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The start of soccer’s modern era can be dated precisely: Jan. 9, 2011. It can be located exactly, too: to the Twitter feed of Ryan Babel, the Dutch forward then playing for a stuttering Liverpool team. That was when, and where, everything changed, when the old world blended, instantly, into the new.
In case you have forgotten: on that day, Liverpool lost (as it did, often, back at the start of the decade) an F.A. Cup match to Manchester United. It was a fractious game marked by hotly debated calls: Howard Webb, then the most highly regarded referee in England, awarded United a penalty in the first minute, and would later go on to send off Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool captain.
Liverpool did not think much of Webb’s decision-making. Kenny Dalglish, the club’s manager, called the penalty decision a “joke.” Babel vented his anger a little differently. He posted a doctored picture of Webb, wearing a Manchester United jersey, on his Twitter feed. And in that simple act, he ushered in a new age.
It is hard to think of a decade in which soccer has changed so much, so quickly, as the 2010s. There is plenty of material for all manner of nostalgic essays about how it all happened, and what it all meant: tactically, financially, off the field and on.
A decade that started with Spain conquering the world with its bottomless patience, wearing down opponents through the brutal hypnosis of tiki-taka, ended with soccer faster and more frenetic than ever as the priests of pressing and counterpressing — from their schools in Germany and Argentina — subverted the orthodoxy. Soccer entered the 2010s as an exercise in dominating the ball and left it an exercise in controlling space.
It has been the age of the superclubs, in which the rich got ever richer and started to think that, actually, they did not need the poor at all. A decade in which Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich won the Champions League in every year but two, when every major domestic league apart from England’s became a procession to the title, and when Ajax, a club with a history to rival any other, could reach the final four of Europe’s most prestigious competition as a “plucky” outsider.
And it has been the decade of the super players, too, of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, quite possibly the two greatest players of all time — don’t @ me — pushing each other to new, ridiculous feats of history with every passing year. Remember that time Messi scored 91 goals in 12 months, or that spell when Ronaldo seemed to break a record every two weeks? Together, they have redefined what greatness looks like; they have forever raised the bar their putative successors will need to reach.
It has been a decade in which soccer teams, and soccer tournaments, were squabbled over and bought up not only by plutocrats and tycoons and magnates but also by nation states, when Manchester City and Paris St.-Germain became an arm of foreign policy, when clubs and players suddenly had to worry that they might incur the wrath of the Chinese government.
It has been all that and more, but it is hard to think of a more substantive change to the sport than the advent of social media. Reading back through that Babel story — he would, a week or so later, become the first player ever to be fined for saying something on Twitter; in time, that would become a rich source of revenues for governing bodies the world over — it is striking how naïve we were.
Twitter is a “social networking site,” or somewhere for “microblogging,” reporters noted at the time. Babel did not post it to his feed, but on his “Twitter website.” The Football Association’s officials, in punishing him, declared that anything published on Twitter was the same as “giving an interview in a national newspaper.”
Nine years later, social media has fundamentally altered the way that clubs communicate with fans, how players interact with the public and how we consume the sport, both the stuff that happens on grass and the stuff that happens away from it: bite-size chunks, brief six-second clips of action, ramping up the hyperbole and the immediacy of every tiny aspect of the game, every grain of news, every word spoken, every deed done.
But it has done more than that: it has proved a crucible for fake news — a phenomenon that some of us might argue actually started in sports — but also has fanned the flames of tribalism, turning most interactions between fans of opposing teams toxic, generating a fierce, fractious, puerile sort of rivalry. It has allowed racism to fester and flourish; it has proved capable of moments of beauty and brutality.
Soccer’s tactics will change again in the 2020s. Players will emerge to take the mantle of Messi and Ronaldo (though likely not meeting their standards). Power will continue to ebb and flow from club to club and, by extension, country to country. But it all will be refracted through social media’s twisted lens, the one, immutable influence of the 2010s that will never wane. That is what can be dated to Jan. 9, 2011, and to a blurred, pixelated photoshop of Howard Webb in a Manchester United jersey. All that history started with Ryan Babel.
A Matter of Opinion
Perhaps the strangest decision in last summer’s transfer market was the one that saw Manchester United sell Romelu Lukaku — scorer of 42 goals in 96 games in his two years at Old Trafford — and replace him with, well, nobody.
It felt like the most damning assessment possible: thanks for your service, Romelu, but we’d be better off with literally nobody upfront. Well, not nobody: United was, in effect, betting on Marcus Rashford shining as a true, through-the-middle striker, and on the potential (correctly, from initial impressions) of the teenager Mason Greenwood.
The whole episode was fairly symptomatic of Lukaku’s career: He left a club that genuinely felt he was adding nothing in a transfer that made him the third-most-expensive player, by cumulative transfer fees, of all time. There can be few players who divide opinion so sharply — not some minor quibble on exactly how good he is, but whether he is an elite striker, or some sort of trundling oaf.
It’s something that has followed him through his career: When I spoke to him in Milan earlier this month, we talked about how one bad year at Manchester United “erased” all that he had done in seven seasons in England, but he also touched on the strange relationship he detected from fans at Everton, where he spent four successful seasons. He never felt the adulation there that he might, perhaps, have expected.
I don’t have a coherent idea of why that might be. Some might suggest there is a racial element to it, though not Lukaku, and I’d be inclined to agree with him. Maybe it is because he has always cost so much money, or because expectations have been so high of what he might be able to do, or perhaps that is the lot of the striker: no matter how many you score, people always focus on the ones you miss.
Excitement Is No Substitute for Experience
In a way, it helped that Arsenal’s visit to Everton last Saturday was an abysmal game. There were no goals. There were only a couple of shots on target. All of which meant that we could all focus on what really mattered: examining, in minute detail, the facial expressions of Carlo Ancelotti and Mikel Arteta — Everton’s and Arsenal’s managers-in-waiting, respectively — as they watched the game unfold.
Given the timing of the appointments, and the contrasts between the two men, comparisons were probably inescapable. Which club had got the better deal? Which one had made the smarter move? Which manager had taken on the heavier load?
The consensus — one I will confess sharing — was that Arteta, with his rich promise and impeccable education, was the better long-term bet than Ancelotti, with his gilded résumé and his vast experience.
There is a logic to that, I think. Arteta is fresh and new and exciting; Ancelotti’s last two jobs have ended unhappily, and in midseason, and his particular strong suit — corralling teams of highly paid superstars — is not especially relevant at Goodison Park.
But it is also inherently illogical, as José Mourinho pointed out: We care less about what someone has won than how many games we have lost. That is, perhaps, a comment on faddism, on the gleam of what Silicon Valley used to call the New New Thing, on how quickly soccer moves on. Perhaps, too, it is an epitaph for how we see sports, now, at the end of the 2010s: Our priority is not glory, but avoiding embarrassment.
Correspondence
I received plenty of feedback on the idea that soccer cannot just shrug its shoulders when it comes to politics, declaring itself above all that whenever anything awkward arises, or if money is at stake. The most compelling came from David Post.
“Soccer,” he wrote, “may have a duty to speak, but what are they to say, and in which circumstances? Should the Premier League issue a statement condemning the treatment of the Uighurs?
“Having made such a statement in one circumstance means their failure to do so in other circumstances would be much more troubling,” David added. “I think that if the league has a duty to speak, it is to say: ‘We stand by our players, and will always protect their right to speak their minds freely about matters of public concern, because we live in a society where that freedom is of paramount value. We support without compromise a player’s right to those comments, and if that costs us a bundle of dough, so be it.’”
I hope you’ve all had a wonderful week with family and friends, if you’ve been lucky enough to have a break. I’m on Twitter, and can be heard every week on Set Piece Menu, having mostly terrible opinions. Correspondence should go to askrory@nytimes.com. And you can help friends ring in the new year by encouraging them to sign up here.
Happy New Year!
Rory
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
