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The night the news broke, Everton was playing — and winning — at Villa Park. After years of waiting, the club had finally managed to snare a billionaire, the sort of benefactor who had the sort of wealth that might restore England’s fourth-most successful team to its place among the country’s elite.
Among the traveling fans, there was a degree of delirium. It was what they had wanted for years. Farhad Moshiri, an Anglo-Iranian tycoon, had bought a controlling stake in Everton from the theater impresario Bill Kenwright. Songs about Everton’s newfound wealth boomed out from the corner of the stadium where the away support was gathered.
It quickly spread inside the club, too. At one of his first meetings with Everton’s manager at the time, Roberto Martinez, Moshiri identified a handful of potential signings he wanted to make in his first transfer window that summer.
It was not the sort of list Everton managers had grown accustomed to hearing: young hopefuls, grizzled veterans, the castoffs and hand-me-downs of Europe’s giants. It smacked, instead, of a dizzy ambition. Mesut Özil, one of the highest-paid players in England, was on top of it. This was now a club of new and bright horizons. Everything, Moshiri promised, was going to be different.
You know how this ends: with Martinez being fired; with his successor, Ronald Koeman, being fired; with Sam Allardyce arriving and leaving in the space of a few months, unloved and unmourned; with Marco Silva, on Thursday night, suffering the same fate, after a humiliation against Liverpool in the Merseyside derby; with more than $500 million wasted in the transfer market; with Everton, currently, in the relegation zone.
Part of the explanation for that, of course, is unique to Everton: Moshiri’s apparent lack of a coherent vision for what he wants his club to be; the failures of not one, but two much-vaunted sporting directors to spend his wealth wisely; the shortcomings of a succession of managers. Everton is typical of that breed of Premier League club that is incapable of long-term planning, that believes that money will solve all of the problems it creates for itself.
But it is part of a broader trend, too, one that spreads across the continent, and perhaps even further afield. There are teams like Everton in most of Europe’s major leagues: Leeds United and Aston Villa, West Ham and Newcastle United, Kaiserslautern and Hamburg, Real Zaragoza and Deportivo La Coruña. Olympique Marseille has endured it and seems to be recovering; a host of Italian teams, from Sampdoria to Lazio, might fit the bill, too.
The precise circumstances vary wildly, but the pattern holds true. These are teams that all claim proud, rich histories, that could, in some instances, once consider themselves superpowers. Thanks to either bad timing or bad choices, they found themselves locked out as the era of the superclubs began around the turn of the century.
At the same time as their former peers were leaving them behind, the world of soccer was changing behind them. The fact that they had large stadiums, huge fan bases and (relatively) weighty trophy cabinets no longer guaranteed them the right to consider themselves “big” clubs. Everyone relied on television money now. In England and Germany, that leveled the playing field. Elsewhere, it tilted it against them.
Smaller clubs started to rise, teams they would once have considered pawns. Bournemouth and RB Leipzig and Sassuolo and Eibar did not have to worry about cherishing a gilded past; they were free to carve out a new path, to take risks, to do things differently, to write on a fresh page. Suddenly, they had the money to do it. First they drew level. And then, as the fallen giants were standing still, they roared past.
What has happened to Everton is typical of this caste of clubs. The weight of history makes innovation burdensome. The pressure from the fans to succeed — not to play some decent soccer and finish 12th, but as they used to, when they won trophies — creates a febrile, tense environment. The bar for failure is lower when the expectations are higher. Changes are made, quickly, without thinking. So are mistakes.
For a while, it does not matter: They can sail along in mid-table, cosseted by their past, insulated by a lingering sense of superiority. At some point, though, there is one mistake too many. The number of clubs lining up to overtake reaches a critical mass. The fall accelerates. Zaragoza is in Spain’s second tier. Hamburg went down for the first time ever last year. Kaiserslautern is in the third division now.
Will the same happen to Everton, a team that has never been relegated from the Premier League? Not necessarily. Perhaps it will drag itself clear of the relegation battle in the coming months. Perhaps its next manager will be the one to halt the decline.
But the lessons, from across the continent, are that none of these clubs are safe. There is no immutable guarantee, no matter how great the history. That is, for teams like Everton, an understandable source of pride. But in this changed world, it is something else, too: no longer a strength, but a weakness.
Nobody Wants To See Palace-Bournemouth, Jeff
I have been in Italy this week, so was not in Britain for the grand unveiling of Jeff Bezos’s latest venture: soccer, delivered straight to your screen, by Amazon Prime (with just a minute or two’s delay when demand is highest). By all accounts, it went relatively well, this little glimpse at the future: a few lag issues, a couple of teething problems, a bit of buffering, but all of that is as much to do with Britain’s broadband infrastructure as it is Amazon’s capacity as a broadcaster.
I did wonder, though, whether everyone was missing the point. Obviously Amazon is not getting into soccer through love of the game. It wants to make you a Prime customer, that’s all, and maybe use your data to advertise products you have just bought to you, in order to make you regret all of your life choices. But equally I’m not sure showing every game live is something that people, well, want.
Certainly, I had no pressing desire to watch Crystal Palace against Bournemouth, or Southampton against Norwich, or even Leicester against Watford, the ultimate in foregone conclusions. But I did enjoy consuming them on Sky Italia, where the footage cut to whichever game was currently most exciting (before tuning in to the second half of the Merseyside derby). Is this not more in keeping with our modern desire for bite-size content, our low attention spans, our constant need for entertainment? And also does it not mean you only have to have one screen open, rather than constantly flicking between four or five?
A Picture Story
The circus left Bury three months ago. There was a time, in August, when the car park in front of Gigg Lane was full of satellite trucks and reporters wielding boom mics and iPhones. Back then, the battle to save the club had been lost. Bury had been thrown out of the Football League, more than a century of history lost in a moment. The story was over. Everyone left town.
This is a part of journalism that I have never found desperately comfortable. We tend to treat everything as a story: a piece of content, a commodity, one to pick up and discard at will, rather than the events of people’s lives. We are generally not around to see what happens afterward, as though if we are not there documenting it, it maybe does not happen at all.
I had been meaning to go back to Bury for a while. It had become one of those things that nagged at me from my notebook. And then I saw an image, taken by Gordon Sorfleet, the club’s erstwhile press officer, of the groundskeeper, Michael Curtis, painstakingly cutting the grass on a field that might never be used again.
There was something in that image that struck me: it was an act of hope, of devotion, of sorrow, of futility. It was an act, in other words, that kind of encapsulated what it is to be a sports fan, what it is to love a team. I wanted to find out what drove Michael to do it. I did — the story is here — but to an extent you can glean all you need to know from this photo, an echo of Gordon’s, by Suzie Howell. Really, the words are just an appendix.
Correspondence
Last week’s edition, which opened with a thought on what sports must do in the face of the climate emergency, brought quite a lot of comment (as I should, really, have anticipated). Ken, who did not supply a surname, so now exists alongside the likes of Pelé and Garrincha in my mind as a man who needs only one name, was fairly representative. “Spare us the long lecture on climate change,” he wrote. “If you must go there then devote a single paragraph to it. Your editors’ agenda are messing up the quality writing.”
My general rule of thumb on these things is that I’m unlikely to change anyone’s mind on a subject that big — “I believed this for a while, but then a soccer journalist said different, so what could I do?” — but I can assure you no editors were involved in coming up with the topic. As for the issue itself: Is it so bad that those of us who are that way inclined might consider what lines we need to draw?
Thanks to Robert Eamonn for pointing out that I completely forgot Tata Martino a couple of weeks ago when discussing Marcelo Gallardo: Martino did, indeed, join Barcelona straight from South America. He did not do well. I’d maybe strike Barcelona off Gallardo’s list of options.
And Ron Givens has a legitimate question. Last week, I mentioned “this side of the Atlantic,” you see. “I live on the west side of the Atlantic — although the ocean is quite a ways away — and I read this column through the graces of The New York Times, also on the west side of the Atlantic,” Ron wrote. “I now assume you live and work in Europe, but should you make this clear somehow?”
I should indeed. For clarity, I do live — and actually always have lived, save for a year in Bolivia a long time ago — on the side of the Atlantic made famous by Abba, the Roman Empire and EuroDisney. But I’ll try to be more global in my positioning in future.
Thanks for all the correspondence, as ever. I’m on Twitter, desperately searching for the dopamine hit of approval. I like getting emails at askrory@nytimes.com, too, but I’d like it even more if you told everyone you knew to sign up for this newsletter here.
Have a great weekend.
Rory
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
