sense in the moment.
This is hardly new, and there are already endless internet lists of this stuff out there. The connection might become a little more overt as entertainment absorbs football. But right now it seems safe to say no other form of culture has wrapped itself around football so intimately.
Certainly music has never spoken to the game like this. What did we get previously? Rod Stewart kicking a ball around in winkle-pickers on Top of the Pops. Indie bands worshipping 1970s mavericks. But no one wrote actual, warm, meaningful lyrics about Steve Bould or Peter Shilton.Otherwise music and football is basically the Kasabian bloke at Leicester looking as if he wants to fight someone in a kebab shop. It’s Oasis and Manchester City, old men retailing Abu Dhabi-branded clothing while making music that sounds like a stadium version of the noise inside the head of an alcoholic pub dog.
Whereas in UK rap you get nuance and love and connection with the players. The music can feel like a version of some classic storytelling tradition, from Calypso to Chaucer, riffing on dirty jokes and the stuff in front of you.
Not that it’s all heartwarming. A lot of this is driven by pain and anger and difficulty, the desire to burn things down. But the talent and the life is real. It is also, from a football angle, the exact opposite of what this industrialised sport can look like, the wall of corporate waffle, accountancy tools, money, politicking, white noise on the internet. Connection is good, moments and shared energy are good. And yes, for older people there is something worthwhile in even a baffled attempt to understand why things can still be good while also being different.
How long can it last? My own frame of reference is limited. Some of the established canon is ageing already. “I’m Pep, I ball with flair,” Stormzy says on Clash from 2021. Is this still accurate? It feels pre-Haaland, pre-four-centre-backs, pre-champions of the world.
But then late last year Dave released a song with the US rapper Jack Harlow, a breakout moment in the biggest market on earth, and there were of course no football references right up until Dave’s last line, where he says: “She more Olivier than France is.” And yes, he just couldn’t resist, because this is, I think, a reference to being Oliver Twist, pissed, but mixed into football with Olivier Giroud. And obviously almost nobody in America is going to get this, which just makes it even greater.
Back in the real world the A$AP Rocky thing may or may not happen from here. Tranmere have just lost to Grimsby, Crewe and Oldham and host Newport County on Saturday, which may or may not prove an additional lure. But it’s hardly the craziest idea out there. And music and football, well, that’s a live connection.
