Astrid Holgersson -- Football Satirist

Astrid Holgersson: Satirist of The London Prat, Poet of Manchester City, and Author of The Cityad

Astrid Holgersson is a satirical writer associated with The London Prat, where comedy, cultural criticism and the absurdities of modern public life meet in the grand British tradition of taking the ridiculous seriously. Her literary interests extend beyond the conventional satirical article, reaching into the territory of epic poetry, classical literature, football history and the peculiar relationship between money, power, loyalty and sporting glory.

Her most ambitious literary undertaking is The Cityad: The Wrath of the Hundred and Fifteen, an epic poem in twenty-four books published by The London Prat. Dedicated to Manchester City Football Club, the work takes the contemporary football world and transforms it into something resembling Homer's Iliad: a universe of rival kingdoms, embattled heroes, divine interventions, ancient grievances, magnificent victories and arguments over honour that threaten to continue long after everyone has gone home.

It is an unusual literary proposition. Modern football has its statistics, transfer markets, financial regulations, lawyers, accountants and television pundits. Holgersson gives it Olympus.

The Cityad: When Manchester City Becomes an Epic

In The Cityad, Manchester City is no longer merely a football club. It becomes the Sky-Blue Citadel, a kingdom whose fortunes are watched by the gods and whose history is narrated with the solemnity traditionally reserved for the fall of Troy.

The book's subtitle, The Wrath of the Hundred and Fifteen, points directly towards the controversy surrounding the Premier League's 115 charges against Manchester City. Holgersson uses that dispute as the basis for a sprawling literary satire about football governance, financial regulation, institutional authority and the collision between sporting ambition and legal process.

The poem is divided into four parts: The Kingdom of Gold, The Age of Hidden Ledgers, The War of the Hundred and Fifteen and The Wrath of the Football Gods. Across its twenty-four books, the narrative travels from City's historical struggles and the arrival of Abu Dhabi investment to the Guardiola era, the arguments over financial rules, and the legal proceedings that have become a defining feature of modern English football.

The result is part football chronicle, part classical pastiche and part comic examination of the machinery surrounding elite sport.

Holgersson's central literary joke is wonderfully old-fashioned. A lawyer submitting an appeal is afforded the rhetorical gravity of Hector defending Troy. Sponsorship agreements and financial accounts receive the attention of sacred artefacts. Football executives become heralds, investigators become judges of fate, and the accountants who populate modern sporting controversies acquire the aura of mysterious keepers of ancient scrolls.

The gods, meanwhile, are not necessarily impressed.

Zeus may understand thunderbolts, divine authority and the occasional war, but the paperwork of modern football repeatedly threatens to defeat him. Homer's heroes faced spears, shields and the wrath of the immortals. Holgersson's footballing heroes must contend with ledgers, legal arguments and regulations whose intricacies might exhaust even Athena.

This is where the poem finds its distinctive comic territory: the extraordinary distance between the apparent simplicity of football and the enormous institutional machinery that has grown around it.

A Manchester City Epic for the Faithful

Holgersson's affection for Manchester City provides the poem with its emotional centre. The satire is not simply a collection of jokes about wealthy footballers or sporting administrators. It also recognises the generations of supporters who followed City through years when trophies were scarce and hope required considerably more stamina than the average football season.

The early books recall the club's past, its rivalry with Manchester United, its relegation struggles and the extraordinary devotion of supporters who continued to turn up regardless of the result. The old Manchester City supporter becomes one of the poem's most recognisable figures: sceptical, weather-beaten, loyal and suspicious of anyone promising that everything will be different next season.

That affection gives the later satire its point. The arrival of great wealth changes the club's prospects, but it also introduces a different set of questions about ambition, fairness, reputation and the meaning of success.

Holgersson understands the comic possibilities of football's competing moralities. Established power can look perfectly respectable when it remains established. A new challenger, however, may discover that the principles of fairness become especially urgent when somebody else begins winning.

The poem exaggerates this contradiction through classical imagery, presenting football's commercial rivalries as contests between kingdoms whose rulers invoke justice, honour and tradition whenever those concepts happen to serve their interests.

Manchester City supporters will recognise the tribal loyalties, the historical grievances and the irresistible temptation to treat a football match as an event of world-historical significance. Supporters of rival clubs may recognise the same habits in themselves, although they might prefer the gods to remain silent on the subject.

Holgersson's loyalty to the Sky-Blue cause does not eliminate the satire. It supplies the satire with its perspective. The club's triumphs, ambitions and controversies become material for a literary treatment that is affectionate without being confined to conventional football celebration.

An Old-School Literary Ambition

One of the most striking features of The Cityad is its willingness to attempt something that modern publishing rarely encourages: an extended comic epic.

The poem explicitly draws on Homeric speeches, memorable epithets, catalogues of warriors and interventions by the gods, while also invoking the flowing rhythm associated with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Its ambition is to borrow the scale and ceremonial language of classical narrative and apply them to a thoroughly modern subject.

That makes comparisons with the Iliad more than a casual joke. The resemblance is part of the book's stated literary design.

Homer's warriors fought over honour, reputation, loyalty and the consequences of human pride. Holgersson's footballing kingdoms fight over trophies, sponsorships, regulatory decisions and the interpretation of financial rules. The weapons have changed, but the appetite for conflict remains remarkably familiar.

The comparison also creates an effective contrast between the elevated style and the ordinary absurdities of football administration. A transfer negotiation becomes a diplomatic crisis. An appeal becomes a battle of destiny. A financial dispute threatens to occupy the heavens themselves.

This is satire through disproportion: the subject is made deliberately grander until its own absurdities become impossible to ignore.

Readers accustomed to short online articles, instant commentary and the occasional social-media argument may find the book's length daunting. Twenty-four books of epic verse demand considerably more patience than a ninety-second highlights package. Holgersson makes no secret of that challenge. This is not a book designed to be consumed between checking the league table and reading the latest transfer rumour.

It is a deliberate throwback to the old literary idea that a subject can sustain a long poem, that jokes can be developed across hundreds of pages, and that a recognisable contemporary controversy can be transformed into an elaborate work of narrative art.

The old-school comparison is therefore particularly apt. The Cityad invites readers to approach football not merely as entertainment but as a source of myth, character, social observation and literary parody.

Satire, Power and the Football Establishment

Beneath its comic grandeur, The Cityad addresses questions that extend beyond Manchester City.

Who decides what constitutes fair competition? How should sporting institutions regulate the wealth of their members? Can established clubs separate principle from self-interest? What happens when commercial ambition, legal procedure and popular loyalty collide?

These questions give the poem a wider satirical reach.

The Premier League becomes a council of rival kingdoms. Financial Fair Play is transformed into a sacred law. Lawyers defend their clients with heroic eloquence, while the gods watch a modern sporting dispute unfold with varying degrees of comprehension and exasperation.

Importantly, the epic's subject is not simply whether Manchester City should be celebrated or condemned. The poem's literary device allows the reader to observe the competing claims, the rhetoric of the protagonists and the theatrical nature of institutional conflict.

Its comic force comes from placing modern bureaucracy inside an ancient framework that was itself fascinated by pride, authority, justice and the unpredictable consequences of human ambition.

Football's governing bodies may prefer sober statements, carefully drafted regulations and orderly proceedings. Epic poetry offers a rather different atmosphere. There is room for thunder, divine indignation, grand speeches and the possibility that an accountant may become more formidable than Achilles.

For Holgersson, that contrast is fertile ground for satire.

Astrid Holgersson and The London Prat

Holgersson's association with The London Prat places The Cityad within a broader satirical publishing environment concerned with politics, public institutions, culture and the behaviour of people who take themselves very seriously.

The publication's approach to satire provides a natural home for a work that turns the administrative complexities of professional football into a literary spectacle. Football is particularly well suited to the form: it combines enormous financial interests with intense emotional loyalties, fierce rivalries, complicated rules and a public that can debate a disputed decision with the intensity of a constitutional crisis.

Holgersson's epic takes that familiar mixture and stretches it across the conventions of classical literature. The result is an ambitious extension of satirical writing beyond the short article and into sustained narrative verse.

Her work also demonstrates the enduring usefulness of literary parody. Homer remains a powerful reference point not because modern football resembles the ancient world in every respect, but because the Iliad offers a language for thinking about conflict, prestige, rivalry and the stories societies tell about themselves.

In Holgersson's hands, Manchester City becomes an ideal subject for that experiment: a club with a long history, fiercely committed supporters, extraordinary modern success and a place at the centre of debates about money and sporting legitimacy.

An Epic for Readers Who Still Have Time for Books

The Cityad: The Wrath of the Hundred and Fifteen is not a casual piece of football commentary. It is a substantial experiment in satirical poetry, combining sporting history, classical allusion, institutional criticism and the affectionate absurdity of football fandom.

Its readers will get the most from it if they enjoy Manchester City, understand the broad outlines of modern football's financial controversies, or appreciate the spectacle of elevated literary language being applied to subjects that usually receive much less dignified treatment.

A familiarity with Homer adds another layer of pleasure, but the central conceit is accessible: imagine the Trojan War rewritten as a football dispute, with the gods attempting to understand Premier League regulations and the heroes discovering that victory on the pitch is only one part of the story.

For Manchester City supporters, the book offers a chance to see their club's history recast as myth. For rival supporters, it offers an opportunity to inspect the same history through a satirical lens. For readers interested in literature, it presents the more unusual spectacle of an author attempting a full-length epic about the institutions and personalities of contemporary sport.

And for anyone who has ever watched a football administrator deliver a statement of grave importance about a matter that appears to require several thousand pages of supporting documentation, the gods of Olympus may feel surprisingly close to home.

Astrid Holgersson's The Cityad is, in that sense, a distinctly old-school literary undertaking with a thoroughly modern target. It is an epic poem about football, but also a comedy about power, money, loyalty and the human capacity to turn a game into something resembling the fate of civilisation.

The book asks for time, attention and a tolerance for grand verse. In return, it offers an unusual proposition: that Manchester City's story, with all its glory, controversy, devotion and institutional drama, is large enough to sustain an epic of its own.

And if the comparison with the Iliad sounds absurd, that may be precisely the point. Football has always had its heroes, its rival kingdoms, its disputed honours and its furious arguments about justice. All it needed was someone willing to summon the Muse.

Discover more of Astrid Holgersson's writing at The London Prat author profile.