A sclerotic institution convinced of its greatness despite decades of mediocrity. A constant harking back to past glories, nostalgia supplanting a realistic assessment of the grim present. Constant worries about debt and meeting financial thresholds. A public that wonders why prices are always going up when nothing ever seems to get better. A leader whose time appears to be up, even though there’s broad agreement that the problems run much deeper. For Tottenham Hotspur in March, read the United Kingdom in June.

While that is a cheap gag, there is a truth lurking within. In football, there has long been a tendency, as soon as results go awry, to sack the manager. Three defeats in a row, and he’s been found out. A couple of disaffected players grumble to sympathetic journalists, and he’s lost the dressing room. Unless he has a huge amount of credit from previous success, there’s never a thought that he might turn it around.

With the resignation of Wes Streeting yesterday and the realistic possibility of an imminent Labour leadership election, it seems likely that Keir Starmer will become the sixth UK prime minister to depart Number 10 in the last decade. Politics, clearly, is mirroring football.

So why has there been such a shift in political culture? In part, it’s a facet of the modern media and its prevailing outrage culture. You don’t generate traffic through detailed analysis of fiscal policy or by breakdowns of the counter-press at throw-ins. Journalists and online commentators draw attention by ranting and ridiculing. Everything is negative and aggressive, the broader context is rarely taken into account, and the leader ultimately always takes the blame. Everything is scrutinised and almost nothing is placed in context, a mentality fuelled by the hyper-partisanship of social-media culture. Tottenham’s rivals laugh at their plight while their fans fret about the best course of action, just as Labour’s political opponents relish the chaos and its members scrabble around for an alternative.

Football and politics have been driven to similar places by the conventions of the broader discourse. It’s arguable that “fake news” was popularised, in a British context at least, by José Mourinho, who took over Chelsea in 2004 and demonstrated a cavalier attitude to the truth, generating and manipulating controversies, as when he accused rival manager Arsène Wenger of being a “voyeur”.

Streeting’s resignation, and the suggestion that other candidates will run for the leadership, is a classic “lost the dressing room” situation for Starmer. Bringing back Gordon Brown, meanwhile, feels a lot like Wenger in his declining years being urged to bring in Steve Bould, a relic of the great days of the Arsenal back four, to sort out the defence.

Starmer, an Arsenal fan, may even have been inspired by those memories. But for now, he looks a great deal like Thomas Frank in his last days at Spurs, a once-competent man diminished by his job, frozen by indecision, left squawking while former loyalists acknowledge that though there are bigger issues at the club/in government, it’s probably time for a change. The question then is whether anybody can do the job or whether, like Tottenham, the UK has become unmanageable.

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Jonathan Wilson is a columnist for the Guardian, the editor of the Blizzard, the co-host of the podcast It Was What It Was and author of 12 books on football history and one novel.

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