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Football

Sport

16 August 2024

6 min read

Is the Premier League too much of a good thing?

A weary look ahead to the new season.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Four footballers stand arms crossed looking expectant and confident.

Premier League.

Well, it’s the time of year again when my emotional well-being is governed by the weekly performance of Liverpool Football Club. Yes: the Premier League is back!

The start of a new season is usually abuzz with the excitement of possibilities. So many questions, so many possible outcomes. What will life look like after Jürgen Klopp? Will we win the league? Will we ever sign a defensive midfielder? This should be an exciting time for any football fan; a time of hope, of daring to believe this really is your year.

So, why does the start of the season fill me with such dread this year?

Normally as the season starts, I know when all the games are; who Liverpool are playing, where, and when. I’ve watched Liverpool’s pre-season friendlies to see if we’ve changed formation or made tactical tweaks. I’m up to date with all the players bought and sold by clubs across the league.

Not this year. This year the season has caught me completely off guard and I’m finding the prospect of yet another year of football hard to process. I was invited to join a work fantasy football league this week and, honestly, the thought of it made me want to cry.

When did the sport I love so much begin to feel like such an obligation? Why does being a football fan feel like such hard work?

I think I’m just tired of football. No, not tired. Fatigued. Exhausted.

Or, more accurately, football itself – the sport – is fatigued. As though it’s been drained of all enjoyment.

As television, rather than sport, football inevitably lives in the aftermath of the ‘HBO effect.’

There are all sorts of reasons for this. To start with one of the more obvious ones, Video Assistant Referees (VAR) have turned football into a glorified science project. It’s now a common occurrence for matches to be stopped for extended periods while three men in a portacabin miles away from the game pull out their CGI rulers. All to determine if an attacker has a toenail offside, so they can gleefully disallow a goal and congratulate themselves on a job well done. The line between ‘being right’ and ‘doing right’ is blurred more than ever as commentators bemoan the increasing gulf between ‘the laws of the game’ and ‘the spirit of the game.’

The standard and nature of refereeing in English football certainly isn’t helping my enjoyment of it. But it’s only part of a wider problem.

But there’s a truth about football that many football broadcasters and organizations don’t want to face.

Football is now primarily a televised commodity - content. Most football fans across the globe engage with the sport primarily through a screen, rather than at a stadium. As television, rather than sport, football inevitably lives in the aftermath of the ‘HBO effect.’

Prestige HBO shows like The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire, Game of Thrones (and countless others besides) have shaped the landscape of TV and, by extension, the culture around us. No longer confined solely to HBO, there seems to be, at any given moment, at least one TV programme you simply have to be watching if you’re going to keep up with the cultural conversation. If you’re not watching, you’re left behind.

This is the context in which football finds itself in 2024. No longer sport, but drama. And drama that begs to be discussed. A series of prompts for those sought-after ‘water-cooler moments’ that dominate conversation throughout the week. “That was never a red card!” “We were robbed!” Competitive sport boiled down and reduced to a series of controversies and talking points.

Because football is more television content than sport now, these controversies are not just discussed in the immediate context of the match in question. No, all week between games, key moments and decisions are slowed down, dissected, viewed from multiple angles, pulled apart.

I watch matches, and then watch people talk about the matches I’ve watched, until there’s another match to watch. There is simply too much football, and too much talking about football. All in service of football as television.

On top of this, the matches themselves are only becoming more frequent. This year, the Champions League will have an extra two games in the group stage.

And then there’s international football. This summer alone, there has been the Euros and the Olympics and, during breaks in the Premier League, players represent their nations in friendlies, World Cup qualifiers, and Nations’ League games (the competition literally no-one asked for).

This is to say nothing of proposals for a 39th Premier League game played abroad and an expanded Club World Cup from 2025 (again, neither of which fans seem to be clamouring for).

And all these matches are taking place within this context of football as television content. There’s not just more football, but there’s more football to talk about, more contentious refereeing decisions, more player mistakes and tactical battles to unpick.

But there’s a truth about football that many football broadcasters and organizations don’t want to face. Loads of it is really boring.

There’s no guarantee anything of actual interest will happen in any given football match. Goals in football are relatively scarce compared to other sports. Liverpool beat Manchester United 7-0 a few years ago and it was heralded as borderline divine intervention. If a rugby match finished 7-0, fans would be asking for a refund.

Authentic mundanity will always be more compelling than manufactured drama.

That’s one of the beautiful things about the beautiful game; it’s authentic. There are no pre-written storylines, and no perfect endings or twists set in stone. It’s real life. Like real life, it can often be mundane.

That should be no surprise, really. At the end of the day, football is a game we humans created to pass time and have fun. Like all sport, football is human flourishing in practice. By this I mean that, through playing sports, we get a glimpse into what it is we’ve been put here to do: to enjoy our existence. It is an expression of communal joy found in delighting in the physicality of our nature as created beings. When we take it too seriously or make too much of it, we obscure that fundamental truth to which it points, even at its most mundane. That we are creatures created to flourish and find joy in our creatureliness.

Authentic mundanity will always be more compelling than manufactured drama. In its endless pursuit to inject drama into the sport so it can compete as television, football has lost the mundanity and authenticity that makes it so compelling.

All of this has been somewhat lost in contemporary football and goes some way to explaining why the thought of yet another season of endless debates, drama, and analysis of the sport I love makes me feel rather exhausted. I just want to watch some people kick a ball.

So, what are my hopes for this Premier League season? It might sound counterintuitive, but if there was less football and less football drama in my life, that would do for me. Failing that, I’ll take a Liverpool treble.

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Joy

Psychology

9 October 2024

5 min read

Dopamine-ing ourselves dilutes the real power of joy

Ditch being happy all the time.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

Cartoon character Joy looks up with arms held open.

Inside Out's Joy.

Disney.

As I write this, I’m looking out of my window at endless grey. It has been raining almost constantly for several days. The garden is waterlogged, the apples are going mouldy on the tree and my dog, who has just come in, is sitting next to me and smelling of, well, wet dog. And it all looks pretty gloomy.

One of my most climbed upon soap boxes is the oppressive myth of our age/western culture that we are all supposed to be happy all the time. If we’re not living our best life and posting photos of our happiness on social media, then shame on us. There seems to be a socially acceptable dopamine addiction running rampant – each swipe, like and tweet feeding our habit.

As someone who lives with the albatross of depression weighing constantly around my neck, I find this compulsory pursuit of very public happiness somewhat trying. And call me Eeyore if you will, but I’d like to point out that sometimes it rains and there isn’t a rainbow. Just puddles.

There is a place for sorrow and disappointment and frustration in real life, and dopamine-ing ourselves out of those experiences dilutes the real power of joy.

I haven’t watched the new Inside Out film yet (See Henna Cundill’s great article on it) but the first one is a firm family favourite. It’s so deeply insightful and brilliantly unDisney. For anyone who hasn’t watched it yet, it’s a Disney animation of the adventures of the five core emotions (Fear, Anger, Joy, Disgust and Sadness) belonging to a young girl coping with moving with her parents to live in a new city.

Happiness is candy floss and joy is a strong cup of tea.

The main character is Joy. And she’s all about the happy. She refuses to allow Riley (the girl whose emotions they are) to be anything but happy. And that’s the set-up of the film. Joy fighting against the odds to keep Riley happy, even when she’s going through some really tough life stuff. And by the end of the film, it’s Joy who has grown because she recognises that Sadness has an important role in Riley’s life and that when Sadness takes the lead, Joy can join in, honestly, unsentimentally and sincerely.

I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed seeing Joy’s bouncy, oppressive positivity being acknowledged as really annoying.

The real strength of the film is that Joy grows from a character that I would call Happy into real Joy. Because, based on no good reasons at all, I have always thought of Joy as a more mature relative to happiness. To me, happiness is lighter, frothier and joy has greater depth and robustness. Happiness is candy floss and joy is a strong cup of tea. Happiness is still naïve while joy has been around the block a few times yet still hangs in there. Happiness is a powerful feeling that eclipses all else. Joy is mature enough to be in the same room as Sadness.

You see, I also think of joy as a choice, not just a happy feeling. Like thousands of other people, I have benefited hugely from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) which says that while you can’t choose your feelings, you can choose your thoughts. And it turns out that our feelings are reactions to our thoughts, not the other way around.

For instance, if you are woken up in the middle of the night by a loud crash, how would you feel? If you feel scared, it’s probably because your first thought is that a burglar has broken into your home. If you turn over and go back to sleep, it’s probably because you know that the cat has knocked something off the kitchen table, again. Our feelings come after our thoughts, not the other way around. Which changes everything.

We can’t tell ourselves to be happy, to be excited, to not be afraid. But we can choose our thoughts, what we allow to dwell in our minds. The pursuit of happiness then becomes about training the mind rather than mindlessly reaching for the next “feel good” dopamine hit.

Joy grows up. She starts out bubblegum-happy-at-all-costs-annoying. And she matures into someone who’s patient and compassionate and strong.

CBT rose to fame, as it were, during the latter years of the twentieth century and more recently, a lot of research has gone into the correlation of CBT within diverse religious frameworks, including Judaism, Taoism and predominantly, Christianity. The evidence suggests that religious belief has considerable positive impact on mental well-being and psychology. It seems that there is real joy to be found in the Unseen.

And I don’t think that’s a surprise. The Bible is full of CBT once you start looking for it. For example, St Paul wrote a letter to a church in Philippi, while he was chained up in a prison cell. I think it’s fair to say he wasn’t Insta-ready yet he says (italicised translation my own) "I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of living my best life in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.” Isn’t that a secret we’d all like to learn? How to have real joy that is completely independent from our circumstances?

St Paul is not saying don’t worry, be happy. He isn’t saying pretend everything is ok, put your head in the sand and act as if you haven’t a care in the world. He is far more realistic than that. He knows better than most people that real life is very complicated and often very painful. He’s saying that whatever our circumstances, we have a choice. A choice to let ourselves drown in anxiety and sorrow or to fill our minds with, “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” He is of course talking about the goodness and faithfulness of God and what pours out as a result of God’s lovingkindness. When I fill my mind, when I choose to think about such things, it means there is less room for despair and Joy has the space to dance.

And this is why I think Inside Out is so good. Joy grows up. She starts out bubblegum-happy-at-all-costs-annoying. And she matures into someone who’s patient and compassionate and strong. Joy can hold you while you give airtime to Sadness, Disgust, Fear and even Anger. And she’s there to celebrate and commiserate with you when that’s done. This may not meet the need for a party-popper-emoji-style happiness, but I for one say, Yes, please, can I have some of that?