The Long Game – Success

In The Ball is Round, David Goldblatt discussed the motivations of those who ran British clubs around the turn of the 20^th century, as football professionalised:

There were probably some indirect benefits for directors who were in the drink or hotel business, supplying clubs and their fans. Brewers on the board of Manchester City voted against a ground move in 1903 fearing that they would lose their local captive drinking audience. This was an exception rather than the rule. There were unquestionably enthusiasts who loved playing, watching, and organizing. But the most plausible return on these investments was the immense local kudos and status that would inevitably arise from occupying such a hallowed position in a hallowed institution. This would be enough for many.

As the game grew in popularity, “local kudos” frequently turned into power. In some places this power was regional, in other places national, and in some places it happened more subtly than in others, but variations on stories like this would eventually appear almost everywhere[1]. Perhaps the best known example of this power being exploited on a national level (and with a notable lack of subtlety) was Italy. The families who came to own the major Italian teams all had significant ties to local industries which gave them power bases that allowed them over the decades to exert influence over other aspects of society. Tobias Jones, writing in The Dark Heart of Italy in 2003, explained one aspect of this:

In Italy there is no fourth estate: newspapers, with a few exceptions, are divided among the oligarchies. (…) Besides owning Juventus, the Agnelli group owns one quarter of all national and provincial newspapers (and, more importantly, controls 13% of all advertising revenue in the country). Berlusconi, besides AC Milan, owns the Mondadori publishing house and therefore the copyright on a quarter of all Italian books. Il Giornale, a national newspaper, is his (or, technically, his brother’s, which keeps it at least in the family), as are three out of the seven national television channels. He, too, has the financial lever of Publitalia, an advertising company without whose revenue many programmes and publications would abruptly collapse (Berlusconi controls roughly 60% of all television advertising sales).

The power that came from owning major Italian football clubs in the 20^th century was not insignificant, but it had limitations. For one thing, it generally stopped at the border. When Berlusconi was Italian Prime Minister, Milan’s recent form might have provided material for small talk between him and other world leaders, but when it came to actual negotiations it was not a factor for the politicians he was talking to, nor their countries, nor the citizens they governed.

These clubs were also more than just playthings of their owners. Fans and owners had a stake in their clubs as institutions representing the communities from which they came. Silvio Berlusconi might have bought Milan as part of a wider portfolio of influence, but he was also a native of the city, a fan of the club and, by many accounts, a better player than the man he hired to coach Milan to greatness, Arrigo Sacchi. The Agnelli were from Turin, the Viola and Sensi families from Rome, the Di Laurentiis clan from Naples, and so on.

Ownership of these clubs gave the Italian oligarchies a form of soft power that could be used in other spheres of Italian life, but this was ultimately an extension of the same local kudos of British club owners at the turn of the 20^th century, even when they veered into behaviour that would have made Manchester City’s brewers blanch. Dino Viola already had the power to get elected senator without being president of Roma. When he had Michel Vautrot bribed before the 1984 European Cup semi-final against Dundee, he was not considering what reaching the final and winning could do for his political career. He just wanted to win. That, to him, was success.

In the decade following Roman Abramovich’s takeover of Chelsea, investment in football changed beyond all recognition, giving rise to a cadre of teams now commonly known as the superclubs. These clubs ceased to be institutions that represented the local, and local kudos ceased to be a primary concern for the people who own them. In a globalised world, that was perhaps inevitable. What was not was that success for them would cease to have much to do with football at all.

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Perhaps the most idiosyncratic example is RB Leipzig, who exist almost exclusively as a marketing program for Red Bull. The means are brutal, but undoubtedly effective. Players are bought very young and very cheap, and encouraged to play in a way that aligns with the company image (high energy, fun, entertaining, and so on). The players are sold for a significant profit once their transfer value has been established but before their salaries are anywhere near the market rate for their abilities. Winning trophies regularly would require retaining these players for longer and paying them a lot more, but that is not the aim. All they have to do is get the Red Bull logo in front of the largest possible audience, which requires qualifying for the Champions League.

Similar, albeit more common (especially among superclubs with US ownership), is the football-club-as-content-creation-studio model, where the focus is on brand partnerships and marketability. Manchester United are an extreme version of this, with the exploitation of their commercial arm being arguably the only thing that matters, itself a product of the eye-watering debt incurred during the takeover by the Glazer family. Liverpool, where everything is set up in such a way that maximises their ability to win football matches seem to be their polar opposites. Yet joining the European Super League underscored how Liverpool is part of a wider entity whose priority remains profit[2].

The other main ownership type for the superclubs comes from individual and state actors for whom funding is essentially unlimited. For these clubs, success is a concept that cannot be measured on a balance sheet. Roman Abramovich spent an absolute fortune on Chelsea, and in the first few years of his tenure the club was seen by others as basically a toy for a rich man. By the early 2010s it was clear that a policy of sorts was being developed, with Chelsea signing and then loaning out young players in vast numbers, many among the top talents in Europe.

A reasonable case might be made that Chelsea had a long-term plan in place to perfect their own scouting and player development operations: buy as many highly rated young players as possible, then draw as much information as you can about them, especially qualitative data of a sort that would only be available to the club those players were contracted to. The operation would be self-financing through sales, and would eventually allow them to identify which attributes, characteristics, and other factors are key to developing world class players reliably. Not capitalising on the potential of Kevin de Bruyne and Mohamed Salah early on would be a small price to pay if in ten years’ time they were able to get that call right 9 times out of ten.[3] The recent successes of academy graduates at Chelsea (Mount) and elsewhere (Rice) might also fit this theory.

Then again, the revelation that Abramovich was involved in third party ownership of other players in various forms suggests that this was just as likely to be purely a business move. Either a shady investment, albeit one seeking a profit like any other, or perhaps something murkier, a way to move assets from one business unit to another, or more likely from one jurisdiction (Russia) to another (Cyprus or the UK). Even if a serious effort was being made at player development, there is no doubt that what happened on the pitch was not the primary concern. As James Montague explained in The Billionaire’s Club, oligarchs from the former Soviet Union were buying strategic visibility in order to make it harder for them to be killed or inconvenienced by political or financial forces.

Theirs is a game that might last at most two generations. Their children will be educated internationally, move into other businesses, and their family assets will eventually no longer be tied to the countries in which their wealth was earned (or pillaged, depending on your point of view). But what then? Chelsea had existed for 98 years before being bought by Abramovich. His children will need the club far less than he did. The same might eventually be said for the custodians of PSG, Manchester City, and Newcastle. As with the oligarchs, the acquisition of these clubs was for the purpose of buying visibility as insurance. The only difference is the size of the goal and the time scale involved.

The heads of the petro-states have, for all their faults, at least recognised that the long-term existence of their nations rests on diversifying their economies, something that requires massive brand awareness campaigns to succeed. Initial methods were often built around tourism (all of them founded global airlines, essentially gigantic billboards in the sky), which cost billions and had fairly limited reach. Investing in European football was expensive by football standards, but incredibly cheap and effective compared to other forms of advertising given the breadth and depth of the audience for European football, especially given that they were facing an economic existential threat within 30 years.

It is important to stress that in each instance, given their ultimate aims, the actions of these owners are logical. Manchester United might not win Premier League titles any more but they still meet their interest payments, the Glazer family still gets its dividend, and should they one day choose to sell United they will make an astronomical profit. The actions taken by the owners are logical even when the football organisation is run badly (like United), or even staggeringly badly.

PSG sits atop a goldmine of talent which has perhaps three or four equivalents anywhere on earth[4], one which the club has shown no ability whatsoever to exploit. The club is run with almost no strategy other than chasing celebrity. This might be a headache for Nasser Al-Khelaifi, but this is not a headache for Sheikh Tamim, the Emir of Qatar. The acquisition of PSG and other investments in France that were related to the takeover (such as the creation of BeInSports) arguably made winning and keeping the right to host the 2022 World Cup possible, and definitely helped create an environment in which Qatar can do business more easily with a European power that holds significant sway in the EU and has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

At the cost of a few billion Euros and a slight uptick in scrutiny into labour practices in Qatar (which few people care about enough to affect any change), Qatar has bought a level of influence that no other state of its size can match. PSG the team are run less effectively than any club on Earth given the resources at their disposal, and it does not matter at all in the wider scheme of things. The overall strategy, for Qatar, has worked. The same is broadly true for Abu Dhabi with Manchester City, and will probably come to pass for Saudi Arabia with Newcastle United.

What is not logical, at least to me, is the reaction of the fans of those teams. The colours and names remain the same, the songs and history too, but these institutions no longer represent them nor the area they come from. They serve, exclusively, the interests of the masters. So why do the fans go to such lengths to continue to defend these teams and the people who own them?

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The world of the fan is one where, in emotional terms, the sunk cost fallacy does not exist. Nick Hornby explained it most succinctly: for fans, misery was currency, earned in the lean years and spent when their team triumphed. The longer the drought and the more unlikely the triumph, the greater the thrill. For those who waited for decades, it created an unmatchable high.

The misery of fans that Hornby described had a variety of sources. At one end of the spectrum was Neil Kaas, the hopelessly devoted Luton Town fan despairing at a team that refused to win. At the other end you had Hornby’s Arsenal at least making it to Wembley, but losing there so often that the ground became, for him, “a giant room 101”. Losing in the first round or the final did little to change how bad it felt to lose and so, in a sense, the quality of football on display at any given time was fairly unimportant, because what mattered was drama multiplied by emotion and time.

Good football can create drama, but in the superclub era good football is increasingly becoming antithetical to drama. The disquiet provoked by the quantity of extreme outcomes like Manchester City eviscerating Watford in the 2019 FA Cup final, or Bayern Munich effortlessly strolling to title after Bundesliga title, was a product of this incongruity. More significant was the reaction of some fans after those triumphs. What joy they might have felt was insignificant compared to their anger that their team and their triumph were not being celebrated to the extent that they should have been by the press.

Fans thinking journalists were biased against their teams and responding with anger is not new, but the gap between the expectations of the fans and the output of the writers is now a chasm, and the recrimination has increased accordingly. This is no longer about a City fan – who wanted to read a report that said that his team were better – being annoyed by a writer who might be a Watford fan saying City did not deserve to win. This is about the rage that City fan feels because the writer says that City being possibly the best team on earth and cutting Watford to ribbons is an existential threat to the sport itself. Thus, the misery now comes just as readily from winning as it ever did from losing, and it is hard not to notice that what fans now want from journalists is exactly the same as what the owners want from the world at large: brand loyalty.

Some fans clearly feel comfortable to act as cheerleaders for these owners. It was noticeable how many Newcastle fan accounts on twitter suddenly had Saudi Arabian flags in their names and bios in the weeks before the collapse of the original PIF bid, and subsequent to the completed takeover 18 months later. What proportion of these were genuine accounts as opposed to sockpuppets is another question entirely, but certainly there are enough genuine accounts participating in this behaviour – either for Newcastle, or equivalent discussions around Manchester City and Abu Dhabi, and PSG and Qatar – to know that this phenomenon is not uncommon.

It is impossible to say whether this was part of the original calculation of clubs like Manchester City and PSG, but there can be little doubt that when PIF made the decision to buy Newcastle United they were counting on fans volunteering their services as propaganda operatives for the Saudi state. No other acquisition in any other sphere of business or culture would result in ordinary people in the UK going online and defending the actions of Mohammed Bin Salman to anyone who would dare criticise him. The Saudi state needed puppets, and for reasons only they would be able to explain, many Newcastle fans were all too eager to attach themselves to the strings on offer. For free.

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It is natural that institutions evolve, either because need they exist to serve changes, or because different people come in to run them. But just because change is inevitable does not relieve us of the responsibility of examining the direction of change, nor asking who benefits from those changes.

In the superclub era it almost feels as if reporting on the matches these teams play is to report on the wrong thing, which goes some way to explaining why so many reporters no longer seem to do so. To report accurately on Barcelona requires a background as a finance correspondent. The PSG dressing room is now just the set of a soap opera whose main plotline revolves around who Kylian Kardashian is or is not talking to. If you insist on reading about tactics there are subversive concept pieces on the dysfunction at Manchester United. And any time someone dares to suggest that all of the above is not something that augers well for the future of football, seemingly the entirety of twitter lines up to scream expletives at them.

This is why I barely watch any men’s football any more – because the real story is elsewhere. Why report on the game when you could be investigating the ever-increasing rage of the fans? Or the progress of the owners in achieving their ultimate aims? Or the fact that, just maybe, there exists a relationship between the two?

For most of the history of football, fans invested their emotions, were paid back in misery, and on rare occasions were able to exchange that misery for the purest form of joy it is possible to imagine.

Fans of large, successful teams had an expectation of success, and a certain impatience which came with that, but winning the league still meant something, and winning a European Cup was a once in a generation event. Uli Hesse wrote an entire chapter in Tor about the dominance of Bayern in the 80s, and the damage those years did to the way fans interacted with football in Germany. But Bayern were beaten to the title four times that decade. Their longest streak was three titles. And the middle of those three was arguably the greatest title race in Bundesliga history.

Fans of teams like Werder Bremen, the team who came second that year, developed a cynicism that came from seeing Bayern dominate through – in their view – a combination of power and luck. But this cynicism did not destroy their hope that small teams like theirs could win too. Two years after losing the 1986 title in heart-breaking fashion, Werder finally won their second national title. You can find stories like this elsewhere occurring well into the 2000s, and fans of my generation remember this, and remember the names: Deportivo, Auxerre, Lens, Boavista, Kaiserslautern.

Then came the superclubs. Their owners had disparate motives, but what united them were two things. The first was the ability to invest enough money to make it impossible for everyone else to compete with them (over time, this ability became a need, albeit one they were able to meet). The second was that the ultimate aim had at best a tangential relationship to football as a game.

The fans’ emotional investment in their clubs might be no different than it was before, but the effect is now toxic. For the have-nots, the vague possibility of joy that made swapping emotional involvement for misery worthwhile has evaporated, leaving little pleasure behind. For fans of the superclubs, it might actually be worse: the disappointment they once felt when they lost became anger once they realised not everyone loved them even when they won everything. And because of the inequalities of the superclub era, their fans now expect their teams to play brilliantly in and win every match they play, win every competition they enter, and be universally adored in so doing, the way historically great teams of the past were. Should any link in that chain fail, the response is rage.

Fans of the club that succeeds at winning it all, even if they play the best football any of us will ever see, will not get a happy ending. They will still want to read and hear that the glory of following the best team in the world is theirs. This they will not get, because the only question still worth asking is whether, for the people who really matter, the ones who pull the strings, winning football matches and trophies even counts as success.

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[1] And I do mean everywhere. The section on the oligarchs of Thailand in James Montague’s The Bilionaire’s Club is a more detailed case study.

[2] In some ways FSG are so far ahead of the curve that they have pre-empted market trends by years, both on and off the pitch. Being: Liverpool was conceived and aired back when Netflix was primarily a DVD rental business. Had Liverpoool waited ten years they could have made a lot more money from the venture.

[3] Of course this is a method that chewed up and spat out dozens of players. Some still reached the very top of the world game: Courtois, de Bruyne, Salah, and Lukaku, although with the latter especially it took far longer than it should have. Very few reached the rung below that: Thorgan Hazard being probably the only example. It would not be hard to make an 11 of players who should have been able to have vastly more successful careers than those they ended up having.

[4] Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and arguably London are the only cities that come close. And Paris has a legitimate claim to come top of this list.

The Long Game – Trust

As much fun as Rugby Union can be, it can be a difficult sport to love. Growing up in England means I associate it with xenophobia, bullying, and the cheerful and casual destruction of other people’s property. On the pitch, the design of the field exposes mismatches more brutally than any other team sport.  In football, a weak team can overturn a palpably stronger one with good organisation and effective counter attacks. In rugby, if one team is significantly better than the other they will utterly crush their opponents because the scoring area is the entire width of the playing area, not a constantly guarded rectangle of less than 18m². However there is one aspect of rugby as it is played on the field that makes it an extremely useful tool for understanding aspects of football as both a sport and as a cultural institution. Whether you are watching the best in the world or a school team, rugby is defined by trust.

In an attacking sense, the aim of the game is to break the opponents’ line, but a single player will only score from a line break if they are either very close to the try line or the quickest player on the pitch. Most of the time a line break will only lead to a try if support is given. When the All Blacks play this looks effortless, and a try seems to be the natural consequence. Watch a side like Italy, however, and you notice that similar breaks do not end the same way. The player might be looking to offload the ball, but will invariably end up kicking on or taking the ball into contact because he has no passing option.

Why is that support not there? In football (to which I promise to return) we call this anticipation, but in rugby it is not. The support is not there because the players do not have the trust required to think in such an attacking way. Firstly, they are not sure that the player who made the break will receive a clean pass, nor whether that pass will even be caught. They worry their teammate might knock on or get stripped in the tackle. The positions they adopt when running at the line are defensive, even when they are in possession. This mindset is infectious in the worst possible sense, so even when a player does offer support to a break, there is a chance that the player in possession will not be looking for them.

Once you start to interact with rugby through the prism of trust, you start seeing it absolutely everywhere[1]. Football is as totally dependent on trust as rugby, even if it is not as obvious, and this applies both on the pitch and off it. Clubs whose members (playing and non-playing) trust each other will win, while those that do not will lose. But saying “you have to trust each other” is so facile as to be pointless. What is worth exploring is where that trust comes from, how it develops, and what effect it can have both within football as well as in society at large.

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Trust is relevant to sport because it is relevant to the world around us. It is universally taken for granted when present, but when it fails the results are inescapable, ranging from the annoying to the terrifying. Consider a day in your life through the prism of trust. Can you drink the water? Will the food you eat for breakfast poison you if it is not boiled first? Do you carry enough money to bribe an official who is not sure they will get paid this month and knows they will get away with making your life complicated? Does your boss to act in an ethical way? Does that boss pay you in full, and on time? Do the shops have the things you need to buy? Are the prices roughly the same as they were last week? Feel free to add to this list with the minutiae of your daily life.

Now consider the mechanics of a football game the same way. When the centre back is on the ball, watch what the midfielders and forwards on his own team do – do they take up conservative, defensive positions? Or are they aggressive in their positioning and trust the man on the ball to find them in space higher up the pitch? When a pass is made, do not look at the passer or the man receiving the ball, look at the other teammates around the receiver. Are they moving aggressively or cautiously? Are they expecting that player to need immediate close support, or do they trust them to control, hold and release the ball again accurately?

From this perspective, off the ball movement is less a measure of a player’s ability to read the game, and more a gauge of the level of trust they have in specific teammates, and of the level of trust within the team as a whole. Looking at football in this way also provokes a rather intriguing chicken-or-egg question about trust with regards to the other pillars upon which football is built. Technique, decision making, tactics and fitness matter, but does any one of them come before trust?

One can attempt an answer by examining instances where trust does not develop, and the England men’s national team is an interesting case study. The match against Iceland in 2016 was perhaps the apotheosis of their biannual catastrophic exit from a major tournament, and the usual arguments were trotted out: one side blamed the players’ lack of desire or loyalty to the shirt, with the counter argument being that their footballing educations failed to equip them with proper technique and game intelligence.

Neither point stands up to scrutiny. One need only look at the reactions of the players upon hearing the final whistle (Jack Wilshire’s thousand yard stare in particular) to know that this mattered. One need only look at some of England’s play in the run up to the tournament, or in the first 70 minutes of their match against Russia, or the level the players are able to maintain at their clubs on a regular basis, to see that these are not bad players. But it seems their trust in one another is not sufficient to withstand playing under pressure.

People watching the game might well laugh at them and call them incompetent, but imagine yourself working in an organisation in which there is no attempt at coordination, with everyone fighting their own corner in a desperate attempt to avoid criticism or the sack. It must be utterly terrifying, however trivial the work itself might seem to an outsider. Could you honestly do your job to the best of your ability in such circumstances?

How to resolve this in England’s case is a question that no coach has been able to answer in twenty years[2], and the way in which each defeat saps at the belief in ever being able to overcome it means that only a radical new idea will ever work. As I have previously argued, it will ultimately come down to the will of those involved to try it and then persevere. History would suggest that that idea has to come from either within (the players themselves) or without (the manager).

As an example of the former, one could look at the Dutch and the propensity of their players to talk endlessly about the game. The football that the first great generation of Dutch players produced was more systematised than any that had preceded it, and was more based on collective understanding and mutual trust than any other. Endlessly swapping positions and executing a ludicrously high offside line could not have been achieved without it, which itself stemmed from their understanding of what it was they were trying to achieve. This idea of trust being derived from collective action and understanding would be instantly recognisable to social scientists. As Robert Putnam wrote in his seminal essay Bowling Alone, “networks of interaction probably broaden the participants’ sense of self, developing the ‘I’ into the ‘we,’ or (in the language of rational-choice theorists) enhancing the participants’ ‘taste’ for collective benefits”.

Of course, as has also been pointed out, this same predilection for discussion frequently leads to bitter personality clashes. One of the many paradoxes that make team sports so captivating is the dichotomy between the need for organisation, cooperation and teamwork, and the need for leadership and individual brilliance. The presence of trust at one moment does not mean it will not evaporate if the delicate balance between these two elements is upset[3]. I would urge anyone who doubts this to read the chapter on East German football in Uli Hesse’s Tor.

The most common source of playing philosophies, however, is from a manager or coach. Given how much time has passed since Arsène Wenger’s arrival in England, it is worth reiterating just how leftfield his appointment was at the time, and how absurd his ideas seemed to the players, fans, and media.  Yet before long Paul Merson was describing how Wenger had given his players “unbelievable belief”, a phrase that summed it up almost as well as Tony Adams’ goal to clinch the title at the end of Wenger’s first full season in charge. Despite his current reputation as the most intransigent of ideologues, this turnaround can be explained in large part by Wenger’s understanding of the psychology of players and his effort to meet them halfway, as Amy Lawrence explained in her piece in Christov Ruhn’s Le Foot:

… hardened British players responded to Wenger because he didn’t storm in and bombard them with orders. He listened, got to know everybody and built bridges across which to transport his ideas. The bonds he develops with his players tend to have more of the human touch than most of the working relationships found at football clubs. For example, when Arsenal reached the FA Cup final and the boys wanted to pop open champagne on the coach back to London, Wenger requested that they wait until they were back because Tony Adams, a recovering alcoholic, also deserved and enjoyable ride home.

In short, the manager came in with something new, the players were convinced to try, and the results were astonishing. But those results need not be so spectacular to demonstrate the role of trust.

The managerial merry-go-round regularly demonstrates this. These managers are fired almost as soon as they are hired, so they are not epoch-defining geniuses. But the short-term aims of the boards that do the firing and hiring, like avoiding relegation or qualifying for Europe, are often met. And even when they are not, the results almost always improve in the short term. The players buy into the ideas of the new manager, before either cynicism or empirical evidence of a lack of quality has entered the equation.

More leeway is given to some, due to the presence of a footballing equivalent of social capital. These could be managers with a very specific and positive reputation that precedes them, or legendary former players who are granted a level of respect that would take a manager decades to generate. Zinedine Zidane was probably not the first person to think that Cristiano Ronaldo could be an even more decisive player if he played less football, but he was just about the only person on the planet who was able to both make the argument and win, thanks to his status in footballing terms (he is seen as a living God by players of Ronaldo’s generation) and institutional terms (as a symbol of Real Madrid). David Squires’ point in the third panel here was very funny, but right on the money with regards to the idea of players – even the Ronaldos – setting ego aside and buying into the ideas of those around them, provided the ideas are coming from the ‘right’ people.

But who are the ‘right’ people? When it comes to the amount of trust accorded to someone at the outset, language is of vital importance, and it is here that the media has enormous influence in setting the terms under which the discussion is held. Obviously this applies to players and managers in a short term sense; a manager who is ridiculed in the press before having even set foot in the training complex is going to find their job much harder than it would or should have been. But more important is the way language the sports media uses reflect and, to an extent, direct, issues affecting society generally. The way we choose to describe people will come to define them much more than the personalities of the people themselves, because the latter is so much more complex than the former.

To give an example from football, there was a time in England when black players were only partially accepted as footballers. Ron Noades, then chairman of Crystal Palace, opined in 1991 that, “The black players at this club lend the side a lot of skill and flair, but you also need white players in there to balance things up and give the team some brains.”

Noades was pilloried, but at the time he was saying what a lot of people were privately thinking. Although variations on this view persist, it is nowhere near as prevalent as before. A black player can now captain England without comment, and in many countries, a black footballer is no longer a black footballer. He is merely a footballer. It has been argued that colour-blindness is not actually something that should be aimed for[4], but considering what has gone before it is not too hard to advance the case for this constituting an improvement.

Yet structural racism is still prevalent in other parts of English football; a black manager is still a black manager because some combination of players, supporters and boards of directors still appear to have great difficulty entrusting that particular job to someone who has a different skin colour to someone who normally does that job. Until it becomes as normal to see a non-white face in the dugout (or in the directors’ box) as it is on the pitch, that lack of trust will be evident in the fact that their race will be mentioned at all. The way the media choose their language to reflect that, crying tokenism or lauding progress, will play a major role in deciding future outcomes for those that follow in their wake.

The example above involved race, but it could just as easily have been about gender or sexuality. Football is distinct from women’s football, and, as far as the English language goes, a footballer is a man, unless otherwise stated. A female footballer is a female footballer seemingly regardless of sexual orientation, but a gay male player will have the words “gay footballer” or “out footballer” hung around his neck for the entirety of his career. The fact that it should not matter (enough elite sportsmen have come out after retiring for us to know that sexual orientation and ability have nothing to link them) has not yet changed the language we still use to describe it.

Hopefully the world of football will be able to wake up and notice the increasing importance attached to the words we use to describe people, and include those people in a way that other major institutions have started to.

*             *             *

We seem to be entering an age in which the social contract between populace and government is eroding to breaking point, and the disillusion felt with the institutions attempting reform is such that perhaps none could ever succeed. Football clubs are tiny, can reinvent themselves in months, and can measure the success of their revolutions on a weekly updated league table. Societies are vast, lumbering behemoths, whose values take decades to evolve, and whose improvements can only be measured in ways that are so open to abuse as to be almost worthless. Nonetheless, football could still teach us something about trust and how we can harness it to make things better.

That trust is necessary at the outset to simply test ideas properly, before we even think about achieving their aims. That critiques or criticism should be prevented from turning into their toxic cousin, cynicism. That whatever trust is present will vanish if the balance between individuals and structures is lost. That once trust starts to disappear, it becomes exponentially harder to get back. That language matters when it comes to the trust we place in others, not just for telling us what is happening but to frame future debates.

Football can often act as a microcosm for the world at large, and the simplification behind such a notion does not alter basic tenets about what can be achieved when trust is permitted to develop, nor how underachievement and stagnation are the inevitable outcomes in situations where trust has either failed to take root, or been eroded.

Bobeto

[1] It is there in the running game as described above, but also when players offer quick support at rucks and in placement of the defensive line. If a centre has a prop inside him, the former will only be able to concentrate on the man he is supposed to be picking up if he trusts the latter to stop the outside back running at him. Do we trust our kicker to score from 40m on an angle or should we kick to touch? If we get a penalty in front of the posts do we trust the tight five to give us the ball from a scrum or should we eschew an unlikely 7 points for an easier 3?

[2] The teams of Robson, Venables, and Hoddle may have all lost, but none did so because they froze as subsequent teams have done.

[3] An interesting parallel in societal terms is the tension between Labour and Capital, the current imbalance between them having been cited as a major factor in the crises many capitalist democracies are struggling with. David Simon outlines this argument more eloquently than most.

[4] See this piece by Gary Younge – “In order to address a problem you must first acknowledge it. Most of those who run and recruit to British newspapers have failed to do that. They claim they are colour-blind. But blindness is a disability. If you cannot see race you will not see racism; nor will you notice that the majority of your staff is overwhelmingly white.”

The Long Game – Periodisation

Google “periodisation in football” and you will get a bunch of websites and articles about conditioning training, peaking at the right time, and a well-known book by football coach and pot-stirrer Raymond Verheijen. What you will not get, sadly, is a breakdown of the various ways you could compartmentalise the history of football, which is a shame. Like most sports, football is very proud of its history and is not afraid of using that history to defend itself when it feels threatened. For instance, when it is suggested (normally by nefarious Darth Vader wannabees) that the top European clubs break away to form a Super League of some sort, the stock responses refer to the long and illustrious histories of the leagues in which those clubs play, the equivalent of terrace chants slating clubs for having “no history”, and the question of whether or not you “know your history”.

The history of football matters for all sorts of reasons. For people like me, it is a window into the societies in which it is played. For football fans of a different bent, history is almost synonymous with trivia. I personally might not care who scored the winner of the 1947 FA Cup Final (Charlton’s Chris Duffy, before you look it up), but this kind of knowledge is the foundation for debates about which team was best or which player was best. There are many people for whom these things matter, and if you doubt it, I can offer baseball as an example. A lot of anger was generated when steroid allegations ripped through the sport in the 1990s and 2000s. But little of that anger was directed at the outcomes of the individual seasons affected. What fans hated above all else was the fact that their stats, the way in which fans compared their idols with those of their parents and grandparents, were now worthless. Cheating to win the league was criminal, but cheating the batting and pitching averages in the process was downright heretical. Fans were furious that the greed of a few had, in their eyes, destroyed over 100 years of carefully documented comparative history.

Regardless of how you interact with football’s history, in order to understand what happened and why it happened, you need to understand the context in which it was happening. Knowing “when” something happened does not merely concern the date and time, but also the period. History is divided into periods so that it can be studied at all. As I explained in the introduction to this series, history is too vast a subject to deal with in its entirety. To understand the whole we must first understand the constituent parts, and to study the constituent parts in any depth we need to identify what those parts are.

So what are the frames of reference when we seek to chop the history of football into more manageable chunks? The most obvious place to start would be the way it is played on the field. We can examine changes to the laws of the game and the tactical developments that sought to exploit those laws.

We can consider eras in football administration. This would be particularly important given the current spate of crises at FIFA, to which many ignorant British commentators are essentially advocating a return to Stanley Rous’ way of operating, ignoring the fact that the arrogance of that era was a major contributing factor to how we got into this mess in the first place. Dividing football into pre-Havelange and post-Havelange eras would also be a helpful way of understanding the increasing commodification of football.

We can partition football by the way it was watched. In a world in which football is increasingly beholden to the whims of TV contracts and sponsorship deals predicated on TV exposure, it is worth seeing what occurred during previous times of transition, from radio to TV, from black and white to colour, and from occasional matches to the smorgasbord of options open to us today. Each had consequences for football’s marketability and the lives and experiences of those living in football’s bubble.

We can track periods of geographic supremacy. Those who believe European club football will never be superseded by its Chinese or American cousins would do well to read about post-war European superstars lured by the fantastical salaries, bigger crowds and better facilities on offer in Buenos Aires or Bogota. After all, like art during the renaissance, football is wonderful, enchanting, awe-inspiring, and an extremely efficient way to find out who had the most money at any given time.

When several of these factors converge we can draw a line. Consider one particularly well-known example: the early 1990s. In England there exists an understandable backlash against the trend of discussing historical records “in the Premier League Era”. However it is important that, while reinforcing the point that football was not invented in 1992, we still appreciate what a useful boundary the early 1990s are. In less than half a decade a series of massive changes took place both on and off the pitch that redefined football in the Northern hemisphere. Among them:

– The break-up of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, leading to the creation of many new leagues and national teams, the latter contributing to the expansion of subsequent World Cups and European Championships.

– Other Eastern European leagues saw shifts in the balance of power both major and minor after the fall of communism – compare where league titles went in the 1980s with where they went in the 1990s. Russia and Poland provide the two most striking examples.

– Jimmy Hill’s 3-points-for-a-win rule, which had been used since the early eighties in England, was adopted in leagues worldwide. Regardless of the debate over the effects this did or did not have on the way football was played, it created a natural break point when comparing league seasons.

– The creation of a group stage in the latter stages of the European Cup in the 1991-92 season, and the competition’s rebranding as the Champions League the following year.

– In England there was the reconstruction of major stadia following the Taylor Report, the post-Italia’90 boom and the creation of the Premier League for the 1992-3 season.

– In playing terms, the early 1990s marked the end, or the beginning of the end, of the careers of a generation of superstars. It really is amazing just how many of the very best players to have played for the very best football nations were born between 1957 and 1964.

– The backpass rule was abolished in 1992, which had major repercussions, both on the way the game was played in general as well as on the careers of many important players.

– The early 1990s also saw the creation of professional leagues in Japan and the United States that, unlike their predecessors, were built to last. These two countries are now regular participants on international football’s biggest stage, and their players have gone from being curiosities to mainstays at Europe’s biggest clubs.

– Perhaps the most significant footballing event that occurred at this time began in the summer of 1990, when a little known former Belgian youth international tried to engineer a move from RFC Liege to Dunkerque. Five years later, Jean-Marc Bosman had won a court ruling that would turn the transfer market upside down and make a generation of footballers rich beyond their wildest fantasies.

So, which period are we in now? It is, of course, difficult to identify a historical period when you’re in the middle of it, but it’s clear that some major changes occurred between 2003 and 2006, not least of which was the acquisition of Chelsea by Roman Abramovich, a move that ushered in the era of the Super Club.

I am not saying Chelsea ruined football, a charge their fans regularly feel provoked into refuting. What I am saying is that Abramovich’s arrival changed the rules of the game quite drastically. As I have previously argued, the way Chelsea bought players like Claude Makelele fundamentally changed the way major clubs built squads and raised the ceiling for the amount of money required to push a club into the Champions League and then keep them there. Between 1995/6 and 2002/3 the average points-per-game ratio for the league winners across England, Germany, Italy and Spain was 2.101. Thereafter it jumped over 10% to 2.38.

Crucially, this was not the only major change taking place, for around the same time, as noted by Jonathan Wilson, the powers that be finally got the offside law right after 140 years of trying. There is a legitimate argument to be made that the peak reached in May 2011 at Wembley by Barcelona was a direct consequence of the Abramovich takeover and the concurrent modifications made to the offside law. Barca’s team may have been shaped via slightly different means to Chelsea’s (or Manchester United’s or Milan’s), but the standards to which they were held were set by their competitors. After all, the phrase “you can only beat what’s put in front of you” has a positive connotation as well as a negative one – and if your task is to beat teams who were carefully constructed at a vast expense, the standards go up. Likewise, the brand of football they played was heavily influenced by the changes in the offside law that had enabled the likes of Xavi and Iniesta to remain relevant and prosper, whereas just a few years previously, articles were being written about how players of their ilk were being rendered obsolete.

While no team since has quite hit the heights of Pep Guardiola’s Barca, more and more money has poured into the game, with the entirely predictable effect of seeing transfer and wage inflation rising to preposterous levels. If nothing else, this proved Alan Sugar right when he said, while owner of Tottenham, that “it doesn’t matter whether the television company gives us £3m or £33m, we’ll piss it up the wall on wages.”

Where football goes from here very much depends on the potential effects of this inflation. For instance, we’ve reached an interesting crossroads in the endless power struggle between players and clubs. As well as pissing most of this TV money up the wall in wages, clubs are also able to invest in resources behind the scenes that were previously unthinkable, with the result that football is more systematised than at any point in the past, and unstructured individual brilliance finds it harder to shine than ever before. Yet at the same time, players now have so much money and bargaining power that this is now reflected in the aims of those at the top of the sport. Players once dreamed of winning the World Cup for their countries, then they dreamed of winning the Champions League for their clubs, and now, it would seem, they dream of winning the Balon D’Or for themselves.

Meanwhile, in the other endless power struggle between clubs and football administrators, the rise of Super Clubs means that demands for breakaway leagues might become ever more compelling to the people that really matter, namely the TV bosses upon whose generosity both groups depend. No sport lasts if it is uncompetitive, and while things might not be as bleak as they were in East Germany in the 1980s during Dynamo Berlin’s government-sponsored dominance, if the current era continues to be defined by the Super Clubs, then the wealth they accumulate and the points-per-game ratios they attain might make the argument for a super league sufficiently compelling. The only thing that could get in their way is increased competition, which could come from a variety of sources:

– Weaknesses inherent to the Super Clubs. This could mean instability wrought by the constant, unquenchable need for success, squabbles between players whose increasingly monstrous egos prevent them from working together effectively both on and off the field, and the difficulties in integrating new players or managers into the setup without the necessary time to allow them to settle in place, institution, or team.

– Other clubs taking advantage of whatever money is available to acquire and, crucially, retain, the best talent available. This money could come from TV, sub-oligarch level investment, increased gate receipts, international marketability or some combination of the above.

– Those clubs taking advantage of the relative flexibility they have compared to the Super Clubs to experiment with styles of play that exploit further changes in the laws of the game. This could mean a radical press or it could mean finding new ways to present teams with problems that existing tactical responses to the offside changes had all but eliminated, like two-striker formations.

Whence has the challenge come in recent years? From clubs who can offer some combination of the above: Borussia Dortmund, Atlético Madrid, Leicester City, and Napoli, among others. Regardless of where your loyalties lie, if you do not wish to see a new period of football history that will be defined by a European Super League, you know whom to support.

Bobeto

The Long Game – The Coming Drugs Crash

It is currently the height of the sporting summer. The first Ashes Test. The Tour de France. And Wimbledon, which some people associate with strawberries and cream, and which I associate with doping.

It is a source of curiosity to me that when I come across tennis on TV, I always end up watching rather than switching the channel, at least for a few minutes. As fraudulent as the players may be, and as complicit as the commentators are, I cannot help but be drawn in by the drama, which is gripping. I do not care for Professional Wrestling, but I imagine aficionados of that interact with it in the same way. We know it is not real. We know it is a lie. But, for the sake of entertainment, we get drawn in and indulge ourselves.

Tennis has (apologies) an ace up its sleeve in this regard. The genius of tennis lies not in the players, but in the game itself. Five vertical lines, four horizontal lines, a net, and the greatest scoring system in sport. Describing it as a sport might be disingenuous, but as entertainment it is unparalleled, and it is massively successful. This dichotomy, the fact that tennis can be both an utter fraud and staggeringly successful raises questions about the only other sport (or “sport”) that can beat it for worldwide appeal and the concurrent riches.

Is football as infected by doping? What does that mean for the way we interact with football? Will a crash come, as it did in cycling? If so, when? What will the effect be?

For starters, because there will doubtless be some idiots in the audience, I feel I should establish that doping must be fought. The “anything goes” policy advocated by some incorrigibles would be reprehensible for many reasons, but two in particular stand out.

Firstly, not all drugs are equal. As has been proven many times, sport cannot be separated from the societies from which it comes. Rich countries do better at sport. What doping does is load the dice even further. A player or team from a poor country does not have access to the kinds of drugs that are as effective as those of their richer rivals. Thus doping turns the probable success of the rich into a cast-iron guarantee. Such imbalance runs counter to the very essence of sport.

Secondly, it is absurdly dangerous. In a fair competition between two rivals, one might get exhausted, run themselves into the ground and still lose. But they will probably go home. The chances of them dying or getting seriously injured are linked only to the inherent dangers associated with the sport itself. With doping, either the drugs themselves can do serious damage, or they can push a body beyond its capabilities, sometimes fatally.

The question of how we evaluate the prevalence of doping in football itself is complicated, not least because it sets us off down so many paths. There exists both concrete evidence and also instances where, as is so common in tennis, there is such a vast weight of circumstantial evidence that guilt must be the presumption. The majority of these cases are well known. The fact that such a staggeringly small number of players are ever caught doping (and, of those, so few ever serve bans) thus becomes evidence for the prosecution, not for the defence.

More generally, football should invite the same scepticism that other sports are subjected to. In cycling, no-one genuinely believes a mere switch in diet can turn a one day competitor into a Grand Tour GC contender in 12 months. In tennis, if a player hires a new coach late in his career and suddenly starts playing harder, faster and more consistently, that is understood for the deception that it is. In football by contrast, we fail to view radical improvements in performance in such a manner. The new tactical system is working. The new coach has got inside the players’ heads, not their veins. Even when the story is specifically about a new fitness coach, which should set off all sorts of alarm bells, the default setting is not one of disbelief or outright anger.

More long term trends are also seen under a benign gaze. We know, for instance, that the two original exponents of total football needed amphetamines. Despite all the improvements in diet, conditioning and training in the decades since then, the radical styles that are increasingly prevalent in modern club football should still be inviting questions. It is perfectly legitimate to ask whether pressing football is even possible without pharmacological assistance. Yet the attitude required to ask such a question is almost never encountered.

When Marcelo Bielsa takes charge at a new club and the players are suddenly transformed, people talk about his video collection and touchline idiosyncrasies. At international tournaments, where so many players seem to be running on empty, the explanation given is that the players are tired at the end of a long season, not the fact that they are suddenly without their club or personal doctors. I am not saying that Marcelo Bielsa dopes his players. I am not saying that the slower pace of football at international level is down to the fact that he players suddenly no longer have access to the same drugs. My point is simply that no-one even asks these questions. Occurrences that would provoke outrage or at least a raised eyebrow in any other sport, even tennis, are just accepted as truth.

At this point the role of the media, especially TV, becomes problematic. TV pays the bills, so the clubs grant them access, and the balance of power would appear to lie with the people behind the camera, not in front of it. But these TV executives have paid a fortune for football, and they have to recoup their investment. Asking difficult questions, even ones as obviously legitimate as those about doping, is simply not part of the equation; the validity of their product cannot be disputed. The commentators duly oblige. Thus the vast majority of fans interact with the sport via a medium that sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil, which is not exactly conducive to the development of a sceptical mindset.

We saw this in cycling. Many print journalists laughed out loud when Lance Armstrong attacked on the climb to Sestriere in 1999, so obvious was it that the American was juiced to the gills. But only a handful ever aired their doubts, and only one had the heart to keep chasing come what may. The TV coverage, more widely disseminated than any of David Walsh’s output, adopted a tone that could at best be described as reverential, at worst sycophantic. And this was a year after Festina. The omertà, within the peloton and without, was still firmly in place.

TV coverage of tennis is similar. It is farcical enough to watch players engage in high intensity sprints with no lapse in hand-eye co-ordination nor any loss of speed after matches of five or six hours, matches at the end of two-week long tournaments, tournaments in the middle of a gruelling season. But to hear the commentators fawning over their winter training regimens and special diets? Perhaps only boxing shows such open disdain for the intelligence of its audience, those who via their TV subscriptions pay for the whole thing in the first place.

For the moment, that audience happily parts with its cash. But neither tennis nor football has had a Festina yet. A video here (Parma), an ex-pro’s autobiography there (Cascarino), and an absolute mountain of circumstantial evidence is one thing. But we have yet to have hotel rooms raided or current players caught in the act. What cycling shows us is that such a moment will come.

Neither the UCI (by choice) nor the anti-doping organisations (by circumstance) were doing enough about doping in cycling, but as drugs proliferate through a sport, the probability of it crossing paths with the law approaches 1. Festina subsequently popularised, for want of a better word, the sceptical attitude that these days is required to interact with sport honestly. One effect of an unknown customs official opening the trunk of a car in 1998 was that over a decade later Lance Armstrong, who had acquired a position of seemingly total control and dominance over his story, could still fall, because enough people had the mindset and critical approach required to know that, deep down, that story was a lie.

What we do not yet know is what the long term consequences of the Festina and Armstrong cases will be for cycling in general. A generation of future cyclists is growing up seeing the Achilles of their sport being tarred and feathered. Will they still want to go into professional cycling? If they do, will their attitude to doping change given the level of hatred they now know such actions may attract? For the sport itself, will participation numbers and viewing figures fluctuate, and if they do what effect will this have on sponsorship and TV money? These are questions that will take at least fifteen years to answer. But the answers will be instructive for tennis, which is very likely to be the next major sport after athletics, cycling and baseball to have its image and legends dragged through the mud in the most public way possible. Subsequently, the way tennis deals with the fall out of its own inevitable scandal will be instructive for football.

How the administrators, players, and sponsors react will be of serious significance for football’s future. More than anything, the fan reaction will be crucial. It could be that the game is abandoned en masse, with no-one willing to put up with such a charade. That would be bad. But the outcome might be even worse. They might decide, en masse, that sportspeople sticking needles in their arms and having extra blood and hormones fed into them is just fine. They want to be entertained, the players need these products to play to the level to which the fans are accustomed, so… well, so be it.

It is too awful to contemplate.

Bobeto

The Long Game – The Future of Football’s Truest Test

“Single nationalities are so 20th century!”

As the closest thing to a truly global game that exists, issues in football can provide a neat way of understanding and exploring wider developments in the world. Population movement and the effect it has on both the concept of nationality generally and the evolution of people’s sense of belonging specifically are subjects that utterly fascinate me. The quote above comes from a conversation I had on twitter with the excellent Maher Mezahi. While France’s team will always have a smattering of Algerian or Congolese surnames, we are starting to see the same process in reverse, with the likes of Michaël Fabre and Michaël Chrétien turning out for Algeria and Morocco respectively. Just as history is an ongoing conversation between the past and the present, population movement creates an ongoing conversation between where these people are and where they or their ancestors came from. This particular conversation – which applies to a greater proportion of the world every year – is particularly visible through football, and thus constitutes one of the most interesting aspects of international football that we can track over the coming decades.

But international football will not continue to survive, despite its relevance on a social level, if it fails to remain relevant in sporting terms. International matches and tournaments are frquently derided for the supposedly poor quality of the football on offer, often with the refrain “wake me up when the league starts again”. But not only do I believe that international football is still important in sporting terms, I would further argue that it is – and will always be – the truest, hardest test of a footballer that we are able to set.

*          *          *

To return to rather basic principles, humans move around rather a lot. They always have done, and much as some of Europe’s more reactionary citizens may complain, they always will. Sometimes they move to escape a threat, sometimes to take advantage of an opportunity, and sometimes for no other reason than to garner an answer to the question, “What’s over there?”

Football reflects all of these, often in rather intricate ways and over vastly different time frames. The national teams of many countries in Western Europe have been strengthened, indirectly, by the fleeing of a whole generation from the Yugoslav civil war. Switzerland might not be at this World Cup were it not for the persecution in their homelands of Kosovars over the previous half a century.

Likewise, the opportunity to start new lives in new places meant a generation of people from all over the world could come to Western Europe to help the rebuilding operation in the aftermath of World War Two. These people brought with them manpower and intellect, but they also embodied the history of their origins. They brought that history in the form of culture, music, food and more besides that permanently changed the countries to which they moved. Some of their children ended up winning World Cups and European Championships for what was now their country.

Perhaps the ultimate example is David Trezeguet. Born in France to an Argentinian of French origin, he grew up in Argentina but matured as a player in France. He is currently playing out his career back in Argentina. Is this person French or Argentinian? Does it matter? More importantly (because in answer to the previous question I would say yes), is the question being asked with a smile on one’s face or a scowl?

For millions of people all over the world these are extremely important questions. It affects their day to day lives in curious ways, from what to call themselves on job applications to the relationships they can have with their parents. Football can both confuse the issue further for some and provide moments of clarity for others. “Who do you support?” can be a friendly question borne of genuine curiosity or it can be a loaded accusation of supposedly failed loyalty[1]. When it is the latter, it is often provoked by a combination of fear, anger and blind patriotism, the kind that extolls how great a country is and how much greater it is than every other nation without any hint of rational thought. Patriotism is a farce.

The idea of nationality, however, is not. Wherever I go I carry French and British passports. I also carry with me French and British sensibilities, French and British culture, and French and British history. I am what I am because France and Britain are what they are. Whether I like it or not (and mostly I do, regardless of any complaints you may hear from time to time), I represent the cultures from which I come, and in a much more specific way than I do as a citizen of Europe or of the World. It is logical, therefore that a football match involving these countries brings out incredibly strong feelings[2]. It is not patriotism that I feel, for patriotism has rather more aggressive, unthinking connotations such as the ones I described above. What I feel is the emotion derived from that ongoing conversation between what I am and what I come from in the happiest way I can imagine it. For want of a better term, it is the “party nationalism” that Simon Kuper described in issue five of The Blizzard. It allows you to feel good about yourself and your origins without feeling the need to belittle those from outside your circle.

Ridding the world of international football, one of the few outlets for this internal conversation and one of even fewer that can provoke such pleasure, would be a needless waste of something beautiful. My parents happened to be in Paris in 2009 when Algeria defeated Egypt to qualify for their first World Cup in over a quarter of a century. The joy they witnessed was something that only football, and then only the beautiful enormity of the World Cup, can provide. Watching your team win a League or a Champions League is one thing, but participating with other people who are what they are for the same reasons you are what you are – who share origins, in other words – in a moment of collective euphoria goes beyond what club football can offer. The end of a World Cup qualifying campaign is like nothing else in sport.

Given the explosion of talent coming out of Switzerland over the last ten years it is not unreasonable to think that they could mount a serious challenge at one of the next two European Championships (a World Cup might be beyond them, but you never know). After winning the Champions League with Bayern Munich, Xherdan Shaqiri took to the field with a dual Swiss-Kosovar flag. Were he to triumph in a European Championship final with Switzerland, Shaqiri might be tempted to repeat the trick. But even if he and his fellow Swiss-Kosovars in the team do not, you can be sure their equivalents on the streets will, just as Algerian flags came out in force to celebrate Zinedine Zidane winning a World Cup for France.

International football might, for some people, be the only way of marrying these diverse parts of their identity. International football is relevant because it can act as a way for an ever-increasing number fans and players to understand, project, or play with their increasingly multifaceted sense of self. It is also, contrary to popular belief, the greatest test of a footballer that we can currently set.

*          *          *

It is hard to argue with the oft-repeated statement that the highest level of football is no longer found in international matches, but in the Champions League – nor is that my intention. But international football is still, and probably always will be, the greatest test of a footballer for precisely the same reasons that explain why the best football is to be found in the Champions League.

International football used to be the highest level of the sport because it was the only arena where all of the best players could play together. Prior to and during the early part of the Champions League era, there was a more even distribution of talent throughout teams and throughout leagues. The rise of what Jonathan Wilson has labeled the super-clubs changed this[3].

The biggest, richest clubs have always collected most of the trophies on offer, but never has the gap between the good teams and the super-clubs been so great, something reflected in the absurd points-per-game ratios required to win the biggest national leagues[4]. The biggest teams have stockpiled all the best players. As if that was not enough, the impact of these players’ abilities is being multiplied by the fact that they are able to train and play together regularly, to build up the mutual understanding required to make lightning fast decisions in high-pressure situations.

Mutual understanding seems to be underplayed as a topic generally within the wider discourse of football as it is played on the field. Perhaps this is because it lies in a halfway house between the often ridiculous dichotomy of individuals vs tactics, so it only gets a passing mention. For instance, I have read articles about David Silva and I have read articles about James Milner, but I have yet to see a piece specifically devoted to detailing the astonishing transformation Milner undergoes in Silva’s presence from a decent player to a dangerous, creative and much more versatile attacking threat[5], a “space-explorer” not dissimilar to Thomas Mueller. This is not a one-way process of the genial Spaniard getting the best out of the willing but limited Englishman. Milner displays his creativity and intelligence in the runs that he makes for Silva’s passes, just as Silva displays his creativity and intelligence in finding Milner. The mutual understanding between them multiplies their abilities, often with spectacular results.

You do occasionally find pieces devoted to the subject, such as this marvelous tale of the history behind Dunga’s Brazil, an infernal machine which could have won the 2010 World Cup. That team was filled with players who understood precisely what their teammates would do based on the mutual understanding built up in different environments over the course of a decade. Sadly articles like this are few and far between. It is a curiously and sadly under-explored aspect of the way football is played, one that is crucial to understanding the importance of international football as a test quite apart from anything club football provides.

The lack of time to build mutual understanding between players means that only those who have the greatest sporting intelligence are able to play at or near to the level they reach for their clubs. Only those who have the greatest understanding of the intricacies of football[6] can truly shine in both environments.

This presents rather different criteria by which to judge who the best players are: rather than those who win the most trophies, they are those who are able to play consistently at their best regardless of who they play with, who they play for and the context in which they play. Those players who can adapt to the shifting sands of different teammates, coaches, tactical systems, and the slightly more reserved style of football one tends to find at international level must surely be seen as superior to those who perform at a high level for their club simply through constant practice with the same team mates in the same systems. Think of it as being akin to the difference between a student getting good marks through rote learning and a student getting good marks through their ability to think critically and understand at a much deeper level. One of the reasons football exists is as a form of the question, “who’s better?” This applies to clubs, and also to nations when there’s a tournament on. We also ask the question, endlessly, about individual players. If we want to answer that question accurately, we need a true test.

Bobeto

[1] An accusation known as the Tebbit Test after that particularly nasty individual

[2] The question of why I support France and never support England is one I may return to at a later date.

[3] As an aside I might as well add here my own take on the ‘Makelele role’. There have always been defensive midfielders whose jobs included protecting their defenders, committing tactical fouls, telling the referee how to do his job, recycling possession and letting more creative players do their jobs with greater freedom. Describing these players as playing in ‘the Makelele role’ is as heretical as saying that Cristiano Ronaldo invented scoring goals from free-kicks. Makelele’s true role in the history of the game is as a watershed between old and new trends in squad-building. The biggest, richest clubs always bought the best players. But Chelsea’s acquisition of Makelele heralded the moment where the biggest clubs accepted the need to pay fortunes for players regardless of their position or marketability and, crucially, paid them as much (or almost as much) as the team’s biggest stars.

[4] This, as much as anything else, was the main reason why I feel Sid Lowe had a point when suggesting that Diego Simeone’s achievements at Atletico Madrid eclipse those of any other club manager ever, including Brian Clough at Derby and Nottingham Forest. Clough was operating at a time when the gaps he was bridging were great, but nothing compared to that between La Liga’s Big Two and the rest during the Superclub era to this point.

[5] If someone has written this article, please send it to me. I would love to read it. The closest I could find was this and this but these illustrate the point I made earlier: a discussion of an individual’s qualities (BR’s article) or a tactical analysis (from Michael Cox) but nothing devoted specifically and in much more detail to their on-field relationship.

[6] They need not be able to express this in words. It is enough that they can express it with their feet.

The Long Game – Mourinho

“That strikes me as normal in a society that is ill”[1]

“Not every win is a gain.”[2]

It is one of the central paradoxes of sport, and football in particular: the nature of football as a contest means that we want to win, either as participants or as supporters. Yet there is a great sense of unease when the focus on the end rather than the means becomes too strong, and the higher up in football one goes the greater that unease becomes.

The case for the importance on winning above all else is often made by stressing how people “just want their names in the record books”. But this is illogical nonsense. The pure data of the results obtained in competition, even at its most detailed, is nothing next to the tomes of articles and books written about how these results were obtained and how the football in question made people feel. Once a certain threshold of achievement has been surpassed, history does not concern itself with what you won, but how you won it.

Which brings us to José Mourinho. For the first time in his career Mourinho has failed and his career trajectory, until recently rather straight, now has a noticeable kink in it. More than anyone else in the modern game, Mourinho focused on the end rather than the means. This is not a commentary on his tactics, simply a manner of highlighting the fact that Mourinho defined himself not by the kind of football he offered to the public but by the fact that he won. But as several people found themselves asking during his third year in Madrid, what does one call a winner when he does not win? This question, combined with a view of football encapsulated by those quotes at the top of the page, provokes a certain disquiet about Mourinho’s methods, all the more so when you view the situation not from the present, but from the future. How will Mourinho be remembered? How will his achievements be assessed when his career ends and in the decades that follow? Will coaches of the future cite him as a reference the way Jurgen Klopp did Arrigo Sacchi after Borussia Dortmund’s triumph over Real Madrid, or will his legacy be that of someone who took from football in the form of trophies, but did not give in terms of a significant positive contribution, tactical or otherwise. To answer a question concerning the future, we can revisit the past.

Mourinho had historical baggage from the very start of his career. His rapid ascent to the very top of European club management meant that there was an awareness very early on that this was someone who would enter the pantheon of the most successful managers, certainly of his own time and perhaps of all time. The desire to profit from Mourinho’s media-magnetism provoked countless biographies, documentaries and opinion pieces that have given us a wide range of attempts to place the Portuguese in a historical context, often by comparing him to greats of the past.

We have had Mourinho as Arrigo Sacchi, someone who had no career as a player but whose obsession with the game and desire to control the playing area allowed him to become arguably the dominant manager of his time.

We have had Mourinho as Brian Clough, a quick-witted and brilliant talker, as effective at getting the press hanging on his every word as he was at extracting the maximum from players who came to see him as a father figure.

We have had Mourinho as Helenio Herrera, a master of psychology who felt that he was wrongly accused of playing defensively by people who did not understand his system and erroneously associated his football with lesser imitations.

Most notably, we have had Mourinho as Béla Guttmann, the restless genius whose capacity for winning trophies was only matched by his ability to fall out with club administrators.

My personal favourite is Mourinho as Alf Ramsey, a formidably confident and determined individual, but overly keen on turning football into a battle and whose methods were questioned even while he was successful. The great Hugh McIlvanney, long-time sports writer for the Observer and the Sunday Times, wrote a fascinating report in response to West Germany’s 3-1 win over England in the first leg of the quarter final of the 1972 European Championship, the beginning of the end for Ramsay’s England team. Change the names and the parallels are frighteningly prescient of Mourinho’s current position and reputation in football:

“The greatest criticism to be made of Mourinho’s teams is that their really memorable performances, the days on which they overwhelmed the opposition with brilliance rather than grinding them down with dour efficiency, could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

It is that truth that is behind the wave of resentment which has risen from Mourinho’s failure with Real Madrid. Cautious joyless football was scarcely bearable even while it was bringing victories. When it brings defeat there can be only one reaction. Obviously, some of those who are offering the noisiest condemnation of Mourinho are being hypocritical, for they were happy enough to ride with him while the results were good.

Those of us who have always had serious misgivings about his approach have neither the need nor the desire to gloat. What is happening now we always felt to be inevitable, because anyone who sets out to prove that football is about sweat rather than inspiration, about winning rather than glory, is sure to be found out in the end.

It is as true as it is unrewarding to say that what Mourinho requires now is not a different team but a different philosophy. His method was, to be fair, justifiable with Porto, when he had more limited resources, but since then it has become an embarrassment.

Mourinho should stop sending his teams on to the football field as if they are going to war. They should start playing the game again.”

With the exception of Clough[3] all of the coaches put forward as historical equivalents of Mourinho have something in common with each other besides an impressive Palmarès: Within a few years of their greatest achievements as managers, they were considered obsolete. Either out of management entirely, no longer desired by major clubs or no longer capable of achieving results.

Just as great teams fall having become parodies of themselves, so do great managers. When taken beyond the elastic limits, the very characteristics that allow them to get to the top either lose their effectiveness or become serious flaws.

The attributes that make Mourinho the winner he is when he wins are also what make him the failure he is when he fails. These attributes were also to be found in the great managers of the past with whom Mourinho has been compared, but having seen what befell them it would not be a surprise if Mourinho’s career from this point is marked more by failures than wins.

But whether he wins or not is, in my opinion, irrelevant. It is the manner in which Mourinho wins or loses, and the football that his teams play in doing so, that will determine his long-term reputation. More significant than the trophies Mourinho takes from football, however many, is the legacy, however small, that he gives to football. Will he be a reference for the coaches of the future? Will he be held up as someone to emulate, or as a warning? The answer will probably be a bit of both. Perhaps they will possess the same drive and attention to detail, but without the abrasiveness that so defines Mourinho. And perhaps, as McIlvanney hoped, they will send their teams onto the field not to do battle, but to play football.

Bobeto

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[1] The response of Juanma Lillo to Sid Lowe’s suggestion that it could be considered normal to analyse football matches by taking the result and then explaining it.

[2] Norbert Seitz’s summation of Jupp Derwall’s phenomenally successful yet widely despised West Germany side of the late 70s and early 80s, as quoted by Uli Hesse in Tor.

[3] And even Clough got nowhere near the heights of his achievements with Derby and Forest after 1981. A UEFA Cup Semi-Final, some third place League finishes and a pair of League Cups is hardly a poor return, but having set the bar so high Clough still fits the trend of (relative) decline.

The Long Game – Introduction

Football was never merely a sport to be enjoyed for its own sake, either for me or for anyone else, and I am fascinated by the minutiae of why we follow football and how we interact with it. For me, football has been first and foremost a learning tool; for geography, politics, religions, languages, human nature and above all for history.

History is an impossibly vast subject. My favourite metaphor for history is that of a building the size of a continent. This building is filled with rooms, some bigger, some smaller, most visible through the windows on the exterior, a few completely hidden deep inside. There are no doors. All you can do is look through the window or windows you think show you best what it is you want to find out about the rooms you want to look at. The size of our building means that one only has time to truly gain expertise in what is visible through two or three windows. The rooms contain the events of the past. The windows are the types of historical investigation that are open to us.

Football is my favourite of the windows through which I choose to look at history. But in the same way that one’s hobbies can provoke or aid an interest in formal study, so those studies can influence the ways in which we interact with our hobbies. My fascination with history, and the history of football in particular, has a huge influence on my attitude as a fan of the sport[1]. My desire to understand where the sport came from, and how the society in which the sport resides came to take shape, provokes a fascination on where this society and the sport within it are going. My happiness or sadness at the outcomes of matches, tournaments or seasons take up relatively little of the time I devote to thinking about football, such is my interest in the more long term developments.

These pieces are thoughts on – and hopefully in some cases answers to – some of the questions I have asked myself over the last few years. In most cases I am simply writing, from a starting point of relative ignorance, articles that I would prefer to read. Where I have strayed unknowingly into ground that has previously been explored in greater depth, further contributions and corrections are of course welcome.

The issues I will deal with in this series will be fairly specific, but the underlying questions that provoke them are much broader. What state is football in? How did it get to that state? Where is it going? Are there lessons from history generally or the history of football in particular that can help us to understand the sport today and in the future? This is the brief; to study the game as one that lasts longer than 90 minutes.

Bobeto

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[1] Especially as someone who no longer follows a club side and who never felt particularly comfortable in the world of partisan support.