Dial “M(CFC)” For Meaning
What does it mean to revel in the sensation of joy caused by the misfortune, pain, or struggle of another -- or what the Germans call, “playing in the same league as Pep Guardiola”?
I was wondering about this last Saturday night at Carragher’s Boot Room, listening to The Anfield Wrap lads talk, with excitement and emotion and triumph, at the likelihood of relegation for Everton, Liverpool FC’s neighbors across Stanley Park.
Like most of us at OLSC Brooklyn, I am not Scouse. I only know Merseyside as a tourist and visitor. I do not know what it was like to be red in the red-blue dichotomy that ruled the Football League 40 years ago. In Liverpool’s intercity derby, there is no political or religious sectarianism to abhor. Nobody is a Tory, nobody is a zealot for anything aside from football.
Since I can’t find the good, the Blues going down is bad. It means no derby. It means a net loss for the city. It could mean no more visits to Goodison Park, ever.
All this to say I just couldn’t find the necessary “fuck you” vibe, until someone wearing a sky-blue jersey walked into the bar.
Depending on geography, the local “Sky Blues” might call themselves NYC FC and play at Yankee Stadium, as this fellow-in-question’s chosen side do. They could be in Melbourne, Australia. Or Mumbia, India, or Montevideo, Uruguay.
It’s just about then, as you are midway down the list of City Football Group’s holdings, that you ask yourself, “Did Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and chairman of City Football Group, an entirely state-owned entity, just buy up every football team he could find in a city that started with the letter ‘M’?”
He might have done, because he – his country – can do that kind of thing. And, by extension, the other members of his exclusive club, the footballing Illuminati: the sportswashers. Though it was Chelsea and Roman Abramovich and the Premier League that opened the door, it was the state owners who stormed though it and now refuse to leave, their dirty boots staining the carpet.
Manchester City are why Saudi Arabia own Newcastle United, why Qatar owns Paris St Germain, why Uefa and Fifa both curry to despots and oligarchs. Gianni Infantini is a disgusting little homunculus, a hired apologist for slaveholders and murderers and tyrants, but he knows where to kowtow in order to keep the machine running.
MBZ, middle. From a Bloomberg item I found, about him helping Russian tycoons hide in the Gulf after the Ukraine invasion.
It wasn’t Pep or Erling Haaland who did any of this, but because they are employed by MBZ and City, because they take the sheikh’s shilling, they are guilty by association. So is the poor lad in the NYCFC kit who walked into a bar that turned and seethed after glimpsing him.
This is the edifice that stands behind Pep, the certified genius with the madman streak; Haaland, the banged-up goal-scoring prodigy with 28 goals through 26 Premier League games (and thus the favorite to eclipse Mo Salah’s record); the pure unapologetic lad Jack Grealish and the rest: likeable Nathan Ake, punchable Bernardo Silva, World-Cup winner Julian Alvarez, who was City’s rage-and-jealousy inducing shiny plaything before Haaland showed up. And whomever else City decided to buy in the last window, because they can and you can’t.
Since the Premier League is twisted and makes no sense, the long international break leads us into an absurdly frenetic eight days. We visit Chelsea, we host Arsenal. We could decide the title, because first, we play City, the only legitimate challengers for the Premier League left.
There’s no need to reread the City riot act here. By now, everyone knows what they’ve done and what are accused of doing. Manchester City is emblematic of quite few things that a Liverpool supporter, or a supporter of “football,” generally, rightfully finds odious and appalling. This is why the sight of Manchester City’s colors cause an involuntary reaction.
In the same way there is nothing quite like a European Cup fixture with Real or Barcelona, there is nothing like an Everton derby or a Manchester United fixture. Each of these matchups summons a different set of ghosts.
But in our century, in our time, because of who they are and what they’ve done (and to whom they’ve done it), there is nothing like playing City. And there is nothing like beating City.
Oh, the what ifs. If City did not exist, or at least not in quite this same form, Liverpool could have had another three or four Premier League trophies. (It could also mean, as someone else pointed out to me, that a title-winning Brendan Rodgers was never fired. Sit with that one for a minute.)
In these matches, our club -- owned by an American billionaire futures trader, with the Premier League’s fourth-highest wage bill -- is righteous and an underdog. We do not get to say that very often anymore. We do not get to say that when chortling at Everton’s misfortune.
At some Jungian level, we ought be thankful for City’s existence. Pep is a certified footballing god and many of his guys are, hard stop, great at what they do. I find most of them hard to dislike (not Bernardo Silva).
If it weren’t for the state power behind them, it is us who would be the bullies and the bad guys. But because of who they are, as dawn breaks in Brooklyn, and as the Evil Footballing Empire hosts us at the Etihad, the task is more than a tricky away fixture at a title contender. It is closer to good versus bad than is often achievable in sport, and in life.
