"There must be blame. We need heads on the battlements. We need entrails, horses, chains, a public quartering. Basically we just need to feel something. We need, above all, to feel that this is all someone's fault. This is how elite football must function now. The Dalai Lama once said that instead of looking to blame others we should look for answers within ourselves, which just goes to show how wrong you can be and is, frankly, very disappointing from the Dalai Lama."
"It turns out medieval medicine was right. Human beings are indeed composed of four basic humours: bile, fire, earth and being incredibly angry on the radio, energies that must be constantly fed. There is a central irony here. Rage and snark have become football's defining energy. There is simply too much space out there, too many content channels, but not enough actual sport to fill them. So perceived injustice, the divvying up of fault, fraud-dom, bald frauddom have become the game around the game."
"But at the same time there is less to actually blame people for. Success and failure have become structural. Big clubs really are too big to fail in any meaningful sense. Managers no longer run teams like autocrats, surrounded by directors, assistants, data wonks. There is simply less space to actually make terrible mistakes on an individual basis, the kind of clear-as-day mistake that really does throw an entire team out of whack."
Fans and commentators seek someone to blame and demand theatrical punishment to feel that failures have a clear cause. Rage and snark have become football's defining energy as media channels proliferate while actual sporting drama is limited. Perceived injustice and the allocation of fault have become the secondary spectacle that fills content pipelines. Simultaneously, structural factors have reduced the room for obvious individual mistakes because big clubs are harder to break. Managers operate within broader networks of directors, assistants and data analysts, leaving fewer opportunities for single-person failures. Defences of underperforming players often point to team form and finishing as root issues.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]