Pochettino, Mauricio

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    Remembering What Draws You In

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    Fandom can be an exercise in frustration. But for a supporter who grew up on American sports, soccer’s community offered a welcome sense of power that had been missing.Astead Herndon, who follows politics for The Times and Tottenham Hotspur because he just can’t help himself, is filling in for Rory Smith this week.Let’s start with the bad: Tottenham Hotspur has not won a trophy in the 13 years I have watched nearly every one of its matches.It did not win one while I was in high school in Illinois, where I settled on my Tottenham fandom after selecting the club at random in the FIFA video game. It did not win one while I was in college, when I was a regular at early-morning gatherings of the first Tottenham Hotspur Supporter’s Club in Wisconsin.The early years of Mauricio Pochettino happened when I lived in Boston. Back then, I would sneak away from my desk at city hall to watch matches at a downtown pub. No trophy.In Washington D.C., the next place I lived, I watched two Champions League runs. In New York I once swore off a bar that serves particularly excellent nachos for a full year simply because it was the place where I watched the 2019 Champions League final. No trophy.Let’s not talk about the José Mourinho era at all.Thirteen years of supporting Tottenham, by American millennial standards, makes me something of Spurs sage. (The day Tottenham sold Gareth Bale, I drank away my feelings at a bar in Wisconsin. A well-meaning friend texted, “Sorry about Gary.”) In the beginning, I had an elaborate system of absolutely illegal streams. Then the NBC Premier League deal brought my team to me every weekend. Now I can stream its games right on my phone.Sell us your cups, your shirts, your scarves. Just please don’t sell Harry Kane.David Klein/ReutersMy 13 years don’t make me special, of course, more deserving of sporting triumph that fans who have waited far longer than I have. I could have just as easily have picked West Ham or Newcastle or Manchester United or (shudder) Arsenal off that FIFA console. Every fan’s pain (and joy) is their own.But those 13 years have seen the sport change itself, influenced by a global landscape that has undergone rapid political and cultural upheaval. There is no denying: the influx of money has changed soccer, probably forever. And while millions of soccer fans, including myself, decried the idea of the world’s wealthiest teams joining in a Super League, the sport’s most powerful bodies seem hellbent on imminent, structural change.The specter of that kind of systemic disruption sometimes feels like a reversal of what first drew me — and probably you — to the game. I grew up watching American sports, where the fan is assumed to be powerless. Your team could move across the country in search of a better stadium, or better tax laws. Rivalries in college sports — but also in baseball, football and hockey — were routinely upended by conference realignments driven by the pursuit of rich television contracts.In soccer, though, structures felt sacred. Tottenham, for example, is still mad at Arsenal for a move the latter made more than a century ago. But most of all, there was a language of fan ownership in soccer that I enjoyed. We are Spurs. There was a supporter’s trust. It rejected the way American sports — and specifically the N.F.L. — seemed to bother me the most. There, I thought, fans didn’t matter.The Super League announcement reminded me of that feeling. It was not only what the team’s were proposing, but the flagrant nature of it all. A group of rich clubs secretly plotting to disrupt a global game, willing to sever century-old traditions and alter generational rivalries, and do it all without a bit of fan input. Soccer clubs, after all — big ones or small ones and especially bad ones — don’t get to pack up their gear and run away from their fans when things go bad.Fans are happy to offer their support. Most times, they just ask their team to deserve it.David Klein/ReutersStill, with the benefit of maturity, I now realize that I always saw soccer through rose-colored glasses. The wealth inequality that has grown in recent years was already present 13 years ago. There was, I’m sure, also some desire to be a hipster in a land of Midwestern, “American football” fans. Spurs are also firmly among the world’s richest teams, even if they are well behind some of their rivals. But isn’t soccer fandom different? That’s what the Super League owners underestimated: The sense among fans that the club is equally their own, and that their support still must be earned. For a decade, fans of my other team, the Chicago Bulls, complained about post-Michael Jordan management decisions (thankfully it’s better now). Tottenham supporters tried to stage a protest over the January transfer window. Every club has its crises, its test of its fans commitment — some more existential than others.As a fan, I think I’ve accepted that 13 years from now, soccer will look different. I will not be surprised if we see a zombie Super League, or a biennial World Cup that no one outside FIFA seems to want. There will be more reminders of our collective smallness as fans. More protests, too.But margins matter. And while the Super League announcement felt familiar to my experience in American sports, the reaction to it was not.So let’s end with the good.At Tottenham, fandom passes through generations, from father to Heung-min Son.Peter Cziborra/Action Images, Via ReutersFor 13 years, across new schools and new cities, new jobs and the campaign trail, the cadence of Tottenham has been a comforting structure. Even the disappointments feel good, sometimes, a reminder that while I don’t support the world’s best team, I do support the world’s funniest.I like to think there’s an open pessimism to soccer fandom. Only a few teams have a shot at the title every year, and there are no coming draft picks to save you. At Spurs, the pessimism is a feature, not a bug. It is a bonding point among the supporters.In a way, that culture helps distill fandom down to its irrational essence. There is no guarantee Spurs will ever win a trophy I can cheer, no assurance that my team — your team, any team — will always be closer to the top than the bottom. The gap is growing between the club and its rivals; even Newcastle United has money now.But for the next 13 years, and the 13 after that, I’m willing watch nearly every Tottenham match, just on the off chance that the facts as I’ve come to know them are wrong.Back to Regular Programming SoonThat’s all for this week, and Rory will be back soon. For now, get in touch at askrory@nytimes.com with any hints, tips, complaints or ideas. Twitter works for finding him sometimes, too.Have a great weekend. More

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      With Man City Positives, Premier League's Coronavirus Outbreak Widens

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Stimulus PlanVaccine InformationF.A.Q.TimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerThe Premier League Has a Schedule. It Really Needs a Plan.As the coronavirus invades locker rooms and postpones matches, soccer needs to face up to a potential worst-case scenario.Manchester City played without fans for months. On Monday, it couldn’t play at all.Credit…Laurence Griffiths/ReutersJan. 1, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETOn the face of it, the Premier League’s decision was an easy and an obvious one. Manchester City and Manchester United had finished last season late, thanks to their commitments in the summer’s European competitions.To ensure that both teams would have a similar break between campaigns as all of their rivals, the Premier League decreed that they would start the new season a week later than everyone else. The league’s omnipotent fixture computer had drawn City against Aston Villa and United against Burnley for that first weekend of the season; those two games would have to be postponed.All of this, so far, makes sense. What happens next does not.Knowing that its teams were facing a compacted schedule anyway, the Premier League could have decided that Burnley and Villa might as well play one another on opening weekend. That may have raised some logistical challenges — policing, scheduling — but hardly insurmountable ones, particularly with fans still locked out of stadiums. The benefit, of having only one game, rather than two, to slot in later in a busy year, far outweighed the cost.That is not how soccer works, though, not even in a pandemic. Burnley did not play Aston Villa. The two games from the first weekend of the season have not been made up. It took until Thursday for the Premier League to find a window: They now will be played in the middle of January, five months late.That may seem a trivial issue, little more than a minor misstep, one that can doubtless be explained by the myriad complexities of scheduling a sporting season and will be easily resolved once the field in the domestic cup competitions is thinned a little. And, in some senses, that is all it is.Soccer has made the best of bad situations for months.Credit…Pool photo by Martin MeissnerBut it is also an instructive example of how the Premier League — and elite soccer as a whole — thinks, how pervasive is its belief in its own relentlessness, how delicate and vulnerable this season remains. The simple fact that Burnley did not play Aston Villa on opening day encapsulates soccer’s myopia, and its hubris.The Premier League lost two more games this week. First, Manchester City requested the postponement of its trip to Everton after five of its players tested positive for coronavirus. Fearing a more widespread outbreak — and much to Everton’s surprisingly public chagrin — the Premier League acquiesced. (Pep Guardiola revealed Friday that City will be missing five players who had tested positive when it plays Chelsea on Sunday.)About 48 hours later, Fulham had to make the same request, canceling its match with Tottenham on only a few hours notice; it, too, had recorded a spate of positive test results, and in the interest of public health, it was determined the game should be delayed, despite the unhappiness of noted Instagram influencer José Mourinho.City and Fulham were not the first clubs to be hit by the virus. In November, Newcastle had to close its training facility and skip a game against Aston Villa after an outbreak that has left at least two players with the kind of persistent and debilitating symptoms doctors refer to as Long Covid. Those clubs will, it is safe to assume, not be the last. Sheffield United played its game against Burnley this week despite reporting a number of positive tests at the club.The situation in the Football League, which governs the second, third and fourth tiers of soccer in England, is even worse. In League One, seven of the 12 games scheduled to be played on Tuesday had to be postponed because of coronavirus outbreaks. Five had been missed on Boxing Day, too. There have been calls from some medical departments for a two-week “circuit-breaker” pause to the season to avoid players’ being overloaded by a backlog of matches in the spring.It does not feel as if any of this was especially difficult to foresee. Soccer cannot be blamed, of course, for failing to anticipate the scale of the second wave of the pandemic in Britain (or anyplace else), or for the appearance of a particularly virulent mutation of the virus in the southeast part of England.Fans have adapted to new realities. Leagues should, too.Credit…Pool photo by Paul ChildsBut it should not have required the clarity of hindsight to project that cases might rise in the winter, that the long-anticipated second wave might have some impact on soccer, that the bubbles the sport was relying on to play through might not prove entirely impermeable, that some sort of contingency plan might be needed.And yet soccer seems woefully underprepared for something that should have been wholly predictable. It is not just that there is little room in the calendar set aside to play postponed matches: just three weekends in the English season set aside for teams to make up games they have missed, but only if they are eliminated from the domestic cups first.It is that — as the Premier League confirmed in a statement this week — the subject of what happens if the season is paused, or worse, canceled entirely, has not even been discussed.(It is striking, though perhaps not vastly surprising, that two of the most ardent voices calling for cancellation on moral grounds in the spring, Aston Villa and West Ham, have been quiet this time. It’s almost as if they are keener to play now that they are fifth and 10th in the table, respectively.)To be clear, at this point, there is no reason to believe the season should be curtailed: Soccer has proved, over the last nine months, that it is able to play on. It has not increased the burden on the country’s medical services, or deprived the general population of tests, or been responsible for a more widespread outbreak of the virus. Its protocols, for the most part, have worked.But it is hardly outlandish to suggest that the Premier League — and most of its peers around Europe — might have looked at what happened in the spring and wondered if perhaps they needed to have a plan in place should the worst-case scenario unfold.Fans at Brighton. European stadiums that opened recently may soon close again.Credit…Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat need not have meant an immediate end to any season; other, more creative solutions were available. Something along the lines of the bubble tournament staged by the N.B.A., for example, or a shortened season — along the lines of what is already standard in Scotland and Belgium — might have served as an adequate break-glass course of action. Only if those workarounds were not possible would a nonsporting conclusion come into force.The Coronavirus Outbreak More