The Crime of Entertainment
There is a terrifying epidemic sweeping through English football right now, and if we aren’t careful, it might completely ruin the sanctity of the Carabao Cup.
The disease? Entertainment. The patient zero? Rayan Cherki.
If you listened to the post-match coverage of Manchester City's Carabao Cup final victory, you would think Cherki had stopped in the middle of the Wembley pitch, pulled out a megaphone, and personally insulted the ancestors of the opposing back four.
His actual crime? He juggled the football.
With the game comfortably in City's pocket and the trophy basically already engraved, Cherki decided to have a little fun. A few keepy-uppies. A momentary lapse into pure, unadulterated street football. It was the kind of thing you do on the playground when you know you're the best player on the tarmac.
Naturally, the punditry class absolutely lost their minds.
The Pearl-Clutching of the Proper Football Man
It is genuinely hilarious how predictable the reaction is whenever a player dares to showboat in England. The "Proper Football Men" in the studios and commentary gantries immediately malfunction.
Suddenly, we have to hear solemn monologues about respect and professionalism. We are subjected to lectures about how you shouldn't humiliate your fellow professionals. Ex-players who built entire careers out of tackling people at thigh height suddenly transform into Victorian moralists.
Think about the twisted logic here.
A cynical, tactical foul to stop a counter-attack? That is celebrated as taking one for the team. A horrific two-footed lunge that could snap an ankle? The player was just eager to win the ball back.
Juggling the ball for three seconds? Disgraceful. An absolute insult to the game.
It is a bizarre cultural quirk of the English game that we celebrate physical violence as a sign of passion, but view technical superiority as an act of profound disrespect.
The Richarlison Precedent and The Antony Spin
We have seen this exact script play out before, and it is always just as exhausting. Remember when Richarlison was at Everton and later Tottenham, occasionally deciding to do a few kick-ups near the touchline?
The collective meltdown from the commentary box was legendary. Brennan Johnson famously scythed him down in a Nottingham Forest game a few years back specifically because of it, and half the pundits in the country essentially argued that Richarlison had asked for it. They practically argued it was justifiable homicide because he had the audacity to bounce the ball on his foot three times.
Or what about Antony’s infamous 720-degree spin for Manchester United? Yes, Antony’s United career has been a colossal disappointment, and yes, the spin is completely pointless because it rarely leads to anything productive.
But the sheer anger it generated was completely disproportionate. Paul Scholes looked like he wanted to jump out of the studio window. Robbie Savage was practically foaming at the mouth. You would think Antony had scored an own goal on purpose rather than just executing a harmless, albeit silly, skill move.
The Cherki incident at Wembley is just the latest chapter in this weird puritanical crusade against flair. English football culture still harbors this deep-seated belief that if you aren't suffering on the pitch, you aren't trying hard enough.
The Pep Guardiola Robot Factory
What makes the Cherki incident so fascinating is that it happened in a Manchester City shirt. We are talking about Pep Guardiola's City.
It is genuinely fascinating that Guardiola even sanctioned the signing of Cherki in the first place. This is a manager who famously demands absolute positional discipline. He wants his players to occupy specific zones down to the millimeter.
Think about the attacking talent that has passed through the Etihad over the last decade. Raheem Sterling was transformed from a direct, instinctive dribbler into a back-post tap-in merchant. Riyad Mahrez, one of the silkiest street footballers the Premier League has ever seen, had his game streamlined into a very specific set of movements.
Look at what happened to Jack Grealish. He arrived at the Etihad as a swaggering, sock-dropping maverick who wanted to take on three men at once. Within a year, he was a glorified system player whose primary job was to hold the width, draw a defender, and play a safe five-yard pass backward to recycle possession.
Guardiola's football is devastatingly effective, but it is often deeply sterile.
That is why Cherki's moment of madness was so refreshing. It felt like a glitch in the matrix. For a few glorious seconds, the tactical straitjacket fell off, and we just got to watch a wildly talented footballer messing around because he knew he could.
Where Have All The Mavericks Gone?
The outrage over Cherki's juggling highlights a depressing reality about modern football. The game has been optimized to death.
Everything is about xG, pressing triggers, half-spaces, and passing networks. Academy players are taught from the age of eight to play the percentage pass rather than try the outrageous flick. The pure, unadulterated entertainer is being tactically coached out of existence.
When was the last time we had a player who existed purely for the vibes? We used to have Adel Taarabt making a mockery of Championship defenders. We had Jay-Jay Okocha doing rainbow flicks into the corners at the Reebok Stadium. Even Allan Saint-Maximin, for all his flaws, would routinely try things that made you spill your drink.
Now, every winger is just a cog in a machine, expected to execute the exact same cut-back routine twenty times a match.
Cherki is a throwback. He is a player who clearly still views football as a game rather than a mathematical equation to be solved. And we should be celebrating that, not trying to scold him into submission.
The Reality Check on Cherki
This isn't to say we should treat Cherki like some flawless footballing martyr. If we are being completely honest, there is a reason he spent so many years frustrating managers back in France before City took the gamble.
It is very easy to be the ultimate entertainer when you are three goals up against a beaten team in a domestic cup final. It is a lot harder to justify the step-overs when you are locked in a grinding 0-0 draw away at Goodison Park on a rainy Tuesday in February.
Cherki's shot selection can be absolutely maddening. He regularly turns down high-percentage passes to players in better positions just so he can take on one more defender. When it works, he looks like a Ballon d'Or winner. When it fails—and it does fail frequently—he looks incredibly selfish.
Furthermore, his defensive work rate is exactly what you would expect from a player who likes to juggle in the middle of a match. While Bernardo Silva is sprinting seventy yards to cover a counter-attack, Cherki is often caught casually jogging back, adjusting his socks, completely detached from the defensive structure.
But the flaws are part of the package. You cannot have the highlight-reel magic without accepting the tactical indiscipline. Football is a game of trade-offs, and right now, the entire sport is trading away individual brilliance in favor of collective safety.
Embrace the Disrespect
We are currently sitting in late March. The calendar is packed. We are exactly 12 days away from the first legs of the Champions League quarter-finals. The stakes are getting incredibly high, and the pressure is ramping up.
With the expanded Club World Cup looming and a massive 48-team World Cup kicking off in exactly 77 days, the football calendar is an endless, exhausting grind of high-stakes, hyper-tactical chess matches.
In this environment, moments of pure, pointless joy are precious.
Football is fundamentally an entertainment product. Fans do not pay exorbitant ticket prices to watch eleven men execute a flawless mid-block. They pay to be amazed. They pay to see things they couldn't possibly do themselves.
When Rayan Cherki started juggling the ball at Wembley, he wasn't insulting the opposition. He was giving the crowd exactly what they paid for.
If an opposing defender feels disrespected by that, the solution is very simple. Go and take the ball off him.
Until then, let the man juggle. English football desperately needs more disrespect.
