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

Climate

Comment

Politics

22 September 2024

5 min read

Climate meets politics at UN summits, so who will save us?

It's that time of year when commitments to change are sought. Is there a different way to power the energy transition?

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

A fallen statute with tyre tracks over it lies on the steps to a government building, in a form of protest.

Climate protest, Berlin.

Nico Roicke on Unsplash.

We’re coming up to a tipping point: the autumn equinox, when the balance of light and dark shifts. For some, this season change still carries the possibility of September – new term, fresh notebook; for others, myself included, there’s more a feeling of ‘here we go again’ with the nights closing in and the hurtle to the end of another year.

On the global scale, it also kicks off the pattern of international summits and negotiations to drive progress on making this world, our world, a bit fairer, safer, and more hopeful. World leaders gather in New York for the United Nations (UN) General Assembly; then it won’t be long until the next UN Climate Summit (COP29) in Baku, swiftly followed by discussions in Busan to create a new UN Treaty to end plastic pollution. Perhaps that draws another sigh; here we go again.

But there’s something new this time on the agenda in New York: the UN’s Summit of the Future on 22-23 September. It is being touted as a ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to forge a better way forward. Will this be the moment that saves not just us, but future generations and the natural world too?

A few years ago, I was involved in organising an event that brought together experts in sustainable development from science, government and civil society. To get the conversation going, we wrote this question on a flipchart: What will save us over the next decade? We asked people to cast their vote with a sticker, giving them just three options: government; society; technology.

As people gathered around, we noticed a general pattern emerging:

the scientists voted for government
the civil servants voted for society
people from civil society voted for technology

There seemed to be subtext to all this:

‘Who will save us?

Not me.’

I wonder if in that moment, the people voting – knowledgeable and connected, experts in their industries – were feeling the limits of their power.

When we brush up against our own limitations, it can be tempting to look elsewhere for reassurance. I find hope in a too-little-known story of change, a kind of David and Goliath story , that cuts across government, society and technology. A story that has seen leaders held to account, voices heard and literally billions of dollars shifted out of fossil fuels and into clean energy.

It might seem distant from our day to day lives, such wrangling over exact punctuation at global summits. But these commitments can have long-lasting influence.

People said it was impossible, because no one had ever done it before. For decades, the UK and other wealthy nations provided billions in taxpayers’ money for fossil fuel projects in other countries around the world. People’s taxes were spent on a gas plant in Mozambique, oil fields in Brazil, thereby fuelling the climate crisis and risking locking low-income countries into using fossil fuels for decades to come instead of investing in the clean energy transition.

This is a transition that has begun. In most places around the world, solar and wind are cheaper and more easily accessible than oil, gas or coal. Power is transformational; it fuels homes, schools and hospitals, it unlocks jobs, education and healthcare. And it’s getting to the point where there’s little reason it can’t be renewable.

With the technology getting there, it became time for the political will to shift too. So, a few years ago, a small group of campaigners came together to push for an end to this funding in the UK. They built relationships with MPs and civil servants, they got the media interested in this fairly niche issue, and they worked with the communities affected by UK-funded projects, coming with a straight-forward message that got to the heart of the injustice: stop funding fossil fuels overseas.

And it worked. In December 2020, the UK announced an end to all taxpayer support for overseas fossil fuel projects, the first high-income country to do this. But not the last. In the run up to the 2021 UN Climate Summit, campaigners and civil servants worked to get 38 more countries and large banks to make the same commitment to end funding for fossil fuels and shift it into renewable energy projects. With Norway and Australia joining at COP28 last year, that group now numbers 41, and represents over $28 billion a year that could be shifted from fossil fuels and into clean energy.

It’s not been plain sailing, and it’s not fully in the bag. For a few years, I got work alongside the incredible advocates at the frontline of this work. A few weeks ago, some of them published a new report which found good progress on the fossil fuels part of the pledge but much more work needed from governments on getting that money into the renewable energy projects that could be transformative for the 685 million people who currently don’t have access to electricity.

This story reminds me that ‘saving us’ isn’t a once and done thing. It’s bigger than that; something to be lived out, imperfectly, with others, over the years.

One of the hot topics at the Summit for the Future, is whether the leaders can agree to transition away from fossil fuels in a new ‘Pact for the Future’, echoing language that was fought for, weakened, then mostly put back into the final commitment made at COP28 last year. (This counts as a high stakes drama in the climate policy world). It might seem distant from our day to day lives, such wrangling over exact punctuation at global summits. But these commitments can have long-lasting influence. For nearly 80 years, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been protecting people – or showing the gap when their rights are being violated.

And really, this isn’t just about words, it’s about power.

Part of the problem with our question on that flipchart was that it divorced people and opportunities, rather than bringing them together. The best way of driving change is to build collective power, holding each other and our decision-makers to account.

Perhaps thinking of the future brings more fear than hope. But this story reminds me that ‘saving us’ isn’t a once and done thing. It’s bigger than that; something to be lived out, imperfectly, with others, over the years. And lived out with God. This is a partnership that he invites us into: to join in his work of seeing a world full of potential being nurtured and restored. We might not see the whole change we hope for, but sometimes we’ll get to see the scales tip.

The energy transition has begun – but it’ll take the collective influence of a movement of people to ensure that it’s fast, fair and serves those who need it most. With a big gap remaining between the finance needed and the finance pledged, all eyes are on this year's COP29 in Baku to see tangible progress.

Here we go again.