The Football Fiasco

 It has been a dramatic week in the world of European soccer. On Sunday twelve of the biggest clubs announced a breakaway league, but the adverse reaction from fans and everybody else led their plan to collapse by Wednesday.

 

The background is evergreen tension between the wishes of the biggest clubs and the various governing bodies. Fans and governments tend to prefer stability and tradition, and also have to ensure that the game is nurtured at grass roots level. The big clubs and star players want money; an entertaining competitive product for TV with familiar teams is the recipe to maximize revenue.

 

This has always been a messy compromise. National leagues have so far been sacrosanct. Rules and marketing practices have evolved slowly. The European dimension beloved of the biggest has been addressed via a midweek tournament called the Champions League, which is neither a league nor for exclusively for champions. The result has been too many matches, jeopardising player health and squeezing international schedules and domestic cups.

 

The big clubs have been angling for more, and a long negotiation has been reaching a unsatisfactory conclusion through a further expansion of the Champions League. The big clubs, considering themselves untouchable, were using brinkmanship to get the best deal. At the last minute somebody stood up to them and that caused them to injudiciously play their nuclear card. It blew up in their faces. Billionaires have been humiliated for ridiculous comments such as that they were “saving football”.

 

Interestingly, the part of the plan that riled everybody else was that the new league would be a closed shop with limited promotion and relegation. It is no coincidence that Americans now own many of the big clubs, a place where the practice of franchises without relegation is normal. Owners argue that they cannot invest for long-term development without certainty of their place. This is poppycock. Did Nokia and Blackberry have guaranteed positions in the mobile phone industry? Would there have been more investment and innovation if that had been the case? Of course not.

 

As a keen watcher of sports on both sides of the Atlantic, I can see advantages in both sets of practices. It is shame that neither seems to learn from the other. American sports benefit from rules to create parity and from innovative ways to make games more entertaining such as playoffs and a bias for offence. The young do like shorter games with more click bait highlights. The European practice of promotion and relegation is its strongest aspect, because it gives everybody hope and fear and because it makes more games meaningful. In Europe we do not see the ugly practice of “tanking”.

 

I think soccer has the opportunity to embrace most of these good practices without sacrificing its core. Rather than bastardising the Champions League further, I think the time has come to make the top primary weekend leagues European. At the same time the game can embrace rule changes and structures to add entertainment.

 

My European structure would create three leagues of eighteen teams to be played on a home and away basis on weekends from September until April. Those fifty-four teams would no longer play in domestic leagues, which would become like lower divisions. Extensive play offs in April and May would allow a second champion to be crowned (and more high profile games for television), but also engineer promotion and relegation between the European league division and between the third European division and national leagues.

 

The midweek schedule immediately becomes lighter, giving space for winter breaks, rest and international matches, as well as national and European knockout cup tournaments like a revived FA Cup and the former European Cup.

 

The big boys would have high profile and meaningful games every week, but without guarantees against relegation. TV would happily pay for an attractive slate of games but should be forced to cover the lower European leagues as well, just as they now agree to cover women’s leagues.

 

For the strong countries like England, more than half of the current premier league would usually qualify for one of the three European leagues, and the top national league would be an upgraded version of today’s Championship. For lower profile countries like Belgium or Romania, only the top few teams would qualify and the national leagues would look much as they do today, but with an extra incentive at the top end, helpful for teams like Celtic or Porto, who currently play in leagues with little competition.

 

The only downside that I see is that fans will have to travel further for matches, but with Ryanair and Easyjet perhaps that is not an issue. An alternative would be to split European leagues two and three as 2A and 2B on a regional basis to reduce long distance travel.

 

Then the new European leagues should embrace the idea of entertainment over tradition. One reason this does not happen is that traditionalists like to compare statistics historically. Baseball is so obsessed with this that it changes more slowly than other US games, and its audience has diminished as a result. For baseball the pandemic was a godsend: it enabled smart changes such as shortening extra innings games and seven innings double headers. Only the diehard would relish games of six hours and 18 innings, and thankfully they don’t happen any more.

 

I would fractionally increase the size of goals to favour the offence: the goalless draw is the single biggest impediment to the take up of soccer in the USA. I would have a shortened penalty shoot out at the end of each draw too and bonus points for goals. An example could be: six for a win plus a bonus for three goals; two for a draw plus one for winning the shootout plus one each for two or more goals; one point for scoring a goal in a loss.

 

Next I would have a stopping clock to reduce time wasting, and even a rule stipulating that there must be a shot after a full two minutes in possession. Four quarters of thirty minutes each would please the TV companies anxious to show advertisements.

 

In a different innovation, I would introduce a salary cap. Currently in the English premier league the top teams have a wage bill that is 8-10 times that of the minnows: it is no wonder so many games are mismatches. As well as parachute payments to cushion the blow for relegated teams, I would have “expansion” subsidies for promoted ones, to ensure some sort of parity.

 

Fewer games, more quality, more meaningful games between closely matched teams, more match ups between giants, fewer injuries, more goals, less passing for minutes on end around the half way line, the excitement of shoot outs and play offs, retention of hope for the smallest and fear for the largest. Who could complain at that delightful menu? It might even be enough to “save football”, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to see Real Madrid relegated every so often?

We Deserve Nationalism

 For a family living in the US, we view a surprisingly large number of BBC programmes. For the most part these are cheap imports bought by PBS, who stick to their format of having no adverts but as a consequence have no money either, so make pitifully few programmes of their own, and spend nearly as much time begging as mainstream channels do on advertising.

 

Sadly, the British imports are about as good as it gets here, if you discount sport and platforms like Netflix or Hulu. We may choose to watch an episode of As Time Goes By from 1990 for the tenth time, but that is an improvement on America’s Got talent or Yet Another Routine Terribly Acted Crime Show with no Character Development. Sometimes it does feel as though we are living in a time warp – I think we may be about five years behind on Midsummer Murders.

 

One bright spot on PBS is a one-hour evening news programme, though I do think it is time for Judy Woodruff to retire and hand over to the excellent Amna Nawaz. The news hour avoids sensationalism and covers foreign stories in some depth. In the Trump era they did occasionally fall into the trap of focusing on his daily horror show, but Trump made that trap hard to avoid. Sometimes it feels as though there is no news nowadays, deprived as we are of Trump’s one-man show.

 

To its credit PBS also shows a half hour world news bulletin from the BBC, a strong programme that complements the news hour well. But last Friday night a strange thing happened. I tuned in, expecting to see the perennially chirpy Katty Kay, but instead found a sombre broadcast from several dull old white men in dark suits and black ties. Prince Philip had died.

 

Even half an hour of this coverage was too much for me. It was like being transported fifty years, before even As Time Goes By and more like Pathé news. All other news was blacked out. Long fawning obituaries followed long platitudes about how sad the Queen must be feeling. Had these people never seen The Crown? What about all Philip’s love children: weren’t they sad as well?

 

Apparently the BBC received a record number of complaints about its coverage, and quite right too. I suppose they were caught by Catch 22, because anything lighter would be attracted the ire of Colonel Blimp, and Colonel Blimp often writes to his Tory MP.    

 

The experience made me reflect about how far we have come as humanity and how far we still have to travel. Twenty years ago few would have complained, because the alternative TV fare might have been equally bland. We have been watching Peaky Blinders and The Great recently, and the crude and irreverent portrayal of history is so refreshing compared with Pride and Prejudice and its ilk. But Prince Philip dies and we are thrust back into the past. We hear of a lifetime of service and the grace of God and all the propaganda that used to be in our history books and brought back memories of singing the national anthem and Onward Christian Soldiers in freezing school halls.

 

Somehow we are supposed to still accept this guff. Life is simple. The British are good and everybody else tries hard but doesn’t reach our standards. We are known around the world for our sense of fair play. The old days were wonderful. Our army would never commit atrocities. Churchill is only a hero. Slavery was mainly about others and it was we Brits that got rid of it. The empire developed the world. The British Isles are a natural union of like-minded nations of shared values and mutual respect (except, temporarily, for the Irish).

 

Somehow all this persists. It seems to be a good substitute for serious thought, rather like a Hollywood blockbuster. It seems to win votes, and sell papers. It might feel like a threadbare coat, one where we must be careful to pick the frayed edges in case it falls apart but one that still keeps us cosy and reminds us of mum.

 

Of course we Brits think we are unique in all this, in fact we have to think that or it would all be exposed as ridiculous. But here is a secret. It is the same everywhere, to a greater or lesser extent.

 

In the US, no politician can wear a suit that does not have the flag displayed on its lapel. The most respected institution by far, admittedly among an unappetising bunch, is the military. Nobody stops to consider just how truly dreadful the track record of the military has been since 1945, both in its commanders’ choices and its execution. This week the announcement of an Afghan pull out, after twenty years of death and destruction and waste of precious treasure, was greeted with a collective shrug, even though nobody could think of anything positive the escapade had actually achieved. I have no problem with lauding veterans, as long as we remember to laud care workers as well, which we never do except for a few weeks in a pandemic.

 

There are still no go areas for the media. The Economist, brilliant in every other respect, still publishes its monthly rubbish from MI5. The news hour, balanced in most fields, did not pause to consider just how shameful it is that an ally, one that receives more aid than anybody else despite being quite rich, should brazenly raid a facility of another country, and then show off about it. How can the US lecture China about values and a rules based world when that is not challenged at all?

 

It is not just nation states; it is the churches as well. We listen to a gospel in which the primary message to love all others, and ten minutes later we pray, but only for our own tribe. How the Evangelicals can attend church with any sort of clear conscience is entirely beyond me. Yet on balance the Christians are probably less hypocritical than most others. Going back to Prince Philip, tomorrow his funeral service will make some very dodgy claims indeed about Britain and its royalty.

 

Does all this matter? Surely it is harmless, even good, if we all feel a bit proud of our nations and show respect for historical tradition? I believe it matters a lot. How can we learn across cultures if we are all stuck in our complacent bubbles? How can we take the best from different systems if each frames the other as an evil mortal enemy? How can we respond rationally to a shift in prevailing power? How can we disarm and stay safe while we glorify a militaristic approach? How can we effectively deal with the increasing list of issues that span the globe, such as economics, climate, cyber regulation and pandemics?

 

There I another specific risk. One large part of the political spectrum is tempted to build a platform around this stuff. It is far from coherent, and a situation develops where it becomes the entire platform. They then have no choice but to amplify it and stick with it. This is called nationalism. We have seen in the 1930’s how this can spread like a cancer, and it is happening again. This is how world wars happen.

 

There are reasons for optimism. Firstly, we can celebrate the EU a truly extraordinary human achievement and something to build on. Then there are many trends that work against nationalism, including education, the end of blind deference and reduction in class barriers, globalisation, mass mingling via migration, social media and sharing of cultures. Going back to PBS, we see more and more thoughtful series with subtitles, opening windows onto other viewpoints and cultures.

 

The nationalists are loud and proud and dangerous. The rest of us must counter this with our own pride, pride in humanity. We have ample weapons if we pause to notice them. If we stay lazy and smug and silent, we deserve the ugly consequences.   

The Cautionary Tale of Andrew Cuomo

 There are a few routes to success as a politician. Sadly, most of them crowd out the people who might make the best politicians. Andrew Cuomo represents a good example of one archetype. He is not the worst leader the world has ever seen, but he has flaws common to that archetype, and these have recently been cruelly exposed.

 

It is not easy to succeed at politics, whether local or national, large or small, democratic or autocratic. Even those who succeed struggle to sustain that success. Enoch Powell, a classic example of a different archetype, is credited with quipping that all political careers end in failure.

 

To understand why success is tough to achieve and usually ephemeral, we need to try to understand personalities and systems. To even want to be a politician requires an unusual personality type. It needs supreme self-confidence, resilient against constant attack. It needs some vision, a platform that can carry a message that will inspire followers. It requires the ability to lead a team, involving detailed planning, coaching, courage and much besides. And it needs some charisma to convey a message of content and of trust.

 

In most societies, success requires lots of other things as well, factors which narrow down the list of candidates and eliminate most of the potential talent. In the USA especially, it requires vast sums of money. Donors are needed to build and sustain name recognition, and investments of time and money are needed that are beyond ordinary people. Once a reputation has been established, the investment of time does not go away but it does become possible to become rich – which provides its own pitfalls.

 

Another prerequisite is often the head start from a network or position. It helps to have royal blood or a title or a father who is an army general or a business titan or a gang leader, or a bit of luck gaining exposure on a talent show or other media outlet – itself often far from a meritocratic process. In more traditional societies, nearly all opportunity is inherited. In the west, we scoff at the “big man” of Africa or the nomenklatura of Russia, but the leaders of our own countries often have rather similar profiles.

 

Andrew Cuomo ticks nearly all of the boxes to have a chance of success. Most important, he is the son of a successful politician. His dad was governor of New York State from 1983-1994. This gave Andrew an enormous head start. Name recognition was handed on a plate, and so were a huge bank account and a massive list of potential donors and operatives. Whereas most newcomers need a vision that explodes into public consciousness, Andrew’s could evolve from a satisfactory starting point of continuing the legacy of Dad. 

 

Growing up in a political family offered other benefits too. Some of the personality traits, like the salesman’s knack of being able to recover from being knocked down, might be inherited or developed during childhood or simply copied. Watching how Dad coped with adversity will have developed resilience in the son. Sadly, the less salubrious aspects of the paternal template will have been transferred as well.

 

In recent months, the Cuomo template has been laid bare, good and bad. On the plus side, his communication skills early in the pandemic were outstanding and truly valuable. In contrast to Trump, his measured daily news conferences became required viewing and a source of comfort. It was clear he was using his influence to prioritise and to marshal resources. His compassion was authentic, and his work rate exemplary. He kept a clear focus even when provoked and showed considerable courage.

 

But the cautionary tale was waiting in the wings to bite him. The classic politician has a personality type that exudes hubris, and Andrew Cuomo chose to cash in on his celebrity by writing a hubristic book. He did it while the pandemic was far from defeated, and the need for a tidy story led him to spin his questionable decisions regarding nursing homes.

 

In reality, Cuomo was probably between a rock and a hard place when it came to nursing homes. It was only a year ago, but we forget how deep were the ignorance and panic when the pandemic struck New York so brutally. The hospitals could not cope, and patients who seemed to have recovered had to be sent somewhere. It was hard to see any other solution than to send them back to their nursing homes, and trust that their contagion had reduced and that the homes were able to quarantine these people satisfactorily. It was a risk, but what else could he do?

 

The problem was not the decision but the book. The book needed a tidy story, so the figures were massaged. And this left Cuomo open to attack should his popularity wane.

 

What is now obvious was that many people were waiting for a chance to attack a vulnerable Cuomo. His leadership style has been one of bullying. He has managed the message and ruthlessly supressed opposition. He has built his own brand by appealing directly to the people and then exploited it by forcing others into subservience to him or to risk attack. He has cultivated key elements of the press, trade unions, donors and other interest groups. Power comes above all else.

 

His current personal crisis was catalysed by revelations of another vulnerability, when many women have come forward accusing him of making them uncomfortable. In the age of “me too”, this is toxic for a Democrat.

 

So we have seen a familiar pattern for people of his style. He rides triumphantly on a seemingly smooth sea, until the sea is revealed to be anything but smooth underneath. One point of vulnerability quickly becomes a storm. Past bullying catches up with him as everybody can’t wait to pile in.

 

Now he faces enquiries from a torrent of accusations by women, a review of his potential cover up of the nursing home scandal, and other abuses of power, cheered on by De Blasio, Kim and others who have suffered bullying over the years.

 

But there is another takeaway, one that suggests that it is too soon to write Cuomo off. People with his skillset fight ruthlessly to the end using all means at their disposal. Favours are called in, procedural tricks are utilised. It helps that he has carefully failed to cultivate any successor, instead choosing tame surrogates as deputies. He can point to enduring support among those in the electorate who have bought into his brand.

 

There are eerie similarities with another brilliant but ruthless politician from another part of the world, Bibi Netanyahu. The personality types are similar. The Netanyahu story is further advanced than the Cuomo one, and might provide good clues as to how the Cuomo one might develop. Bibi is still standing after facing years of constant attack and many apparently damning revelations. Do not count out either man yet.

 

Supporters of both men would argue that we should accept the good with the bad when it comes to this sort of leader. The same bullying and bending of the rules and brand building and courage can be a recipe to really get things done, especially in crises. Netanyahu can rightly be proud of his country’s vaccination record. Distasteful as it is to many of us, he has also advanced the narrow political interests of his base. Cuomo has also achieved a lot for New York.

 

Personally I don’t buy that version of events. I like to believe that there are routes to success that include more integrity. If we had a politics that was not stacked against talent, we could hope for more role models of talent with integrity.