Shankly's Football Fallacy

I first heard on Saturday evening. I hadn't gone to the game myself as I'd arranged to go to see Crystal Palace play Hull with my dad before the date and time of the tie was announced. My parents don't have ESPN, so I was planning to listen to the second half on the journey back from South London to Hampshire. I tuned in first to Five Live, then Talksport, but couldn't hear any commentary. I was about to put on a CD instead when the Talksport anchor said something along the lines of "and now we return to White Hart Lane for the latest on the very worrying events that have unfolded there". At first there was that acute tinge of excitement that hits you when you know you're about to hear some big news, that something extraordinary has happened. The heart quickens as the mind zips through the possibilities like a flick book. Crowd disturbance? Horror tackle? Suddenly, the flick book stops abruptly on a page where three words are written in bold, stark lettering. The excitement turns into a sickening dread. Those words are Marc Vivien Foe.

We were given a brief description of events from an audibly shaken Ian Abrahams and told that Fabrice had already been taken to hospital. The game had been abandoned by Howard Webb and supporters had made their way out of the ground quietly, respectfully, solemnly. Ian had said that an "eerie silence" had descended on the Lane while Fabrice was being attended to by medical staff on the pitch. For six minutes the 35,000 or so men, women and children had watched helplessly as a young man fought for his life on the pitch.

We love football for the drama; it is our escape from real life. Football is improvised pantomime; we cheer our heroes, we boo and hiss at the villainous opponents and evil referee. We go to football to experience strong emotions. To do so we need to convince ourselves of football’s ultimate importance and we do just that. In our collective delusion we scream in ecstasy when our teams score and weep when they are eliminated in a penalty shoot out. But our emotions, strong as they are (or appear to be) are experienced within very strict parameters. We experience heartbreak and devastation when our team is relegated in the same way we experience fear during a horror film; it is really only a simulacrum of the true feelings. But football is far more convincing than the movies. We are there, in the midst of the drama, even part of the drama. Its hold over us is mesmeric, the illusion unbreakable. Almost.

Rarely, in the soap opera that is football, we experience events that fall beyond those parameters which shatter the illusion. Reality encroaches on our sanctuary and renders football, with its diluted emotions, exposed as the unimportant, insignificant game that it is. The result is not the theatrical wailing of fans of relegated sides on the last day of the season, but the blank, confused faces we saw at Tottenham on Saturday evening of people forced to comprehend the triviality of the game they believed, until a few moments ago, was the be all and end all.

Bill Shankly is famously quoted as saying “Football isn’t a matter of life and death – it’s much more important than that” – a phrase that has come to embody the false importance we attribute to football. On Saturday, at White Hart Lane, that ultimate sporting fallacy was, at last, laid to rest.

Managerial sacking, financial cracking and Premier League slacking.

It's been an eventful couple of weeks since I last wrote my blog. The ranks of the unemployed have swelled with managerial sackings, one of Britain's biggest clubs has gone into administration, the top two teams in England have both been turned over by supposedly inferior continental opposition and Tottenham are crap again.

The highest profile sacking was, of course, AVB. While it was sad to see a promising young coach's reputation shot out of a cannon at the Chelsea circus, one has to admit that it was always on the cards. In fact it seems on the cards for any poor sod who takes the job, so much so that New Age shops on the Fulham road have started stocking tarot packs with an image of a sickle-wielding Abramovic replacing the grim reaper on "death".

The sacking of AVB coincided with two things. The first was a trend on the part of pundits and commentators to pronounce his surname "Villash Boash" in an absurd attempt to appear cultured and actually sounding like a dinner party bore doing a shit impression of Sean Connery. The second was a screening of the insightful fly-on-the-wall documentary QPR: The Four Year Plan, which followed the club as it was taken over by the consortium of Bernie Eccelstone, Flavio Briatore and Amit Bhatia. Bernie was largely absent (or at least camera-shy), while Briatore single-handedly affirmed every negative stereotype surrounding Italian masculinity in the first four minutes. The only one of the trio to come out of it with any degree of dignity was Bhatia, who came across as a balanced, calm and considered businessman, clearly embarrassed at times by the bullish egomaniac in the seat next to him. It was a fascinating and terrifying glimpse into how modern football clubs are run, particularly in terms of the relationship conflict between ultra-rich "benefactors" and the "football people", clearly mirroring the situation a few miles down the road at Stamford Bridge. The thing that struck me most as I watched it, was how much this "new breed of owner" (criticised by David Moyes in a recent BBC interview: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/17306087 ) acted less like professionals and more like your average fans. At points Briatore looked more like a disgruntled season-ticket holder as he gesticulated wildly and yelled obscenities at the string of hapless managers inhabiting the dugout at Loftus Road. And that seems to be the root of the problem with this new breed - they buy clubs for their entertainment, like many of us buy season tickets. This being the case, they often fall into the trap that many fans do - having their rational thought clouded by the intense emotion in the midst of a game. But instead of venting their frustration down the pub or on a 606 phone-in, they actually have the power to hire and fire the object of their disaffection at the drop of a hat. In psychology there is a term; negative affectivity, which refers to simultaneous, co-existing high-levels of different emotions such as extreme joy, anger and anxiety - which every football fan will experience through the course of a season, if not a single game. People with high-levels of negative affectivity struggle to maintain stable relationships, often falling madly in and out of love with someone, perhaps several times, before dumping them and starting the cycle again. So it is with football fans - one minute Arsene Wenger is tactician extraordinaire, the next a dunce who has "lost it", then a genius again. This new breed of fan-owner cannot seem to run their businesses with the necessary degree of detached objectivity that has kept clubs like Man Utd stable for a generation. Remember that in Sir Alex Ferguson's first four seasons in charge Man Utd finished 11th, 2nd, 11th again and 16th. Fans of the club would shudder to think where they'd be now if Briatore was in charge in the late 80s. It's strange, as Briatore is clearly a successful businessman in other areas, which further suggests it is the raw emotion attached to football that drives men like him and Abramovic to make sudden, impulsive decisions based on how they are feeling in the moment rather than looking at the long-term picture. The victims are the managers, particularly the young ones like AVB and Paulo Sosa who find themselves unceremoniously dumped and with a damaged reputation, albeit with a nice bit of compo to keep them going until the next appointment. And of course there are the fans, who are becoming increasingly disillusioned despite the initial success the new breed has brought the club. One of the most telling moments of the film was the footage of hoards of QPR fans singing "we want our Rangers back". Many Blues fans I know also want their Chelsea back, and long for the good old days when Ford Sierras were parked behind the goals at the bridge. In the meantime they'll have to hold on and hope the roller-coaster doesn't make them too sick or, even worse, that the wheels don't come off with an almighty crash.

Rangers are the biggest club so far to join the ranks of UK clubs that have gone into administration. At this point it looks as if large amounts of unpaid tax on wages form the bulk of the debt. Much has been written about the mega-inflation of wages since Sky invented football in 1992, but the threat of liquidation hanging over some of Britain’s most established clubs has brought it sharply back into focus. On the radio yesterday, I heard one presenter on a football talk show voice the argument that Taylor Swift was recently named as the world’s highest earning music artist last year - pocketing a whopping 22 million dollars - and no one is saying she's overpaid are they? That's fine, but A) Taylor Swift is essentially paid according to her performance; she makes (what some people think is) a cracking CD, they buy it and she gets paid a percentage unlike, say, Fernando Torres who gets paid a huge amount of money to score goals for Chelsea despite the fact that this happens about as often as Posh Spice pops into Lidl, B) The amount Taylor Swift gets paid will not have a knock-on effect in terms of how much her CDs cost and make her music unaffordable for her fans and C) Because Taylor Swift's pay is directly related to how many CDs she sells her record label is unlikely to go bust as a result of signing her. It's a massive gamble that clubs are taking, banking on players on inflated wages to bring the success and associated income to help them pay for themselves. The owners say "fans demand success", but most clubs maintain a stable base of core fans (usually ST holders) regardless of how successful they are, and it's these fans, rather than the occasional or fair-weather varieties that really support the club in the literal sense. Clubs such as Portsmouth are vital to their communities and you'd still get a decent turn out at Fratton even if the FA enforce their own rules and relegate Pompey to the Conference South, in the same way that Wimbledon maintained their core supporters when they were reborn as AFC and had around 2000 fans show up to watch them play on a roped off pitch in Chessington. Surely a more sensible approach is needed by clubs to buck these trends and keep the clubs safe for the people they really matter to.

With Manchesters City and United both crashing to defeats in the Europa League the quality of the Prem has once again been put under the microscope. However, what could be more telling than the poor performances we've seen in Europe is the fact two of the three sides promoted from the Championship have thrived this season. A few seasons back it was a given that newly promoted clubs would go straight back down or at least be bang in trouble of doing so, but Norwich and Swansea have both taken big scalps this season and sit proudly in the mid-table wilderness that most clubs strive to avoid. It could be that the level of quality in the upper echelons of the Championship has risen to be indistinguishable from the majority of the clubs in the Prem or, more ominously for English football, that the fears arising from our European form are not unfounded. The positive thing is that we've so far had an exciting and unpredictable season where anyone can beat anyone. Tellingly, there have also been plenty of goals, which has been cited by some as another indicator of the general lack of quality, but who can really complain about high-scoring games? For me, entertainment has been the winner, and if it's to our detriment in Europe for a season or two I'm not too bothered.