A Funny Old Game

 

“The net was the bridal veil of an irresistible girl. In front of the open goal he licked his chops. And in one fell swoop he stood naked, then bit.” Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow

I’m not writing much these days because of the World Cup. For more than a decade I’ve supported Chelsea in the Premier League, rarely missing a match, while also watching as many Italian Serie A matches as I can. Like many football fans, I found FIFA’s award of the tournament to Qatar bizarre and upsetting. First and foremost because of Qatar’s dismal human rights record, and second because of the human cost of building the infrastructure the tournament requires. One report I read claimed that nearly 6,500 workers died in the decade-long effort, most of them poor laborers from India and Nepal. Stadiums, training facilities, hotels, media centers, roads, all financed by some of the richest people in the world, but constructed by some of the poorest and most disposable. 

Holding the World Cup in November and December fouled up the schedules of all the major European soccer leagues, forcing compression of domestic and Champions League fixtures which undoubtedly led to injuries for players lacing up their boots every three days. Chelsea, for example, has been riddled with injuries and is so far having a forgettable campaign. 

Living in the US forces me to watch the tournament on FOX Sports, which means an unrelenting diet of adverts, news, fluff and jingoistic commentary about the US team, which prior to this tournament was ranked 16th in the world by FIFA. Call me jaded, but I simply don’t give a rat’s ass about the US team. Other than Christian Pulisic who for now plays his club football for Chelsea, and Weston McKennie of Juventas, I’m not that familiar with US players. But when it comes to US men’s soccer, and FOX Sports, Christian Pulisic is nearly a god, Captain America with superpowers in his boots and brain. This reputation is laughable for any Chelsea supporter who has watched Pulisic for the past four seasons. Yes, the young American has had moments -- against Liverpool and Manchester City in the Premier League -- but his highlight reel is brief. The physically slight Pulisic has often been injured, and unlike with the American national team, isn’t an automatic first name on the Chelsea team sheet. I’ve watched him get bundled off the ball by Premier League defenders, fail to convert clear chances in front of goal, and make the wrong decision in the final third more times than I care to remember. So, I’m not a big Pulisic fan; yes, he’s talented and still young, but in my estimation will never be a consistent top player in the physically demanding and very fast Premier League. I think Weston McKennie is a better overall talent, but McKennie doesn’t get the media hype. 

Making it out of the group stage isn’t a sure thing -- just ask Germany or Belgium or Mexico -- so I give the US credit for advancing to the knockout stage, although they got a gift from England in their head-to-head match when the Three Lions played flat, boring, and slow football. With all the attacking talent on its roster, the likes of Harry Kane, Marcus Rashford, Phil Foden, Raheem Sterling, and Jack Grealish, England managed only one or two shots on target. It was dismal, like watching Chelsea flail about. England, ranked number 5 by FIFA, didn’t appear to be playing to win. The usefulness of the FIFA rankings is suspect anyway because when the tournament began Belgium was ranked 2nd, behind Brazil, which is hysterical. Belgium were soundly beaten by an inspired Moroccan team, and their core players -- the so-called Golden Generation -- looked old and slow. Eden Hazard is a shadow of his former self after two injury-plagued seasons at Real Madrid. Belgium are due for a rebuilding period. 

The World Cup usually provides a twist or two, like Saudi Arabia beating Argentina and Japan topping Germany and Tunisia defeating France. Upsets are what make the tournament interesting and dramatic. Who would have picked Australia to advance to the last 16? 

I'm neutral in this World Cup, interested in watching competitive matches, but I do have a soft spot for France, Croatia, and Portugal. By the depth of its roster, and sheer talent, I think Brazil is the odds on favorite, even without Neymar, but as the saying goes, football is a funny old game. Anything can happen.  

Fated to Keep Going

 “It’s a warning: tread carefully, you who are drunk with power or even a little tipsy; you too could end up plucked and squawking and driven from the city.” Eduardo Galeano

I hated to do it but I couldn’t leave the shopping cart full of stuff next to the dumpster behind the market. For one thing, the cart wasn’t one of ours, it belonged to Smart & Final. Most of the contents had spilled on the ground: two pairs of sneakers in plastic bags, part of a Swiffer duster, a Big Gulp plastic cup, two wooden broom handles, an empty pack of cigarettes, a mattress cover, a gray sweatshirt, a pink bedsheet, a soiled bath towel, a couple of magazines, a flimsy floral-patterned scarf, a section of hose from a vacuum, a metal nail file. Somebody’s stuff. Somebody’s earthly possessions. I opened the lid to the dumpster and started tossing it all in, then I wheeled the cart out to the street. It made me feel sad. 

Our shopping carts find their way all over town, miles from the store, until they are rounded up by a man paid to return them to us. The carts often come back from their travels encrusted with mud and grime, with bent frames and broken wheels, littered with weeds and branches. Wheeled beasts of burden, luggage carriers of the poor and downtrodden. If they have any life left, we douse them with disinfectant, rinse them off, and let them dry in the sun. Sometimes my co-worker Jose gives them a new set of wheels. 

M runs the receiving dock. He unloads trucks and checks deliveries in. M is short but thick, big-boned, with a long ponytail and a deep, raspy smoker’s voice. He lives in the San Fernando Valley and his daily commute is in the neighborhood of 160 miles. I don’t know why he doesn’t look for a job in a store closer to home. The cost of gasoline has M sleeping in a black van in the parking lot a couple of nights a week. The shit people have to do to keep going is unreal. In some cases the problem is too many hours, too many days in a row, and in others it’s not enough hours, a losing proposition either way, but that’s the American wasteland; wages are low, rents are stratospheric, especially here on the glitzy American Riviera, and serfs swap the hours of our lives for money. I walked 13.3 miles last night during my shift. It wasn’t too difficult, the store wasn’t busy; I made my rounds with my broom and dustpan, took out the trash, emptied the cardboard baler, mopped the johns, and rounded up the carts. Simple job. The secret is just to keep moving, circulating. 

My neighborhood is noisy. If it’s not wailing sirens from fire trucks, ambulances or cop cars, it’s the unsettling whine of leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, chainsaws, or nail guns. MTD buses lumber past on Milpas. One of the things I remember about the first Covid lockdown was how quiet it was; that was eerie, but kind of beautiful in a way, when the dominant sound was the wind in the trees or birdsong. 

And we are fated to keep going, through the stupidity of our rulers, their cruelty and indifference to life, the hypocrisy and cowardice that follows in their malevolent wake; the sun rises and we get up and do it all over again. No wonder people go insane. No wonder so many are too worn down and tuckered out to think for themselves, to push back against the bastards who run the machinery that churns out misery and suffering; it doesn’t have to be. Human beings still haven’t figured out how to share the bounty in any manner that approaches equity. 

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. 

///

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.

The Festive Period

“There are towns and villages in Brazil that have no church, but not a one lacks a soccer field.” Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow

This time of year is a football (soccer, for my American readers) fan’s dream. The matches come thick and fast as they say -- probably too fast for the players’ liking -- but it’s a delight for fans. My beloved Chelsea continued their bizarre home form on Boxing Day, falling to a Southampton team they should have defeated. The match itself was eerily similar to recent matches against West Ham and Bournemouth, both losses. Those clubs arrived at Stamford Bridge desperate for points, and Chelsea obliged. In all three matches, Chelsea started ponderously and played with a cloak of futility. Against Southampton, Chelsea might have played for two or three hours and never troubled the opposition keeper. Our attack sputters in the final third, as if our forwards, Willian, young Tammy Abraham, and Callum Hudson-Odoi, run out of notions when they reach the edge of the penalty box. The American Christian Pulisic is capable of injecting a spark of creativity, but he can also go AWOL at times. Frank Lampard scowls in his technical area, but he seems powerless to get more from his players. 

Chelsea are in a transition year, so expectations must be muted. Our youngsters -- Mason Mount, Abraham, Fikayo Tomori, Hudson-Odoi, Reece James, and Pulisic -- have each shown flashes of their potential and from time to time the ability to link up and play appealing football. But consistency and Frank Lampard’s squad are not well acquainted. A good performance, like the away win at Spurs, is followed by a dud against Southampton. It’s baffling. 

As a Chelsea fan I’m not supposed to say anything positive about Liverpool. I’m supposed to despise the Scousers at every turn, but the fact is, as a football fan, I enjoy watching Liverpool play. Jurgen Klopp has developed a style that suits the players at his disposal, and watching Liverpool play is a pleasure. The Reds are not just quick physically, they are quick mentally. They see space and exploit it without hesitation. They move forward with a relentless energy. The Liverpool fullbacks, Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold, are often other-worldly in their ability to get up the pitch, creating width, and delivering pinpoint crosses to the front three of Firmino, Salah and Mane. Where Chelsea dwell on the ball, play it backwards to their goalkeeper, pass side to side, Liverpool plays one or two passes to get up the pitch and into attacking position. It’s slick and fluid, with the front three interchanging. Liverpool also have the best defender in the world at this moment, Virgil van Dijk, the rock at the back. There’s a reason Klopp’s side is running away with the Premier League. I thought Leicester might give Liverpool a game, maybe spring Jamie Vardy for an early goal, but it wasn’t to be. Liverpool dominated their nearest title rivals and left the King Power Stadium with a 4-0 victory. 

In about five minutes of play, Alexander-Arnold delivered more dangerous balls into the Leicester penalty area than Chelsea’s mediocre fullbacks, Cesar Azpilicueta and Emerson Palmieri, did over ninety minutes. When Chelsea have a corner kick they invariably fail to get the ball past the first defender. It’s very frustrating for the supporters. Even with good business in the January transfer market, I don’t think Chelsea should expect to finish higher than sixth or seventh this season. The gap between potential and results is too wide. Chelsea lack players with high footballing IQ’s, who sense where the space will be and run into it, who make the right forward runs at the right moment, who can make something happen when the team is chasing a game or under pressure. Chelsea have too many deficiencies at the moment. 

But it’s football and fans always hope. And, as Vicente Calderon famously said, “Soccer keeps people from thinking about more dangerous things.” 

Beacon of Freedom

“Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a Midwest where things function again. A countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it. Taverns, too.” Thomas Frank, Rendezvous with Oblivion

 

Historically speaking, the Supreme Court has never been a friend of us commoners. With few exceptions, the Court has advanced or protected the interests of capital and property, rich over poor, whites over Africans, males over females. That the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s Muslim ban was shocking at first, but when considered in historical perspective, not shocking at all. The United States -- beacon of freedom and liberty for the world’s poor and downtrodden, (don’t laugh) -- has blocked Chinese immigrants, Hindus and Sikhs, Syrian-Lebanese, and, of course, we shamefully incarcerated Japanese-Americans during World War II. North Korea and Venezuela were tossed into Trump’s mix to make it appear more palatable, but the target population was crystal clear: Muslims.

How many terrorist acts have been committed by Iraqi, Syrian, Iranian, Libyan or Somali immigrants? Zero. How many Iraqi, Syrian, Iranian, Libyan or Somali citizens have been displaced by undeclared US wars against their countries or by US support for countries like Saudi Arabia? Millions. Like presidents before him, Trump’s rhetoric inflated the danger and downplayed the reality. He is playing the very same card with regard to our southern border. Think about it, is the most heavily armed country on the planet really at risk of being overrun by brown-skinned immigrants from Mexico and Central America, many of them women and children? Demagoguery isn’t designed to make sense, it’s sole purpose is to stoke fear and make people act irrationally.

After upholding Trump’s Muslim ban, the corporate-friendly Court swung a lead pipe at the kneecaps of the last stronghold of organized labor -- public employee unions. The argument in JANUS vs. AFSCME, that collection of mandatory and involuntary agency fees (also called service fees or fair share fees) violated an employee’s first amendment right to free speech, was spurious at best, but this Court must believe that corporations don’t already have enough power and might over workers. The radical right has long sought to decapitate public employee unions and the JANUS decision might just do it. I was a member of a public employee union for many years, a local president, an activist, and I know that unions, like corporations, do dumb things; I got ticked off by the so-called “member leaders” who seemed as disconnected from reality as Washington politcos are from people who work for wages. But I always, and still, believed in collective action, people with shared interests, be they of whatever color or creed, standing together and making demands of the high and mighty. What remains of organized labor after JANUS must be more radical, more confrontational, more inclusive.

One bright light in this otherwise dreary week was the primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Latina socialist in New York who whipped an entrenched Wall Street toadie Democrat. Ocasio-Cortez is smart, passionate, real, and she’s promoting issues like Medicare for All, free college, and so on, that make the Democratic Party establishment cringe, and Chuck Schumer’s hemorrhoid pop. Ocasio-Cortez just might be going places, making things happen, shaking the tree. We need that.

Short Takes:

Shocking news from the group stages of the World Cup: Germany, the defending champ, is out. The talented giant, tripped, then stumbled, and never recovered. My three favorites: Belgium, France, and Argentina remain in the hunt. The knockout stage is next.

I just began reading a delightful book about football by the late Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow. Here’s a quote: “In soccer, as in everything else, consumers are far more numerous than creators.”

And so it goes, in June of this terrible year.