Mick Hartley

The link at Arts and Letters Daily:

“Just as oil is part of the oil business, so stupidity is part of the football business.” The sublime idiocy of English football is beyond remedy…

And here's what they're linking to – a review by David Goldblatt in Prospect of Why England Lose and Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski:

For starters, take the case of the striker Nicolas Anelka, whom Real Madrid purchased from Arsenal for £22.3m. Multinational companies, like football clubs, spend a great deal of time locating and then transferring key personnel to foreign postings. When they do, they also spend a great deal of time and money making that reallocation as easy as possible: finding their staff housing, schools for their kids, and providing a variety of services to acclimatise them to new cultures and ways of working—on the grounds, not unreasonably, that they want them to focus on their job.

When you are moving young, often poorly educated, shy and emotionally fragile, inexperienced, young men who happen to play football very well, you might think this a useful model; not as an act of kindness or generosity, lord forbid, but because it makes economic sense. This of course is not the case in football. Anelka was left to rot at Real Madrid: for all the money thrown at him, when he arrived they failed to give him a locker, any assistance with housing, let alone any formal introductions to the team he was to be working with. Unsurprisingly, his performance at Real was disappointing

For a start, that's Real Madrid – which isn't in England. OK, so that's a bit of A & L Daily misdirection: the Prospect headline is The profound stupidity of football - in general. But really, is this the best they can do? Nicholas Anelka not being given a proper welcome when he arrived in Madrid? Is this the story to shame football? – exposing the dirty rotting underside of a sport in crisis? Nicholas Anelka – a notoriously unsettled and difficult young man, widely assumed at the time to be under the influence of an exploitative family, who now, just turned 30, appears to have reached a new maturity and success in his career at Chelsea? 

Have these wonderful multinational companies never treated their key personnel less than ideally? And, while we're on that subject – aren't they doing well, these companies? Have you noticed? And banks too. No problems there. Meanwhile in the Champions League the English teams, despite Liverpool's Tuesday night setback, are powering their way through to the knockout stages, as they have done in recent years with a consistency no other country has matched. Arsenal have just announced record profits, billionaires are queueing up to buy English clubs, and hundreds of thousands troop through the turnstiles every week while TV companies pay small fortunes to broadcast the games.

Not that football is without its problems – of course. Goldblatt brings in the old chestnut of class – "Of all the 34 England team members who have played at the last three international tournaments, only 5 came from anything approaching a middle-class background." Oh dear oh dear. Which goes some way to explaining why middle class writers enjoy rubbishing the game so much. God knows it's easy enough. Look at all those idiots dressed up with their scarves and silly hats, shouting themselves hoarse…

It's like going to a club or a rock concert with your earplugs in. Look at all those idiots jumping up and down, moving around with absolutely no sense of decorum or decency. Well yes – but you're kind of missing the point.