How David Squires has made his mark in the cartoon world of football

EMO Jose Mourinho, Erling Haaland as the Iron Giant, or Ian Holloway as The Exorcist, just three of the sublime and ridiculous concepts you might have stumbled across by reading David Squires’ hugely popular cartoons in The Guardian each week.

Cornering the market in football satire from a small office in his home just outside Sydney, Australia, no stone in the Beautiful Game is left unturned, or un-lampooned, with content far removed from the old comic strip classics like Roy of the Rovers or Striker.

Squires, a boyhood Swindon Town supporter who can accurately recall the club’s marathon Littlewoods Cup ties against Wanderers in the late eighties, or the 7-0 thrashing at Burnden Park which left local radio commentator Stuart Mac weeping into his microphone, has just released a book entitled Chaos in the Box, Chronicles from Modern Football, which draws from his weekly columns between 2018 and 2024.

Now the best-known name in his field, Squires admits his journey to becoming a full-time illustrator of footballing cartoons was no less circuitous than the Magic Roundabout outside the County Ground.

“I always knew I wanted to do something in artwork as a kid and you draw the things you’re interested in, so I probably started drawing Star Wars, then more into football,” he said. “I actually wanted to be a kit designer, and I had sketch books full of them, which I desperately wish I had kept.

“I trained as an illustrator at uni and my portfolio was basically all football, not dissimilar to what I do now but painted colour designs with no words. I was hawking it around to various publications in the mid-90s, pre-internet, and you’d be talking to fashion magazines or interior decoration magazines and showing them pictures of Alex Ferguson and Kevin Keegan.

“For those reasons I didn’t get many gigs, so I let it slide, took on other jobs and moved to Australia in 2009. At the time social media was developing and I had a bit more time on my hands, so I started putting out cartoons based on how I felt the game was going. And compared to now, they were halcyon days, right?

“They were quick sketches on Facebook and Twitter and by the time of the 2014 World Cup I was probably doing one a day and it really grew. Then The Guardian asked if I’d like to do something for them but at the time I still had a full-time job, so I juggled for a bit, then took the plunge and did the cartoons full-time. That was 10 years ago, and it’s still going, I hesitate to say strong, but it’s still going!”

Football cartoons have traditionally centred on the heroes – a la Roy Race – or the game’s minutiae, such as the You Are the Ref column which ran in various publications from the late fifties.

Squires’ uniquely wry, sardonic view has taken some of the most famous names around to task – but he says there has been minimal negative feedback despite the egos involved.

“Luckily I haven’t had anything from anyone featured in the cartoons but I know if I write about certain clubs or subjects that I’ll get anonymous emails, which kind of make me laugh,” he said.

“Considering the job is to make jokes about people’s football teams, and folk don’t always have a sense of humour about that sort of thing, it is generally quite good, and especially clubs like Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea. It’s more the ones who have, shall we say, come into money more recently.

“I consider myself so lucky to get a page every week, and not many cartoonists in any other field can really guarantee that, especially with sport, which isn’t treated – rightly so – as some of the weightier subjects.

“I’m sure I’ll eventually be replaced by AI but I have a specific way of writing and drawing and I have worked hard at it now for many years. But if you have the right tools now it doesn’t matter if you can’t draw you can ask for a picture of Pep Guardiola scratching his head and hey presto!

“Maybe my days are numbers, but I’ll keep fighting for the humans.”

Squires jots down his ideas for the weekly column on Sunday and then spends two days writing and drawing the contents, hoping no big footballing stories break in the meantime.

Living in Australia means he is slightly removed from the Premier League hullabaloo but he knows exactly when a big story breaks.

“I am literally in a different time zone, so every time any big happens you can guarantee I wake up with a load of text messages,” he said. “The best one was last week when Ian Holloway – and I am a Swindon Town fan – had claimed the training ground might have been cursed and was talking about ghosts and getting his wife to bring in a sprig of sage. I was getting messages from people I haven’t heard from in 15-20 years.

“It would be nice if we were in the headlines for some sort of achievement other than this but I wondered whether the moment had passed, then when Manchester City’s form continued it got me thinking about whether there is something about the paranormal I could work in. I was able to combine the two and claw it back to Swindon, and The Guardian usually allow me to mention them once or twice a season, to pacify me.”

Though the usual mood of his cartoons is light, Squires takes most pride from some of the weightier themes, which include loving tributes to some of football’s stars who have passed away.

“There are certainly some subjects that are trickier to write about than others,” he said. “I do remember having to redraw an entire cartoon around the time of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, and the effect it was having on Chelsea. You can probably read between the lines on that but it was a legal tightrope. Even cartoonists can’t afford legal action against Oligarchs.

“I try and find a funny line if there is one to be found, use humour to tackle to subjects.

“The tributes are the ones I am most stressed about getting right and they are the ones that get the most reaction.

“But one of the ones people talk about most to me is when Arsene Wenger left Arsenal and I had an idea that he’d been institutionalised and struggling to cope in the outside work, so I parodied the Shawshank Redemption. In the end he’s reunited with Gunnersaurus on a beach in Mexico.”

Chaos in the Box charts a period of footballing history which included a global pandemic, the rise of foreign ownership in football, a mooted European Super League plus global political changes that have also spilled over into the sporting world.

One of his cartoons in the book also tackles the plight of Wanderers and Bury – both at the time stood on the edge of a financial abyss – and the EFL’s rather haphazard owners and directors’ test which was in place at the time.

“It’s so interesting looking back at the six years, we move on so quickly, but so much mad stuff happened,” he said. “People aren’t keen to dwell on the coronavirus, it was such a mad period of human history, but football carried on.

“They were scary times and, selfishly, it didn’t change my lifestyle because I worked in a small room then, and I do now.

“I hope if I do another collection in six years that it all went smoothly, that whole fascism thing all went away, and Twitter came back better than ever.”

Chaos in the Box: Chronicles from Modern Football is available for £14.99 from all good bookshops from December 5, and £7.99 for ebook.