Rome fell in a day
A couple of thoughts about the collapse of the so-called European Super League.
First, it’s impossible to overstress how badly thought-out the entire enterprise was. The twelve clubs who signed up to create the Super League did nothing to get any of their constituencies on board. They didn’t even inform their managers and players. The one refrain from the managers interviewed about this – the managers who had to go out and face the press and public while the people who made the decisions were hiding in their penthouse apartments – was that they didn’t know anything more than the journalists: They found out at the same time the journalists found out. Moreover, the massive loan these executives had secured from J.P. Morgan was essentially an advance on television revenues, and they hadn’t made or even attempted to make a TV deal. If no TV deal had been forthcoming, or an unexpectedly poor one, then all of those clubs would have been on the hook for paying back a loan that at least some of them simply do not have the resources to pay back. It was a pyramid scheme, and a badly designed one at that.
The second point is this: The chief makers of this fiasco are extremely unlikely to resign or be fired. (Ed Woodward is out, but he was on his way out anyway — I don’t think he would’ve been fired over just this, because Manchester United has been the least apologetic of any of the English clubs — and only Arsenal issued a straightforward apology that acknowledged the damage done.) There’s no way Florentino Pérez should still have a job, but I cannot imagine any circumstances in which he will get what he deserves; nor, obviously, can he. Andrea Agnelli remains confident in his excellent judgment and enjoys mocking his critics, despite being an absolute clown. And they can be so serene because they quite obviously do not give a rat’s ass about the clubs they work for or the game their teams play. They don’t care! It doesn’t matter to them! If, as a result of the stupidities of Agnelli and Pérez, those two great old clubs Juventus and Real Madrid had to close up shop, shut down altogether, do you think either Agnelli or Pérez would acknowledge any responsibility — or even lose five minutes’ sleep over the catastrophe? Of course not. It’s unthinkable. Somehow or another they would get a golden parachute and that would be just fine with them. Whatever wrath was directed their way by the press would mean absolutely nothing to them. This is what we mean by the word “shameless”: people cannot be shamed when they’re permanently content with their own behavior and care not a whit about the views of their fellow human beings.
It’s the fans who care, the fans who love the game and love their clubs, and they are the ones who are hurt by all this — and by the manifold corruptions that led up to it and that remain in place. And, as the Agnellis and Pérezes of the world know, this means that the fans will come back. The fans actually have the power to force change: if they were to stop attending the games — once attendance becomes possible again — if they were to boycott the clubs’ merchandise, if they were to boycott the television sponsors, they could make something happen. But we all know it won’t play out that way. People don’t just love their teams; in a cruelly mechanical surveillance-capitalism world they need the emotional hit that comes from investment in the successes or failures of their club. It’s surely asking too much of them to demand that they take meaningful collective action. And that’s why at the end of all this Agnelli and Pérez, or in any case people very much like them, will still be running the big clubs. They have the freedom that comes from not caring about anything but their own bank accounts.
updates on this and that
In the wake of the jury’s determination that Derek Chauvin is guilty of the murder of George Floyd, I’ll just say that I stand firmly by what I wrote last August.
I wish to align myself wholly with what Tish Harrison Warren says here about the “whole life movement.” Preach it, sister, I’m here for it all.
In the wake of what appears to be the imminent collapse of the European Stupid League, I will just say that the most accurate and concise summary comes from Manchester City defender Aymeric Laporte:
— Aymeric Laporte (@Laporte)
And in other positive news, I have added to my repertoire of media ecology essays with this entry at the Hog Blog on Substack (and other new platforms) as Distributism for writers and artists.
Welcome back, friend.
transnational capitalism in boots
Perhaps once all this has shaken out, once the imminent threat of a breakaway European super league has been resolved one way or the other, football will find the time for a little reflection.
How we reached this point. How the game’s elite clubs managed to engineer a scenario in which a hostile takeover came to feel inevitable, even irresistible. How the world’s most popular sport managed to hand over so much of its power and wealth and influence to people who despise it.
Because make no mistake: this is an idea that could only have been devised by someone who truly hates football to its bones. Who hates football so much that they want to prune it, gut it, dismember it, from the grassroots game to the World Cup. Who finds the very idea of competitive sport offensive, an unhealthy distraction from the main objective, which in a way has always been capitalism’s main objective.
Several thoughts:
- I agree fervently with Liew.
- I don’t think the super league will come to pass, because I don’t think the big clubs want one. I think this is a shakedown to squeeze everyone else in soccer for more money.
- I wish the national associations would call their bluff and just say “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” But I don’t think they will: those big clubs bring in a lot of revenue for everyone else. (But they don’t want any of their money to go anywhere else — thus the shakedown, and thus my plea for letting them go. Giving in to their demands would mean virtually eliminating their value to the rest of soccer.)
- If the super league does come to pass, I won’t watch it. Seeing those clubs play in the late stages of the Champions League is fun; seeing them play every week, not so much. Besides, Arsenal would finish at the bottom of the league every single year, and Stan Kroenke would be just fine with that — in fact, would prefer it. He’d get the cash without having to invest in the quality of his side. (In other words, he’d simply extend his current ownership strategy.)
- The domestic leagues without the big clubs would still be Very Big Businesses, but they wouldn’t be empowering the kind of transnats that Kim Stanley Robinson writes about.
- I could then settle in firmly as a Fulham supporter — and they need the support. Tough day for Scott Parker and the lads today.
UPDATE 4.19: A big angry Yes to this from James McNicholas: "They stand to benefit more than most from the formation of a Super League. Right now they are not, on merit, a Champions League club. Their team is not good enough, and their executive structure and ownership are ultimately responsible for that underachievement. Admittance to this Super League would be a Get Out Of Jail Free card for a badly-run club, a rope ladder to rescue Arsenal from mediocrity.”
SECOND UPDATE: I am too sick (reaction to my second vaccination, which: Yay!) to write coherently, I see, so I’ll just tell everyone to read this helpful overview by Rory Smith. It’s obvious that my point number 2 above was wrong wrong wrong. I hope and trust that the domestic leagues will boot out the ESL, or rather €$£, clubs because otherwise it’s all too easy to imagine a situation in which Arsenal, putting all of its entertainment energies into the €$£, cheerfully allows itself to be relegated to the Championship.
OH HECK ONE MORE: An interesting and insightful essay by David Baddiel, except for one thing: he writes, "Americans have never quite taken to football, because it is a sport that requires a certain tolerance of boredom. As far as sport goes, Americans just want all the top action, all of the time” — a claim to be made only by someone who has never watched a game of American football, in which three-and-a-half hours of TV contains, on average, eleven minutes of action.
FINAL UPDATE (4.20): What we have here is an instance of a universal rule: Phenomenally rich people will do anything they possibly can to become still more phenomenally rich. Their plans can be thwarted in one of two ways: (1) by collective action that makes it abundantly clear to them that they will not get richer by acting as they plan, or (2) by legislating against them. I fear people have been rendered too passive by social media to make collective action possible, which would mean either we’ll have (2) or the super-rich will get their super-league … but the anger at this move is shockingly strong and widespread.
— Héctor Bellerín (@HectorBellerin)
The achievement of coherence is itself ambiguous. Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused.
— Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992)
We planted this Lindheimer’s beeblossom last year, and we’re delighted that it survived our polar vortex just fine and is looking great – because never has a flower been better named. The bees adore it. And all of us need to take care of our bees.
"the church itself does not believe"
This by Russell Moore is incisive — devastatingly so:
Where a “de-churched” (to use an anachronistic term) “ex-vangelical” (to use another) in the early 1920s was likely to have walked away due to the fact that she found the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection to be outdated and superstitious or because he found moral libertinism to be more attractive than the “outmoded” strict moral code of his past or because she wanted to escape the stifling bonds of a home church for an autonomous individualism, now we see a markedly different — and jarring — model of a disillusioned evangelical. We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches. The presenting issue in this secularization is not scientism and hedonism but disillusionment and cynicism.
Thousands upon thousands of young people are leaving evangelicalism because they have been told all their lives that evangelicals hold up Jesus as Lord and the Bible as God’s Word — and have seen all their lives that many evangelical leaders ignore Jesus and ignore Scripture whenever those witnesses conflict with the leaders’ preferred cultural politics. "And what if people don’t leave the church because they disapprove of Jesus, but because they’ve read the Bible and have come to the conclusion that the church itself would disapprove of Jesus? That’s a crisis.”
a bit of pedagogy
College students are busy, so they practice triage: they decide (a) what must be done now, (b) what can wait until later, and (c) what need not be done at all. If a professor tells students to do something but offers no reward for doing it and no punishment for failing to do it, then it will inevitably go directly into category (c).
This is why I give reading quizzes — a common enough practice. But over the years I have come to build my entire classroom practice around those reading quizzes. My method looks like this:
- We begin class with a quiz; I allow roughly one minute per question.
- Then we go over the quiz question by question — and everything else stems from this. Students volunteer answers, which is helpful to me not least because sometimes they have given an accurate answer that I did not anticipate. I also discover which questions they found easy and which they found difficult.
- After the correct answer is noted, I’ll sometimes ask “Why does that matter?” That is: Why is this a sufficiently important detail for me to put it on the quiz? This opens up the conversation, and sometimes we can spend ten or fifteen minutes unpacking the significance of just one question.
- In other cases I will simply unpack the significance myself, asking them to turn in their book to passages that reinforce or expand on the point the question explores.
- When we’re done the students grade their own quizzes, record their grades so they can retrieve them later (and always know how they’re doing), and turn the quizzes in to me.
Books I teach tend to look like this:
And there are many notes on the inside. I’m thinking that when I retire I should bundle a much-taught book with its annotated quizzes and sell the bundle as my own version of an NFT.