Guillaume Faye, the Golden one and the metapolitical legion

Professor Ico Maly writes in 2021:

Metapolitics 2.0 is deeply woven into the new media system. The impact and the influence of The Golden One, and thus his role in the distribution of far right ideology, cannot be reduced to his content alone. We have to understand it in relation to online persona and thus also the digital and algorithmic environment in which he produces his voice. The management of visibility, as well as avoiding non-visibility, is a constant worry for all actors in this media system. Making yourself visible is thus critical for all ideological projects. Over The Golden One’s long social media career he has proven himself a master of this game. Further he has remained fully integrated on all major digital platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) for almost a decade. He used the affordances of each platform and adopted classic influencer techniques to grow an audience, keep that audience, and build a community around him.

Key to any contemporary metapolitical project is thus being and staying integrated in each platform’s culture and adjusting to community rules. It is their integration in the new media ecology that allows them to become so influential. Since the end of 2020, the Golden One has struggled to remain integrated. His personal Instagram and Facebook accounts have been deleted. He is now using his existing mainstream accounts to move his audience to new platforms like GAB and Telegram. In a desperate attempt to remain on YouTube, he has announced that he will stop posting political videos there. His attempts to reinstate his Instagram and maintain his YouTube account show us just how important mainstream digital media are for the metapolitical project.

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WHO’S WHO IN THE DISSIDENT RIGHT: BRITTANY PETTIBONE

Colin Liddell writes:

As an e-THOT, it can safely be assumed that she has no ideas, originality, or authenticity of her own worth commenting on. So, why even mention her in a serious compendium like this?

The main and perhaps only reason to keep tabs on Brittany is as an “historical artefact” demonstrating how the combination of social media and thottery became conduits for the degenerative sub-intellectual and sub-ideological content that undermined the once potent force known as the Alt-Right. From a high-IQ, “Apollonian” movement, forging a future spiritual and philosophic elite, it instead transmuted into an impotent, infantalised, emotionalised, and over-feminised hot mess, which is where it kind of remains today.

Characters like Brittany played their part in this tragic downward spiral.

Luckily, I don’t have to do all the tedious research to demonstrate this, as a hard-working academic at a Dutch university has spent years trawling through Pettibone’s Twitter and other social media to build up a convincing picture of how she was turned from an apolitical airhead with a petty interest in sci-fi writing into part of the mooing herd of Alt-Righters stumbling off the conspiritard and meme cliffs.

The academic, Professor Ico Maly details how Pettibone was a nobody on Twitter with low engagement until she started to pick up on the noise generated by the Alt-Right and Trump’s presidential run, and started to tentatively chime in, about one month before the election in November 2016.

Professor Ico Maly (in the Culture Studies Department, Tilburg University in the Netherlands) writes in this 2020 paper:

Far-right movements, activists, and political parties are on the rise worldwide. Several scholars connect this rise of the far-right at least partially to the affordances of digital media and to a new digital metapolitical battle. A lot has been written about the far-right’s adoption of trolling, harassment, and meme-culture in their metapolitical strategy, but researchers have focused less on how far-right vloggers are using the practices of influencer culture for metapolitical goals. This paper tries to fill this gap and bring new theoretical insights based on a digital ethnographic case study. By analyzing political YouTuber and #pizzagate propagator Brittany Pettibone, this paper contributes to our understanding of radicalization processes in relation to the use of digital media.

…Mainstream digital media like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are used by radical right and far-right actors in connection to niched websites, boards, crowd funding platforms, click farms, bot-networks, and alt-tech to engage in a metapolitical battle: a cultural or ideological war for hegemony.

The Alt Right works in niches because the mainstream means of cultural production (New Yorker, New York Times, Harvard, etc) are shut to them.

Ico Maly writes: “The appropriation of digital culture and digital technologies has changed the metapolitics of the far-right. Not only the intellectual, but also the activist, the politician and the prosumer are now imagined as part of the new right metapolitical battle.”

Colin Liddell points out that prior to 2014, the Alt Right was primarily a written medium, but after 2014, it became primarily a lower IQ podcasting and livestreaming and s***-posting medium.

Maly:

* People do not radicalize in relation to abstract phenomena, but in relation to (a network of) very specific individuals, websites, channels, and discourses. The Trump campaign under Steve Bannon succeeded in connecting several of these niches together (the so-called alt-right, incels, #maga-activists, 4channers, anti-feminists, pizzagaters) in one movement…

* At its core, every new right metapolitical project is about the
production and hegemonization of an ideology that rejects liberal democracy, the left and the (radical) Enlightenment tradition in general.

* micro-celebrity should be understood as ‘a self-presentation technique in which people view themselves as a public persona to be consumed by others, use strategic intimacy to appeal to followers, and regard their audience as fans’…

* This “edited self,” as García-Rapp and Roca-Cuberes (2017) call it, is at the same time a product of the internal norms of each community (shaping its discourses, styles, looks, and ideologies) and the technical affordances and the media-ideologies connected to the platform (visible in its community standards and norms), and the intrinsic features of online content. Influencer culture is thus a socio-technical assemblage: the voice and performance of the social media influencer is not entirely
“free,” but a product of socio-technologic interaction between the vlogger, the platform(s), his or her followers, and the larger niche in which the influencer acts.

* Influencers are an integral part of the so-called attention-economy or what Venturini calls the ‘economy of virality’ (Venturini 2019, p. 133). They capture the attention of the users and activate them (García-Rapp and Roca-Cuberes 2017). Audience labour (Fisher 2015), or more specifically, the interaction between people, interfaces, and algorithms, is the fundament of the contemporary digital economy. This audience labour and attention is measured, quantified, and standardized in the form of “reach,” “views,” “interactions,” “likes,” and “shares.”

* Such claims give readers the impression that those recommendation algorithms work independently and overrule human agency. New research shows that YouTube’s recommendation mechanism does not promote inflammatory or radicalized content (Ledwich and Zaitsev 2020). Both claims do rely on a technological determinism, as they seem to understand the algorithms as completely independent actors. By adopting an ethnographic interactionist approach, the focus is not on the algorithms and the platforms alone, but on what people do with interfaces and algorithms.

* …Pettibone links to a thread from the infamous pro-Trump-reddit
/r/The_Donald as “proof” that the Democratic party organized pedophilia rings. The whole thread is based on one email from performance artist Marina Abramovic to John Podesta in which she says that she is ‘looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place’ (Wikileaks 2016). In those tweets, Abromovic’s arty “dinner party” concepts called Spirit Cooking were de-contextualized. They were now read literally as an invitation for “occult/magic gatherings” where children were molested and
murdered. Art—fiction—was turned into “reality.” This re-entextualization has had profound and powerful effects, as it was the start of a new conspiracy theory—Pizzagate…

* In less than one month, Pettibone developed a feel for hashtags and tapped into very successful ones like #DNCleak2, #spiritcooking, #ClintonCult, and #SavetheChildren. The success of these hashtags was not only a matter of organic uptake. Twitter found that 5% of the activity related to the #podestaemail hashtag came from bots (O’Sullivan 2018). The #spiritcooking hashtag was supported by the Russian internet agency (DiResta et al. 2019) and the #pizzagate hashtag was also pushed by
extensive bot-activity, primarily focused on internationalizing the affaire (Guenon des Mesnards and Zaman 2018). This made pizzagate into a global phenomenon getting global traction. Pettibone’s hashtag tactics helped turn Brittany Pettibone, the aspiring teenage writer, into an influential political tweep playing a major role in spreading the #pizzagate conspiracy theory…

* Pettibone, together with the Canadian far right YouTuber and activist Lauren Southern, started travelling to Europe and published vlogs on
their travels and especially on the identitarian movements and their actions in Europe.

7. From Activist Tweep to Metapolitical Influencer

In less than one year after her first political tweet, Pettibone had acquired large visibility—a key value within the attention economy (García-Rapp and Roca-Cuberes 2019)—within the global far right
niche. The name Brittany Pettibone had become a brand with a substantial audience of alt-right and identitarian activists. In the next months and years, she would capitalize on this position. Since May 2017, Pettibone started to craft her channel around her own personality. The banner ‘Virtue of the West’ was replaced by a professionally crafted intro positioning her name and her own logo.

In less than one year after her first political tweet, Pettibone had acquired large visibility—a key value within the attention economy (García-Rapp and Roca-Cuberes 2017)—within the global far-right
niche. The name Brittany Pettibone had become a brand with a substantial audience of alt-right and identitarian activists. In the next months and years, she would capitalize on this position. Since May 2017, Pettibone started to craft her channel around her own personality. The banner ‘Virtue of the West’ was replaced by a professionally crafted intro positioning her name and her own logo.

Since April 2017, we also see that Pettibone more regularly starts to use her Instagram account, giving her followers more insight in “the back office” of her political activism and seemingly giving unfiltered access to her private life. This influencer practice is commonly understood as “networked intimacy.” The concept was initially introduced to try to understand how people use digital media to make friends or to display intimacy in the context of social media (Miguel 2018). In relation to influencers, it has gotten a slightly different meaning. Networked intimacy has become an instrument to bind audiences to the influencer and create a perception of authenticity.
Whereas in 2016 pictures on Pettibone’s Instagram mostly showed typical family pictures, we see a clear break in 2017. From her invite to Trump’s inauguration, over selfies with Lauren Southern to her performance at the Free Speech Rally in Berkeley in April 2017: Instagram was now regularly
used to give her fans a look behind the scenes of her activist life. With the exception of some old #TBT pictures—showing her travelling with friends, celebrating her dog’s birthday and pictures with her family—most pictures were now carefully staged and stylized to contribute to her brand as an “important activist.” The intimacy of these “old family” #TBT photos were re-entextualized in a political context and blended with more glamorous pictures reminiscent of fashion shoots with behind the scenes pictures and stories on her political activism. Influencers, Hou (2019) argues, try to create an aura of authenticity through the (interactive) representation of the intimate and private self.
A practice Hou calls staged authenticity. A good example of how Pettibone uses staged authenticity for metapolitical goals is her wedding. In the weeks and months before her wedding with Martin Sellner (see Figure 8)—a key figure within the pan-European identitarian movement Generation
Identity—followers on her Instagram could see her getting her wedding ring sized, kissing Martin Sellner on a carriage under the caption ‘Du bist die liebe meines lebens,’ and pictures of both giving their wedding vows in a church on the Austrian countryside.

* Uptake refers to (1) the fact that within the digital ecology users are not only consumers but also (re)producers of discourse, so-called prosumers (Miller 2011) and (2) that algorithms and the interfaces of digital media play an important role in the dissemination and reproduction of ideas (see Maly 2019a, 2020c). Uptake through human and non-human actors (from bots to the algorithms organizing the communication on a platform) has become a crucial part of any political and metapolitical battle. Metapolitical messaging in the digital age is thus not a linear process between sender (the intellectual) and receiver (the people), but involves a multitude of human and non-human actors that
are all potential senders and receivers. This “uptake” is as crucial as the input.

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The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi and the Making–and Unmaking–of the World’s Greatest Soccer Club

Simon Kuper writes in this 2021 book:

* By 1970, they had developed a revolutionary new brand of football, one that would help shape the sport for the next fifty years, especially in the Netherlands and Barcelona. Ajax people didn’t really have a name for the style, but foreigners called it “total football.”
“Total football” meant that every player attacked and everyone defended. Ajax’s players changed position so fluidly that it became hard even to speak about positions. Ajax’s game evolved into what Cruyff called “a controlled chaos.” 26 Every player had to think for himself nonstop, adapting his position second by second depending on where every other player was. The ideal of a totally fluid football team went back to the “Danubian Whirl” of the 1930s’ Austrian Wunderteam. Ajax had reinvented it for a new era. 27
The dominant style of the 1960s had been defensive Italian catenaccio . Ajax took the opposite approach: they played in the opponents’ half, passing one-touch at top speed, with players changing positions all the time. They positioned themselves so the man on the ball always had at least two diagonal passes to choose from. A pass that goes straight ahead is easy for an opponent to read, while a square ball is usually pointless, and can be fatal if intercepted. But no single opposition player can block two diagonals simultaneously. So Ajax made triangles, prefiguring the great Barcelona teams of Cruyff himself and Pep Guardiola.
Cruyff saw football as geometry, a question of space. When Ajax had the ball, they made the pitch wide: he said wingers had to have “chalk on their boots.” When Ajax lost possession, they shrank space: several players would “press” the opponent on the ball, aiming to win it back at once. That was the perfect moment, because a team that had just won the ball was usually disorganized, disorganized, with players out of position. If you could rob them, you could have a clear run on goal. And if your opponents never got a chance to build, they grew demoralized.
Pressing, or “hunting,” as Ajax called it, required almost military coordination. Each player had to occupy exactly the right spot, and everyone had to join the press. Ajax’s attackers were the first defenders. Conversely, the goalkeeper was the first attacker, starting moves with incisive passes. He played like a “fly keeper” in street football, patrolling his entire half as if he were a defender in gloves. This meant that Ajax used all eleven players, whereas other teams played with just ten.
“Nobody had overturned the codes of football like we did,” 28 Cruyff said later. Arrigo Sacchi, coach of “il Grande Milan” of 1987–1990, would comment, “There has only been one real tactical revolution, and it happened when football shifted from an individual to a collective game. It happened with Ajax.” 29
Cruyff marshaled the collective. He could pass in any direction because he was, in the phrase of his great biographer, Nico Scheepmaker, “four-footed”: 30 he used the insides and outsides of both feet, curling the ball like a snooker player. He clocked at a glance which foot a defender had planted in the ground, and accelerated past him on that side. He always said that speed wasn’t about running fast, but about knowing when to run—a claim that denied his own astonishing acceleration.
On the field, Cruyff was everywhere. Ajax’s trademark changes of position were in part an adaptation to his penchant for roaming. He was an extreme version of what we now call a “false nine”: a center-forward who constantly abandoned his position, dropping back into midfield or the wing or even central defense, losing his markers to find space and opportunity. He once explained, “If they don’t follow me, I’m free. If they follow me, they’re one man short in defense.” 31 Ajax’s midfielders would burst into the space he vacated.

* The great player used to live like a rock star. He was pursued by groupies. He expected his body to give out by the age of thirty. He didn’t make a fortune. And so he lived large. After all, being a genius meant you didn’t have to work hard. Ferenc Puskás in the 1950s was fat, George Best in the 1960s an alcoholic, Cruyff chain-smoked, and Maradona took cocaine. The temptations of stardom were magnificent; succumbing was almost the point.
Best after 1968, and Maradona and Pelé for most of their club careers, played with many unremarkable teammates. Maradona at Napoli often received passes behind him (which he would kindly applaud). Both for his club and his country, he learned to play alone.
Few of these men aspired to weekly brilliance. Pelé was forever crossing the planet to play lucrative exhibition games. Maradona turned it on for World Cups but rarely in between. And they all got kicked a lot. In 1966, Pelé limped out of the World Cup. A few years later, before Cruyff joined Barça, Real Madrid’s chairman Santiago Bernabéu warned that the Spanish league wouldn’t suit the Dutchman, “because they’ll break those little legs of his within three weeks.” 55 Watching clips of Cruyff playing for Barcelona, it’s noticeable that almost every opponent chops or trips or elbows him, or slides in with a two-footed challenge, or at least tries to. In his first match against Granada, his teammates wouldn’t let him enter the opposition’s penalty area for a corner: “You don’t go into the box against these guys.” 56
In 1983, Maradona’s spell with Barcelona effectively ended when his ankle was crushed by the defender Andoni Goikoetxea, the “Butcher of Bilbao.” “Maradona has not died,” Goikoetxea pointed out in mitigation. Sometimes, intimidation took baroque psychological forms. A month before Goikoetxea’s assault, Barcelona hosted Nottingham Forest in a preseason friendly. Forest’s manager Brian Clough went up to Maradona in the tunnel before the game, announced, “You might be able to play a bit, but I can still grab you by the balls,” and proceeded to do just that, recalled Clough’s midfielder Steve Hodge. 57
What transformed the star’s lot was TV. Before the 1990s, few matches were televised live. Then Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlu-sconi built TV channels on football. Suddenly clubs became content providers, and stars were premium content. The clubs offered the stars a new deal: we’ll pay you fortunes if you’ll live like professionals. Messi and Ronaldo accepted the offer.
Football’s authorities protected stars by cracking down on fouls and banning the tackle from behind. Messi said in 2005, “In professional football nothing really happens because there are referees. At school was where kicks were real kicks.” 58 Once he became recognized as an international treasure, from about 2008, he received extra protection. Even if a referee missed a foul, the culprit still had to worry about being caught on camera. Cruyff noted in retirement, “TV improved the skill level. Now the good players are protected.” 59 Imagine what Cruyff himself could have done with that protection.
Perfect, telegenic fields have helped, too. Messi didn’t have to navigate the muddy Dutch fields of Cruyff’s youth, when simply not falling over was sometimes a feat. And Messi was never going to destroy his knee on a frozen pitch on Boxing Day, as Brian Clough did as a brilliant forward in 1962.
In the TV era, the best players have congregated at a handful of the richest clubs. Messi has spent his entire club career playing with world-class teammates, who enabled him to reach his best.

* Messi’s need for a band became clear during all those tournaments struggling in front of mediocre midfielders and defenders with Argentina. He was unable to imagine the mindset of a player who couldn’t see obvious one-twos or execute basic one-touch passes. At the World Cup 2010 I was transfixed by Newcastle United’s ungainly winger, Jonás Gutiérrez, who performed a comic impersonation of a right-back for Argentina while often struggling to stay upright. The next World Cup it was center-back Federico Fernández, astute enough to know he had been promoted beyond his competence, so terrified of the ball that the moment he received it, he would try to shove it into the feet of the nearest teammate.
The manager of a leading national team explained to me the difference between the Messi of Barça and the Messi of Argentina. For his club, the manager said, Messi typically received the ball near the opposition’s penalty area, after a series of short passes involving multiple players. He then had about five teammates within twenty meters of him, each one drawing away defenders. He could choose between multiple passes, or he could dribble. Often he was in a one-against-one situation, and as Mourinho said, “When Messi has the ball one-on-one, you’re dead. There’s no way to solve that problem.” 61
Argentina, by contrast, are a team without a system. They rarely manage to win the ball near the opposition’s goal, and they give it to Messi when they can find him rather than when he asks for it. Often that’s in midfield, with no teammates near him, as if plan A is for him to re-create Maradona’s solo goal against England. Opponents closing in on him know something useful: he’ll probably dribble.
Argentina have forced Messi to play like a pibe . At the 2014 World Cup, he completed forty-six dribbles, seventeen more than his nearest rival, Holland’s Arjen Robben; meanwhile, Messi completed only 242 passes, two fewer than Germany’s keeper, Manuel Neuer. But Messi didn’t want to be a pibe anymore. Whereas Maradona was the individual who wanted to beat the system, Barcelona had socialized Messi into a Cruyffian collective game. With Argentina, his frustrations often spilled over into quarrels with teammates and referees. After the defender Nicolás Burdisso was unable to get the ball to him during a match in 2011, he and Messi had to be separated in the changing room. 62 Cruyff in the 1970s had enjoyed playing for his national team because the standard was higher than at Barça; 63 for Messi it was the other way around.
Only at Barcelona did Messi find the ideal environment for greatness. One afternoon, a woman who lives in Castelldefels drove me past his home, and I realized: the essential underpinning of his routinely brilliant football was a boring life. High up in this unremarkable town, away from the beaches, he had bought the neighbor’s house and constructed a compound complete with mini–football field. Palm trees, bougainvillea, and white walls provided privacy. He lived here for years without security cameras or alarms until eventually the club installed some. He later learned to make himself unpredictable to criminals by driving different routes to training in different cars. 64 But even with these precautions, his tranquil home life couldn’t have been further from the overheated chaos of Argentina.

* …let’s pause for a moment and think of what Messi does for global happiness. To paraphrase Cruyff’s biographer, Scheepmaker, he has made our lives richer than they would have been without him. We live in the age of Messi, and it often feels like the best way to spend this time is to watch him. A friend who has struggled with his mental health told me that for years he tried to catch almost every match Messi played for Barcelona: “For me, watching him has something of a therapeutic quality. He’s basically an accessible genius, on a weekly basis at a relatively low cost of a yearly subscription.”
Messi can even have that effect on opponents during a game. The French striker Djibril Cissé recalled, “I was surprised to find myself watching him, leaving the match and becoming a spectator.” 85
Messi is extraordinary even when playing for his country. If the Messi of Argentina sometimes seems disappointing, that’s because we compare him with the Messi of Barça and with the Maradona of the World Cup 1986. In fact, according to the sports statistician Benjamin Morris, the Barcelona Messi and the Argentina Messi have been probably “the two best players in the world.” 86 Remember that between 2007 and 2016, Messi reached four finals with Argentina, three in the Copa América and the World Cup final of 2014. He lost them all, but three of them only by the finest of margins.

* Sociability is part of the point of Barça’s football, Seirul·lo told me. “That’s why we pass the ball a lot,” he said, “so that all the players are involved.” Eamon Dunphy, in Only a Game? in 1976, put it even higher:
If you are just knocking a ball between you, on a training ground, a relationship develops between you. It’s a form of expression—you are communicating as much as if you are making love to somebody. If you take two players who work together in midfield, say, they will know each other through football as intimately as two lovers. That would apply to Giles and Bremner, for example. It’s a very close relationship you build up when you are resolving problems together, trying to create situations together. It’s an unspoken relationship, but your movements speak, your game speaks. The kind of ball you give each other, the kind of passes you give each other, the kind of situations you set up together, speak for you. You don’t necessarily become closer in a social sense, but you develop a close unspoken understanding.

* Great soloists were what distinguished Barcelona from the Spanish national team of their era. Spain passed like Barcelona, pressed like Barcelona, and built walls like Barcelona, but they didn’t score like Barcelona, because they didn’t have the soloists. They won the World Cup in 2010 by scoring just eight goals and conceding two in seven games.

* A coach has to seduce players into accepting his ideas. Whereas motivating players is a top-down relationship, seduction implies a relationship of equals. The contemporary manager is more film director than military general. Authoritarian rule has faded out even faster in football than in most high-skill workplaces.

* Lilian Thuram: “I’ve never met a racist person in football. Maybe they were, but I didn’t see it. You know why? Because people who are racist tend not to know the Other. In football, we share things. And in football it’s harder to have discrimination, because we are judged on very specific performances.”

* [Luis] Van Gaal left at the end of that season after multiple conflicts with his Brazilian players, and no prizes. He had learned what happens in modern football when the talent clashes with the club: the talent wins.
Many fans find this incomprehensible. They still expect a manager to command his players like the no-nonsense headmaster of a 1950s reform school for bad boys. In fact, a macho coach who tries to break the players’ will, or who attempts heavy-handed “motivation,” will prompt talent flight. Modern clubs have abandoned the fantasy of dominating their mobile, multinational, multimillionaire, near-irreplaceable players, most of them armed with egos, agents, and journalistic sycophants. In a talent-driven business, rule by talent is inevitable.

* Money is the best measure of player power in football. Big clubs spend about 50 to 70 percent of their revenues on footballers’ salaries, and another 20 to 40 percent on transfer fees, calculates Ian Graham of Liverpool. In other words, the talent is able to command up to 90 percent of clubs’ revenues.

* But the truth is that sport isn’t a very useful model for business. On the contrary: many sports clubs are so badly run that they ought to model themselves on ordinary companies. (The only sphere of excellence inside many clubs is the playing squad.)
More fundamentally, though, a football club is a different kind of animal than a bank, a law firm, or a multinational oil business. The biggest difference is the importance of talent.

* Wenger, who went from running Arsenal to giving management talks at corporate conferences, admitted that lessons from sport weren’t easily transferable: “Players have to be as close as possible to 100 percent of their potential to be efficient—what is not the case in daily life.”

* At Barça—and in Spanish life more generally—there are high expectations of courtesy. Public tellings-off are not tolerated. This indirectness can be a problem. It helps explain (along with the family nature of Barça) why nobody ever took Busquets or Piqué aside to tell them they had got old and it was time to go.
“It’s part of top-level sport that you say things, and discuss things,” said Zenden. But in Spain, “if you have an open clash with a player, it won’t automatically come good again.” Any criticism needs to be delivered in private and carefully phrased. A shrewd coach will first invest time building a relationship of trust with a player before trying to broach sensitive issues.

* Inside a football team, pay is the main measure of status. Cruyff said, “The degree of appreciation is expressed in money. So it’s not about the sum that you earn, but the hierarchical position that you occupy.” 23 Piqué was signaling, in the grossest possible way, that his status was stratospheres above that of the people who abuse him.
Since money in football equals status, players keep trying to gouge more of it from their club, no matter how much they already have.

* High-intensity running—defined as moving at over fifteen kilometers an hour—increased 30 percent in the English Premier League between 2006 and 2013, according to the Gatorade Sport Science Institute. The number of sprints rose sharply in the Champions League, too. “We have to have a much better physical condition to play our game,” Paco Seirul·lo told me.
Modern coaches push players almost every day for eleven months of the year, leaving little time for recovery. Most players can perform optimally in the autumn, but struggle to maintain that level between February and May—the period that Barça defines as “high competition,” with lots of matches, travel, and sleep loss.
Gil Rodas, a specialist in sports medicine at the University of Barcelona who has worked with Barça for many years, said the game’s rising “intensity and density” had prompted an increase in muscle and tendon injuries, which he called “the cancer” of football. The packed schedule didn’t help: one study found “a 6.2-fold higher injury rate in players who played two matches per week compared with those who played only one.” 10 As players’ pay rose, so did the cost of injury: on a salary of €8 million, spread across forty club games, each match appearance was worth €200,000.
In short, footballers needed to get fitter. How best to achieve that? An unspoken truth in the game is that doping will do more for you than broccoli. I’m sure there are some illegal drugs in football. On the other hand, clubs, doctors, and players have strong incentives not to risk getting caught.

* Here are some of Barça’s recommendations:
• Cheeringly, caffeine appears to improve everything in football from cognition through sprinting to passing accuracy. Barça’s booklet recommends tea or coffee at pre-training breakfast, and caffeinated sports drinks (or gum) on match days, ideally to be taken during the warm-up. 13
• Carbs are an essential part of the pre-match meal, usually eaten about three hours before kickoff. Most clubs also provide them at halftime, often in the form of a gel or a drink.

* Within an hour of a match ending, players should ingest protein to help their damaged muscle fibers recover. (The player’s cycle is “damage/recovery, damage/recovery,” said Lizárraga.) The anti-inflammatory protein recovery shake—which some clubs personalize for each player—has become a ritual in the industry after training and matches.

* For all the effort invested in getting footballers to eat right, there is still little scientific evidence that it makes a difference. We just don’t know whether good nutrition wins football matches or does much to prevent injury.

* Decision-making and football intelligence—pattern recognition, in effect—seemed to improve with age, he explained. “The percentage of successful passes is 3–5 percent higher in players over 30 compared to players between 16 and 29 years old.” That could compensate for a decline in speed. Lago Peñas cited a study of players in Germany’s Bundesliga: after age thirty, their number of sprints (defined as runs faster than 6.3 meters per second, maintained for at least a second) was 21 percent lower than for younger players.

* Active footballers may not be any happier than the rest of us, but they do have more intensity. The basic illusion of top-class sport is that it is more important than life and death. Winning in front of a hundred thousand fans provides a buzz unmatched in ordinary life. So, perversely, does losing. You sit in the changing room with all your teammates, your body hurting, too tired to lift a bottle of water to your lips, slumped in misery, and it is a shared intensity of emotion that you will never experience again after football. Retirement in one’s thirties is a widespread fantasy among Dilberts in office cubicles, but most top-class athletes have too much internal motivation to spend their remaining decades on the sun lounger.
They struggle to understand how the rest of us put up with our low-adrenaline lives.

* But deprived of Barça, [Neymar] lost some of his discipline. At times he degenerated into a number ten who liked to receive the ball standing still, then taunt opponents by doing tricks while they kicked him. It was his natural game, and perhaps he preferred it to brilliant servitude at Barça. Stuck in the French league, the most gifted player of his generation effectively retired from weekly top-class football.

* Only outside Western Europe does youth football remain pre-Cruyffian. Around 2013, a kids’ indoor soccer tournament in Rockville Centre, New York, found itself a referee short. One of the organizers asked the parents: Does anyone know the rules well enough to call a game? A Hispanic-looking man in a baseball cap volunteered.
But he turned out to interpret his role rather broadly. He kept stopping the game to advise both teams on positioning. The watching parents, who had come to see their kids win, grew antsy. “Come on! Let them play!” they shouted.
The guy in the baseball cap, on sabbatical in New York after four draining seasons at Barça, was Pep Guardiola.

* In Catalonia today, people stomp out of Sunday family lunch or break up with old friends because of quarrels about independence. Catalonia has become an even more distrustful place than the rest of Spain, which is itself low-trust by European standards. In the World Values Survey for 2010 to 2014, only 14 percent of people in Catalonia strongly agreed that “most people can be trusted”—less than half the level of Madrid.

* Messi (and for the most part, Luis Suárez) stopped defending—an almost unheard-of privilege in top-class football. When Barça lost the ball, opponents aimed to play the ball out through Messi’s zone, while he just stood there and watched them go. Then he would often trudge back alone, yards offside behind the opposition’s defenders, watching play unfold at the far end of the field. Teammates like Rakitić, Arturo Vidal, Sergi Roberto, and Griezmann acted as his legs, pulling forty-yard sprints to cover the holes he left. That dragged Barça’s midfield out of shape.
As the team aged with Messi, Barça’s training sessions slowed down. This was a shock for Griezmann, who had come from Atlético Madrid. There, he recalled, “Every training session was at the intensity level of a match.” 6 To the quiet dismay of Barça’s younger players, football’s most demanding rondo descended into a warm-up routine. In matches, Barcelona’s defenders and midfielders rarely overlapped anymore.

* “Every day football gets more spectacular, the players physically, technically, and tactically stronger,” remarked Gerard Piqué. “I always say that the best defenders in history are those of today.” Even Franz Beckenbauer, he added, was “worse on the ball, slower and understood the game less well” than Piqué’s generation. As for defenders who just kicked people, they had died out. 7
Piqué was right that football kept improving—but most of all outside Barcelona. While Barça neglected pressing, other teams updated it. Gegenpressing , the Germans called the latest version: chasing up the opposition the moment you lose possession, so as to win the ball near their goal, before their defense could organize. It was Ajax’s “hunting” of the 1970s on fast-forward—a game so rapid it should be called “storming.”
Storming teams adopted some of Barça’s innovations, such as Guardiola’s five-second pressing rule, but discarded others, like the obsession with possession. Whereas Guardiola’s Barça had hated losing the ball, for teams like Klopp’s Liverpool, losing the ball and then winning it back was the strategy.
In 2014, Germany’s 1–7 thrashing of Brazil with rapid forward pressing had seemed like a hilarious one-off. It turned out to be the portent of a new phenomenon: blowout wins by teams playing at a pace that would have seemed impossible as recently as 2010. By 2020, storming had become the orthodoxy, practiced even by traditionally cautious teams like Juventus and Chelsea. 8 Wing-backs pelted forward nonstop. Midfielders pulled sprints when their team won the ball, and also when they lost it.
Wenger told me in 2020:
In the last ten, fifteen years we have gone for real athletes, and from the day on where everybody could measure the physical performance, all the players who could not perform physically well were kicked out of the game. Today football goes at two hundred miles an hour, so you have to show first that you can go on the train. Once you’re on the train you can express your talent, but if you cannot get on the train, you don’t play.
A football field is about seven thousand square meters in size. Teams like Bayern and Liverpool, said Wenger, squeezed their defending into 8 percent of that space: they massed players around the ball in a zone of about six hundred square meters in the opposition’s half. Storming had become so overwhelming that a brilliant lightweight like Mesut Özil was squeezed out of the Premier League at Arsenal.
“It has killed some artists,” said Wenger. “I think it has uniformized a little bit too much the way to play football. . . . Everybody presses on the first ball from the keeper. . . . It has emphasized the chain defending to close balls down. And it has killed a little bit the creativity.”
Yet storming produced lots of goals. After a team went ahead, rather than sitting on their lead they just kept on storming.

Posted in Soccer, Spain | Comments Off on The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi and the Making–and Unmaking–of the World’s Greatest Soccer Club

Soccer Men: Profiles of the Rogues, Geniuses, and Neurotics Who Dominate the World’s Most Popular Sport

Stimulated by the World Cup, I’m reading books on soccer, including this 2014 one by Simon Kuper:

* I’ve increasingly given up chasing interviews with players. It isn’t worth the humiliation. Sometimes a magazine will call and ask, “Can you get an interview with X?” I always say that you can: if you want to spend weeks sending faxes that somehow never arrive, phoning impatient agents on their cell phones, hanging around training grounds, and trading favors with boot sponsors. In the end you’ll get an interview with X. He’ll probably turn up hours late, say, “I hope we’ll win on Saturday,” and then drive off again.
Another colleague of mine describes acting as an interpreter for a star who had just joined Real Madrid. As the two of them sat in the car heading for the press conference where the star was to be presented, my colleague asked him what message he wanted to convey to the waiting media. The star looked surprised at the thought. “The aim,” he explained, “is to say nothing.”
Soccer players almost never say, “No comment.” As the English playmaker Paul Gascoigne once pointed out, if you do that, the newspaper will report that the player said, “No comment,” which makes him look suspicious. Instead, the player says sweet nothings.
I live in Paris, and the other month I caught Franck Ribéry being interviewed on French television. It was impressive to see how fluently the phrases rolled out: “We played well…. Another big game coming…. Let’s hope we can win. . . . Only the team performance matters.” In its way, it was a perfect performance. This kind of drivel often satisfies interviewers, too. Many newspapers and television stations barely worry about the content. What they are trying to show is access to players—or the appearance of access. That by itself is enough to sell. I think I sold my interview with Kaká to publications in eight countries.
Of course, sometimes you catch a player on a good day, often after he has retired, and then the interview is a pleasure. I felt that in some of the profiles in this book: going around Cape Town with Bruce Grobbelaar, around Rotterdam with Johnny Rep and Bernd Hölzenbein, or sitting in the Polo Bar in Ascot, England, with Glenn Hoddle. Soccer players tend not to respond well to abstract questions about emotions (“How did you feel when? . . .”), but if you ask about specific moments or places or people, they sometimes get going. Even interviewing active players can be worthwhile. These people are roaring with energy, almost never have low blood sugar or a hangover, and are fascinated by what they do. Nicolas Anelka and Rivaldo were not pleased to see me, but they did say interesting things.
Then there is the intangible sense of a person that you can get only from actually meeting him: his aura, if you like.

* The other type of superstar common from the late 1960s until the 1980s was the leader. Maradona was one (being a rock star didn’t get in the way), but the ultimate leader-superstars were Johan Cruijff and Franz Beckenbauer. Both men were born just after the Second World War, as part of western Europe’s baby boom. By the late 1960s, in a world growing in prosperity and shedding deference, the boomers were seizing power for themselves. They demonstrated against Vietnam and led the street revolutions of 1968. On the soccer field, too, they made a power grab.
Cruijff and Beckenbauer didn’t only take responsibility for their own performances, but did so for everybody else’s as well. They were coaches on the pitch, forever pointing and telling teammates where to move. They helped the nominal coaches make the lineups. They didn’t do deference.

* Yet when soccer changed in the 1990s, both leaders and rock stars were doomed. With all the new money coming in, clubs became better organized. They regained control over their players. Often the manager—typified by Alex Ferguson at Manchester United—became a sort of dictator over his team. Clubs also began to focus more on the physical and demanded that their players abandon rock-star lifestyles. Even Ronaldinho had to leave Barcelona when the club grew fed up with his partying every night, particularly after he began to take along the teenage Messi. In soccer, the rock star was ousted by the corporate man. Liverpool’s defender Jamie Carragher, in his autobiography Carra , describes the “robotic, characterless ideal modern coaches want.”
Soccer players today are almost all followers rather than leaders. Joan Oliver, when he was Barça’s chief executive, insisted to me that Messi was a leader. But it turned out that by leader , Oliver meant something very different from a Cruijff or a Beckenbauer. Messi, Oliver explained, was a “twenty-first-century leader”: someone who didn’t speak much but led by example. That’s not what Cruijff would have called a leader.
So today’s superstar—Lampard, Kaká, Messi—is a slightly monomaniacal corporate man and yes-man. (In my profile of Florent Malouda, I describe his battle to turn himself into just that person.) Sure, they want to win. Like all good corporate executives, they take their jobs seriously. And they’re paid a lot to win. They practice hard.

* When Johan Cruijff was a young player and still rather naive, Dutch journalists used to tease him by asking him what was the last book he had read.
Invariably, he would cite the now-forgotten American novel Knock on Any Door . Sometimes the journalist would say: “But you said that last time!” and Cruijff would reply, “I’ve read it again. It’s a very good book.”
So it is ironic that Cruijff—voted European player of the century last week by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics—is responsible for the Dutch publishing sensation of this winter.
The book, You Have to Shoot, or You Can’t Score, and Other Quotes from Johan Cruijff , first appeared in October. It sold out instantly. It was reprinted twice in November, sold out again, and now sits once more in piles beside the tills in half the bookstores in Holland.
The quotes were assembled by Henk Davidse, who collected Cruijff interviews for decades and found rich material. Cruijff talked a lot. Even on the pitch, on the ball, with three men on him, he was always gesticulating and shouting advice to teammates. His whole life has been a conversation.
He talked about everything. The chapter headings include “On Guilders, Pesetas, and Dollars,” “On Tar and Nicotine,” “The Dutch Team: A Difficult Relationship,” and “On His Youth, Father Manus, Brother Henny, Wife Danny, the Children, and Health.”
And Cruijff said things that no one else did. “Even when he talked nonsense,” wrote Nico Scheepmaker in his biography Cruijff, Hendrik Johannes, 1947–1984, Fenomeen , “it was always interesting nonsense.”
Cruijff understood soccer better than anyone, but he also thought he understood everything better than anyone. He told a Chicago taxi driver the quickest way into town, advised Ian Woosnam to change his swing, and before having heart bypass surgery debated the method of operation with his surgeon.

* When a teenage waif named “Jopie” Cruijff began training with Ajax’s first team, many of the senior players had already known him for years. Cruijff had grown up a few hundred yards down the road from the club’s little stadium, in Amsterdam-East. He had been hanging around the locker room with the first team since he was four. Nonetheless, he surprised his new teammates. It wasn’t just his brilliance they noticed; it was his mouth. Even while on the ball, the kid never stopped lecturing, telling senior internationals where to run. Maddeningly, he generally turned out to be right.
Jopie Cruijff would become more than just a great soccer player. Unlike Pele and Maradona, he also became a great thinker about soccer. It’s as if he were the lightbulb and Edison all at once. It’s impossible to identify one man who “invented” British soccer, or Brazilian soccer. They just accreted over time. However, Cruijff—together with Rinus Michels, his coach at Ajax—invented Dutch soccer. The game played today by Holland and Barcelona is a modified version of what the two men came up with in Amsterdam in the mid-1960s. Only now are the Dutch finally liberating themselves from Cruijff’s style and, above all, from his bizarre personality.

* To Cruijff, soccer was “a game you play with your head.” He was a man who came from Mars and said, “This is how people have always done it, but they were wrong.” He rethought everything from scratch, without caring about tradition. Perhaps his greatest goal ever was a case in point. Ajax was playing a friendly against an amateur side, and there were no television cameras, but what seems to have happened is that Cruijff was advancing alone on the goal when the keeper came out to confront him. Cruijff turned and began running back with the ball toward his own half. The keeper pursued him until the halfway line, where he realized that Cruijff no longer had the ball. At some point he had backheeled it into the net without breaking stride.
Cruijff took responsibility not only for his own performance, but for everybody else’s too. He was forever pointing, a coach on the field. Michels had told him, “If a teammate makes a mistake, you should have prevented that mistake.” Frank Rijkaard, later a teammate of Cruijff’s and opponent of Maradona’s, said that Maradona could win a match by himself, but didn’t have Cruijff’s gift of changing the team’s tactics to win it.
As a leader, Cruijff was a child of his time. Like his contemporary Franz Beckenbauer, or the students in the streets of Paris in 1968, he was a postwar baby boomer impatient to seize power. The boomers wanted to reinvent the world. They didn’t do deference. Before Cruijff, Dutch soccer players had knocked on the chairman’s door to hear what they would be paid. Cruijff shocked Ajax by bringing his father-in-law, Cor Coster, in with him to do his pay talks.
Cruijff drove everybody at Ajax crazy. He never stopped talking, in that working-class Amsterdam accent, with his very own grammar, his penchant for apparently random words (“Them on the right is goat’s cheese”), and the shrugs of shoulders that sealed arguments. He once said about his playing career, talking about himself in the second person as usual, “That was the worst thing, that you always saw everything better. It meant that you were always talking, always correcting.”

* Dutch stadiums sold out wherever Cruijff played, as people flocked to see him one last time. He gave us thirty-yard passes with the outside of his foot that put teammates in front of the keeper so unexpectedly that sometimes the television cameras couldn’t keep up.
But what he did on the field was only the half of it. The older Cruijff was the most interesting speaker on soccer I have ever heard. “Until I was thirty I did everything on feeling,” Cruijff said. “After thirty I began to understand why I did the things I did.” In 1981 I was twelve, living in Holland, and for the rest of my teens I imbibed everything he said about soccer. It was as if you could read a lucid conversation with Einstein in the paper every day or two.
Cruijff said things you could use at any level of soccer: don’t give a square ball, because if it’s intercepted the opposition has immediately beaten two men, you and the player you were passing to. Don’t pass to a team-mate’s feet, but pass it a yard in front of him, so he has to run onto the ball, which ups the pace of the game. If you’re having a bad game, just do simple things. Trap the ball and pass it to your nearest teammate. Do this a few times, and the feeling that you’re doing things right will restore your confidence. His wisdoms directly or indirectly improved almost every player in Holland. “That’s logical”—the phrase he used to clinch arguments—became a Dutch cliché.
Cruijff had opinions on everything. He advised golfer Ian Woosnam on his swing. He said the traffic lights in Amsterdam were in the wrong places, which gave him the right to ignore them. His old teammate Willem van Hanegem recalls Cruijff teaching him how to insert coins into a soft-drink machine. Van Hanegem had been wrestling with the machine until Cruijff told him to use “a short, dry throw.” Maddeningly, the method worked.

* English players tend to divide into two social types. Players of the first type are so thoughtless and inarticulate that they would struggle in any profession but soccer: Think Paul Gascoigne, Lee Bowyer, Jonathan Woodgate. Then there is a minority type that thinks hard about the game: Gary Lineker, Gareth Southgate, or Tony Adams after giving up alcohol.
Owen told me that as a boy he watched Lineker and Alan Shearer “to get tips off playing, but also tips off how to conduct yourself off the pitch as well. If there was such a thing as someone copying exactly what they do and following in their footsteps, I don’t think you’d go far wrong with players like that.” His project—almost revolutionary in English soccer—involved not behaving like a half-wit.
It shows the instant you meet him. He enters the room—rapidly, of course—looks you in the eye, smiles, sticks out his hand, and says in his Welsh-Mersey lilt, “Hello, how are you?” An utterly banal sequence, except that few other English players could manage it. Owen may be the only England player with basic good manners.
Being both gifted and sensible, Owen progressed as rapidly as he moves. At seventeen, he made his Liverpool debut as a substitute, and when his team got a penalty, guess who was entrusted with it? At eighteen years and fifty-nine days, Owen became the youngest England player of the twentieth century.
This was weird. English soccer is run by the English working classes, who in their professions tend to follow the dictum that experience trumps talent. The best players traditionally had to prove their worth for years before being picked for England, after which they were given a berth on the team until years past their prime. In 1998, the notion of playing an eighteen-year-old in a World Cup therefore seemed heretical. England’s manager, Glenn Hoddle, tried to dismiss Owen as “not a natural goalscorer,” which raised the question of who on earth was. Owen began that World Cup on the bench beside another green youngster, a mere twenty-three-year-old named David Beckham.

* World Cups are ruled by fear. Most players are on a mission not to screw up. Yet there was Owen, dribbling as if in his back garden in Hawarden. He had “balls,” said Diego Maradona.

* Many times after England matches I have stood in the “mixed zone,” where journalists shout out questions to passing players. It’s mostly a sad scene. Paul Scholes, who could barely talk, used to trudge by with head bowed—probably more out of shyness than rudeness. With other players, it was rudeness. David Platt used to stop to chat with selected journalists about horse racing. When David Beckham became captain, he always stopped for a word. “I just hit it and it went in” is his usual account of a goal, though Beckham’s voice is so high-pitched that some words are audible only to certain breeds of dog.
Only Owen stops for a thoughtful analysis of his game. At the World Cup in Japan, he sometimes did so with a black garbage bag slung over his shoulder, so that he looked even more than usual like the boy next door. Owen seems immune to status. His partner is not a model but a girl he met in kindergarten, and life for him is not a series of confrontations in which you have to defeat all comers with your clothing, but a chance to play snooker, table tennis, or darts after training in your specially designed home. Or you could play golf. Whereas Beckham uses his clothes and hairstyles to draw the observer’s eye, Owen, who is arguably equally good-looking, and has done much more for England, tends to make himself look neutral.

* First, he has what you might call the opposite of nerves: The bigger the match, the better he plays. His goals generally come against teams like France, Argentina, Brazil, a hat trick against Germany, Brazil again, Argentina again, two late goals against Arsenal in an FA Cup final, saving England’s qualification against Russia, and so on. That is why international soccer, not club soccer, is his natural milieu. Playing for Liverpool, Real Madrid, and Newcastle, Owen has never won a league title or a Champions League, and he probably never will. We will remember him for World Cups.
The other essential point about Owen is that being intelligent, he can improve even as he slows down.

* Few British heroes are as popular at home as they are abroad. The basic reason is that the British can place each one of their compatriots precisely on the national class ladder.

* Just as Winston Churchill was unmistakably upper class, Beckham was clearly Essex Man, and so each was distrusted by members of other classes. To quote the musical My Fair Lady : “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him, / The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.”
Beckham’s one inelegant feature is his voice, that high-pitched, nasal monotone. Whenever he appeared after an England game to convert soccer into clichés, something of the magic drained. Beckham became a vehicle for the British to mock their new cult of vapid celebrity. To most adult English people, there was something tacky and absurd about him. Typically, when a pair of his boots was auctioned for charity in 2000, they were bought by a man dressed as a ferret to publicize a new Web site.
Even Beckham’s own class treated him with suspicion. Many in the working classes felt that Beckham had deserted his roots—hence the peculiar enmity he attracted from fans of West Ham, his local club in childhood.
Worse, in a country that prefers its heroes flawed, his physical perfection counted against him. That’s why Beckham’s first appearance in the national melodrama had to be as villain. After getting sent off against Argentina in 1998, he took more abuse than any English player before him. Things got so bad that a placard outside a Nottingham church proclaimed, “God forgives even David Beckham.”
His third constituency—the rest of the world—was the most grateful, and it’s here that Beckham will best be able to build in coming decades.

* foreigners barely noticed what Beckham said. To them, he is simply beauty, fame, and wealth incarnate, an Andy Warhol painting come to life.
Like Marilyn Monroe or Charlie Chaplin, Beckham works best as a silent brand. Fittingly, his first autobiography was essentially a picture book.

* Typically, Beckham’s first meeting with his future wife seems to have been orchestrated to boost both their brands.

* The Beckhams produced three sons, bearers of the Beckham brand. Over the years, it was above all Mrs. Beckham and Fuller who turned a very good right-half into a great brand. They understood that Beckham speaks through his body. It became a work of art in progress, the creation of hairdressers, tattooists, soccer managers, couturiers, and his wife, who all redesigned him endlessly as if he were a doll.
Once his appeal was discovered, it was marketed. In soccer, it has long been thought best practice to shield yourself from the media. Beckham, however, went on promotional tours of the United States and Asia. The inspiration seemed to come from his wife: In soccer you are expected to let your feet speak for you, but in pop music, where you are your image, life is ceaseless self-promotion.
The farther away people are from England and from soccer, the louder the Beckham brand seems to speak to them.

* Wayne Rooney. On the upside, he is the most accomplished English player since Bobby Charlton. On the downside, everyone wants a piece of him: fans, the media, his agent, Manchester United, and United’s manager, Alex Ferguson. In fact, due to his peculiar historical circumstances—a great English player living in contemporary England—Rooney may be the most grabbed-for player ever.

* It’s hard to know what Rooney thinks, because he rarely speaks in public, and has never been heard to say an interesting sentence in his life. Yet from his seat in front of his television, watching the world talk about him, he must marvel at how everyone gets him wrong.

* There are two types of English player, those from the working class and those from the underclass, and Rooney is the latter.

* Traditionally, players were picked for their country only once they had served their time and established themselves as “honest pros.” As in most British working-class occupations, seniority mattered. But Rooney broke all the rules. At one early training session with England, the boy dribbled past several players and then, as was his habit, lobbed the keeper. Initially, there was silence. Then his fellow internationals spontaneously broke into applause.
Like every new celebrity in modern Britain, Rooney became the object of hype. At first, he was very popular. He was treated as the authentic masculine counterweight to Beckham’s constructed effeminate beauty. There are two types of British player: ugly ones like Rooney, Paul Gascoigne, and Nobby Stiles and pretty ones like Beckham and Michael Owen. The British public usually prefers the ugly ones.
And English fans had been waiting decades for Rooney to arrive. Not only did he score goals, but he was that rare thing in English soccer: a player who sees space. Soccer is best understood as a dance for space. The team that can open spaces when it attacks, and close down spaces when it defends, generally wins. There are two kinds of passers: ones like Beckham, who pass the ball straight to a teammate, and ones like Lionel Messi, who pass into empty space. Rooney finds space. It’s partly because he has perfect control of the ball, which means that he never has to look down at it and instead can run with his head up looking for space.
The few previous Englishmen who could see space—chiefly Gascoigne and several so-called mavericks in the 1970s—ruined themselves with alcohol and various other vices. Rooney hasn’t. He has been England’s main man since he was eighteen. The country’s need for him often segues into dependence. Among the many groups who want their piece of him, England’s fans often appear the most desperate.
Rooney was never surprised or confused by his own rapid rise. He liked playing for England at seventeen.

* Rooney is a careerist.
Players hardly ever come out as careerists. That’s because the game is pervaded with the rhetoric of lifelong love for club: Players are always trying to keep fans happy by kissing their club’s badge or talking about how they have supported the club since childhood. Yet probably no professional player is “loyal” in the sense that fans use the word. Pundits sometimes rhapsodize about the old days, when players often spent their entire careers at one club, but that was because clubs could then simply forbid them to move. No longer.
Contrary to popular opinion, Rooney is not especially selfish. He’s just typical of his profession. Nowadays he is often contrasted with teammates like Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, and Gary Neville, who have supposedly stayed “loyal” to United all their careers. But it would be more accurate to say that these men have a happy employer-employee relationship with United.

* British talents have traditionally needed a father figure. But Rooney doesn’t. In fact, he barely seems to need a manager at all.

* But like most players he will be remembered chiefly for what he did with his national team, and so he will be remembered above all as a failure. [Frank] Lampard belongs to England’s “golden generation,” which was supposed to win trophies but never got past the quarterfinals of any major tournament. He is the symbol of his generation: an apparently brilliant failure.
The question is why his generation failed. You could call it the Frank Lampard question.

* “Frank is a box-to-box player, as they call it in England,” Hiddink reflected in the hotel lobby in Istanbul. English players, [Gus] Hiddink said, need to be set limits: “‘This is your area and this is your task.’ If you don’t do that, Frank has so much energy, so much drive, that he often does too much. In my early days at Chelsea too, he’d come back to his own defense, collect the ball, worm himself forward through the midfield, and then he’d actually score quite often, I must say,” Hiddink chuckled fondly, “in his energy-eating style.”
Of course, being everywhere is precisely what Lampard had been brought up to do.

* Hiddink wasn’t just worried about saving Lampard’s energy, about leaving him power for the crucial moments in a game when you need it most. He also saw that Lampard, by going everywhere, was slowing down Chelsea’s attacks. The ball moves forward faster when a midfielder doesn’t come to fetch it. Hiddink felt that Lampard at Chelsea, like his box-to-box twin, Steven Gerrard with England, was taking too much responsibility for moving the game along. At the World Cup in South Africa, Hiddink said, you’d see Gerrard collecting the ball in England’s defense and then running twenty yards with it. Gerrard was working as hard as he could, showing spirit. However, the effect of his work was to slow England’s attacks. His running gave the opposition’s defense time to move into position.
Other teams—most notably Arsenal, Germany, and increasingly also Brazil—like to strike the moment the opposition loses the ball. In basketball, this is known as the moment of “turnover.” When the ball is turned over from one team to the other, the team that has lost it is fractionally out of position. That’s when you need to move play forward in three quick passes. But England’s galloping midfielders do that too rarely. That’s one reason England has gotten so little use out of Michael Owen—the ultimate “turnover” striker—since his hat trick in Munich in 2001.

* Lampard and Gerrard are responding to English cues. At the moment suprême , they will tend to forget the words of Hiddink and Benitez (and presumably Fabio Capello) and do too much.
Yet Lampard and Gerrard perform better with Chelsea and Liverpool than they do with England. I asked Hiddink why that might be. He raised the issue of “coaching” on the field. At big clubs, great players coach wayward colleagues: “Drop back!” “Take it easy,” or simply, “Stop running around so much and stay in your zone.” At Chelsea or Liverpool, experienced continental players reinforce the coach’s message in real time. But watching England labor in South Africa, Hiddink had noticed almost none of that.

* Players like Lampard and Gerrard had become demigods in their own country, he pointed out. “At a certain point players get a status—sometimes rightly, sometimes forced—that creates a sort of screen around them. Others think, ‘Oh, I can’t touch him or make demands on someone who’s such a big name in England.’” The demigods themselves might want to be coached, Hiddink said, but their teammates don’t dare. And so the demigods are allowed to run around too much.

* All these books are keen to establish the author’s social origins at once: as a member of a tight-knit, loving working-class family. The message is that however much the player earns per week, he remains anchored and authentic.

* By their teens, the five authors [Jamie Carragher, Ashley Cole, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, and Wayne Rooney] are already on a career track.

* You close Ashley Cole’s My Defence feeling dirty and stupid for having read it, your main emotion surprise that his agent let him write it. Rooney’s book reads a bit like an essay that a child has been forced to write in elementary school.

* These books help you understand the stages of a player’s life, from boyhood to media victim.

* …childhood in the family home was about the only time in their lives that they were not treated as celebrities. Only then did people relate naturally to them. Almost everyone they meet afterward has ulterior motives for the relationship. No wonder the players feel nostalgic for childhood. “Family means everything to me, all together, sitting around and laughing, under one roof,” says Gerrard. “However crazy my life became with Liverpool and England, I wanted that protective wall of my family around me.”

* With all this going on, school cannot matter much. The five are not necessarily stupid—well, Carragher, Lampard, and Gerrard aren’t. Rather, as budding stars they are taught to view anything outside soccer as a distraction. That’s why players are seldom complete human beings.

* …if you are a talented Englishman playing in England, your almost unlimited access to sex is balanced by having to perform it in front of the nation. At Liverpool’s Christmas party in 1998, a young Carragher, dressed in a Quasimodo costume, is photographed “working my way through a variety of angles” with a stripper. On the eve of publication, “I waited at a garage until midnight for the first edition of the Sunday papers.”
Carragher doesn’t get caught that way again. Any leading player in Britain soon becomes a sort of part-time professor of media studies.

* In January 2001 Eriksson became England’s fourth manager in four years. The country’s soccer was in the midst of an identity crisis. The traditional English game—muscular, not very clever, long balls hoofed forward by big men on muddy pitches—had failed. England needed to adopt the intelligent passing soccer of continental European teams. Yet no English manager seemed capable of this. For the first time ever, England hired a foreigner.

* Intellectually, there are two sorts of countries: ones where people tend not to believe in conspiracy theories (most of western Europe) and ones where they do (poor countries). Thus, many Iraqis believe that Saddam Hussein is still alive, his execution staged; many Arabs assume the Jews were behind the September 11 attacks; and many Africans think Western scientists concocted AIDS in laboratories.

* The main thing that had struck [Billy Beane] in Germany was the emotion of the fans. You didn’t see that so much in American sports. In Beane’s view, “Wherever I see emotion, I see opportunity.” He drew two conclusions from his German visit: Where there’s emotion, there’s money to be made. And where there’s emotion, people are probably making emotional decisions.
Rational Moneyball thinking might have a place in soccer, too.

* [Franz Beckenbauer] soon returned in his third incarnation as soccer politician. Alone among soccer’s former greats, he was born to the role: Beckenbauer isn’t a squabbler like Johan Cruijff or a dullard like Bobby Charlton or a drunk like George Best or a recovering drug addict like Diego Maradona or a weak character like Michel Platini or a talking puppet like Pele.

Posted in Soccer | Comments Off on Soccer Men: Profiles of the Rogues, Geniuses, and Neurotics Who Dominate the World’s Most Popular Sport

What is our political system?

In a December 7 Substack podcast, Richard Spencer says: “People who are enraged against the current system, those people who will bring it down, whether it is January 6 or Yeism or the aggressive stupidity on Tucker Carlson… These people who feel that the world is beyond their control and they rage against it from a lower status.”

In a video released November 30, Eric Alterman at 16:40 tells Robert Wright that the United States is not a democracy but an oligopoly.

I find this analysis shallow. The United States is an oligopoly, and a democracy, and the country also contains dictatorship (the president has the foreign policy powers of King George III), socialism, capitalism, and many other things.

What strikes me as more likely than a revolution is that the relative value of these components of America changes so that the country becomes more or less democratic, elitist, socialist, dictatorial, capitalist, etc.

And what will cause these changes? Events, dear boy, events. When the situation changes, the state will have to change. To survive a nuclear war, for example, Dwight Eisenhower said America will have to become a dictatorship. To get through Covid, most democratic states curtailed basic rights. To get through its war with Russia, Ukraine has curtailed rights.

Israel is sometimes called an apartheid state. There are elements of Israel’s reign over parts of the West Bank that does recall apartheid while life in Israel proper is generally far away from apartheid.

Am I an honest person? In some situations, I am honest, and in some situations, I am dishonest.

Am I a righteous person? In some situations, I act righteously and in other situations, I don’t.

Everything we stand for is contingent. I stand for free speech, but in a time of war, I understand the need for some censorship. I stand for the free practice of religion, but in the case of dangerous contagion, I understand there might be a case for restricting attendance at religious services. I believe in God, but I understand that for many people, belief in God is impossible and they are better served by a different worldview. For other people, believing in God makes them worse. For other people, such as myself, we believe in God, but we sometimes need different words for God such as “reality” to keep God real. If you, like me, get tired of hearing you need a relationship with God, you might benefit from developing a positive relationship with reality.

Posted in America | Comments Off on What is our political system?