“It impacts my life more than it should… it’s been a struggle.”
It’s not often that Michael McIntyre allows his incessantly cheery demeanour to slip, but this is a serious subject matter.
The hugely successful English comedian and television presenter has granted a rare interview to The Athletic and, in a moment of deep soul-searching, is beginning to open up on a sensitive, difficult topic that is clearly close to his heart and has brought him much pain over the years: supporting Tottenham Hotspur. Oh boy.
Yep, this won’t be easy to navigate.
“I made my eldest son be a Spurs fan, which is perhaps not the most fatherly thing I could have done,” McIntyre says with a smirk.
“I’ve seen my kids suffer badly when Spurs lose. Once, we lost a game and my son was so beside himself, I worked out how many games there would potentially be in his life if he lived to be 85.
“I added them all up and took Europe into account. I can’t remember what the number was, but remember, he’s literally a child, (and told him) ‘In your life, Spurs will play approximately 28,700 games… we’re going to lose a lot, so the sooner you come to terms with that, the better’.”
As with most of McIntyre’s stories, it ends with a roar of laughter from its teller, a glance around the room to see who else is laughing (clue: everyone) and a jiggle of that trademark bouffant hair.
“It’s the whole Match of the Day thing,” he continues, now in full flow. “I never watch it if we lose, it’s dead to me, I hate all of football and I’m p***ed off. But if Spurs win I’m like, ‘Ohhhh, let’s watch Match of the Day!’.”
While following Tottenham may be a labour of love at times, it’s quickly evident that football is a huge passion for McIntyre, one he’s kept under wraps for much of his career.
But that doesn’t quite explain what a stand-up comedian and prime-time TV host is doing launching a new football app that he hopes will significantly alter the way his fellow supporters engage with their teams online.
Confused? So is he.
“I’m surprised, too,” McIntyre says, when it’s put to him that people may raise an eyebrow at his involvement with Fanalysis, an app designed to empower football supporters with a voice in a non-toxic environment — i.e., away from social media.
We say involvement, but Fanalysis — while it may now have other people and organisations on board, including Gary Neville — is McIntyre’s brainchild, and he is the driving force behind it.
GO DEEPER
What is Fanalysis? Explaining the player ratings app co-founded by McIntyre and Neville
In essence, the app sees fans rate the performances of players in the team they support after matches, which gives said player a rolling rating out of 100. It’s basically TripAdvisor but with footballers. App users can engage with fellow supporters via posts and polls and, if you live in the UK, you may have seen some of these people appear on various Sky Sports shows and platforms (on Fanalysis, each Premier League club has a ‘best XI’ of their most-engaged supporters, who are dubbed ‘Fanalysts’, a process which took a year of applications and auditions, many of which McIntyre sat in on). Here at The Athletic, we’ll be using Fanalysis data, too.
The theory is that while pundits bring expertise from having played the game professionally and journalists call on their many sources, inside knowledge and data to bring insight that others can’t, nobody knows their team better than die-hard fans.
The idea came to McIntyre after he found that when Spurs were linked with a potential new signing, his son would contact fans of the team he played for to garner their opinions.
“I remember the moment,” he begins. “I was in the shower. I did think of the game show The Wheel in the bath, so I do have a history of the bathroom being a successful creative place, although I want you to know I’ve washed every day since, with no other ideas about anything.
“Anyway, I just thought, with the world moving more from institutions to individuals, like Letterboxd, Rotten Tomatoes, TripAdvisor, why is there no resource for fan opinion?
“And then I thought fans’ analysis = Fanalysis. That’s a really neat name. I’m still in the shower at this point, my hands are as wrinkly as a 90-year-old woman’s, then I got out of the shower and thought I’d see if the name existed, which it didn’t. So I trademarked it, with no plans.
“(It’s) a place where fans can input their own opinions and ratings of their own players. In a world where everything is already rated, you have a plumber come around and give them a review, you get an Uber and give the driver stars out of five, you go for dinner and can review the restaurant, but there’s nothing to rate football players. Plenty of apps and websites rate players, but those are algorithmic ratings. And the ones where fans vote, supporters of other teams can hijack them (on Fanalysis, you can only contribute to your own team’s ratings).
“So why don’t we curate knowledgeable, passionate fans and ask them what they think? And maybe we could own player ratings.”
It’s an interesting concept, and not one McIntyre has merely invested in and then left for others to drive. He has met football clubs, players and managers such as former England manager Gareth Southgate to discuss how footballers are treated online and what Fanalysis could do to help purify the environment of abuse and hate that pretty much everyone in the game is subjected to.
“We need to stop that vitriol as best we can,” he says. “It festers, and people, even pundits, lean into that negativity because they’re obsessed with getting views and clicks and traction. We’re all slightly dizzied by this dopamine of social-media traction and losing sight of the effects of it.
“I talked to (former Chelsea and England midfielder and now Coventry City head coach) Frank Lampard about it and he said he could feel it on the pitch sometimes. He was playing for England once — which is another level of madness and pressure — and he said someone threw the ball to him and he wanted to kick it back, but he’d made a mistake earlier in the game and was thinking so much about what s**t he was going to get for it, so his body wasn’t responding because the brain was thinking about the negativity.
“We’re not going to change that pressure, but let’s see how many people want to join.
“Someone involved in running a lower-league club was saying they wanted to know what fans thought of their manager, whether to get rid of him, so they commissioned somebody to scrape social media — i.e., do fans like this guy? The report comes in: fans hate him. So he fires the manager. Then social media erupts: ‘Why did you fire the manager? We like this guy’.
“So this stuff on socials isn’t real data or a reflection of reality. I’ve had it over the years myself. You put a TV show out there, I’ll go on social media, and it’s like, ‘Have I done something terrible here? Is it the worst thing I’ve ever done?’, and then the ratings come out and are enormous.”
McIntyre has enlisted staff from his TV production team to help set up Fanalysis, which already has 40 people working on it and plans to expand into predictions and player transfer values, as well as to other leagues and sports.
It’s clear McIntyre is a genuine football fanatic himself. He frequents websites such as Premier League Injuries, Transfermarkt and Wyscout to help him follow Spurs, as well as The Athletic. In fact, at the risk of navel-gazing, he uses the comment section of this site as an example of his Fanalysis vision.
“The Athletic is something I would reference a lot in my pitches, not just because of your incredible journalism, which is above and beyond anything else — the output is extraordinary — but also because of the most-liked comments below the articles,” he says. “They come from a fan who I will know supports Spurs — and other Spurs fans have endorsed it — so there’s so much value in that top comment. That is the entire principle of Fanalysis, that top comment.
“When Antonio Conte was fired (as Tottenham head coach in March 2023), I read an article on The Athletic and the top comment wrote everything I felt… I cut and pasted it, sent it to my son, and said, ‘This is everything we feel about how Conte is behaving’, which was that it was outrageous and he should go. My son put that grab on Twitter and it went viral. I was like, ‘That’s Fanalysis’. The app will bring to the fore true voices endorsed by the fanbases.
“I’ve just always felt — and I think I’m right about this — that fans, about their own players, will know best. They’re watching the closest.”
His energy and passion for the subject are — like his involvement in it — quite surprising. In fact, the longer McIntyre hammers home his points about trying to change the media landscape and help offer a sanctuary from social-media toxicity, the more he’s giving Bob Geldof/Live Aid vibes.
“Yes, although the money he was using was for a much better cause, I think we can be clear about that,” he jokes.
“I think we are on a mission. It’s been so energising to realise that something so simple didn’t exist. So it’s a process that’s snowballed, and I pinch myself to think we have an office, 40 people in it, and plans to expand, because the fundamentals are so valid.
“You want it to infiltrate the landscape of football. Honestly, my dream is that David Ornstein links somebody to a player and starts talking about their Fanalysis rating.”
An hour in McIntyre’s company is a warm, convivial whirlwind of enthusiasm, jokes and anecdotes.
He has been following Tottenham since 1987, but unlike his sons, Lucas and Oscar, he only has himself to blame for his lifelong affliction.
“I can specifically recall how it started. Grandstand (an all-afternoon sports show the BBC used to broadcast on Saturdays) was on the telly and they literally just said, ‘Spurs are a team to watch this season’. That was it. So I followed them… and we had a really good year, we finished third, David Pleat was the manager, and we got to the FA Cup final.
“And then your allegiance is just lifelong. It’s utterly mad when you think about it, and in no other walk of life does this happen. It’s the equivalent of selecting a business in the FTSE 100 and supporting that business until you die, no matter who the CEO is. Madness.”
His boys became obsessed with Spurs at a young age, leading McIntyre to start going to away matches and on pre-season tours in the early 2010s. He was even in the dressing room after the famous ‘Taxi for Maicon’ win against Inter in 2010.
“They invited me down,” McIntyre recalls. “Harry Redknapp was the manager, and he asked if I wanted to see Gareth (Bale, who dominated Inter full-back Maicon in that match). So they dragged him off a physio table or something. I asked him how early in the game did he know he literally had this guy totally beaten, and he was like, ‘Pretty early on’.
“Seeing a player who can do anything, like Gazza (Paul Gascoigne) when I first started watching, or (Wayne) Rooney… that feeling of a player being superior, it’s incredible.”
They certainly haven’t all been as good as Bale at Spurs over the years. In fact, McIntyre’s secret shame — and it’s not easy to envisage such a happy man doing this — is that he once got so annoyed with what he was watching, he aimed verbal abuse at one of his own.
“I did boo once, and I still shudder when I think about it… I booed (former full-back) Emerson Royal,” he confesses. “To be honest, we’ve had worse players, but I let myself down.
“I’ve calmed down a bit. VAR has hurt me, though… when we score, I don’t react as much anymore because I’m so ready to be hurt by offside.”
Royal’s infamous no-look pass that went straight behind for a goal kick might have given McIntyre some material for one of his stand-up gigs, but the comedian has largely eschewed football in his routines over the years.
“I had a joke about England a few years ago when we were very bad,” he says. “It was about playing football games on an Xbox and how England were like when you play with someone who doesn’t know the controls, so they’ll suddenly do a slide tackle for no reason, or you’re through on goal and you press the wrong button so you pass instead of shoot.
“I do have a laugh around football, mainly at Spurs’ expense now. Once you’ve got that bug, it’s lifelong. With Sir Alex Ferguson, you saw him rebuild three whole different teams of players at Manchester United. Well, I’m already thinking back to Poch (Mauricio Pochettino, Tottenham manager from 2014 to 2019)… I miss that team so much!
“Toby (Alderweireld) and Jan (Vertonghen), Kyle Walker, Danny Rose, I miss Mousa Dembele and I miss DESK (the attacking quartet of Dele Alli, Christian Eriksen, Son Heung-min and Harry Kane). I just miss them! I even miss (Moussa) Sissoko, who had that one good season.
“It affects my week more than it should. It’s wonderful to see what football can give people, like those scenes with Crystal Palace winning the FA Cup last year, or Newcastle with the Carabao Cup, and then Spurs with the Europa League.
“The biggest impact Spurs has ever given me was that Lucas Moura hat-trick (at Ajax in the second leg of a 2018-19 Champions League semi-final, turning around a tie that looked lost at 3-0 down on aggregate in the second half that night).
“I’ve never felt anything like that in my body. Only football can make you do that, when your team score and you lose your s**t. Only football. Nothing else makes you go (wiggles head furiously and swears loudly) like when Lucas Moura scored that hat-trick, and then the ‘We’re in the final!’ feeling. My legs just went.
“There are some funny people in football. I love Ally McCoist, especially how he adds more words than are required (in commentary). He won’t just say, ‘That’s a corner’. He’ll say (adopts impeccable Scottish accent), ‘If you ask me whether that’s a corner, I’d say I wouldn’t be surprised’. He’s brilliant.
“They have to be entertaining. Roy Keane is clearly a very funny character who everyone is scared of… Then Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville are just absolutely filled with football.
“It’s a never-ending conversation.”
He may be an unlikely instigator, but McIntyre now hopes to add something new to that conversation.