Column

Comment

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.

Article

Comment

War & peace

25 September 2024

6 min read

How Ukraine reckons with its reality

From Kyiv's coffee shops to the front line.

Mark Meynell

Mark Meynell is the author and minister.

A woman squats and touches a war memorial

War memorial in Bucha.

How on earth it came up I have no idea, but I vividly remember chatting with my grandmother about the ‘Phoney War’ of 1939. I can’t have been much older than 10. It’s not that I was especially inquisitive about history, nor that I had the presence of mind to ask for stories from her extraordinary life. How I wish I’d done that with all four of my grandparents. But my hunch is that it was prompted by sitting in the garden on a glorious summer’s day. We were probably shelling peas or peeling potatoes or something—she always got people staying to do jobs.

She was reminiscing about how weird those months in mid-1939 were, in particular remembering how lovely the summer had been, far brighter and drier than normal. Even after the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1st September (thus triggering Britain and France to declare war two days later), the weather remained good. A sense of war’s inevitability had hovered throughout 1939, so even after Chamberlain’s famous ‘final note’ was rejected, nothing much changed. At least, not for ordinary Britons. Life went on. It would take many months before the conflict came all too close to home.

I couldn’t help but think about this during my visit to Kyiv and Lviv earlier this month. The difference, of course, is that there was nothing phoney about Russia’s 2022 invasion or the horrors inflicted on eastern Ukraine since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. But for the majority, routines continued uninterrupted. As they must.

For example, assuming the worst, I had contacted several Ukrainian friends offering to bring any scarce or unavailable items from Britain. No one took me up on it; it was unnecessary, they all said. After wandering through both cities, it was obvious why. Although trade will undoubtedly have been slower than before the war, shops seemed well stocked with all the necessities and not a few luxuries.

Then on my final morning, I was quietly sipping a cappuccino in Lviv’s historic Rynok Square when the air-raid sirens suddenly cranked up into their now familiar whine. Being kept awake by Kyiv’s sirens had been a new experience for me (a mark of our Western privilege that we have avoided all-out war on our soil for decades). But this was my first daytime alert. It was even accompanied by booming Ukrainian announcements, although the advice was inevitably lost on me. As it was on all around me, who seemed assiduously to ignore it. The few mid-morning pedestrians—few tourists come here— maintained their ambling pace unchanged; the taciturn waiter patiently took orders at the next table; a middle-aged businessman on the square continued his negotiations on the phone while gesticulating with his briefcase. So naturally, I kept sipping.

This was not because the sirens cried wolf. Just 10 days before my visit, Lviv had suffered one of the worst air attacks of the war, with 7 killed, over 60 injured, as well as the destruction of schools and historic buildings. Moreover, I met a friend for lunch an hour later who told me that some man-sized drones had attacked his side of Lviv and he saw one or two shot down. So it was all real enough. What was everyone thinking?

Those who keep going amid a siren’s whine are not perhaps ignoring it but taking calculated risks in their perseverance.

Ignoring reality

T. S. Eliot famously observed that "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." So perhaps that was what was going on here. After two and a half years of war, I can quite imagine exhaustion and resignation to what was going on. So it just gets ignored. Ordinary life must go on. After all, only a small proportion of the population is actively engaged in the war; the rest, if they haven’t already left, must try to keep calm and carry on. In fact, men aged between 18-60 are unable to leave at all without the necessary papers and these are hard to come by. Perhaps the only way, then, is to avoid thinking altogether. On a beautiful day, once autumn has begun to temper Ukraine’s oppressive summer heat, sustaining the illusion is simple. Life carries on.

Of course, it can’t last. Every single person I spoke to had family or friends at the front; some had already been killed. The destruction caused by air raids brought a distant conflict onto people’s doorsteps. However, it was driving through the pleasant Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, both of which I had previously visited several times, that reinforced the impossibility of ignoring reality. Bucha is now emblematic of the invasions very worst atrocities, from when Russian forces had Kyiv almost entirely surrounded before being pushed east. Locals were rounded up and slaughtered, with the bodies of several hundred civilians later found to have died from bullet wounds rather than shrapnel. But as we drove through, it was impossible to conceive of those horrors. Apart from anything, the weather was so lovely. Atrocities don’t occur on beautiful days… or in lovely places… surely?

Persevering amid reality

What impressed me most in those areas was the speed of the rebuilding work. Entire shopping malls and neighbourhoods had been razed. But after only twelve months or so, a memorial to Bucha’s 500 dead had already been erected. As we drove through, major construction projects were underway, with multiple cranes towering over rapidly rising apartment blocks and retail parks.

These are not signs of reality ignored but faced. These are signs of gritted hope. So it struck me that those who keep going amid a siren’s whine are not perhaps ignoring it but taking calculated risks in their perseverance. Just as it is unwise, if not impossible, to live on a permanent adrenaline rush, so one cannot always exist in flight or fight mode indefinitely. It is simply that in wartime, risk thresholds change. Human beings are resilient and adaptable. They endure the most extraordinary setbacks and conditions.

So, to be with Ukrainian friends in my limited, deficient expression of solidarity, has been inspiring. No one I met had any illusions about the realities of Ukraine’s current plight (especially with a harsh winter looming as Russia systematically destroys power stations). But still they persevere.

Seeking deeper perspectives of reality

However, Eliot did not primarily refer to bearing the reality of the mundane. As the novelist Jeanette Winterson explained, Eliot was identifying how little twentieth century society (that of his Waste Land in particular) could bear of spiritual reality. He meant the phenomenon of resistance to a journey towards God or of facing themselves as they stand before God.

However, the horrors of invasion and the nightly anxieties of air raids have put paid to all that. One friend I was glad to see again is Andriy, previously a fairly well-known Ukrainian journalist and now a church pastor. He regularly goes to the frontline as an unofficial chaplain, visiting troops in their camps and the injured in hospital. He was unequivocal. Before the war they would undoubtedly have been shrugged off. But now, he has not met a single soldier who is uninterested in the things of God and eternity. War has forced them to face their mortality and Andriy has found that most are desperate to talk about little else. These things matter. Even on a beautiful, bright, early autumnal day.