(On Soccer)
Back in the heady, innocent days of 2016, before most of the gruesome things that have since happened, Nick Serpell was given a somewhat morbid task, by the standards of that time.
As naive as it seems, in retrospect, the year was cursed theory had taken root in social media, the place where all theories take root. It seemed that everything had started with the death of David Bowie and he did not stop there. Alan Rickman died. Zaha Hadid has died. Harper Lee died and was followed by Leonard Cohen, Johan Cruyff, Muhammad Ali and Prince.
Serpell’s job was to find out if this was unusual or if it was just the effect of the public nature of grief in the age of social media. As the BBC’s obituary editor, Serpell searched through several of the obituaries they had prepared and published in the first three months of that year – the kind archived by all news organizations, including The New York Times, for a lot of of famous figures—and then compared the total to some of the previous winters.
Serpell found that there was a significant jump: For example, from January to March 2012, only five people deemed worthy of a prewritten obituary had died. There had been eight in 2013, eleven in 2014 and twelve the following year. However, by 2016, that figure had skyrocketed: In the first few months alone, Serpell found that the BBC had published 24 obituaries.
However, Serpell still wasn’t convinced it was a curse; the explanation seemed much more prosaic. He found that the apparent rise was due to the fact that at that point more than half a century had passed since the world saw the first great flowering of a shared popular culture with the rise of television, the growth of popular music, and the reach global Hollywood.
As alarmingly young as some of those who had died in early 2016 were, many more were in their 70s and 80s, a product of that burgeoning mass popularity. It wasn’t that a larger proportion of prominent people were dying, but rather that, 50 years or so following technology made a certain form of celebrity globally more attainable, there was a much larger pool of prominent people who might die. .
This year, that phenomenon is repeated in a very different context… and luckily much less sad. The 2022 World Cup will be a profound turning point for football; in a distinctive, almost tangible way, it will mark the end of one era and the beginning of another, a generational shift will unfold live on television.
It has long been assumed that the World Cup will be the conclusion of the international careers of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, assuming that Portugal will beat North Macedonia in their final tie on Tuesday. However, the light from its stars is so bright that it has served to obscure all the other farewells that will occur in the camps built under Qatar’s kafala system.
This World Cup will extinguish the light of an entire galaxy. It will most likely be the last time Luka Modric, Thiago Silva, Daniel Alves, Manuel Neuer, Thomas Müller, Jordi Alba, Ángel Di María, Luis Suárez, Edinson Cavani, Eden Hazard and Antoine Griezmann grace the greatest stage in sport. . Robert Lewandowski, Gareth Bale, Arturo Vidal, Alexis Sánchez and James Rodríguez might still join them, another clutch of superstars on a farewell tour.
Of course, the World Cups have always had that purpose. Just as they are the place where greatness is forged, they also function as the place where it says goodbye to the public. It’s not that unusual for players — like Silva and Alves, in particular — to have to continue their careers to secure yet another shot at the biggest prize of all. After all, the 2006 World Cup final was Zinedine Zidane’s last goodbye.
In that sense, this World Cup is no different from the others. And, despite everything, the transparency of the numbers suggests something different; It gives the impression that football will arrive at the tournament with an elite and leave it with a completely different one. This is not because there is a higher than normal proportion of famous players at the end of their careers. It’s because there are more famous players, period.
The last fifteen years are likely to be viewed almost exclusively through the lens of Messi and Ronaldo. After all, they have dominated this era of football and so it is fitting, in many ways, that they end up defining it.
However, such an interpretation would be reductive. Instead, it is best thought of as the first era in which football was truly global: an era in which fans around the world were able to watch almost every second of a footballer’s career, in which the greats and the The good ones met with unprecedented frequency in the Champions League and came into our homes via video games, a time when exceptional talent was congregated in a handful of superclubs.
The generation that will leave the stage in Qatar is the last bastion of the first generation of footballers who began and ended their careers in that ecosystem; it is the equivalent of that blossoming of shared and mass popular culture that germinated in the 1960s. Lewandowski is much better known, much more famous than Gerd Müller, his predecessor at Bayern Munich, was. More people will be watching when Suárez withdraws from the Uruguayan team, which he will have been dismayed by the departure of Enzo Francescoli.
The fact that they have been so prominent for so long is as much regarding the scientific and medical advances available as it is regarding their skills. A couple of weeks ago, there was a reason why the two midfield deployments that stood out in the Champions League – sheer tireless energy, sheer irrepressible dynamism – were from Modric, 36, and Vidal, 34. That level of performance, in that exclusive group, would not have been possible even 20 years ago; it has served to prolong their careers and, in doing so, expand their legacies.
For many of them, Qatar will be their last stop. It will give the tournament a touch of sadness. An entire generation, one we’ve watched from the start, one we’ve come to know like no other in history, one that has become part of the fabric of the game, will be gone, in unison, and at last we’ll have to say bye.
Those flies are already in. Quick, shut your mouth.
As with deep-dish pizza or the new version of “Sex and the City,” in theory, there was no problem with Financial Fair Play, or with applying the spirit of fair play and respect for the rules to the appearance. financier of the sport…wait, don’t go; listen to me please-. In the middle of the first decade of this century, there was little doubt that European football needed to find a mechanism to make its teams less vulnerable to the whims of reckless owners in order to prevent them from going into colossal and uncontrollable.
The problem was the implementation. Elite clubs twisted and contorted the idea—with the help and complicity of pliant governing bodies—until a set of rules intended to promote sustainability became a method of cementing the status quo. Not that it mattered much either, since the ineffectiveness of the punishments for not complying with them was immediately evident.
It is unlikely that the successor of the system —which they have called with the concise title of “financial sustainability regulations”— will be more effective. The new guidelines, the product of a decade of bickering and a year of negotiations, will have little or no impact on the way any of the major teams operate. As in the past, the impact of the regulations will be like closing lips long following the flies are already rubbing their legs inside their mouths.
For now, there is no doubt that the way to handle the central problem in European football – the lack of competition due to economic imbalance – does not lie in a set of budgetary rules. They’re too easy to circumvent, they’re too loose to enforce, and, as usual, they’re several years late.
Rather, the solution must be sporty. Bigger teams will always make more money—or at least say they make more money—and thus have an advantage when spending is capped at a percentage of revenue. The most effective way to improve competition, both between clubs and between leagues, is to limit how they can spend revenue.
To be sure, a hard salary cap, the kind often seen in North American sports, is something clubs aren’t prepared to accept. However, nothing prevents UEFA from instituting policies that oblige all teams to have a significant proportion of local players or a set number of players under the age of 23. There’s no reason not to limit teams on the number of players they can loan out or even introduce rules that grant free agency to players who haven’t made a specific number of appearances.
Any and all of these measures would discourage the accumulation of stars in a handful of teams. Instead, they would allow for a more even spread of talent across Europe’s various leagues. They would encourage teams to be more sensible in the market, to think more long-term. They would help level the playing field not by holding back some, but by elevating others.
the legacy of pain
The strange thing is that Steven Gerrard knows better than most just how devastating an injury can be. By his calculation, during his career he endured around sixteen operations. He has screws in his hip. These days, he has a hard time going to the gym.
He is also aware that the impact goes beyond the physical aspect. A decade or so ago, following missing six months of Liverpool’s season with a groin problem, he admitted he had been “at the lowest point” of his life. He defined it as “the most difficult period” of his career. At times, he felt as if his “body had given up.”
Injuries are unavoidable, of course. Many of the problems Gerrard faced can be attributed to wear and tear, the body giving in to the pressure that is placed on all elite athletes. After all, that’s the most common source of injury: not a reckless sweep or dangerous tackle, but the almost routine snapping of tightly wound hamstrings or wear and tear of overstressed ligaments. Gerrard, the current Aston Villa manager, was right when he said last week that pain is “part of the game”.
However, that does not justify the conclusion he reached. After Arsenal’s 1-0 win over Gerrard’s Villa, London squad winger Bukayo Saka complained that his opponents had him targeted “on purpose” to hit him. Gerrard’s response was frank. He said Saka must “learn and learn fast” that “it’s not a non-contact sport; sweeps are allowed, the use of the physical is allowed ”.
In part, that can be attributed to the ordinary hypocrisy of the coaches – following all, Gerrard himself had complained that the referees do not “protect enough” their teams – but, in a way, it is also the legacy of generational trauma.
Just because Gerrard and his peers were exposed to (and sometimes added to) a totally unnecessary level of brutality doesn’t mean their successors have to go through the same thing. Just because injuries are a part of sports doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything we can to minimize their effects. By itself, the players endure enough pain. The game should ensure that they do not suffer more than necessary.
