“Football is not just 22 players kicking a ball around,” David Squires tells Sky Sports. “It is everything. Humour, life, war, pandemics, soft and hard power, geopolitics. It all trickles down. My challenge is to make eight funny jokes out of it every week.”
It is a challenge that Squires has embraced over the past decade, becoming the pre-eminent football cartoonist, dubbed ‘the king of the football comic strip’. And it is why his new book, covering his work from 2018 to 2024, is well worth revisiting.
“A lot has happened in six years.” Throughout it all, Squires has captured the zeitgeist, mastering humour and pathos. “I wanted a mixture of funny and serious topics.” That has been key to his success since Twitter helped launch his career a decade ago.
“For all its ills, I don’t think I would be able to do the job without social media. It gives a good sense of what people are talking about. I owe my career to Twitter. That is where the Guardian first saw my work and that is where I got most of my news.”
As well as his weekly column in the Guardian, his work is featured in the German magazine 11FREUNDE and French outlet L’Equipe. It has been a triumph but with the self-deprecating air of a man living his childhood dream, he still fears being found out.
“Every time I hit send on a Tuesday, I am convinced it is going to be the last one and they are going to sack me because it is not up to standard. If they take longer than usual to get back to me, I think they are having a meeting to work out how to tell me I am fired.”
Now 50 and living in Australia since 2009, this lifelong Swindon Town fan – “my editors limit me to one Swindon cartoon a year” – has taken an unusual path to his current role. He even recalls blowing his first chance of a creative career. Because of football.
“When I did work experience at 15 during Italia ’90, my school set me up to go to this graphic design studio in Swindon. A good opportunity. I was adamant I wanted to go to Radio Rentals. I knew I could watch the daytime group games on the wall of televisions.”
It backfired. “They sent me to the service centre. The only TVs I saw for a whole week were broken ones.” But he did work in West Ham’s ticket office. “I was the club’s least professional employee and Neil Ruddock and Paolo Di Canio were there at the time!” he quips.
While Squires describes himself as “drifting” through that period of his life, there was still the occasional outlet for his creative side. “I designed their terrible Hammer mascot. That is on my CV forever.” The Premier League continues to provide material.
If you are even a casual fan of the cartoons, you will know all about the cast of characters, those amusingly lampooned over the years. From Pep Guardiola to Jurgen Klopp, from Mikel Arteta to, perhaps most memorably of all, Jose Mourinho.
His reimagining of Mourinho as an emo teenager certainly struck a chord. “He just seemed so morose and miserable. It reminded me of a sulky teenager. I extrapolated it from that with the emo look and this fringe across his forehead,” he explains.
“People ask me if I am a fan but I missed it by a generation. So I plunder the Wikipedia for emo bands quite often. I think I have almost exhausted it.” But his Mourinho take has been updated. “I am drawing him as Elvis in his later years, just playing the hits.”
Arteta remains a Lego man but that has been updated as his character emerges. “The caricatures that really work have an essence of their true personality. That can take time to reveal itself. You just need one small nugget of an idea and to build from there.”
When Arteta introduced pickpockets to a pre-season team meeting to help motivate his players to improve their awareness, it was a gift. Others such as Arne Slot, could take longer. “He seems pretty upbeat. Let’s see what happens when they are not winning.”
Ruben Amorim? “Like Erik ten Hag before him, you can play on him being bewildered. Amorim’s face when Ed Sheeran joined the interview, for instance.” The dream is that they evolve into classic characters such as his memorable take on Roy Hodgson.
“I think I could draw Roy Hodgson from memory, using only a few lines,” says Squires, reflecting on the fact that as an illustrator he would spend a week poring over a painting but with such short deadlines, he has had to master the art of working much quicker.
“In fact, I know I can because I tried to recreate Roy over a beer on a picnic table for the sports editor, James Dart, when I was in London recently. Just through repetition, I know the angle of Roy’s nose, the way it cuts back to his top lip and his chin then juts out.”
He is not expecting any requests for a signed copy. “Roy isn’t on the phone very often, thankfully.” But a relative of Louis Barry did get in touch asking for one. And a friend once showed Roy Keane on his cartoons. “The bravest thing I have ever heard anyone do.”
For all the sense of fun in his work, it tackles the sadder stories too. “My natural instinct is always to try and make a joke about anything. It’s probably really annoying for everyone around me. But the tribute ones are where I steer away from humour.”
In recent times, he has covered the deaths of both Charlton brothers. “The Jack Charlton one had a couple of lighter moments that really reflected his life. He was a funny guy.” With Bobby, it required a different approach given the Munich air disaster.
“Bobby Charlton had an amazing life with this incredible life-changing moment. There was always a sadness to him. I wanted to reflect that.” It is a moving cartoon. And yet, even here, when recalling one of his more poignant pieces, Squires has a story.
“It ended with the screen fading to white to reflect the snow of Munich and also his fading memory, life fading away. The printer phoned me a couple of days later and told me that I had left the last panel blank by mistake. So it did not quite land with everyone.”
Squires’ work lands with more than enough people to keep doing this for a very long time to come.
Chaos in the Box: Chronicles from Modern Football, published by Faber, is out now
Source : Sky Sports
