When Winning Feels Like Losing

Strange Times Indeed. A Reflection.

Photo by Nadine E on Unsplash

I love football. I want Arsenal to win the league and the Champions League and The FA Cup and hey, even the League Cup. I’ve got hopes and dreams for the team. But these are strange days indeed.

I know football isn’t just a sport, it isn’t just entertainment. I know its delicious and seductive stuff that gets into your emotional architecture, a heady brew of potentiality, vulnerability and sensuality that only football fans really understand. And I know football creates an experience of bonding and camaraderie where we become one, where we share joy, share pain and the mirage of separation is momentarily removed. I love it.

There are those that’ll say football is just a sport and as so, it’s got nothing to do with “real” life, with politics or with society. But those people haven’t really thought about what sport is or, for that matter, what “real” life is either. Planet Football isn’t just some place in distant orbit from life, it’s a reflection of our societies, of our values and ourselves.

The spirit of football, what we allow and expect, depends on the spirit of our times and what we allow and expect in life. Football is a theatre that reflects back to us who we are. And right now football is reflecting back some pretty depressing truths.

Here’s what I mean. Let’s take Gabriel Martinelli’s actions in the Liverpool match. You all know what I mean: Conor Bradley injured himself and Martinelli tried to push him off the pitch (after Bradley himself intentionally crawled back onto the pitch). We all know why Martinelli did this, but besides his desire to get on with the game and try and bag the points he was also pushing against gamesmanship, against players pretending to be injured and trying to run down the clock or influence the referee. Martinelli is as aware as any professional footballer that simulation is legitimised in today’s game and he wasn’t having it. In this particular case it turned out Bradley was genuinely injured, but Martinelli, in the heat of the moment assumed that Conor’s behaviour wasn’t genuine.

Football is reflecting back to us the dishonesty, cheating and rule bending that is prevalent (and encouraged) in wider society. Martinelli couldn’t be sure if Bradley is injured or play-acting because bullshitting to get what you want is the name of the game in life right now.

Can anyone really throw the book at Martinelli for assuming dishonesty, cheating and rule bending in a sport in which FIFA president Gianni Infantino just bestowed a spurious “Peace Prize” on the current US president? The dishonesty, cheating and servile toadying of this act is beyond belief. Football is playing a dangerous game by displaying the same immorality and unethical behaviour on the pitch and in the football boardrooms as we’re seeing in the wider world.

Can we throw the book at Martinelli?

Well, Sky Sports “commentator” Gary Neville doesn’t think so, he thinks we should be throwing punches instead. I won’t repeat Neville’s incitement to violence here but essentially he suggested it would be worth getting a red card for “whacking” Martinelli. The man who kicked the hell out of Arsenal player José Antonio Reyes is being true to form at least.

OK. So what’s going on in this case? Besides Neville being a throwback moron knuckle dragging us all toward the good old days of violence and stupidity, and besides Neville reflecting a very modern penchant for simplicity over complexity, what Neville is really doing is creating Clicks Through Conflict. He’s baiting the world with arrogant stupidity to create content and clicks. His comments are repeated a trillion times on a trillion websites and hey presto, business is booming and cash machines are boiling over.

Yep, football reflects life. We live in an era of sensationalised lying and narrative creation designed to control opinion and create traffic. Neville is doing exactly what Sky bosses want. He’s screaming fire in football’s theatre and creating panic where none exists but panic drives traffic and engagement like nothing else so who cares about the consequences?

That’s why the media and so many fans are projecting such a negative picture of what is essentially a hugely successful season. Arsenal are doing better right now than for the last two decades and yet there’s never ending flow of moaning and negativity. Commentators after the Portsmouth win immediately started complaining that Arsenal should have won by far more goals and that set piece goals were close to invalid because, hey they were only set pieces, which as we all know isn’t really football.

This is football reflecting “real” life because right now nothing is good enough, victimhood is platformed (even and especially when you’re winning) and expectations are insanely over-hyped and unobtainable. Nothing gets the the cash machines boiling over like negativity, anger and aggression.

Even winning football matches isn’t enough for the football “industry” these days.

I love football. But at the moment the world is depressing as hell and football is reflecting back way too much of the hellish landscape. When football’s most powerful governing body awards a made-up-on-the-spot and frankly insane peace prize to a man who authorised American Racist Squads that regularly kill human beings and then refuse to accept blatant murder as anything but legitimate, what are we as fans supposed to do?

How do we think about the upcoming World Cup to be staged partly in the US when it’ll inevitably be hijacked by violent, racist, misogynist forces desperate to platform hate? With all the billionaires using football as a pissing contest I’m already tied up in so many knots a goddamn sailor couldn’t undo me. With all this corporatisation, aggressive narrative building and promotion of conflict click-baiting I’m already folded in so many ways a Japanese origami expert couldn’t unfold me.

And what do we do as citizens, as human beings, when football reflects back the world’s grotesque performance of incompetence and its duplicitous and vile values? What do we do about the angry aggressive hatred that’s being normalised day after day by those continually promoting conflict and driving the social narrative into darker and more dangerous places?

So this week, after the murder of Renee Good in the streets of Minneapolis, I’m feeling that football needs to get its house in order. FIFA states that “Football offers a universal language, one of joy, peace, hope, love and passion,” and that could be true but it isn’t. Right now all I see from football’s governing body is hypocrisy and complicity. It’s not up to football to police the world but it’s also not up to football to pick up a stick and start swinging.

I love football but right now I feel ashamed at what I’m seeing on and off the pitch.

Apologies for the tone this week Wonderlanders. It is what it is.

Have a great week. I’ll be back next week with some actual updates about Arsenal’s ongoing excellent season. I hope.