Soccer Clubs, Please Stop Your Awful April Fools Jokes

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

The internet is a terrible, terrible place to be on April Fools' Day. For the naive, the unwary and the downright credulous, it's a rollercoaster of baffling news headlines, social media pitfalls, and jaunty celebrity death rumours – a white-knuckle ride on the misinformation train which leaves the nerves shredded and the skin slathered in a cold sweat.

For the rest of us, it's an endless stream of jokey advertising, a river of safe, chummy craic flowing out onto the vast sea of corporate synergy. Even soccer clubs are in on the act. In fact, they're probably the worst offenders when it comes to exploiting April Fools' Day for the sake of brand strategy, reducing a fun medieval folk tradition to a joyless marketing exercise.

Stop it, soccer clubs. Stop with your safe, social media friendly banter. Stop with your shareable content, your godforsaken hashtags and your unforgivable use of emojis. Stop sucking the joy out of our souls, stop stealing our laughter and turning it into Facebook likes. Only a tiny, tiny minority of your fans are enjoying the calculated amusement. Put an end to the dismal, mirthless lols. Please, just make it stop.

Look at Southampton's April Fools' effort, for God's sake. There's an emojii on the club crest, an emoji with a little halo to represent the #Saints. Forget the fact that all those Christian martyrs got shot full of arrows, broken on the wheel and so on for the sake of a fucking emoji. Compared to the horror of this banal, risk-free attempt at banter, their suffering is nul.

#SaintsFC is pleased to announce plans for a new club crest from the 2016/17 season onwards! pic.twitter.com/zsnlUTt7Bc
— Southampton FC (@SouthamptonFC) April 1, 2016

What about Arsenal's effort? Apparently, the club are going to install a retractable roof at the Emirates – and it's going to be designed by someone called William daRoufe! What an utterly ludicrous coincidence.

As much as we enjoy jokes about mechanical engineering and complex building projects, we can't help but feel this is even more by way of crushingly benign April Fools' content. Oh, and did they mention it's inspired by the Citroen C1 Airscape? Citroen just happen to be an official club partner. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain will sell you one personally, we imagine. It's probably written into his latest contract, just under the clause about having to do a daily Snapchat takeover alongside Danny Welbeck.

Opening April 2017: The world's first retractable sunroof at Emirates Stadium, inspired by @CitroenUK technology.https://t.co/c0FTWnC3vZ
— Arsenal FC (@Arsenal) April 1, 2016

Liverpool have at least gone with an actual, proper prank on the players – though it is sponsored by Vauxhall. Did you know that the new Vauxhall Astra has WiFi? We didn't either, until we'd watched this hilarious YouTube clip.

And so it goes on, each team marketing April Fools' Day more aggressively than the last. Football clubs are desperate to banter with us right now. They desire nothing more than to fulfil their sponsors' banter quotas, to calculate the exact worth of our banter to their sales departments.

Unfortunately, we do not want to banter with football clubs anymore. It's over. Just stop.