Write It Like Disaster
The art of being an elite club in European football is the art of forgetting how to be happy. The competitions you don’t win have to sit like a stone in the middle of your consciousness of the competitions you do.
Stoke City (“not an elite club”) were ecstatic this weekend after a 0-0 draw with Leicester City secured their promotion to the top flight in England for the first time in 23 years. Elsewhere in Europe, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich were clinching top-flight league championships by commanding margins, but feeling a bit poignant, on the whole, that they didn’t win their European tournaments. Oh, there were celebrations, songs, and dousings with Weißbier in the gray continental rain, but a faint philosophical melancholy ran through both teams. Together they’ve won 52 league titles, so it takes something special to keep ennui from creeping into the experience.
If value in football were absolute, it would be odd to see Stoke City treating a second-place finish in a second-tier league as a triumph, while Real Madrid were depressed about “only” reaching the round of 16 in the Champions League, and Bayern were still stinging from their loss in the the semifinals of the UEFA Cup. But value in football isn’t absolute. Expectations color everything, and if people think you’re stupid enough, just putting verbs in your sentences will win you a lot of debates.
This begs the question, of course, of what all these wins are for. Stoke City have almost certainly graduated to a new life of being pummeled by every mediocre team in the Premier League, in which case what they’re celebrating now is the chance to lose on a bigger stage later. (It is, admittedly, a lucrative way to lose.) But suppose they don’t. Suppose they stay up in the Premier League next year, gradually acquire young talent, consolidate their position, expand their fan base, sell bath mats, and finally establish themselves as a major force in Europe. What do they have to look forward to, except crushing expectations and the slow disappearance of joy?
Last year, Fabio Capello brought Real Madrid their first league title in four years…and got fired at the end of the season because his team wasn’t “entertaining” enough. Obviously, there are disappointments at every level of the game, complex sub-competitions within specific niches (teams jumping up to the Premier League for the payout that will enable them to dominate the Championship after their inevitable relegation), and many occasions for even a Liverpool fan to feel happy. But do you ever have the sense that, at bottom, sadness is the ultimate cup? Isn’t the prize that every team is working for a state in which they and their fans become numb to success, and morbidly sensitive to failure?
Its interesting that you note that Real fans were ‘upset’ about only winning the league and not the CL. Here in England, we have for the past few years (ever since Liverpool won it) seen the CL as just another trophy, nowhere near as important as the League, and Rafa Benitez has been villified for ‘only’ winning the CL (and being the most successful manager in the competition over the last 4 years).
Now that Man U are doing well in the cup, it seems the media are rightly viewing it as the great competition it is again!
Football is closer to life than to art in this respect, I feel. The truly staggering moments of catharsis are splendid and worth years of patience, but for the most part –in the long run — you have to live in the same world as everyone else, and get comfortable with the idea that equanimity is going to be your greatest comfort.
You have touched a chord with this; I was thinking about the debilitating euphoria of victory last night, following the curious jellying of my knees in the wake of Milan winning the derby, and I think my approach to football is taking on a form closer to the low-key don’t-look-now hopefulness of an Elizabeth Gaskell novel than the entitled romanticism of a Shelley poem. A girl has got to survive this crud, man.
Bet Man, I think it all has to do with what competitions a team has won recently. For Liverpool, who won the Champions League in 2005, all the pressure is to win the Premier League. But for Chelsea? I think Abramovich wants that first European title a lot more than he wants a third league championship. And from everything I hear out of Manchester United, Alex Ferguson (nine league titles but only one European Cup) is fixated on improving his European resume—and if Man Utd win the league but fall short in Moscow, I think a lot of people will see their season as somewhat tainted.
Roswitha, I agree, and the whole idea of equanimity in football presents a intriguingly elusive possibility. One of the few essays I enjoyed in My Favourite Year was Harry Pearson’s, in which, instead of choosing to write about a year in which Middlesbrough were very good or very bad, he wrote about a year in which they were comfortingly mediocre and didn’t put him through much stress. But more generally, equanimity never sold a tabloid, and the whole mechanism of the sports media is designed to make us feel like every match is the Trojan War. It’s hard to know how to feel, especially since the Trojan War can be a lot of fun for anyone not actually living in Troy.
I entirely agree with Roswitha’s comment and your response, and therefore think that this post might be called a “Why Do We Follow Sports” entry in disguise. Social scientists in the new (?) field of “positive psychology” have recently reminded us that beyond a certain basic level of material comfort, a person’s happiness owes less to her actual circumstance than it does to her management of expectation. Following a team could be early and long-lasting practice in precisely this skill.
Henry, that’s a great point, and probably suggests why fans of financially solvent lower-league teams seem to be happier than most other sports fans.
Also: from The Onion, same point, different metaphor.
Good points all. As a graduate of Florida State University, I became completely jaded by winning so often in the decade of the 90s. When we started winning fewer games, it was heartbreaking at first. Winning had become joyless, losing had become the end of the world. Then I realized, after a few seasons of medicority, that winning could be fun again. The price of constant success is the expectation of success and the subsequent disappointment of the occasional loss. I’ve experienced that in other sports. I can only imagine having a team lose in the round of 16 in Europe would be disappointing to some. If my Pompey lost there, I’d be ecstatic. Until it happened every year, then I’d be upset. That ebb and flow of winning and losing keeps us fresh and keeps the joy in sport.
One also needs to keep in mind that those expectations are to a significant extent shaped by rival supporters and the media (which of course feed off of each other).
This is why the Milanisti chose to mock Inter’s relative lack of success in the European Cup/Champions League on Sunday (through a tifo of a drunken Homer Simpson watching the tube on the couch on the night of the CL final) and why us Tottenham types never tire of alluding to Arsenal’s lack of success in Europe.
Its a great point raised here, and one which I think exemplifies why so many people follow football.
The outlook on one’s club is largely related to what a fan can expect from the team any given weekend or season. The enjoyment of the club is directly related to how you expect to fare - for a team like Stoke this season goes way above expectations, while at Leicester for example, relegation is way outside the realms of what they would have hoped for.
Without the constant stimulation derived from managing one’s expectations for their club there would be no yardstick and it might all become a bit drab.
In England for example, below the top four teams there would be no supporters whatsoever.
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