Photo of Rory Smith
Photo of Rory Smith
There is a shot, captured on Sunday afternoon by the camera placed high in the rafters of Anfield’s towering Main Stand, that encapsulates pretty much everything.
On the pitch, Manchester City’s players and staff stand with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, jubilant in victory. In front of them, their banana-wielding fans writhe in a sort of wild ecstasy. And at their backs, row upon row of empty seats, the beaten and bedraggled remnants of the home support queuing for the exits, unable or unwilling to take any more.
Pick your metaphor, really: this is what Manchester City did to Liverpool in their first game since they were found to have cheated, on an industrial scale, over the course of a decade; this is what they have done to the Premier League as a whole, in the years since they first discovered the joys of disguised funding schemes; this is, and maybe this is a push, what unfettered, late-stage capitalism has done to our society. The perpetrators celebrate their spoils, and the rest of us are forced, helplessly, to watch.
Football, at this point, makes me think rather more of Max Mosley than I had anticipated. Mosley, you will remember, was the longstanding boss of Formula 1 and, through no fault of his own, the son of Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford, probably Britain’s two most notorious fascists until the current resurgence.
In 2008, Mosley (junior) was the subject of a News of the World sting operation. The former newspaper was always strangely prudish in its use of language: it had footage of him “engaging in sex acts” with five women. It was all consensual; the twist was, apparently, that Mosley had a taste for what we can only call “Nazi roleplay.”
Ordinarily, back in the heyday of tabloid sleaze, this should have ruined Mosley’s reputation. The fact that there had been no Nazi element to it whatsoever would have been entirely irrelevant. But Mosley fought back. As Jon Ronson writes in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, he either intuited or came to realise that the tabloids’ bullying tactics only worked if you acquiesced to it.
He did not. He took the News of the World to court, and won. He later helped finance the legal battles of several victims of phone-hacking. At one point, he even broadened his fight to encompass Google. As Ronson notes, Mosley refused to be shamed, and so was immune to it. As far as he was concerned, he had absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.
Since reading Ronson’s account, years ago, I’ve always found Mosley quite an admirable figure – it’s not for me to judge his more private tastes – and, at least in the circumstances in which he found himself, regarded an absence of shame as a strength, rather than a weakness.
In others, though, it is rather less appealing. Gianni Infantino is not only currently standing for a fourth term as Fifa President, but doing so after attempting to force through the privatisation of much of the commercial income from the World Cup. All things considered, he could probably do with a little more shame.
Over the last couple of weeks, the same could be said of Manchester City. Pinning the headlines to the dressing room wall is a hopelessly antiquated concept, of course; managers had stopped doing that long before the News of the World had even closed down. Most modern players would regard newsprint as a strange, alien substance.
But the spirit of the idea lives on. Football’s instinct is to take any exterior noise, any criticism, and convert it into fuel. The process is now so refined it can be conjured from thin air, like solar power: it is why so many players will celebrate a goal by putting a finger to their lips, silencing critics that only they appear to have heard. The siege mentality is every coach’s default status.
And so it should be no surprise that Enzo Maresca has used the fallout from the verdict on the City case to galvanise his squad; Elliot Anderson said after the win at Anfield that playing for a team that has been found guilty of cheating for a decade has “really brought us together.” After all, he said, “everyone is against you.”
Likewise, that the club’s fans would use a trip to Anfield to prove their unrelenting support for their team was both predictable and admirable. They felt, not without reason, that the world was against them, that their club’s name had been sullied: it is in the nature of fandom, of love, that they should want to defend it.
At the risk of sounding po-faced and pompous, though, there are ways of achieving these aims that are less galling than others. It would be absurd to have expected City’s fans to have gone to Anfield with banners reading “sorry” and “what’s important is that justice is done,” the journey down the M62 transformed into a pilgrimage of penitence.
But by the same token: they did not have to sing the name of Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the club’s chairman. They did not have to wave money at the home fans. One of them did not have to dress up as a sheikh.
There has been, in the last couple of weeks, a tendency to stress that City’s fans are victims in this, too: they are the ones who have seen their club’s name tarnished, after all, their most cherished memories asterisked whether they like it or not. The glee they take in their outlaw status effectively scotches that idea. They were flourishing bananas in the away end; they could have just hoisted a skull-and-crossbones.
That too, though, feels like a snapshot of something distinctly modern, and not just in football: not just the absence of shame but a willingness to revel in it, to relish it, to celebrate it; the instinct to cast any criticism, any accusation, any disgrace as nothing but proof of some nefarious conspiracy; the refusal to engage with a reality that is not entirely to your liking.
Thanks to Dominic Solanke and his feather-light late header, Manchester United – with just one win from their first six games – are now in the midst of their worst start to the season for 40 years. This, obviously, does not reflect well on Michael Carrick. But it’s probably significant that it feels like United produce a statistic of that genre every few months now. He may not be the man to solve the club’s issues; he most certainly is not the primary cause of them.
Given both of those teams’ troubles, as well as the slow starts made by Liverpool and Aston Villa, it is starting to feel as though this might be a good season for the Premier League’s upwardly-mobile clubs. The top five, certainly, does not look quite as calcified as normal; there may yet be a Champions League spot available. Brighton are best-placed at the moment but may be affected by their European commitments; Brentford have no such caveat, and so no such ceiling.
I’ll write about this at greater length soon, but if you’re not thrilled by the games on offer in the Champions League over the next couple of days, I have a suggestion: look for the fixtures where neither team is effectively guaranteed – by wealth or weight of history – to qualify. That is, often, where the best drama can be found. Lens-Sporting and Villarreal-Napoli on Tuesday; Feyenoord-Como and Real Betis-Porto on Wednesday. Jeopardy makes for better drama.