Two Verdicts

 “The number of fans has multiplied, along with the number of potential customers of as many things as the image manipulators wish to sell.” Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow

How to rile up the football world? Have a cabal of wealthy team owners make an announcement that 15 of the biggest football clubs in Europe are breaking away from their respective leagues to start their own European Super League. I began writing about this on Monday, before the whole scheme unraveled with extraordinary speed. Supporters were not having it. Pundits were aghast. Former players reacted with anger. The word “greed” was tossed around in a way almost never heard in this country, where business titans are impervious to criticism. And then the dominoes fell, first Man City, then Chelsea, followed by Man United, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Tottenham. The firestorm of criticism that erupted on social media and swept across the world was astonishing. The greedheads got rolled by a tsunami and lost control of their gambit. What seemed to the moguls a can’t-miss money-making bonanza -- a virtual monopoly over the highest quality football in the world -- ran headlong into the love of football fans for the game and their beloved clubs; ran headlong into traditions built over 100 years or more; ran headlong into the idea that football -- unlike other sports -- belongs to the supporters. The Americans, John Henry, the Glazer brothers, and Stan Kroenke, just found out what love and devotion and tradition really mean. 

Money was the driving motivator behind the ESL. Broadcast deals. Merchandising. Not the good of the game, expanding competition, sharing revenue, or strengthening the football pyramid, that is, all the second, third and fourth tier clubs. Football’s wider ecosystem, where players are developed, learn the game, and move up the ladder. No, the ESL was envisioned as a closed league, an elite league, with no chance of relegation for the 15 founding members. No bumping up against and rubbing elbows with lesser clubs. For the players, among other restrictions, no international duty and its potential for injury. The ESL owners would control their human assets, protect their money-making potential in the same way a racehorse is protected. The owners are interested in profits, first and foremost. An argument can be made that modern football is a business and the owners have every right to make money from their “assets.” But in most countries, football transcends money, and for many supporters the game is almost a mystical experience, as precious as life itself, with generations of fans having grown up supporting a particular club. In England, as elsewhere in Europe, football clubs have deep roots in cities and towns, club and place inextricably linked. Liverpool, for instance, where the relationship between the club and its supporters is long, intimate, intense, and unwavering. Following the fortunes of the club year in and year out gives texture and meaning to the lives of thousands of supporters. 

Do the American owners, in particular, understand the deep bond between supporters and their clubs? Do they care? My guess is no. American capitalists have a long track record of abandoning communities for more profitable pastures. Auto plants, steel mills, foundries, coal mines and factories that gave work and life to towns and cities were sacrificed to the “global” economy. Money has no loyalty except to its own multiplication. When I was a boy the Rams called Los Angeles home; years ago the team’s owner moved the whole shebang to Saint Louis; after the Raiders left working-class Oakland they tried Los Angeles and then settled in Las Vegas. The NBA’s Seattle Supersonics decamped the Emerald City for Oklahoma. There are still a few New Yorkers who remain angry about the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. Team owners in America, almost all white and rich, often choose a new home based on the tax breaks they can extort, land they can corner for cheap, and a stadium or arena built for them with taxpayer money. 

I didn’t grow up watching soccer. Back then the sport wasn’t popular in the US, it was weird, foreign, too uneventful for American tastes. I came to the game late in life -- and fell in love. The skill of the players, the passion of the fans, the talk and camaraderie, the global nature of the game -- I fell hard for all of it, in a way I had never experienced. Football brings people together, it brings players from different countries together, it’s inclusive and beautiful and more than a commodity to be packaged and peddled. 

For now, football supporters have stopped the greedheads. 

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I didn’t follow the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop who murdered George Floyd, because I felt certain he would get off. Despite the overwhelming video evidence, I assumed Chauvin would somehow be exonerated. I didn’t dare believe that Chauvin would be found guilty on any counts, let alone all three. I prepared for a bitter disappointment akin to what I felt when the cops who beat the hell out of Rodney King in Los Angeles walked. I thought of the video of George Floyd’s slow, agonizing death, the smug look on Chauvin’s face as he kneeled on Floyd’s black neck, and how his fellow cops did nothing. 

I would like to think the verdict will mark a turning point, that twenty years from now Americans will look back and see April 20, 2021 as the date the arc of the moral universe actually bent toward justice.