Parenting & Family Quote by Ian St. John

It lands like a pub confession with teeth: a former teammate watching a club legend shrink under the weight of other people talking. Ian St. John isn’t doing therapy-speak; he’s doing football-speak, where “paranoid” is a moral charge. The target (unspoken but obvious in context) isn’t just thin-skinned, he’s distracted from the one duty the culture still treats as sacred: “worry about the team.”

The line works because it’s really about status and control. Criticism is the background noise of English football, and St. John frames obsession with it as a kind of vanity - or worse, a leadership failure. “Forget what people are saying” is the older code: results talk, managers don’t. When that code breaks, everything that looks petty starts to look political.

Then comes the nastiest detail: “He got Phil Thompson... to have a go at me.” That’s not merely interpersonal drama; it’s a portrait of a hierarchy weaponized. Pulling in a younger club figure to confront an elder is how you launder an argument into an institution: you turn disagreement into disloyalty. St. John’s aside - “a kid coming through when I was a Liverpool player” - is a reminder of pecking order, and a quiet accusation that the manager is rewriting it for self-protection.

“So now I don’t talk to him” is the coldest ending available. No grand feud, no reconciliation arc - just severed contact. In football culture, that’s not a sulk; it’s a verdict.