Football is a closed-loop system. That doesn’t make it separate from or impervious to outside influence. Culture, violence, state-ownership — it’s all there. Rather, football is knowable. Completable. With the right inclination and a fair inheritance, you can give up your day job, tie up your laces and embark on the long road to sporting ataraxia.
This goes some way to explaining why football rewards obsessives in the way your partner, employer or the expanding universe may not. Step away from the manosphere and life tends to reward adaptability over mastery. Complex systems, from the climate to financial markets, continuously confound even those paid handsomely to predict them. And all the while, the twin perils of time and technological development might, without warning, render hard-won knowledge obsolete.
This, happily, supports my unified theory of football as ‘human-systems emotion wheel’ for men, on the whole, who never learned to develop a rich emotional vocabulary beyond rage. The game, therefore, allows them to outsource the work of feeling to a self-contained world whose rules they understand.
Refereeing decisions and managerial sackings may make for infinite online debate but every fan instinctively knows what to feel for a given situation. So, winning beats losing, a draw’s worth depends on who scores last, while the opposing team’s striker hitting the side-netting and their fans breaking into premature celebration is the greatest joy of all.
But now, City have blown a 114-charge, £900m hole in the loop.
Man! I Feel Like That Was a Waste of Time
Heading into Sunday’s clash at Anfield, City had started the season with a perfect record: five wins from five games. Under normal circumstances, fans of rival title challengers — Arsenal, Chelsea, Man Utd (sic), even Brighton — would be rooting for Liverpool. It’s not schadenfreude — it’s how this works.
But as far as I can tell, my Arsenal-blinkered preferences were broadly shared. With a guilty verdict and a potential relegation looming, it made more sense to want City to win, on the basis that any points they accrue this season and perhaps seasons beyond will be effectively null and void. And it gets sillier.
Do the Premier League 19TM (that is, all clubs other than City, with a pleasing echo to the EU 27) want City to win every match, not only going the season unbeaten but with a perfect 114 points, by way of demonstrating to the independent panel, who will be in charge of doling out punishments that, yeah, funny what an unlawful billion pounds of spending over a decade can buy you?