Working Class Zeroes 15 - Gary Neville

I always had Gary Neville pencilled in for the Number 15 slot in Working Class Zeroes, so it’s another happy accident that his turn has synchronised with the start of the 2026 football World Cup.

To be perfectly frank with you, I am so disconnected from football and the sporting world in general that I had no idea at all that there even was a World Cup looming this year until the other day. I’m afraid I find sport very, very boring. My brain loses focus as a spectator, and as a participant - forget it. I spent most of my time on the school sports field staring into the distance and thinking about Kate Bush. I am appallingly clumsy and uncoordinated. My spatial awareness is so wonky that I literally can’t follow what is going on in sports. To me it just looks like people moving randomly about. The ball, shuttlecock, golden snitch (or whatever the big deal might be) is always going too fast for me to estimate its current or imminent position. On the few occasions when, by some fluke, I have got sufficiently involved watching sport on TV, I found the emotional toll of investing in a team quite exhausting, and actually unpleasant after a while. The heat of physical competition I find very disquieting, and I don’t like crowds. Nick Hornby’s phrase, that football is ‘entertainment as pain’ is very accurate, I think. Perhaps oddly, I have really enjoyed some sporting memoirs, and ‘You Know Me Al’ by Ring Lardner is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. If I get inside somebody else’s head, which only reading can do, then suddenly I understand.

So it takes quite something to make me notice a sporting personality, of any kind, at all. They have to be very famous and ubiquitous, and there usually has to be some other quality that elevates them from the background rumble.

Which brings us neatly to today’s subject, Gary Neville - former right-back (whatever that means) for Manchester United and the England national side, turned football pundit for Sky, who is also a property developer, businessman, and the co-owner of Salford City FC.

We have already, of course, met a footballing Gary in this survey - who also became a pundit and offered up his political opinions. But this Gary is different enough to merit his own slot, though equally as appalling. Possibly more.

Because the hypocrisy of Gary Neville is staggering. His extremely dull demeanour masks his incredibly brazen levels of sheer nerve.

One almost feels envy when dealing with such characters - how do they get away with it? All you need, it turns out, is brass neck. People like this are so out of the ordinary that it’s hard for the rest of us, the broad flow of socialised humanity, to fully comprehend them; liars who admit that they lied yesterday, but that’s all right, because you can trust what they’re telling you today. That move requires such an incredible iron level of self-belief, such shamelessness, that there is nothing for the ‘normal’ human to grab hold of. When a person just doesn’t possess the capacity for shame, such an integral part of most personalities whatever their quirks, it breaks the chain of human interaction.

What Gary Neville offers us, then, is the chance to examine such a person, and attempt to find the though-line of their motivations. Gary has the look - and the drone - of a very, very boring man, and he is boring. but he reveals something interesting about the rest of us, simply because he lacks it.

Let’s do the background, which is particularly significant this time around. Gary was born in Bury in 1975. His father, Neville Neville (I smirk, but my paternal uncle was called Robert) was the commercial director of Bury FC, and he had previously been a league cricketer. (Back then, we must remember, these weren’t especially lucrative professions.) Mum Jill was a full-on sporting sort too, a former netball player who became the general manager at Bury FC.