I was six the first and only time my father took me to Wembley. It was 1966, and we went to watch England play Argentina in a bad-tempered, goalless quarter-final that passed into legend when the Argentine captain, Antonio Rattín, was sent off, and refused for a small eternity to leave the pitch. He clearly wasn’t a gentleman. Twenty years later, in Mexico, Diego Maradona knocked England out with two goals, one of them scored with his hand. “It was as if we had beaten a country, not just a football team,” he said afterwards; the Falklands War was four years gone, and “we knew they had killed a lot of Argentine boys there, killed them like little birds. And this was revenge.” Football, as someone ought to have said before me, is the continuation of war by other means.

This is the uncomfortable thing the World Cup keeps trying to tell us about ourselves. The tournament is the largest recurring ritual of group identity our disenchanted species still performs, and what it reveals is that the group has two faces.

Consider first the good one. When Jean-Paul Sartre wanted to describe how a mere collection of separate individuals becomes something more, he reached, of all improbable things, for football. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, he distinguishes the series — the inert bus queue, each of us alone together, a plurality of solitudes — from what he calls the group-in-fusion, in which separate people dissolve into a single acting body bent on a common object. A good team is exactly this: 11 private ambitions subordinated to, and elevated by, a shape that none of them possesses alone. And so is a crowd. What happens in a stadium when your side scores is that a series of strangers becomes, for a few delirious seconds, a group.

Émile Durkheim gave this its name a century ago: collective effervescence, the heat that runs through a gathered crowd until it boils over and lifts each person clean out of himself. His scandalous conclusion was that this, and not any doctrine, is the origin of the sacred. The god, on this account, is the fever of the group. I have felt the fever, and not only at Anfield. I once watched Liverpool beat Bayern in Munich from a Scottish pub in the northern suburbs of Athens, among the Pan-Hellenic Liverpool supporters’ club, and found myself, against every instinct of my nature, high-fiving strangers whose language I do not speak (I am not, in the ordinary run of things, a hugger). For those 90 minutes everything was, briefly, right with the world.

The anthropology here inverts what we tend to assume. We imagine that a community exists first and then expresses its readymade unity in a shared rite. It is the other way about: the rite makes the community. “If one must act as though one believed,” wrote the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “one ends in believing… as one acts.” First you buy the shirt, sing the song, take the same seat; the belonging arrives afterwards, as a gift of the doing. This is why a nation you were merely assigned at birth can be felt, across 90 minutes, as the most intimate thing about you — and why a nation not your own can be borrowed wholesale. 

My first experience of passionate national feeling was for Brazil, in 1970; aged 10, in a full yellow kit, I rolled the names — Pelé, Jairzinho, Rivelino, Tostão, Gerson — silently around my mouth like an incantation. Identity, the World Cup teaches, is not a possession but a performance, and a fluid one — fluid to the point of vertigo. At the 2006 tournament, I watched Serbia and Montenegro play on as a nation that had, a few weeks earlier, ceased to exist, singing the anthem of a Yugoslavia that had ceased to exist before it, and losing 6–0 to Argentina for good measure. My hosts in Belgrade were delighted, rather than crushed: here was a theater not of identity but of its endless differentiation — family, city, tribe, nation — against the forces of fate.

But here is the turn. The very warmth that binds the group is also what curdles into its opposite. Durkheim knew it, and so does anyone who has stood on a terrace. The same effervescence that produces the embrace produces the howl; the fever that makes the choir makes the mob. The going-out of the self is as available to the lynch party as to the congregation. I have heard grown men make jokes about the 97 dead of Hillsborough and the dead of Munich; I have wondered how much of the particular venom aimed at Mohamed Salah, an Egyptian and a Muslim, belongs to this darker order. Years ago, watching England go out of another tournament, I wrote of the “stupid, bloody-minded white tribalism that surrounds the England team, even when most of the best players are black”. That the phrase still fits, 12 years on, is itself the lesson. The fused group needs an enemy against which to fuse, and the World Cup, by dressing the tribe up as a nation and handing each one a flag, obligingly supplies one every four years, with fireworks.

This is not an argument against the tribe. It is an argument for the rule. Every tradition that has taken ecstasy seriously — every mystery cult, every church — has hedged it with ritual, an appointed time and place, a law. The rule is not the enemy of the rapture; it is what keeps the rapture from becoming a fire. Football’s genius, when it works, is to be at once the most tribal and the most rule-bound thing we do: a bounded 90 minutes, 17 laws, a marked and consecrated pitch, within which the fiercest collective passion is licensed precisely because it is contained. Off the terrace, I can loathe Manchester United and still, over a pint, hear out a United supporter’s reasons and grant that they are good ones. The small miracle of football talk is that it holds tribal loyalty and reasoned respect for the enemy in the same hand. If only our politics could manage the trick.

Suggested reading

America: land of the cheats

By B. Duncan Moench

It was Bill Shankly — a socialist who thought the game came down to “everyone working for each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day” — who liked to remind us that the true name of the sport is association football. That is the whole of it. Despite the ongoing horror show that is FIFA, the World Cup is the greatest festival of association we have left, and association is double through and through: the free society of equals and the baying pack are grown from a single root, and the only thing that decides which we get on the night is the rule we agree to keep.

And so, once again, I kept my seat and my superstitions, and gave myself over to the thing that is, as Shankly did not quite say, a good deal more important than life and death. For 55 minutes I even dared to believe: Anthony Gordon put England ahead, and in the treacherous minutes that followed I permitted myself a small vision of the final. I should have known better. I did know better. In the 85th minute, Enzo Fernández rose unmarked to shoot in a cross from Messi; in stoppage time, Lautaro Martínez scored with a header, from precisely the same source. One–two, and it was finished. Two goals, two crosses, both floated in by the little magician who is Maradona’s true heir — though this time, mercifully, he used no hand at all, only his feet, which somehow makes it worse. A decade ago, in the same doomed spirit, I wrote of the “headless chicken panic” that grips England the moment an opponent “dares to cross it into the penalty box”. It is a bleak little consolation to be proved right twice in seven minutes.

But it is never the losing that undoes you. England have a long and distinguished record of contriving to lose to Argentina in the end, and there is a certain grim solidarity to be had in it — the solidarity of the funeral. As Prometheus tells the chorus, chained to his rock, the one gift he gave to mortals was to stop them foreseeing their doom: “I sowed in them blind hopes.” That is the 90-minute anxiety dream — you are trapped, you can see exactly what is coming, and it comes anyway — and it is the tournament’s last and best revelation about the tribe. What binds us is not the certainty of glory but the blind, renewable, faintly ridiculous hope we hold in common: the hope that kills you, and that you would not, for all the world, be without. Spain will play Argentina on Sunday. I shall watch with the serenity of the neutral, which is to say with none at all. There is always 2030.

Yes, Donald Trump may have personally intervened with Fifa to get Folarin Balogun, America’s star striker, an exception on the red card he’d earned in the previous match. But having Daddy Warbucks pull strings for your side can take an athletic effort only so far: in the end, Belgium won the game 4-1. Money and power cannot buy a World Cup. Qatar is a partial exception, but even in the case of the 2022 competition, the team got nowhere close to holding the World Cup trophy over their heads while confetti streamed down.

Corruption in Fifa, much less professional soccer, is hardly new. For years, if not decades, rumors swirled around top Italian club Juventus’s strange habit of winning games at the last minute on highly suspicious penalty decisions — suspicions vindicated by the Calciopoli refereeing scandal that, in 2006, got the club stripped of titles and relegated. 

Put aside the fact that Balogun’s red card was indeed dubious. The same could be said of numerous others, Francesco Totti’s red card against South Korea in 2002 being perhaps the most ludicrous. The injustice of the card is not the point. World Cup history is full of calls far worse, against teams with far greater chances of actually winning the competition, from countries who care infinitely more about the sport than the US, which after last night’s defeat will almost certainly return to treating football as a secondary concern. 

What made Trump’s effort to overturn Balogun’s suspension different is what it reveals about the nature of American political life. Bending the rules — and even outright cheating — is often deemed acceptable as long as it benefits “our side”. Part of American folklore is the belief that the country represents the “last best hope of earth” — a phrase that politicians of both parties still deploy, few realizing they’re borrowing from Abraham Lincoln. 

The 16th president was a man nearly everyone in the establishment still agrees represents the greatest of the American ethos. Yet Lincoln too — just like Trump — bent the rules to get his desired result. When the Southern states expressed their desire to leave the Union, Lincoln maintained that they had no such right, even though the foundational premise of the American liberal tradition is governance based on consent. To this day, that element of the Civil War remains underplayed; to even touch it risks ostracism. We are told that Lincoln used the legal mechanisms available to him to make his side, our side, prevail, and the arc of history bent toward “justice”. But who decides what “justice” really is, and therefore when the established rules and norms are acceptable to break? Those in power, obviously.

More from this author

Why the US sucks at soccer

By B. Duncan Moench

Had Balogun matched his earlier form in the tournament and the US had won instead of Belgium, Trump’s maneuvering to clear the deck for his return would have become the story of the World Cup. In typical Trumpian fashion, he would have made a story completely unrelated to him — the US is finally good at soccer! — about him. There’s no such thing as bad press, as Trump’s notoriously ruthless consigliere Roy Cohn taught him. It’s a sentiment the President hasn’t ridden just to fame and fortune, but to two of the strangest presidential terms and some of the oddest cultural milestones in the republic’s history.

Alongside hosting MMA fights on the White House lawn, Trump must now add to his résumé exposing the truly bipartisan nature of American enthusiasm for corruption. When it was announced that Balogun’s red card was rescinded, the notoriously kneejerk Left pundits, who have made entire careers out of reflexively condemning everything the man does, all of a sudden flipped on a dime and said, more or less: in this one case, corruption and arm-twisting behind the scenes was good. Why? Because it made our side better off. Our tribe — in this case the US national team — had a better chance of winning. 

In a culture that glorifies winning and encourages its members to see the stakes of not only elections, but competitions for college admission or job placement, as existential contests that validate one’s identity, sport is the only place where shared identity is still allowed. Studies have shown that when a fan’s team wins, their testosterone spikes; researchers famously measured the effect in fans after basketball and World Cup matches. Conversely, when their team loses, cortisol surges as though the loss were personal. This occurs, psychologically speaking, because fans’ nervous systems unconsciously treat the objects of their affection not just as extensions of their own identity but, literally, as their own high-stakes competition. So, when American Leftists and other commentators suggested, as Cenk Uygur did on X over the weekend, that Trump’s corruption might be okay in this one particular instance, they were revealing how American politicos — both Right and Left — actually think. 

Put aside debates about Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was “stolen”. If you actually spend time around Democratic Party diehards, they, just like their counterparts in the GOP, will openly express admiration for cheating if it’s used to the “right” ends. Lyndon Johnson, possibly the Democratic Party’s greatest-ever legislative architect after Franklin Roosevelt, is lovingly rumored to have instructed his staff to spread rumors that an opponent had sex with farm animals simply to “make him deny it” in the press. JFK’s father flooded the 1960 primaries with vote-buying efforts, only to have Kennedy joke about the electoral purchases himself, reading from a fake telegram from his father. “Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary,” it said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”

The Democrats are not alone in bending the rules in their favor. Late-20th century political operative Lee Atwater was as notorious as he was admired for his dirty-tricks campaigns against Democratic opponents. Atwater’s legacy is nearly always spoken of positively by GOP operatives. When Atwater rode the infamous “weekend prison pass” attack against Michael Dukakis — outsourcing a brutal ad to a nominally independent group, so the Bush campaign could maintain plausible deniability  — he showed us the future of America’s political present. A place where nearly every YouTube feed in the country is flooded with attacks that recklessly try to recreate some version of Atwater’s one-dimensional tarring of his Democratic rival.

But Atwater — like LBJ, JFK and, lest we forget, Tammany Hall before him — was loved by his tribe because he carried out his dirty tricks for “our” side. Presuming, of course, you have an active dog in the political race. And while more Americans than ever are disgusted with both parties, nearly everyone watching the red, white and blue on the field at the World Cup still feels the primitive pull of the national tribe.

In America, when rule-breaking delivers our tribe a win, our objection evaporates. That reflex, not Trump’s phone call, is the genuinely American thing on display. As for Belgium, they shouldn’t just have complained to the press, they should have flat-out threatened to refuse to take the field. Rule-bending for the powerful — and a public that never mobilizes to stop it — is the new American face of world football, already on full display.

But here is the thing about sport that politics can only envy. The game has a court of final appeal that no president can phone. Trump proved he could bend Fifa to his will. But he couldn’t bend the ball. Ninety minutes after the greatest rule-bending intervention in World Cup history, the beneficiary’s team was down 4-1, its goalkeeper face-down in the Seattle turf, consumed with shame, and the entire apparatus of executive pressure had ultimately purchased nothing whatsoever. The sports gods audited the books and issued their correction. Ball don’t lie.

American politics, however, has no such auditor. No ball and no net. Only the next election to be bent by whichever tribe holds the whip and a public — Right and Left — that has quietly agreed to measure every violation by a single standard. Did it help us win? 

It wasn’t just that England failed to beat Uruguay or Japan. It wasn’t even that their football was stodgily unimaginative, or that so many players were unavailable with injury. It was the grim sense of familiarity. This was what pre-tournament friendlies looked like in the bad old days before Gareth Southgate started taking England deep into World Cups and European Championships. There have been many occasions this season when English football has felt like an Eighties or Nineties tribute act — as the football has become more direct and the strategy more focused on dead balls — but rarely more so than in the Japan game, in which Tuchel’s players fruitlessly chased opponents who were cleverer, more tactically and technically astute than them.

With the bookmakers, England are third favorites to win the World Cup. Whatever the qualms about appointing a foreigner, Tuchel is an excellent coach. More than that, beyond the occasional lack of diplomacy, he has a skillset that seems attuned to international management. International managers have limited time available with their squads, and so the game tends to be less sophisticated, less complex, more about individuals than the club variant. Tuchel, throughout his managerial career, has managed to effect rapid change; he is good at formulating solutions and achieving player buy-in. The problems have tended to come later in the relationship, when he falls out with sporting directors and board members.

While it’s reasonable to see the dearth of plausible English candidates for the job as a failure of structure, the fact that Tuchel is German may help. Although he is an Anglophile who clearly loves London, he has a distance that arguably makes him both more clear-sighted and more willing to take risks — as demonstrated by his controversial squad selection; balance and having players fulfill specific roles matter far more to him that reputation. His life will not be defined by one decision. He can go back to Germany whenever he wants; he’s not going to be popping into Tesco in 30 years time, worried that the bloke at the cheese counter is about to harangue him about a substitution from the distant past.

More from this author

The triumph of Brexitball

By Jonathan Wilson

And England do have match-winning individuals. In fact, it’s probable that no England manager has ever had access to such an array of creative talent. The Football Association has traditionally been an easy organization to blame, but on this point, it deserves great credit. After England’s failure to qualify for Euro 2008, the FA launched yet another root-and-branch review, but this one actually led to change. The Elite Plater Performance Plan was introduced in 2012, radically overhauling the academy system. Two years later, a team that included Southgate launched the England DNA project, setting a template for how England should seek to play: a possession-based, tactically flexible model.

Technical accomplishment is almost impossible to gauge beyond an eye test, but a quick comparison between the current squad and the side Roy Hodgson took to the 2014 World Cup tells its own story: Tuchel’s options are so deep he could omit Cole Palmer and Phil Foden, while Hodgson was debilitatingly dependent on Raheem Sterling.

The success of the overhaul can be seen in results. Since 2018, the England men’s team has reached the finals of two European Championships, plus the semi-final and a quarter-final of a World Cup, while the women have won two Euros and reached a World Cup final and a semi-final. Both men’s and women’s teams have been more successful in the past eight years than in the entirety of their prior history.

For a long time, England were deficient in such players, which is why there was such a sense of reliance on the handful they did have — Wayne Rooney, David Beckham, Paul Gascoigne… — and why pre-tournament injuries became such a saga. But having those players is not sufficient. There must also be a system to get the best out of them and, in creating that, a surfeit of high-profile creators can be just as detrimental as a dearth.

Southgate’s first three tournaments as England manager were qualitatively different to the last. In the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, and in Euro 2020 (played in 2021 because of Covid), England had a clear plan. It might have been a more conservative plan than many fans and pundits wanted, and Southgate might not have had the clarity of vision to make in-game changes when things began to go against his side, but underlying it all there was a strategy and it brought progress.

Euro 2024 was different. England got to the final, it’s true — but they also did not play well. Basic tactical issues were never resolved, and the sense was of a return to the bad old days of picking big names and trying to find a solution on the hoof.

Suggested Reading

England fans can't be beaten

By Will Lloyd

Most obviously, there was a glut of creators all trying to operate in the same central area behind Harry Kane, when one of Kane’s great gifts is his capacity to drop deep, creating space for players running beyond him. In 2024, as well as being hampered by a back injury, Kane was playing in a team with no such runners, neutering one of his key assets. At Bayern, where he is having the season of his life, there are five such runners competing for spots in the line of three behind him. That’s why Tuchel picked less glamorous players such as Morgan Rogers, Anthony Gordon and Marcus Rashford, who naturally make those runs beyond a center-forward, rather than taking an out-of-sorts Palmer or Foden.

That has created a backlash, among media and public — just as the decision to leave out Bellingham did last October. Bellingham had missed the 5-0 win in Serbia the previous month through injury, and Tuchel preferred the balance without him. Perhaps Tuchel also felt it would make for a more harmonious dressing room; Bellingham is a large personality and the suggestion is that certain other members of the squad can find that grating. Whatever the logic, it resulted in a media furor. The scale of the hysteria is only magnified by the long yearning for another trophy. And that may in part explain why England managers tend to take the path of least resistance and pick the most famous players.

England is not the only country in which the national football team exists in a tumult of opinion. But it is the country with the most intense league in the world. Of the 30 wealthiest clubs in the world by revenue, according to Deloitte, 15 play in the Premier League, and that means that the average game in England is tougher than elsewhere. When Arsenal play Wolves, they are playing against the 29th-richest club in the world; the challenge for Barcelona or Real Madrid playing Oviedo or Elche, or for Bayern playing Heidenheim or St Pauli, is simply not the same.

This is not a new phenomenon. When he was Uefa president, Michel Platini used to speak of English clubs as lions in winter and lambs in spring, when fatigue set in. Of course, there are foreign players in the Premier League, who are also affected, but only two of Tuchel’s probable 26-man squad for the World Cup play abroad. England, habitually, go to major tournaments exhausted.

That exacerbates another issue, which is that the majority of major tournaments are played in hot weather. Admittedly England were awful in the winter chill of South Africa in 2010, but it’s probably not insignificant that, in terms of quality of football played, their best recent tournament was played in Qatar in December, before they were exhausted and when the temperature was in the low 20s. In football, climate is destiny, and England’s traditional game is based on the sort of hard running that simply isn’t possible in high heat and humidity. The USA will be hot and humid, while Mexico City, where England could play their last-16 tie, is hot and 2,240 meters above sea level. Tuchel’s assistant Anthony Barry has spoken of developing a “heat-proof” game model, which is encouraging, but there is a limit to how much national managers can do to curb the natural instincts of players.

In time, it may be that the academy reform and the England DNA project will lead to greater homogeneity of style, something that has, for instance, helped Spain’s rise over the past couple of decades. Individual club identity in England, though, remains extremely resilient, which makes it harder to develop the sort of coherence that characterized Germany with their Bayern core when they won in 2014, or Spain with their Barcelona influence in 2010. But Argentina in 2022 and France in 2018 overcame a similar scattering of their talent.

There’s also, clearly, an issue of psychology. The 60 years of hurt are real, at least in the sense that persistent failure gnaws at confidence, particularly when the prize comes in sight. In the Euro 2020 final, England led Italy 1-0 and looked the better side, but tightened up in the second half, as the full scope of what they appeared to be about to achieve dawned on them. The issue of the heavy shirt is likely to persist until England actually do win a trophy; just as Spain went 44 years without success and then suddenly won three tournaments in a row.

This could be a good England squad. Unlike a decade ago, player production is not the issue. But few, if any, of England’s game winners are fit or in form, the over-emotional media/public landscape is unhelpful, and English football still needs a light drizzle on a chill autumn afternoon to be seen at its best — conditions that will very much not be present in the summer. There’s no reason to believe the 60 years of hurt will be coming to an end any time soon. Failure begets failure, and so too does fatigue.

The Isle of Man’s Tourist Trophy (TT) is the most dangerous motor competition in the world. It has killed more than 270 of its competitors and crippled many more; since the birth of the TT, only two years have gone without fatalities. Formula 1 drivers race upon purpose-built circuits, places provided with run off zones, safety barriers, and specialized road surfaces; the TT has none of these. Reaching top speeds of more than 200 mph, competitors hurtle through country roads, villages, towns, and up a mountain.

They must pass walls, trees, houses, and horses; spectators, furniture, telephone poles and iron railings. They must negotiate more than 200 bends and kinks to the course; blind turnings and hairpin corners; airborne jumps and fearsome plunges; corners so tight that their knees hang centimeters above the tarmac — and they do all of this knowing that if they get it wrong, if they miscalculate an angle or a turning or a bump in the road, they may die. It is a competition almost entirely run and raced by amateurs, mechanics, builders, farmers, plumbers. None do it for money; winners can expect to receive a mere £26,250. They are doing it instead for something else: the thrill of speed, of risk, and of victory; the regard of other racers, and the call of tradition.

Now finishing its 114th year, the TT is an arena of danger and glory, the subject of films, documentaries, and songs. The central event of an entire industry, it is also a testing ground and product exhibition. Generations of motorcycle builders used the TT as a benchmark, a standard against which to measure the performance of their models; companies have lived and died based upon how their vehicles performed on the track. Through the TT, we can tell a story not only of courage, meaning, and myth, but also a story of manufacturing — of Britain’s long reign as workshop to the world, and its precipitate collapse to foreign competition.

The TT was born in exception. In 1903, the British government banned motor vehicles from traveling at more than 20 mph; speed enthusiasts were obliged to look elsewhere. Possessed of its own legal system, and pleased to accept financial incentives, the Isle of Man was the perfect place in which to stage the races and trials so earnestly sought by the motor industry. The first TT was held in 1907 and — wars and pandemics aside — it has been going strong ever since. It dominates the island’s annual calendar, and is the backbone of its tourist industry. On average, 40,000 fans and 10,000 motorcycles visit the island. There are many more visitors than hotel beds; residents rent out their homes, guest bedrooms, and even their fields, charging tourists for a spot to pitch their tent. To accommodate the racing, schools have a two-week summer half term. The course itself transforms; spectator stands are erected, barriers put up, livestock fencing inspected, the road itself repaired and swept.

What is it that drives the contestants up onto the mountain? A lonely impulse of delight; a tumult on the roads. Stuart Barker, interviewing TT riders for his 2022 book Ragged Edge, found that they spoke of the thrill, the buzz, adrenaline; the feeling, as 1950 winner Geoff Duke put it, of “elation and absolute wonder of going down Bray Hill for the first time”. For some, the risk is the point; as observed by TT racer Guy Martin, “You have to take the risk to get the buzz.” For others, it is a matter of history and tradition, with brother following brother and sons following their fathers. Beside tradition, besides the thrill and the adrenaline, riders are also attracted by the magnitude and prestige of the TT, the “pure kudos” of the event, its status as the “ultimate” challenge.

More from this author

Military drones will upend the world

By James Kingston

To win in the TT is to participate in a century-long tradition, and to rank with and among the legends of the course. The TT’s great contests are the stuff of legend: the 1967 Senior race between Mike Hailwood and Giacomo Agostini, say, or Hailwood’s comeback some 11 years later. So too are they emblems of endurance and will. Consider the determination of Robert Dunlop, who arrived for the 1998 TT on crutches. Right arm and right leg crippled from a TT crash four years earlier, he had broken his collarbone and re-broken his leg only three weeks before the event. Not only did he join the Ultralightweight race, but he won it; victorious, he cast his crutches into the crowd. Or else there’s Conor Cummins. Thrown from his bike and sent tumbling down the mountain, he sustained a broken back, arm, pelvis, and torn ligaments, yet returned and, 12 years later, took second place in the 2022 Superstock race.

The most successful riders ascend into myth. In pubs across the Isle of Man, hanging on a wall someplace behind the bar, sit the icons of a votive cult — portraits of Joey Dunlop. The victor of 26 TT races, Dunlop, who was Northern Irish, dominated the track for a quarter century. A statue of him can be seen on the TT course, overlooking the Bungalow Bend; last year, 25 years after his death in Estonia, TT organizers arranged a tribute lap in his honor. This week, his life-sized image decorated the walls of the grandstand bar, along with other TT greats, figures like John McGuinness, Michael Dunlop, Dave Molyneaux. So too are they etched into the route itself; each of these men has a corner of course named after them. Through competition, meaning is inscribed into the landscape.

TT races end where they begin: in the shadow of the grave. Directly opposite from the TT grandstand is the Douglas borough cemetery. Yards from the dead, winners are brought to the podium, there to be adorned in a giant laurel wreath, one so large it must be slung across the chest and under the shoulder. In some respects, the TT is not an event in history — it is an event before history, an extrusion of premodern values within a risk-averse, money-centric liberal order. By joining the TT, ordinary men and women, the vast majority of whom are amateurs, trade the risk of death for the thrill of life, and for the chance of glory.

“I don’t want to grow old and regret things I didn’t do. What do you do in life? Do you sit around wishing you’d done stuff, or do you get out there and do it?” These words were said by James Hillier, a TT competitor in our own era; said in a different register, their message is still older. In the Iliad, the hero’s existence is defined by the choice between a long and obscure life and a short, glorious one. Sitting in his camp, Achilles must choose between the pleasures of home, and the immortality of renown; it is a choice between death, and between life. The Trojan hero Sarpedon puts it a different way; were it possible to go on ageless and immortal, he would not go on fighting. “But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them, let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.” Risking their lives, embracing the thrill of risk, the danger of injury, and the glory of competition, TT racers affirm, in their own startling way, the existential choices all of us face.

The TT is one of the great cultural events of British life. Despite this, it is oddly underappreciated in mainstream British culture. Too Northern, perhaps; too working class. A festival for mechanics and motorheads, taking place far from the power centers of the South East. In a sense, this too has a heritage. From the earliest days of the industry, British motorcycling had clear class connotations, seen as the domain of young men, of factory workers and laborers, embracing the freedom of the open road. For British manufacturers this was the industry’s strength — a clearly defined market — and also its curse.

Throughout its long life, the TT has tracked the improvement of technology — the relentless improvement of the internal combustion engine, of frames, suspension, tires, brakes, fuels, metallurgy, lubrication, aerodynamics, engine configuration, reliability, and electronics. As the machines improved, so too did the lap times. The first 60 mph lap was reached in 1924; the first 80-mph lap in 1930. The first 100-mph lap was achieved in 1957; 120 in 1989; the current high, achieved by Peter Hickman in 2023, is just over 136 mph. Driving this has been competition: the competition of individuals, and the competition of companies and nations.

“One is apt to think of the TT as a sporting event that the trade happens to find worthwhile to patronize. But it is more accurate to consider it a trade event that happens to be of a sporting character… The ultimate purpose of the meeting is to sell motorcycles.” Writing in 1951, motor journalist Francis Jones was clear on the role of the TT. The course was used to sell bikes, and to test them, a way of examining performance and reliability under the most severe of conditions. Bikes that succeeded in the TT would succeed with the sports-driven, risk-oriented, male customers that the industry identified as its core market. It was a mindset built up over decades, decades within which British bikes stood supreme across global markets. Right up until the Sixties, the TT was a showplace of British manufacturing prowess. Matchless motorbikes dominated the years before the First World War, and between 1926 and 1939, at least one Solihull-made Norton finished in the top three places of the Isle of Man TT.

More from this author

Does crypto make you horny?

By James Kingston

Alongside the commercial ties were those of passion, for many of the UK’s leading firms were owned and operated by motorcycle hobbyists. Harry Collier, the son of the Matchless founder and later an MD of the company, raced semi-professionally and had a distinguished TT career. Across the industry, senior management would be almost obliged to make the annual pilgrimage to the Isle of Man. Employees also participated: at the AMC factory in Woolwich, employment preference was given to motorbike riders, TT results were broadcast over the public address system, and, on at least one occasion, the company gave leave to 200 staff so that they could travel to the TT.

This strength did not last. In 1939, a BMW won the Senior TT. Accompanied by billowing swastikas, it was an important prewar propaganda for victory for the Nazi state. In 1947, an Italian machine won the Lightweight TT race. British dominance in the Senior and Junior categories lasted into the mid Fifties, when the Italian Gilera and Moto Guzzi teams started to win prizes. From 1956, Norton and AMC announced they would no longer run official race teams. Honda won its first race in 1961; within a few years, Japanese bikes dominated Honda alone has since won over 250 TT races, followed by Yamaha and Kawasaki. By 1992, when first asked to ride upon a British-made Norton, Steve Hislop laughed; no-one had won on a British bike in 30 years. In the end, he did win — but that remains the last time a British bike triumphed in the TT’s biggest competition.

The British motorcycling industry failed for three reasons. Believing in craftsmanship, postwar managers failed to adopt new assembly line technology, thus damaging their ability to scale, and to maintain quality control. Focused on sport, and upon a masculine ethos of competition, they missed the female market. Above all, British firms failed adequately to recognize and meet demand for “economy” bikes: cheap, stylish, easy to use vehicles for the non-technical commuter. By doing so, they laid the ground for their eventual failure in sport as well.

British motorcycling is a case study of “segment retreat”. Category by category, Britain’s postwar motorcycle manufacturers withdrew before the advance of their Italian and Japanese rivals. First, they sacrificed the home market, focusing instead on exports of motorbikes to North America. Focused on heavy bikes, they then sacrificed the economy, light, and medium-weight sectors; by 1975, the British industry produced nothing smaller than machines in the 500cc displacement class. Backed by a superior manufacturing base, better factories, the revenues and the scale they gained in other segments, Japanese firms soon beat them there as well. With nowhere left to retreat, the British industry collapsed; its decades-long position as the world leader had vanished. The TT rewarded courage and mechanical brilliance, but the postwar motorcycle market increasingly rewarded a different kind of genius: the ability to make motorcycling ordinary and scalable.

For motorcycling, we can read Britain as a whole. For decades, our story has been one of retreat. Retreat from empire, retreat from ship-building, from steel and energy production; retreat from textiles, railways, and electronics, from aerospace, car-building, and telecoms. Retreat too, if blind complacency has its way, from the existence of the United Kingdom itself. At each stage, British elites have trusted in something to rescue us: the global service economy, the European Community, the transatlantic alliance, the prestige of our laws, the global nature of our language. None of these can be trusted to endure. In a darkening world, Britain now stands exposed, adrift, and with nowhere left to retreat.

The question is what we do next. Unlike the Italians, Germans and Japanese of the postwar era, Britain’s elite still do not know they have been defeated, and so presume things can continue as they are. We must embrace both the TT spirit, its culture of risk-taking and victory against the odds, but at the same time we must embrace the humility of defeat. The defeated Axis power won the development of the postwar industry through discipline, creativity, and an emphasis on achieving scale; so too must the contemporary UK. Decline is a choice — a choice to retreat, a choice no longer to strive, a choice to abandon ambition. Above all, we must remember this truth: those who risk nothing, do nothing, achieve nothing, become nothing.

Suffice to say this was not an old spit-and-sawdust sort of gym. Yet more than its style, what makes BoxCentric truly remarkable is how unexceptional it now feels. All over London, similar boxing boutiques are sprouting up like welts on a fighter’s face. BXR, founded by Olia Sardarova and backed by Anthony Joshua, has membership fees starting in the thousands. Then there’s JAB Boxing in Victoria, which features champion boxers from Harlem Eubank to Caroline Dubois in its slick promotions. Boxing, a working-class sport, sneered at by the likes of George Orwell, has been repackaged for the affluent.

Boxing’s migration into luxury gyms is easy to mock, but harder to dismiss. These clubs are opening the sport to women, professionals and people who would never enter a traditional gym. They are also giving fighters and trainers a way to earn outside the sport. The problem is not that the rich have discovered boxing. It is that, just as boxing becomes fashionable among the wealthy, the grassroots clubs that made it socially useful are starting to decay — with ominous consequences for the sport and its future.

As a boxer myself, it’s easy to scoff at the posh hitting pads. “This isn’t real boxing,” one England prospect tells me, “it’s feel-good boxing.” In practice, that means less actual sparring and more bag work, circuits and pads, played to some trippy music. Yet it’s precisely the pressure of being punched in the face, to paraphrase Joshua Buatsi, the Ghanaian-British Olympian, that makes diamonds. And for those of us who used to pay £2 in subs, £225 a month feels like a hook in the liver. For me, then, visiting BoxCentric felt rather exclusionary, a far cry from boxing’s egalitarian motto: all are welcome, rich or poor, black or white as long as you can fight.

Suggested reading

Boxing fights on in Bethnal Green

By Ross Davies

The economic upper cut stings in other ways too. Think again to our England prospect. He wakes up early, cycles across London to teach a class, then returns for his own training in Brixton. And for what? Life for kids like him is hard. “You spend 10-to-15 years in the amateurs and get your brains bashed in,” says Dan Morley, a pundit and former professional. “There’s no money in the gym. We make little money from it.” It’s easy, then, to resent the suit turning up in a sanitized gym, thinking that a few hits makes him Balham’s answer to Joe Frazier.

All the same, I’m not sure sneering is quite right. “Everyone,” Morley points out, “should have an opportunity to try a sport.” That’s especially true when these new spaces have opened boxing up to people who would never have walked into a traditional gym. Louie Basso, a manager at JAB, tells me that around 65% of their clients are women. This is unsurprising. I myself have seen many women wanting to enter my gym, but finding the old boxing environment intimidating.

Morley makes a similar point. “It gives people who in previous eras would turn their nose up at boxing an understanding of how difficult it is — the technical aspect.” If a cleaner, safer, better-lit gym gets more men and women hitting pads, learning footwork and discovering the discipline of the sport, that’s hardly a bad thing, especially when audience numbers continue to drop.

As our England prospect’s early-morning hustle implies, meanwhile, luxury boutiques help boxers themselves. That £225 a month has to go somewhere, and fighters need all the help they can get. As Mark Turley shows in Journeymen: The Other Side of the Boxing Business, the average journeyman’s living often depends less on ability but on the fact that he’s a poor ticket seller. Few know that the fight game is stacked in favor of the ticket seller; as Morley puts it, the industry is “fucked”, controlled by promoters and with very few opportunities for outsiders. Boutique clubs offer former fighters a way to earn money outside the magic circle. Visit 12×3, a gym in the City, you can be taught by Darren Barker, a British, Commonwealth and world champion. George Veness, the founder of JAB, is another good example. A Newham boxing vet who fought for England before leaving the sport, he began training Victoria’s Secret models before replicating the idea at JAB.

There’s a broader point here too. Boxing may have been the poor man’s sport, but few boxers would begrudge men like Veness from making money. That, after all, is what prize fighting is all about. And there are other reasons to feel relaxed about boxing’s posh turn too. When the Marquess of Queensberry put his patronage behind the sport in 1867, he helped civilize it. From the brutal brawling days of old, gloves, rounds, the 10-second knockout rule were all introduced. Without the Queensberry Rules, without money, boxing may not have survived in the form we know it. Certainly, many young men would have pointlessly lost their lives.

If rich people want to pay for expertise — let them. Even if the next Mike Tyson doesn’t come from Knightsbridge, we may still reap the benefits of high-flyers becoming advocates for the sport, just like the Marquess of Queensberry himself. Like it or not, it’ll be precisely these people who become future school governors, magistrates and lawyers, and who may actually advocate for boxing as a way of solving London’s epic social problems.

Having worked with young men involved in knife crime, I know that the first thing you teach a novice is not aggression. It’s emotional regulation. You teach balance, positioning, defense and timing. And that can only be achieved if you can stay calm, as Teddy Atlas, Mike Tyson’s old trainer, put it, “in an un-calm environment”. In sparring, the aim is not simply to hit the other man. It is to create enough distance to think and act, not merely react. To remain composed while someone is offloading on you is a beautiful thing. It gives you immense confidence in the ring, but also in life, business, conflict and personal relationships.

All that’s useful whoever you are, but especially for Londoners born on the wrong side of the tracks. Social workers and youth-offending teams in overstretched boroughs like Croydon recognize the benefits of boxing, often taking their charges to the gym. Every single kid that I myself trained up in Croydon had an absent father; what boxing gives them is not merely toughness. It gives them discipline, restraint and, believe it or not, gentleness. Little wonder that gyms often act as a mediator with law enforcement, even as some police forces have funded clubs as a preventative measure against antisocial behavior.

More from this author

The Syrian super-drug coming for Britain

By Tam Hussein

What a shame, then, that while places like BoxCentric thrive, their working-class cousins are struggling. Once again, money is key to this dynamic, with soaring rents a particular blight. Consider the plight of Broad Street Amateur Boxing Club. A typical East London community center, nestled between Shadwell’s council estates, it has a 138-year tradition in the sweet science. But then, in 2024, it received an annual rent increase of more than £60,000, saved only by a public campaign. Nor is this just a London problem. Stockbridge ABC in Liverpool has struggled. The late Ricky Hatton’s old club, Hyde & District Amateur Boxing Club near Manchester, is at risk too. Sudbury Boxing Club, with a 70-year pedigree, recently needed Eddie Hearn, the larger-than-life promoter, to step in and appeal for funding.

These sorts of things create resentment because property owners and councils are removing one of the things that allows for Britain’s poorest to succeed. When someone chooses to “turn over”, or become a professional boxer, it’s often because other doors are closed to him. To prevent a young man from carving out a future with the only thing he has — his fists — seems to me a grave injustice. And what councils fail to grasp is that offering to move a club elsewhere doesn’t solve the issue. I saw this myself at Sting ABC, a club I once boxed and coached at. Too many of the gym’s young boxers were lost to the streets of Croydon, despite the dedication of coach Bruce Smith, an ex-British army veteran. Only now, after years of struggle, has Sting ABC finally re-found its feet in Lewisham.

After all, the young people who frequent a club can’t move with it. A boxing gym isn’t just a room with bags. It’s a local institution and a source of pride. Each gym has its own character, whether that’s the spartan white paint of Miguel’s in Brixton, or the converted church at Ingle Boxing Gym in Sheffield. Or else go to London Military Boxing Club and watch my own teachers, Andy Haines and Del Ali, teach their boys how not to lose control, how strength without composure is useless. That’s why boxing was once taught in schools. Boxing absorbs social pressure and tensions from home and the schoolyard. It creates intergenerational authority. It gives difficult boys structure, in a way no Tube poster campaign ever could.

So yes, let the lawyers, bankers, influencers and executives box. Let women find confidence in gyms that feel safe rather than hostile. Let old fighters earn proper money holding pads for people who want to feel, for an hour at least, that they are part of the fight game, that there is no tomorrow, that they are really in a Rocky movie. Boxing and wealth need not be enemies.

But if boxing becomes only a premium lifestyle product, something has gone badly wrong. The sport’s glamor has always depended on the existence of the unglamorous rooms beneath it: the local clubs, the volunteer coaches, the kids paying a few quid to train, the veterans wrapping hands, the smell of sweat and leather, the lessons in restraint disguised as violence. Whatever happens, after all, the rich will always be able to buy the feeling of boxing. But the poor will need its function.

The bar never leaves the ground. After three seconds of agonizing effort, Hooper releases it in defeat. He stands back, meekly waves to the crowd, and slinks out stage left. Even after a three-month regimen of heavy steroid and testosterone use, the synthetic support did not prove enough to get him over the line.

For this was not an ordinary strongman competition. This was the inaugural Enhanced Games in Las Vegas — an Olympics-style spectacle with a distinctly un-Olympian twist: drugs, and lots of them.

Testosterone, anabolic steroids, stimulants, metabolic modulators, and a pick ’n’ mix bag of peptides were just some elements of the “stacks” that these athletes had been taking ahead of the Games. In any other sporting context, it would have resulted in an automatic disqualification and a lengthy (if not lifetime) ban. But at the Enhanced Games, it was almost a prerequisite for qualification.

These competitors were, after all, sporting outcasts. They were rejects, drug cheats, and also-rans. Few had a pathway back into the disciplines they had spent their whole lives devoted to. Now, they had effectively sealed their fate by competing in a tournament that was widely dismissed as a “clown show” by the US Anti-Doping Agency and “dangerous and irresponsible” by WADA.

Suggested reading

The orthodox Jews tripping on toad toxins

By Frederick Kaufman

With so many drugs involved, I made my first trip to Vegas expecting an event as riveting as it was uncomfortable: a Hunter S. Thompson sort of scene, but with steroids instead of psychedelics. I didn’t plan on barrelling down the Strip with a fistful of mescaline and a quart of ether, but I had already been offered to go to a gun range by another attendee before the event had even begun. It was a promising start.

Instead, the Games proved to be a more sterile affair. Like the athletes competing, the crowd appeared to be on their own strict protocol, with tech bros and YouTube influencers flexing their enhanced muscles on camera. Veins bulged out of muscles I did not know existed, and skin stretched across foreheads so tightly that eyebrows were rendered immobile. As I wandered around the makeshift arena, many were happy to share with me the details of their regimens, no doubt taking inspiration from anti-aging guru Bryan Johnson, who was commentating on the Games. One even offered to put me in touch with his “peptide guy”, which I politely declined. As for Johnson, he delivered analysis while sheltering under a black parasol — all the better to prevent his skin from aging.

Ironically, many in the stands looked more enhanced than the athletes themselves. Since his dramatic weight gain last year, the swimmer James Magnussen, a former 100-meter freestyle world champion, had shed the 20 kilograms he once carried. Perhaps to the disappointment of thrill-seeking spectators, he was one of many athletes to have retained the lean, familiar physiques of their former Olympic selves. The contestants were competing across three categories: swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting, with 42 competitors vying for a total prize pot of up to $25 million. $250,000 would be awarded to first-place finishers and bonuses of up to $1 million for “breaking” world records.

By the end of the evening, only one $1 million prize was handed out. The Greek swimmer ­Kristian Gkolomeev swam 20.81 seconds in the men’s 50-meter freestyle, 0.07 quicker than the world record — and 0.05 seconds faster than his previous record at an Enhanced Games-sponsored event in February 2025. It hardly represented the dawn of a new sporting era, but it was nevertheless heralded by Max Martin, the Enhanced Games CEO, as the moment “we changed the world”.  Martin knelt at Gkolomeev’s feet in gratitude; the prize money, evidently, was well-spent.

The millions of dollars in cash was certainly a powerful incentive for these athletes, but the event lacked the intensity of a conventional sporting competition. EDM music blared during races; sprinters were allowed to restart after false starts; and a weightlifter was granted an additional attempt in the snatch. Records or no records, athletes were applauded as if they were returning war heroes. By the end, I half-expected participation trophies to be handed out.

At times, the Games felt more like an episode of Severance: a sealed-off system observed from the outside, its participants acting according to rules that seemed both hidden and self-evident to them. At the end of each race, athletes were routinely asked how enhancement had changed their lives. The responses were uniformly effusive — gratitude directed at the organizers; praise for a newfound lease on life; and carefully rehearsed reflections on the transformative effects of the substances they had taken.

This was, of course, the point. The Enhanced Games is a publicity stunt. The athletes are running, swimming, and lifting advertisements for the long list of the supplements, longevity treatments and specialized regimens promoted on the event’s newly revamped website. But if they were meant to be an advert for a better, faster, stronger tomorrow, tonight’s performances suggest there is some way to go.

Critics have already dismissed the Games as a sideshow, but they are wrong to do so. If last night’s competition revealed anything, it was the glimpse it provided into a future in which “enhancement” is no longer the exception, but the norm. With the use of performance-enhancing drugs on the rise, even as “looksmaxxing” becomes normalized, events like these are helping redraw assumptions about what constitutes a desirable or even normal body. As those boundaries shift, so too may the pressure for people to interfere with their bodies — chemically, medically and permanently — without fully reckoning with the risks.

Enhanced had billed the competition as the beginning of a new era for elite sport — one in which pharmaceutical optimization would render old records obsolete, and bring human potential to new frontiers. Not only was a single world record broken, but three unenhanced athletes ended up winning their respective events. Ben Proud, the Olympic silver medalist and poster child for the Games, improved on his previous personal best, but missed out on the world record by just 0.05 seconds. His dejected look at the finish line made clear his disappointment.

If these results were meant to serve as a rebuke to the old sporting system, the event was a failure. But they also pointed towards a deeper tension that lies at the heart of the organization. On the one hand, its founders present the Enhanced Games as a “new Apollo mission”, testing the limits of human performance and pushing the boundaries of human potential. On the other hand, they argued that there was nothing altogether that different from what today’s enhanced athletes are doing compared to previous generations. Promotional videos invoked the Ancient Greeks, who supposedly used figs, mushrooms and plant seeds to sharpen performance, or the runners of the early-20th century who turned to stimulants and tonics in pursuit of an edge.

It does not take a scientist, however, to understand that there is a difference between eating a fig and injecting EPO (erythropoietin), a hormone which is designed to increase red-blood-cell count, but can also raise the risk of stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism, blood clots and sudden cardiac death. While Enhanced athletes underwent medical supervision in the months leading up to competition, the long-term consequences of sustained pharmacological enhancement remain poorly understood. That uncertainty raises a broader question: what happens when these protocols — or simplified, mass-market versions of them — move beyond tightly controlled experimental settings into a wider, commercially accessible market?

The rise of the “looksmaxxing” community offers some clues. Though Enhanced’s founders reject any direct comparison with influencers such as Clavicular, there are notable overlaps: in both cases, the body is subjected to pharmaceutical intervention in pursuit of an aesthetic goal. The language may differ — performance versus appearance, sport versus self-image — but the underlying logic is not. Besides, most of Enhanced’s customers will be less fussed about beating world records than looking good in the mirror, which they can do with testosterone injections for $169 a month, low-dose tadalafil for $80 a month, or semaglutide for $179 a month.

Enhanced’s co-founder Christian Angermayer has himself acknowledged that vanity is no bad thing. He argues that the pursuit of enhancement does need not be morally distinguished by its motivation: whether driven by vanity, ambition or competitiveness, it forms part of a single continuum of biomedical self-optimization. Notably, he sees these Games as a node in a broader cultural campaign to make pharmacological enhancement socially acceptable, arguing that medicine is too narrowly focused on treating illness rather than improving healthy people.

Yet what is most revealing is where he draws his inspiration from: the trans movement. Writing in 2024, he argued that the broader freedoms won through struggles over gender identity would eventually extend to the right to “shape and enhance one’s own body and mind according to individual desires and aspirations”. In his telling, enhancement is not simply a sporting or medical question but a libertarian one — part of a wider rejection of fixed ideas about what constitutes a “normal” body.

It is a revealing analogy. The debate around transgender athletes exposed how fraught questions around hormones, bodily autonomy and fairness in sport can be. In 2022, the 6’1” trans swimmer Lia Thomas won a National Collegiate Athletic Association women’s freestyle title in 2022; the sight of her on the podium alongside smaller female competitors became a lightning rod for public unease about where inclusion ends and competitive advantage begins. James Magnussen’s own transformation — after putting on 20 kilos through pharmaceutical enhancement — provoked a different but related reaction. His enlarged physique, with lats spilling out of his swimsuit, looked disturbingly unnatural, looking more like that of a WWE wrestler than an Olympic athlete.

Perhaps this is part of the appeal. People came to the inaugural Games expecting to see mutants; this time around, mutants were not forthcoming. But as more and more people develop their own regimen at home, that boundary may begin to blur. As for the Games itself, the format will almost certainly return, iterate, expand. And once athletes have crossed the line into enhancement, there is no obvious way back to the old rules without cost — physiological, competitive, or reputational. In that sense, what happens in Vegas rarely stays in Vegas.

Not everyone here sees the game as literally miraculous. But it’s hard not to feel that Opening Day in St. Louis is life-giving, the crack of batted ball the moment spring’s green shoots defeat the prairie chill. This year, over 100,000 are here to party. And why not? The St. Louis Cardinals are the bishops of baseball, with a near-mystical relationship with their fans. “You’re going back to the late 1800s, handed down to generations of fans,” explains Tom Ackerman, program director at KMOX, a local radio super-station that’s broadcast Cardinals games for a century. “If you grow up in a Cardinal’s family that’s what you know. The loyalty goes back through the generations, the history, the success of the franchise.”

And what success: with 11 World Series, the Cardinals are historically one of elite franchises across American sport. Technically, too, the team is impressive. Embracing what’s known as the “Cardinal Way” — a robust training style involving crisp defense, speed on the basepaths, and putting savvy play over big payrolls — the team is equally famed for its sportsmanship. As Jan Daniels says, former players returning in different jerseys will always get applauded if they play well. “Whenever there’s a good play from the other team that deserves a hand, we do that. That’s what the St. Louis fans do, we just like good ball playing.”

Yet if fans love vibes and a winner, the Cardinals are ultimately so beloved thanks to KMOX: a 50,000-watt mega-station that broadcasts games to over a dozen states. Because of St. Louis’s prime location in America’s heartland, some 700 miles from the sea, it gathers in supporters from right across the south and Midwest. For 71 years to 2021, a series of radio icons called the Cardinals’ games. Sure, on TV, the graphics and images tell the story. But on radio, the announcers can paint a picture in prose. Phrases like Jack Buck’s iconic “That’s a Winner!” now serve as city-wide maxims. For three quarters of a century, these greats were the sound of the summer. They were more than broadcasters; the intimacy of radio made them friends; their warmth and talent made them family.

To that extent, then, Opening Day is a city-wide family reunion. “They’re our glue, the glue of the city,” says Al Crenshaw. 34 years old with a broad smile, he’s hanging out with some pals, tailgating as it’s known in America, standing by a grill of smoking meat and holding a can of Budweiser, St. Louis’s hometown beer. “They are our glue, the glue to the city,” Crenshaw adds of his team. “You can’t think of St. Louis without thinking of the Cardinals first.”

More from this author

Nostalgia won’t save Niagara

By Jeff Bloodworth

Fair enough. Yet amid the joys of Opening Day, you don’t really get the sense that St. Louis’s communal spirit survives the rest of the year. “That’s part of our problem as a region,” says Tony Messenger, a veteran local journalist. “We aren’t literally invested in the success of downtown St. Louis. And if we were, Opening Day would be more meaningful.” Separated by city and county, middle-class suburbanites adore the St. Louis Cardinals. But their tax dollars do not pay for the streets abutting the team’s stadium, nor for derelict city schools. United on Opening Day, St. Louis is divided on most others.

 Around the turn of the century, some 60% of St. Louis residents were immigrants or their children. Many found work in the city’s famous breweries — both Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch, the latter giving the Cardinal’s stadium its name. Home also to the nation’s eighth-largest African-American urban population, St. Louis soon became a hodgepodge of ethnic enclaves. The Hill, a neighborhood famed for its migrants from the Lombard plains, was typical. Amid this diversity, the Cardinals were the city’s social glue. For an immigrant kid whose parents spoke with an accent, donning a red hat meant near-instant assimilation. The baseball diamond is where two Hall of Fame baseballers, the Hill’s Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola, shed their ethnic origins and became plain-spoken Middle Americans.

All the while, the city boomed. As late as 1975, St. Louis hosted eight Fortune 500 corporate firms. Aerospace, cars, biotechnology, food — all these, alongside beer, fueled the local economy. Corporate execs enjoyed cushy expense accounts; organized labor gave workers security. Even now, this wealth can be seen on the city’s streets. Think, here, of the “painted ladies” of Lafayette Square — their iron balconies and double-sloped mansard roofs evoking the city’s 18th-century French founding — or else the Siamese-Byzantine beauty of the Fabulous Fox Theatre. Then, of course, there’s the Gateway Arch, 630 feet high and a symbol of the city since 1965.

Yet as so often in Middle America, the good times wouldn’t last. From the Sixties, residents started fleeing the urban core for the suburbs. Crime, urban riots, and integrated schools drove them out; cars and interstates made the exodus easy. That was bad news for the institutions that drove St. Louis’s economic growth: the universities, the corporate headquarters, and, indeed, the Cardinal’s downtown stadium. Mirroring the city’s wider decline, attendance rates collapsed through the Seventies, even as the team itself stopped winning.

In some ways, things are even worse today. In 1950, roughly a million people lived in St. Louis. Now, there are barely a quarter, with white-collar workers, alongside their tax dollars, fleeing to ever-more distant exurbs. For Messenger, indeed, the city’s vast scale is part of the problem. Bestriding the mighty Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, Greater St. Louis is an 8,500-square-mile region that spans 15 counties and, in Illinois and Missouri, two states. Yet if that means the central core has long struggled with money — residents can easily commute to jobs far away — St. Louis also has to contend with the shadow of its hyper-local, polyglot history. “Where did you go to high school”, the city’s standard icebreaker, is a remnant of a past when neighborhood was a core marker of identity. But that hardly chimes with a place where whole districts are ghost towns. As Messenger puts it, St. Louis has the “bones” of a big city, but without enough people to fill it.

And if that causes a host of downstream problems — city schools are only “provisionally” accredited; the state recently assumed control over the police department — none feel as pressing as crime. Messenger says it permeates every discussion of the city, and with 139 murders a year, it’s not hard to see why. This brutal reality is impossible to separate from the question of race, itself, in a sense, the unfortunate flipside to the city’s central location. If, after all, the Cardinals boasts fans from right across the country, St. Louis also blends the post-industrial black ghettos of the Midwest with the sharper racial legacy of the South.

Practicing a semi-official form of Jim Crow, with schools and hospitals segregated until the Sixties, the 2014 Ferguson Riots suggest that the city’s wounds are far from healed. And if the proportion of black people murdered in Missouri is the highest in the nation, that’s shadowed by less vicious but no-less disruptive crime. During Covid, teens staged “street takeovers” where drivers performed dangerous stunts, while onlookers tossed fireworks and even mobbed police cars. Dr Mike Tsichlis, a St. Louis native who studies the city’s history, laments. If things continue, he worries, “the city itself will not be a viable sustainable place for living.” That’s a far cry from lily-white suburbs like Ladue, where donors put gold-plated nameplates on school water fountains. Meanwhile, the black kids in 30 city schools go thirsty from shut water fountains fed by lead pipes.

More from this author

The betrayal of rural America

By Jeff Bloodworth

And though crime has now returned to pre-Covid levels, Messenger concedes that the “crime narrative” drives residents from the city — or, decades after the mafia bombings or garden-variety street robberies of the Seventies, from attending a Cardinals game. Go to any drinking hole in Greater St. Louis, the journalist guarantees, and you’ll find “an old white guy” saying “‘I gave up my ticket, so I’m not going down there.’” Such sentiments are based on headline-grabbing incidents. In 2025, for instance, a visiting kid from Tennessee lost both his legs when an unlicensed St. Louis teenager, out on bail for robbery, sped through a yield sign and caused a major crash.

Not that everything’s hopeless. The Cardinals, Messenger argues, are dealing with the city’s crime-soaked “narrative” — a narrative he thinks they can beat. Well, maybe it was Super Fan Jan leading the cheers of a sellout crowd. Or perhaps it was “Don’t Stop Believing” blaring through Downtown. It could also have been the Budweiser Clydesdales, a team of eight draft horses pulling a red, white, and gold beer wagon around the pre-game field. But, whatever the reason, on this Opening Day, St. Louis beat the narrative. Down 7-1 in the sixth inning, the Cardinals came roaring back for a 9-7 win. The St. Louis family erupted.

It’s a joy Daniels knows from her 60th and final Opening Day with her husband Dan. On that 2017 day, they were celebrated on the stadium Jumbotron. Fans roared for the couple and their six-decade streak. Leaving the stadium after the game, the 85-year-old Dan Daniels struggled to walk. He panicked. Yet at this moment of fright and anxiety, the Cardinal Way intervened. Dan, with his walker, and Jan, carrying two-dozen roses, were easy to spot. So just as a terrified Daniels shuffled his way through the crowd, his son Daniels recalls, “you hear this clapping, and then another person’s clapping, and another person. And the sea of red parted. And all the people lined up to one side and started clapping.” In the center of this parted sea were Jan and Dan, who walked back to their car past lines of cheering fans. “And as we get to the end,” Stephen recalls, “these girls came up and said, ‘thank you, you gave us something to believe in’.” They’re not alone there.

The match against Gillingham’s Hollands & Blair was not yet 10 minutes old, and didn’t seem destined to be a classic. But the Fisher faithful, whose side plays in the Southern Counties East Football League Premier Division — the ninth tier of the English pyramid — had not come to berate the players for the absence of overlapping wing play. They were there to support their club. Over the next 80 minutes, the team’s most vociferous supporters huddled together in the Dockers’ End, a small stand-cum-shelter behind the goal, its name a nod to the local area’s role in London’s once-booming shipping trade. As they watched, they belted out “When the Fish Go Swimming In”, their briny homespun chant.

Fisher ended up beating Hollands & Blair courtesy of a second-half penalty. But I got the sense the fans would have been just as happy, as they walked back up Brunel Road to the Overground, if they’d been hammered 5-0. Nor are they alone. From Mousehole AFC on the Cornish coast to Northumberland’s Blyth Spartans, gaggles of supporters brave summer sweat and winter snow, as well as some truly dreadful football, to cheer on their sides with a pint and a smile. Taken together, in fact, non-league football offers the perfect antidote to the petty tribalism and disenchantment of big-time fandom — and, perhaps, offers a path forward for society after the final whistle blows.

Non-league football is enjoying a moment. Average attendances in the National League South and the Isthmian Premier Division — levels six and seven of the pyramid, where most clubs are semi-professional — stood at 1,221 last season: up 134% from a decade earlier. Fisher, whose average crowds grew 13.9% in 2024-5, registered its highest ever attendance last November ,when 423 supporters filed through the stadium’s single turnstile to see the team take on Faversham Town. The depth of support in Britain’s football league pyramid is also impressive when compared against other similarly football-mad countries. In Spain, to give one example, the average attendance for the top team in the fourth tier of Spanish football is a mere 852.

The most obvious explanation for England’s non-league boom is the growing sense of fan disenfranchisement with elite football: namely the Premier League, where ticket prices continue to skyrocket. Manchester United’s announcement last season that it would increase match-day tickets for members from £40 to £60, and scrap concessions, as part of a cost-cutting exercise by its petrochemical magnate owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, was met with protests outside Old Trafford. Leeds faced the same backlash after introducing a 14% markup for its lowest-rate adult rates.

More from this author

Boxing fights on in Bethnal Green

By Ross Davies

The malaise also extends to the lower divisions. In the Championship, to give one example, Middlesbrough has faced criticism after increasing its top season ticket price to over £780. “What’s bred such disillusionment in the professional game is the ripping off of supporters,” Fisher’s secretary Jim Maycock tells me over a cup of tea, as we sit in the team’s empty clubhouse one weekday afternoon. “We’re trying to do the opposite. We just don’t see it as something we should be making money out of. We’re here for people to have somewhere to come and enjoy a game of football with their friends and family.” Fair enough: a Fisher’s season ticket will set you back a mere £100, with match-day admissions for adults capped at £8. Children under 16 get in free.

In truth, though, Fisher’s success rests on more than pounds and pennies. Football, after all, often sells itself on the romantic notion that it’s the game of the people: that the clubs would be nothing without their fans. And if that sentiment feels less-and-less relevant at the top, at Fisher it’s literally the case. Formed as a phoenix club out of the ruins of Fisher Athletic — a small team that bobbed about in the minnow leagues for several decades, before going bust in 2009 — it operates as a supporter-run cooperative. Members have a direct vote on who makes up the club’s board, which is responsible for everything from appointing the manager to picking the kit. In fact, Fisher is one of several fan-run clubs operating further down the footballing pyramid. Some were formed in protest at the unscrupulous dealings of their owners, such as FC United of Manchester, which appeared in 2005 following Manchester United’s takeover by the much-loathed Glazers. Others are minority supporter-owned, where fans collectively own a slice of the team’s shares through a fund or trust.

That sense of local ownership is a far cry from the creeping ugliness found elsewhere in the beautiful game: from the endless corporate sponsors to  the sight of children in kits emblazoned with the names of shady betting firms and state-owned Middle Eastern airlines. Then there are those soulless converted retail parks and parking lots that increasingly pass for modern stadiums. “The quality of elite football is probably higher than it was, say, 30 years ago,” says Neil Fredrik Jensen, a football analyst and author, “but the game has never felt less attractive because it’s so corporatized and polarized.” Fans, Jensen adds, are just “customers” now.

Spend an afternoon at Fisher’s and corporate sterility feels a long way off. In the clubhouse, a melange of regulars mingles with groundhoppers clutching matchday programs and pin badges for their collections. During my visit, the bar was doing a roaring trade in beer from a local brewery, and milky cups of tea. At half-time, a makeshift hospitality area was assembled for dignitaries from Hollands & Blair, who stood chatting around a small table piled high with coronation chicken sandwiches and Jammie Dodgers.

All the while, the steel and glass monoliths of Canary Wharf loomed large across the Thames, sparkling like polished diamonds in the sun. From Rotherhithe’s bend of the river, Britain’s financial heartland feels almost close enough to touch. Yet amid the no-frills surroundings of the Dockers’ End, it might as well have been an image beamed in from some distant universe. Beyond the bar-room banter, indeed, non-league football offers authenticity on the pitch as well. Unlike at the big stadiums, you can hear the thwack of the ball, and the crunching tackles, and the corner flags fluttering in the wind.

Free from the clutches of international television networks — which dictate that Premier League weekend games must take place either just after midday or late in the evening — the traditional 3pm kick-offs are also still upheld on Saturday afternoons. “That’s a huge thing that’s worked in our favor,” Maycock explains. “There’s none of these 8pm kick-offs where you end up getting home at midnight. Fans can come and watch us play knowing they can be back home for tea and Strictly or whatever.”

That sense of gentility — of integrating sport into the normal rhythms of life — is arguably also encouraged by the comparatively low stakes. The furious tribalism rife in higher levels of the English game, often not relevant to any real historical enmity between clubs, but a confection borne out of Sky Sports’ marketing departments, is rare at the non-league level. That conviviality makes it appealing to young families, much like women’s football has seen an influx of supporters grateful for an alternative to the toxicity that often accompanies male fixtures. “Non-league crowds have definitely changed,” says Jensen. “There was a time when they were almost entirely made up of men in their 50s with a passion for real ale and trains. Now, it’s much more about families.”

There are other reasons to watch too, for watching non-league football can sometimes be a portal to the bizarre. Where else would you find matches postponed as a result of sheep invasions and Canadian Geese droppings? Where else might an unsuspecting fan be prevailed upon to undertake linesman duties because the official went missing, as one Fisher fan was obliged to do a couple of seasons back?

Not that this amateurishness should take away from the sheer effort that goes into running the clubs and making the match days happen, often solely dependent on volunteers. When I meet Maycock, he had just spent the morning mending a fence and descaling the showers. “It can be hard work,” agrees Richard Davies, treasurer of Welsh semi-pro side Taff’s Well FC, and who also happens to be my brother. “And it’s not just match days. It’s marking out the pitches, cutting the grass, stocking the bar, washing kits. But we all chip because it’s for the good of the club. There are still those working-class values that you don’t see at the big clubs anymore.”

Of course, non-league football is not always a bastion of bliss. Jensen recently witnessed racist abuse while watching his beloved Hitchin Town. Concerns have also been raised over whether some of the jerry-built grounds, however charming they may seem, are truly fit for purpose. In September, one player died after colliding head-first with a concrete wall bordering the pitch at Wingate & Finchley.

Suggested reading

Why Italy’s hooligans can’t kick drugs

By Tobias Jones

But such tragedies are rare. And besides, what non-league football ultimately offers, above all else, is that elusive sense of connection, whether with one’s fellow fans or indeed with the players themselves. Fisher’s players, Maycock tells me, can often be found in the clubhouse after home matches mingling with supporters over pizza. “Even the referee,” he adds, “will come in for a slice.” Instagram may have made Premier League players appear more accessible than ever, but your chances of sharing a Capricciosa with Erling Haaland remain slim.

Yet if non-league attendances are on the rise, Premier League fans continue to display an impressive following. For all the grousing over being exploited, the waiting lists for season tickets remain long. Despite the team’s ongoing problems on the pitch, the current queue for season tickets at Manchester United exceeds 120,000: with some fans set to wait 25 years for their slot. Average shirt prices across the league’s 20 teams last season crept up to £73, meanwhile, but that proved no deterrent to merchandise-hungry fans, with Liverpool generating $1.8 billion in kit sales alone.

We are unlikely, then, to see minnows like Fisher entirely supplant the bigger clubs in fans’ affections. Maycock still holds a candle for Brentford from his native West London. My brother’s first love remains Cardiff City. And while Wrexham’s ascendancy from non-league obscurity to the Championship, under the celebrity ownership of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, may have captured imaginations and gained it an international fanbase, it’s worth remembering that the North Wales club has an established history dating back to the 1860s. Its stadium, the Racecourse Ground, is among the oldest on Earth. Wrexham’s status as a “sleeping giant” therefore made it ripe for a renaissance of the sort that most non-league teams could only dream of. Not that the minnows really care: they’re just happy to exist, sustained by peak attendances and the hope, some day, of a televised run in the early rounds of the FA Cup.

All this is also a reminder of Terry Eagleton’s tart assessment of football as the “crack cocaine” of the masses, which he speculated was part of a capitalist plot to suppress appetite for political change. That bread-and-circuses theory might raise some eyebrows, but the fact remains that the sport holds enormous sway over people in Britain in a way other pastimes don’t. When cricket moved from terrestrial television to Sky in 2006, it lost its place in the national conversation overnight, as armchair fans weren’t ultimately prepared to pay.

You could never imagine that happening with football, even for tiny teams like Fisher FC. My most recent visit was for a cup game against Bridon Ropes from Greenwich. It was an early September evening, Canary Wharf now twinkling bright against the dusk. As Fisher eased to a 4-0 win, I noticed a bear of a man in a tracksuit, cooing at a baby and with a side-eye on the game. It was Fisher’s manager Ajay Ashanike. He briefly paused to bark some instructions into a mobile phone to his assistant in the dugout across the pitch — “tell them not to get complacent and take pride in a clean sheet, yeah?” — before returning to the more pressing duty of peekaboo.

Brentford’s best chance also came from a long ball, misjudged by a defender who headed towards his own goal, letting in Brentford’s mountainous new striker, Igor Thiago. Modern football has become throwback football — a return to something basic, traditional, earthy. Across the Premier League, fussy ministrations and careful planning are out; the big man and uncompromising directness are back. Gone is the approach of cosmopolitan globalized technocracy and in its place has come something grittier, more visceral, perhaps more immediately appealing, something that — at least at first glance — feels more English. More like Brexitball. Who needs patient build-up or sophisticated theorizing when you can just get it launched? In football as in politics, the big man is back.

There will be those who think this is absurd, that it is ludicrous to discern in the way a team plays some sort of expression of a broader culture or societal trend. But if we accept that literature or music or architecture reflects the world around it, why should football be any different? Like any other cultural mode, football presents its practitioners with a series of challenges, some practical and some aesthetic: how could the way in which they answer them not be conditioned by the prevailing sensibility, even if they are willfully striking against it?

To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 2008, a moment of crisis for Europe’s political technocrats as they wrestled with the Eurozone crisis — and coincidentally, a major turning point in the game’s tactical evolution. Before 2008, there was only one occasion when the average number of goals in the knockout stages of the Champions League was higher than three. From then until 2020, there was only one occasion when that average dropped below three.

More From This Author

How political is Orbán’s football obsession?

By Jonathan Wilson

As it happened, 2008 was also the year that Guardiola took over as head coach of Barcelona — but clearly something was already beginning to shift. No coach, not even one as gifted as Guardiola, can have that sort of impact in his first season. Changes in pitch technology had improved playing surfaces to the point that a player could almost take his first touch for granted; as the ball approached him, he didn’t have to give it his full concentration, waiting for a bobble — but could already be assessing his passing options. That made the game more chess-like. It was less about the ability to react than about strategy. How could players move around to create overloads or to isolate defenders? At the same time, the liberalization of the offside law meant defensive lines sat deeper, increasing the effective playing area. There was also a crackdown on intimidatory tackling, which allowed technically accomplished, creative but less physically imposing players to play a greater role. This was the era of Xavi and Andrés Iniesta, David Silva and Luka Modrić.

So Guardiola emerged into an environment perfectly suited to his approach. As a player at Barcelona under Johan Cruyff and Louis van Gaal, he was schooled in the Total Football played by the Dutch in the early Seventies and managed to repurpose the style for the new era. He was extraordinarily successful, first at Barcelona, and then at Bayern Munich and Manchester City. His way of playing was derided by his detractors as tiki-taka — an onomatopoeic term coined in the Eighties by the no-nonsense, Basque coach Javier Clemente for passing football that went nowhere. He preferred to call it juego de posición — the positional game — though Pepism might be a more useful label, given how closely identified it is with one man.

Whatever the label, the style became hegemonic. It became broadly accepted that “good” football — progressive football, the football elite sides had to play — must follow the Guardiola template. You try to dominate possession, and when the ball is lost, you win it back by pressing aggressively with a high defensive line. But Guardiola was also a cautious coach; his priority was always control. As the background conditions made retention of possession easier it became possible to defend by keeping the ball from the opposition. When Spain, playing a particularly sterile version of Pepism, won the 2010 World Cup, they did so by winning all four knockout fixtures 1-0.

Given the globalized nature of modern football, it’s probable that there has never been such consensus across the game as to how it should be played. But not everybody liked it. A vague culture war grew up. Did you admire the level of control, the triumph of tactics and technical ability — or did you find this attrition by possession all desperately dull? Did you yearn for the old days, for big tackles and working the channels? Did you seek a footballing identity outside what the European technocracy deemed acceptable, progressive, correct?

It should realistically be possible to hold both views simultaneously, to see this degree of control as impressive while acknowledging that there was something slightly bloodless about it — but that’s not how modern media works. Various figures within the game have recently taken to claiming that Guardiola, the most revolutionary and influential figure in football for 50 years, has somehow “ruined football” — a list diverse enough to include the former England manager Fabio Capello, the former USA goalkeeper Tim Howard and the Colchester striker Lyle Taylor.

If there is an issue, it probably lies less with Guardiola than his imitators. Guardiola himself has never stopped evolving — as can be seen in the way that two of his former assistants, Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta and Chelsea’s Enzo Maresca, have their sides play in such different ways having learned from the master at different stages of his career. Certain core principles have remained, but Guardiola has never stood still. He’s a pragmatist. It’s his disciples, the likes of Xavi, Jorge Sampaoli and Russell Martin who are the ideologues — who insist on playing their way however inappropriate that may be for their players or the circumstances.

Over the past year, though, Guardiola has acknowledged that he is no longer at the vanguard of the game’s evolution. “Today, modern football is not positional,” he said. “You have to ride the rhythm.” He was talking specifically about how there are now so many fixtures that there is no time to drill their players into efficient positional machines — and so, it is now external factors that are shaping the evolution of the game rather than individual coaches. Guardiola has been moving for several years now towards a more physical model of play, while against both Manchester United and Arsenal this season he had his City side sit deep, eschew possession and play on the counter-attack. Against Arsenal they had only 34% of the ball. Only once before had any of his sides ever dropped below 40% in a league game. This felt shocking — a Götterdämmerung. And as the one true faith falls away, what is left is confusion.

In the gloom, without an obvious ideology to follow, many teams have gone back to basics. Football has, abruptly, become more direct and more focused on set-plays. Over the first month of this Premier League season, non-penalty goals from set-plays rose by 21%. Long balls are up 7%. High turnovers (that is, occasions when the ball is won back in the opposition’s defensive third, an indicator of a high press) are down 14%.

On the level of personnel, inverted wingers and false nines are out, and in their place has returned something more traditional. Football at its simplest level is about putting the ball in the net, and who better to do that than an old-fashioned, physically imposing number 9? The summer transfer window was characterized by the great carousel of center-forwards: Liverpool spent £125m on Alexander Isak and £100m on Hugo Ekitiké; Manchester United spent £65m on Benjamin Šeško; Newcastle spent £65m on Nick Woltemade; Arsenal spent £55m on Viktor Gyökeres; Chelsea spent £30m on Liam Delap; Tottenham brought in Randal Kolo Muani on loan. That’s six of a putative Big Seven shelling out on center-forwards over six feet tall. The odd one out is City, who began the trend — Guardiola as usual leading where others follow — by signing the 6’ 5” Norwegian striker Erling Haaland in 2022. Not since the Eighties have big men been so in demand.

More From This Author

Fifa doesn’t care about football

By Jonathan Wilson

As the dominant, often over-intellectualized, globalized liberal consensus falls away, so there is a demand for something more straightforward, more direct. For somebody who gets things done without worrying about retaining possession while a structure is established to rebuff a potential counter-attack should the ball be lost. Deal with that if it happens; for now, get it to the big man. There is a weariness with Pepism, a background sense that it is the ideology of a dominant international elite that has spent the past 20 years enriching itself at the expense of those lower down the economic scale.

The Champions League is now the preserve of, at most, a dozen sides. The superclubs dominate like never before. The gulf between the Premier League and Championship has never been so vast. Traditional fans are increasingly priced out in favor of wealthy tourists and globalization is destroying the community function of major clubs. The ticket prices for next summer’s World Cup, released last week, are just the latest example of a game that has lost touch with its roots, with most costing several hundred dollars. This used to be the working man’s ballet. And so there is a desire to go back — back to a perhaps illusory simpler past when the game was open to all, when it was possible to compete without being owned by a state, an oligarch or a private equity group, when football was a simple game, unadulterated by boffins with iPads, in which defenders defended and attackers attacked.

There are tactical-evolutionary reasons for a post-Pep reset, but it’s surely no coincidence that the form that it’s taken is this one. As politics has become more direct, so has football; as strength, unencumbered by subtlety, becomes a virtue in one sphere, so it does in the other. Football is part of culture, inevitably influencing it and being influenced by it. They may be very different people with very different views, but the turn to Haaland, Šeško and Gyökeres stems from the same place as the turn to Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Javier Milei.

That random element inevitably results in controversy. Nearly every year, a large segment of the fan base walks away convinced that the lottery is fixed by the league brass in advance. Like so much in America, the NBA draft and its unique system of talent allocation is on the verge of losing its legitimacy.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Each spring, the NBA holds a lottery to determine the order of the first 14 picks — those are awarded to teams that failed to make the playoffs. The four worst are given the best odds at a top four pick, but it’s not guaranteed. Ping-pong balls, weighted according to regular-season record, are drawn behind closed doors and the results revealed on national television. A month or so afterwards, the actual draft proceeds in order, team by team, each selecting the player they believe can change their fortunes.

This year, though, the results are even more shocking. Despite very long odds, all three top picks in the lottery landed with middling teams which already have All-NBA-caliber players (as well as previous championship banners). Each of the teams rewarded with a coveted top-three pick comes with a host of reasons that make a fix plausible. The most notable — and oft-repeated — being that the Dallas Mavericks were given the top draft spot in return for selling one of their best players, Luka Doncic, back to the Los Angeles Lakers for a dubiously low price.

Former top picks LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal have shared their suspicions (and relevant anecdotes) around the lottery delivering their talents to what seemed, to them, like the league’s preferred destinations. Dwyane Wade, the Hall of Fame guard and now part owner of a small-market team, added further fuel to the fire. In a recent interview, Wade danced very close to admitting the lottery results are in fact predetermined. “When you’re in the NBA, it’s a business,” he said. “Sometimes they have to do what’s best for the business.”

On some level, though, whether the draft is rigged is beside the point. A perception of backroom dealing threatens any sport’s most sacred commodity — the idea of fair play. All the same, there’s something essential that the conspiracy-mongers miss. The draft, and its lottery, has always existed to shield American fans from a reality which, owners believe, American national culture can’t psychologically handle.

Unlike football clubs in Europe — where the richest teams can just buy the best players — American sports owners let their fans cling to an illusion of competitive parity. Drafts are the foundation of that illusion. A performative ritual meant to uphold the fiction that every team has a shot, no matter how small their market or feckless their owner. At its core, a draft, as a system of resource allocation, mirrors a deep contradiction at the heart of American thinking. Like the nation itself, US sport insists on a democratic mythology centered around the country’s unique take on the Protestant work ethic — fairness for all, success through effort, and a staunch belief that underdogs can reach the top of the mountain even when faced with the worst possible odds.

This “overcome — no matter what” mentality permeates all aspects of US decision-making. In the founding era, Americans needed to think this way. The entire nation was barren frontier. Civilization had to be built from scratch. Immigrant settlers without a belief in their ability to overcome perished or, at minimum, became a burden on communities that had few extra resources to offer. While this overcome-the-odds mentality served the early stages of the country well, in the 21st century, it has ossified into a hyper-individualist “society does not exist” mentality. Something that encourages citizens to avoid acknowledging that equal opportunity is now less a reality and more a manipulative mythos (if not a farce).

For instance, Gen Z faces a less affordable existence — and worse employment prospects — than possibly any generation in US history. However, nearly 70% of college-age Americans still believe that they will someday be rich. Predictably, they attribute that prospect’s likelihood to their personal work ethic and guile. As a national culture, Americans believe — with near religious conviction — that the system will eventually reward them and “everything will even out in the end” if they just “work hard enough”. Sports drafts consciously play into this mentality. However, recent progressive reforms to the NBA’s lottery distort it in destabilizing ways.

The NBA is by far the most technocratic — and the most overtly progressive — of America’s Big Four sports leagues. This applies both to the league’s public-facing politics and its constant tinkering with the structure of the game itself. From shortening the time allowed to cross half court, to eliminating defensive hand-checking, to legalizing zone defenses, nearly every recent rule change has been designed to boost scoring and dampen the sport’s physicality — an aesthetic the league’s front office increasingly finds distasteful, for corporate-related reasons. As a result, the NBA is without a doubt the most manicured of all American sports leagues.

In the summer of 2020, amid the post-George Floyd reckoning, the NBA allowed players to replace the surnames on their jerseys with social justice slogans like “Black Lives Matter”, “I Can’t Breathe” and even “Education Reform”. It has also operated the WNBA at a significant financial loss for nearly three decades — a loss that has actually grown in the wake of Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark’s meteoric rise to stardom and the accompanying spike in attention women’s basketball has received. The NBA’s paternal support of their sister league isn’t driven by profit but by ideological principle: it sees the WNBA as an essential public service campaign. Given the league’s consistent commitment to social engineering, it should come as no surprise that fans increasingly suspect this ethos might bleed into its system of talent distribution — i.e., the draft.

Unlike NFL helmet-ball, which lets the worst team draft first (fittingly brutish and old-fashioned), the NBA’s leadership habitually re-engineers the rules of its draft lottery system in an attempt to discourage what it considers bad behavior — in this case, “tanking”. In other words, teams intentionally losing to secure better draft picks. The NBA’s current lottery system was specifically designed to discourage this by providing far less favorable odds for the worst teams than before. However, in a manner typical of progressive policy, the recent lottery reforms have in fact produced the opposite result while somehow still hurting those most deserving of assistance. Paired with other changes in team payroll structure, also meant to promote fairness, it’s only made it harder for well-run franchises to sustain their competitiveness long-term. Team salary caps are now also so rigid that clubs can’t retain role players around their stars without sacrificing the depth needed for playoff competition. As a result, teams are now more dependent than ever on the draft and the cheap, young players it provides.

Suggested reading

Who whacked Jensen Huang?

By Jeff Bloodworth

Small-market teams — and league integrity overall — would most probably be better off if the NBA scrapped the draft, and its lottery, altogether. Instead, eligible young talent could enter a structured free-agent pool under union-negotiated salary tiers. Teams would still operate under a strict salary cap, but the power dynamic would shift. Instead of team managers gambling on lottery ping-pong balls, they’d compete to convince young prospects that their system offers the best path to success — as happens throughout European football academies (not to mention National Collegiate Athletic Association recruiting).

Top talent, especially in a small-roster sport such as basketball, always gravitates toward the best opportunity. No high-powered agent would put a potential super-star behind a successful veteran in their prime on a lengthy guaranteed contract. Nor would they send them to a franchise with a reputation for mismanaging top-player development. In the system I propose, small-market success stories — teams like the Indiana Pacers, Utah Jazz, and Oklahoma City Thunder — might actually dominate the world’s top professional basketball league. They’d at least avoid the indignity of having to lose on purpose for years on end simply to improve their meager odds of securing top players. Under a more European arrangement, they’d win by being competent — not by luck or the privileges of wealth or location.

Ironically, this year’s Finals were the first in the NBA’s modern era to feature two small-market teams. Indiana and Oklahoma City got there the old-fashioned way too — patience, development and savvy financial management. The recent implementation of something akin to a hard salary cap has, in some ways, greatly helped the small-market teams compete, resulting in six different champions in the last six years — a level of parity unheard of in previous eras.

However, despite some of the most hard-fought and exciting Finals play in recent memory, the TV ratings for this year’s Finals (minus game seven) have been some of the worst on record. A major disappointment for the television providers, which almost guarantees the introduction of future structural “reforms” seeking to bring the league back in line with domination of wealthy, large-market teams like the Los Angeles Lakers, who just got one of the league’s best players for practically nothing. Hence the conspiracy theories surrounding how their trading partner, only a few months later, got the number one pick despite — literally — the worst odds possible.

Suggested reading

Why Italy’s hooligans can’t kick drugs

By Tobias Jones

The NBA is nothing if not conscious of its own image, not to mention its massive profit margins, much of which comes from mammoth television and merchandise contracts. Given those priors, fans are hardly paranoid to ask if the league’s constant tinkering carries over into its draft lottery results. And so perceptions of the NBA draft lottery have become a microcosm of Americans’ declining faith in their institutions. These days, you don’t need a tinfoil hat to broadcast your suspicions of foul play. According to Gallup, public trust in every major American institution has cratered, from Congress (a laughable 7%) to higher ed (just 36%) to the presidency itself (26%). What Gallup does not say is that Americans increasingly believe their institutions are not just broken, but that they’re being run exactly as intended — for insiders only. Fans’ perception of the NBA’s draft lottery slots into this broader national disillusionment: it performs legitimacy while running its most consequential decisions behind velvet ropes.

The NBA’s need to constantly adjust its lottery structure shares ideological DNA with increasingly unpopular DEI favoritism practices — a deliberate show of randomness that conceals centralized control. However, what it really delivers is a platform for institutional preferences cloaked in algorithmic mysticism. And when fairness becomes understood as a social engineering project — unaccountable technocrats construct the illusion of chaos, carefully manage outcomes behind the curtain, and gaslight anyone who implies they’ve put a thumb on the scale.

Naturally, the NBA’s yearly lottery ritual happens in a private room. No personal cameras. No smartphones. Only hand-picked VIPs and pre-approved media are allowed. This isn’t transparency; it’s security theatre — lottery as high-church liturgy. Faith replaces evidence and the congregation is expected to clap politely from the pews.

Of course, the NBA’s draft lottery doesn’t need to be rigged for that perception to become a system-ending problem. What matters is it feels rigged or, at least, unfair and dishonest. That perception, at some point, will become inseparable from fans’ view of the basketball league as a whole. And, in this way, the NBA draft and its lottery has achieved something characteristic of late-stage America. It offers fans a spectacle they can still believe in — if only they ignore their own instincts and trust authorities with the most to gain.

Whether people will actually turn up to watch almost feels like a minor concern alongside the potential ramifications for football and its place in politics. Since 1960, the South American club champions have been playing their European counterparts for a de facto world title. Since 2000, Fifa, the global governing body, recognizing the hold Uefa, the European confederation, has over the elite level of the club game, has been trying to expand that. Cue the Club World Cup: an annual seven-team competition in which a single European side played a maximum of two games. It was done in 10 days, and nobody in Europe paid much attention. So why the massive expansion? The only reason is Fifa’s attempt, in its eternal struggle with Uefa, to increase its influence over the club game and access some of the revenues it generates.

On the face of it, the Club World Cup might seem like a great idea: the globe coming together in sporting celebration. Except we already have such a thing: the World Cup, a tournament for national sides, and which works because there is a rough equality. Since nations have to use the talent allotted to them by geography, rather buying up the best talent from around the world, Senegal can beat England whereas a Senegalese club side would have next to no chance against a Premier League titan. A Club World Cup might have made sense half a century ago, but now the gulf between rich and poor is so vast that mismatches are inevitable.

It’s not just the fans who are unconvinced. Only six months ago, the tournament didn’t have a broadcast partner. Then in February, DAZN, Len Blavatnik’s media company, which has posted losses of at least $1.3 billion every year since 2019, summoned $1 billion to buy the global rights. Given Fox had offered only $10 million for the US rights, that seemed a vast sum. Coincidentally, a few days later, Surj, a company owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), announced a $1 billion investment in DAZN. Two months earlier, after a bidding process widely regarded as flawed, Saudi Arabia was confirmed by Fifa as the host of the 2034 World Cup. Last week, the Saudi PIF and Qatar Airways were confirmed as Club World Cup partners. It’s fair to say it’s highly unusual for major sponsorship deals like that to be agreed less than two weeks before the start of a competition. After all, these are entities owned by the governments of Qatar (World Cup hosts in 2022) and Saudi Arabia (World Cup hosts in 2034), underwriting a Fifa project whose commercial viability has become increasingly doubtful.

Players are already protesting about how many games they are expected to play, but Fifa is determined to press on, for the political gain and the revenues that may in future accrue. The only gap in the football calendar today — at least from a European point of view, and Europe is where the bulk of football’s money is — is in odd-numbered summers, when there is no men’s World Cup or Euros (the Copa América, the South American championship, runs concurrently with its European equivalent). The fact that players and fans (and journalists) find those odd-numbered summers a useful rest-period, perhaps even necessary, clearly means little to football’s administrators.

And in any case, it’s not actually a free summer. Already, Liam Delap, an emerging star of last season’s Premier League campaign, has been forced to withdraw from the England squad for the Under-21 Euros to play for Chelsea in the Club World Cup, while the tournament can’t but deflect attention from the Women’s Euros.

There is then an issue of qualification, which has edged towards the gimmicky even before the tournament has begun. The World Cup has an established process that goes on for a couple of years before the tournament. But qualification for the Club World Cup is by performance in various other competitions. Real Madrid, Manchester City and Chelsea, for instance, are there as the last three winners of the Uefa Champions League. Al-Ain, Urawa Red Diamonds and Al-Hilal are there as winners of the Asian equivalent.

More from this author

Football is a game for intellectuals

By Jonathan Wilson

But at this point, Fifa runs into a problem. You can’t have a team win a league in May and then join a tournament two weeks later. So Fifa is about to kick off a Club World Cup, a competition that at least on some level is about determining the best team in the world, without the reigning champions of England, Spain or Italy, who, arguably, are already at the top of the global game.

Yet once again, it’s hard to avoid the sense that finance trumps integrity. Consider the situation in the US. Here, the season follows a league format followed by playoffs to determine the champion. As Club World Cup hosts, the US gets one additional qualifying slot. It had been assumed that it would go to the overall champion, but Fifa had left enough ambiguity in the protocols that when Messi’s Inter Miami finished top of the table, they were confirmed as qualifiers. For marketing reasons, Fifa had to ensure the presence of Messi, still a great box-office draw. It was just as well that they did, given Inter Miami promptly lost in the playoffs to unfancied Atlanta United.

Messi, though, wasn’t enough. The organizers wanted more. An additional transfer window has been introduced to allow clubs to sign players for the start of the competition. That has two benefits when it comes to marketing the tournament. There is always a glimmer of intrigue, as in pre-season games, in seeing a new signing at his new club, assessing how he fits in: what will Trent Alexander-Arnold be like at Real Madrid?

Suggested reading

How Saudi bought Britain’s architects

By Malise Ruthven

But the new window also created the possibility of short-term loans. In the end, Cristiano Ronaldo, now 40 and playing in the Saudi league for Al-Nassr but still a huge celebrity, will not be at the tournament, but there were talks about finding him a club, trailed by the Fifa president Gianni Infantino in an interview with the influencer iShowSpeed.

But there’s something even more concerning going on here: the prize money. The $1 billion pot (coincidentally the exact amount of the Saudi PIF’s investment in DAZN, and the exact amount DAZN paid for broadcasting rights) will have a major distorting effect on local leagues, a significant amount particularly when clubs are scrambling to meet the thresholds for Profit and Sustainability Rules. But that is nothing compared to the impact in, say, Argentina, where Boca Juniors and River Plate will each make a minimum of £11.25 million in geographically weighted appearance money; each of the two league champions in Argentina each season receives just £370,000 in prize money. Boca and River are being handed a mammoth advantage for the next few years — which should secure future qualification for the Club World Cup, a permanent seat on the carousel of cash. Auckland City, meanwhile, play in the Dettol Northern League for clubs in the north of New Zealand’s North Island, where player expenses are capped at £70 a week. They will receive £2.56 million even if they lose every game.

So Fifa is staging a tournament that could effectively ruin domestic leagues as functioning competitions. The Club World Cup could finally release Europe’s stranglehold on the club game and lead to a cadre of superclubs too big for their domestic leagues. And if that cadre decided their future lay not in domestic competition but in a global superleague, that would suit Fifa rather well. But is that good for football? Why would anybody care about that?

When the wrestlers, or rikishi — literally “strong men” — enter the ring, they throw purifying salt and perform their stomp to scare away evil spirits. They clap to attract the attention of the gods, raise their arms to show they are concealing no weapons, and cleanse their mouths with water.

Then, in front of a referee wearing the robes of a Shintō priest, it is down to business: the rikishi crouch on their marks and eyeball each other in a prolonged act of psychological combat known as shikiri. The bout begins only when both wrestlers finally have both hands touching the ground. After that, if any part of your body but the soles of your feet touches the ground, or if you are forced from the ring, then you are vanquished.

More from this author

What Labour could learn from Japan

By Christopher Harding

It’s a familiar sight for any fan of Japan’s most honored pastime, especially those who will be in attendance at the Natsu Basho — Summer Sumo Tournament — currently underway in Tokyo. Across two weeks of intense competition, all eyes are on the winner of the previous tournament back in March: Ōnosato. Just 24 years of age, he has been heavily involved in sumo since his early high-school days. Since turning professional, he has risen rapidly through the ranks and is now on the verge of earning the coveted title of yokozuna, or “grand champion”. There is huge anticipation in Japan: sumo has become ever more international of late, and most grand champions of the past 20 years have been born in Mongolia. Ōnosato would be the first Japanese wrestler to become yokozuna in almost a decade.

This matters because while baseball is Japan’s most popular sport, with more than 26 million people attending professional league games each year, sumo is the country’s national sport, Japan’s ancient past brought to heaving, sweating life. And, like the country as a whole, it finds itself at a crossroads: thriving, both at home and abroad, yet beset by major demographic and social challenges.

Sumo’s links to its past are on display at a handful of shrines around Japan where bouts are held between a man and a local deity. To the mortal eye, only the human contender is visible, yielding the nickname hitori-zumo or “one-person sumo” (the expression now doubles as a metaphor for inner struggle). Quite how many people watching hitori-zumo sense the presence of two contenders is both hard to say and beside the point. Religion in Japan has long been a fascinating blend of ritual, play, humor and heightened awareness of the world. Sumo draws on all of this, while channeling and celebrating a certain kind of masculinity — discipline, character, focused aggression — and a little bit of swagger.

The sport’s human origins are said to trace back to a nobleman and notorious braggart named Taima no Kehaya, who claimed in 23 BC that he was the strongest man “under the heavens”. The Emperor took offense and commanded a potter called Nomi no Sukune to teach him a lesson. This he did, dealing Kehaya such devastating kicks to the ribs and back that he died the following day. Sukune is now remembered as the “father of sumo”.

Sumo went on to serve, across the centuries, as a mixture of spectacle, strength training for aspiring warriors, and religious ritual, performed in hopes of good harvests. Where early sumo was raw combat, with few if any rules, form and etiquette were gradually introduced over time: rings, rankings, winning techniques, “stables” where wrestlers could live and train, and public tournaments — often held to raise money for good causes. After Japan opened its doors to the modern West in the mid-19th century, sumo wrestlers and samurai alike became symbols of a distinctly Japanese kind of masculinity: guardians of the country’s traditions against encroachment from abroad. One of the best-known woodblock prints of a sumo wrestler dates from 1861 and shows him throwing a puny and over-dressed foreigner to the ground.

Opinions differ in Japan regarding how well this sumo masculinity has aged. Critics note the long and largely unflattering history of women in the sport. The earliest recorded use of the word “sumo” goes back to bouts between women in the fifth century AD, but these were topless matches arranged by the Emperor to try to distract a palace carpenter who had boasted he never made a mistake. The Emperor’s plan worked: the flustered carpenter ended up damaging one of his tools and was duly executed. More than 1,000 years later, women once again returned to the sumo ring. But professional names like “Big Boobs” and “Holder of the Balls” tell you all you need to know about who the punters were and what they turned up to see.

Women now compete as amateurs, but at the professional level they are not even allowed to enter the ring, for fear of its defilement. This became a flashpoint in Japan back in April 2018, when the mayor of Maizuru lost consciousness while he was giving a welcome speech from inside a sumo ring. A number of female spectators, including a nurse, ran onto the ring to administer CPR, only to be ordered off again by a panicked-sounding announcer. A male emergency worker eventually took over, the ring was purified with salt, and the tournament commenced. But the scene was viewed millions of times, which led commentators at home and abroad to question whether the rules on women’s participation laid down by the Japan Sumo Association (JSA) ought at long last to change.

If sumo has struggled with its rules on women, reflecting what critics charge is Japan’s broader failure to push the patriarchy from its perch, something similar has played out over the question of how welcome an addition non-Japanese rikishi might be to the ranks.

In July 1972, English was spoken for the first time from a sumo ring. A telegram from President Richard Nixon was read out, congratulating the Hawaiian wrestler Jesse Kuhaulua — better known as Takamiyama — for winning a tournament at Nagoya. Some in the Japanese media nicknamed him kurobune: “black ship”, recalling the unwelcome arrival off Japan’s shores of American gunboats back in 1853. Others questioned whether a foreigner could ever rise to the rank of grand champion, since that coveted title depends not only on a person’s qualities as a fighter but also his “outstanding character”.

The problem — or opportunity — for sumo, as for Japan as a whole, is that a shrinking population means difficult choices. A dwindling number now choose to go professional in sumo. Football, basketball, rugby and baseball all represent more attractive careers: often more lucrative, while lacking the grueling training (and eating) regime required of sumo wrestlers, at enormous cost to their health. Instead, Hawaiian and, more recently, Mongolian wrestlers have begun to dominate the upper tiers of the game — the former through long-standing links to Japan and the latter thanks to Mongolia’s own wrestling traditions. Both populations boast good numbers of people with the right build. Opinion is divided in Japan, between those who hanker after Japanese heroes and those who are impressed with the respect and dedication exhibited by foreign-born competitors. To add to their list of woes, the Japan Sumo Association has been accused of slowness in dealing with bullying directed at young wrestlers by senior members of the stables where they train — intended to toughen up new recruits and in some cases to punish them for a lack of proper behavior.

And yet, despite these challenges, sumo in Japan is more popular than ever. A younger generation became hooked during lockdown and later through the sport’s growing presence online and via highly-publicized children’s competitions for girls and boys. Sumo got its Rocky moment in 2023, with the hit Netflix drama Sanctuary tracing the rise of a rookie wrestler, Enno, from dysfunctional beginnings to troubled superstar. Real-life stars meanwhile serve as highly-effective hadaka taishi, “naked ambassadors”, for their country or their region within Japan. And good seats for tournaments now sell out within hours, while tickets for tours abroad — including the Royal Albert Hall this October — are equally in demand.

Suggested reading

Welcome to the age of Otaku

By Louis Elton

Progressives in Japan recently noted with pleasure the decision of baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani to take parental leave to look after his baby. Might, they wonder, “Papa-tani” encourage other Japanese men to do the same — in a country where child-rearing is still thought of primarily as women’s work? What wonders might female rikishi (suitably-attired) work on Japanese hearts and minds?

The question, for now, is moot. Female rikishi at the professional level seem no closer a prospect than women priests in the Catholic Church — and perhaps for broadly similar reasons. Just as it’s often said that the fastest-growing Christian denominations are the ones least prone to compromise with modern culture and shifting public opinion, so many in the Japan Sumo Association see their role as custodians of practices going back many centuries.

No doubt Japan will apply to sumo a little of its tried-and-true formula for surviving and thriving in the modern world: a generous dollop of tradition gingered up with a splash of innovation and cutting-edge tech. Expect foreign tours by major rikishi to see sumo gaining ever more in popularity abroad in the years ahead. And don’t be surprised if some serious money finds its way into supporting grassroots women’s sumo, raising it up to the point where men and women go head to head — if not in that sacred ring, then at least in a competition for attention from fans both at home and abroad. And, all the while, there’ll be that heritage, that sense that when a rikishi stomps by in his kimono, you’re witnessing not just a bit of traditional culture but a presence that transcends history. And there will always be a hunger for that.

Tucked away next to a used-car dealership, on an industrial estate a few miles from Cardiff, the whole club is like this, an echo of a lost Britain. Deep within its cave-like chamber, the players resemble wraiths, forever trapped beneath the golden pools of light that illuminate each table. When I visit, Roxette’s 1987 song “It Must Have Been Love” hums from a TV overhead, perennially tuned to a channel showcasing big-haired hitmakers. The club seems to trade in yesterday’s prices too. I seize the offer of becoming a “lifetime” member for a mere £5, only to be informed that the club has run out of membership cards. Is this how it works at Soho House?

Not that I’d have it any other way. With its odd atmosphere, at once inviting and moody, Penarth Road is the kind of place I’ve been seeking out since I first stepped foot in a snooker hall some 25 years ago. Yet if it feels strange in its oldness, Penarth Road is unusual in other ways too. Over the last few decades, hundreds of clubs have closed right across the country. Cardiff alone has seen the shuttering of several over recent decades, each departure snuffing out a universe of cheap pints and the baize.

It speaks, if nothing else, to the deep questions floating around snooker’s future. How can the game flourish, in this country anyway, if there are fewer places to practice and play? Why would youngsters even want to master this maddening old game, seemingly stuck in the past and played by middle-aged men? And yet, in the Far East, potting balls is increasingly seen as young and cool. It all suggests a sport at the precipice of change, as this quintessential parlour game forsakes its English roots — and globalizes alongside everything else.

On the face of it, snooker is in good shape. Over recent years, the professional tour has seen an increase in tournaments and prize money. Ticket sales are strong: the World Championships and Masters are often sell-outs, with punters eagerly handing upwards of £50 to enjoy the privilege of watching a ludicrously difficult game made to look easy.

Snooker’s global audience has also skyrocketed. That is partly down to growing interest in Europe, following the victory of Belgium’s Luca Brecel in the 2022 World Championships. China, too, is increasingly attracted to the game, with the People’s Republic hosting as many as 60 million active players. The World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA), the game’s governing body, reckons the World Snooker Championship, set to start in Sheffield tomorrow, could attract a global televised audience of 500 million people.

This hardly suggests a sport on its knees, as snooker truly was some years back, when the end of tobacco sponsorship saw the number of ranking tournaments dwindle to just six. Some consider the intervention of Barry Hearn, with the promoter taking control of the tour in 2010, as the moment snooker was coaxed back from the abyss. “Snooker is no longer a UK-based sport,” says Jason Ferguson, the WPBSA chairman. “It’s a truly global sport.”

More from this author

Boxing fights on in Bethnal Green

By Ross Davies

It’s perhaps unfair to gauge snooker’s success through this country alone. But for all the talk of the game’s global standing, the only other places outside the UK to host professional tournaments this season have been China, Hong Kong, Germany and Saudi Arabia. In other words, then, the sport seems popular merely in pockets, rather than being a genuinely international phenomenon.

At one point during our chat, Ferguson, himself an ex-professional, tellingly refers to snooker as a UK “export”. “There’s something still quintessentially English about the game,” he says, “be that the dress code or its history.”

It’s a reasonable point. From the bow ties and waistcoats to the emphasis on sportsmanship — players are obliged to admit to fouls even if the referee doesn’t notice — snooker still brands itself on its British roots. But what if those roots are withering? According to one estimate, Britain hosted around 650 clubs in 2019. That pales compared to the thousands that sprung up in the Eighties, when it wasn’t unusual to find three or four in any mid-sized town. Much like pubs, many went out of business after the smoking ban arrived in 2007, while others were gobbled up by developers eager for slabs of prime real estate.

Ferguson says the rate of closures has since stabilized, while implying that the market may have been oversaturated anyway. Perhaps. But beyond the raw numbers, another way of understanding British snooker’s health is by going to places like Penarth Road — and here, the prognosis feels grim.

The punters when I visit are mostly men, with few appearing under 40. One, sporting a large gray beard and wearing an old Cardiff City top, swears as an attempt at a long red misses the pocket by a proverbial country mile. He looks admonishingly at his cue and grouses to his playing partner. “I might as well be playing with a bloody boomerang,” he laments, his South Welsh drawl hanging thick about my ears.

It didn’t used to be like this. Back in the Eighties, snooker was part of the national conversation. Its cast of colorful personalities — from hellraisers like White to housewives’ favorite Cliff “The Grinder” Thorburn — were chat-show regulars. On Fleet Street, each national paper had its own in-house snooker correspondent. A miniature snooker table was the Christmas present to have for any self-respecting child. As Chas ‘n’ Dave sang it in 1986, we were all “snooker loopy”.

While it’s true that snooker’s boom period was helped by there being only four television channels, meaning most households had little choice but to watch, it arguably tapped into the era’s political zeitgeist. As Dominic Sandbrook notes in his history of Eighties Britain, this individual sport, played by working class men dressed as gentlemen, chimed with the aspirationalist promise of Thatcherism.

How, then, to explain snooker’s apparent decline since those heady days? One answer, surely, is that there are now far more distractions. Its slow and gentle rhythm puts it instantly at odds with the mores of modern society. While fans savor the ebbs and flows of the World Championship final, the idea of a sporting contest taking two days feels increasingly ridiculous.

Then there are the multiple demands of being an aspiring professional in today’s game. The long hours of practice. The costs of traveling up and down the motorway to qualifying events. The cheap hotels. The solitude. Ben Harrison, a talented former English amateur champion, abandoned the sport in 2016 because of the strain. “It just all became too much in the end,” he tells me. Harrison now leads a much happier life as a married man and estate agent in his hometown of Trowbridge. “I have no regrets.”

But snooker’s authorities are not giving up bringing young people into the game. This includes projecting a healthier image of clubs, moving away from their erstwhile reputation as smoke-filled dens of iniquity, frequented by truants, gamblers and chancers.

Yet if it’s true that many of these new venues offer better facilities, others feel more like sports bars than snooker clubs, rigged out with bright lights and big screens, where American pool tables outnumber their larger, green-baized counterparts. They don’t immediately lend themselves to the atmosphere required to play a game so demanding in concentration that Australian wit Clive James once described it as “chess with balls”.

Not that everywhere seems to take snooker so casually. For if Penarth Road Snooker Club symbolizes the game’s past, and those shiny bar-and-grill joints seem only tangentially interested in the sport, then Victoria’s Snooker Academy in Sheffield might offer a glimpse into its future.

Located in a converted modern office space, on a quiet street next to the city center — not far from the Crucible, hallowed home of the World Championships — you could easily miss the place but for an A4-sized notice Blu-Tacked to the door: “KNOCK HERE FOR SNOOKER”.

The club is silent, save for the drone of an air-conditioning unit and the purr of a fridge stocked with tubs of Asian ice cream. The wall above the door is emblazoned with a flurry of motivational buzzwords: “Creativity”; “Ambition”; “Belief”. The players, for their part, wear earbuds as they go about various practice drills in metronomic fashion on the professional-grade Star tables, as pristine as country lawns. It’s all a long way from Penarth Road: some of the tables at my old club don’t seem to have been reclothed since before Welsh devolution.

While technically open to the public, anyway, the Academy is very much a place of work. Andrew Bromley, who runs the club with his Chinese wife Victoria Shi, doesn’t seem overly bothered when I mention it’s listed as “permanently closed” on Google. “We don’t really want people coming in off the street with cans of lager and disturbing our players,” he whispers as he shows me around. “This is a professional environment.”

Fair enough: several members of the Academy’s stable have made it to ranking event finals over the past few seasons. That includes the 22-year-old Si Juahui, and the 21-year-old Wu Yize, even as Zhao Xintong captured 2022’s UK Championship at the tender age of 25.

As the names imply, Victoria has become a haven for Chinese players especially, talented young professionals who’ve come to chase their dreams. They’re far from alone — for if snooker has become popular viewing in Beijing and Chengdu, Shanghai alone may have some 1,500 clubs.

China’s fascination with snooker can be traced back to the Eighties, when Barry Hearn organized exhibition tours in Hong Kong, then still a British territory, with the hope of growing the game in Asia. But it wasn’t until an 18-year-old Ding Junhui captured the China Open in 2005 that snooker truly took off on the mainland. Ding’s success turned him into a national hero overnight, and thrust the sport into the public consciousness. Ever the shrewd businessman, Hearn’s first act upon his 2010 return to the sport was to increase the number of tournaments in China.

While there is no evidence of strategic investment in snooker on the part of China’s government, local officials have set up snooker academies. The game is also on the sporting curriculum in schools. There are even so-called snooker colleges, such as International Billiards Academy in Yushan, in which students are taught the art of the baize alongside vocational subjects.

Little wonder, then, that former world champion Stephen Hendry recently predicted that up to eight of the game’s Top 16 players, considered snooker’s elite, may hail from China in the next decade. That’s even as the People’s Republic new stars are feted as heroes in their homelands, with Bromley describing how Academy alumni “can’t walk down the street” without being recognized.

It’s again hard not to make the international comparison. Apart from Ronnie O’Sullivan — arguably the most gifted player ever to pick up a cue, and charismatic enough to have been profiled in the New Yorker — it’s tough to think of any British snooker player the public could spot in a lineup.

Suggested reading

Snobs miss the rare beauty of darts

By Howard Jacobson

But O’Sullivan, who turns 50 this year, can’t go on forever. Neither can his longtime peers Mark Williams and John Higgins — collectively known as the “Class of ’92” after the year they turned professional. At 35, world number one Judd Trump is still the closest this country has to a cue-toting wunderkind, while the reigning world champion Kyren Wilson is 33.

“Snooker could definitely do with a Luke Littler moment,” says Nick Metcalfe, host of the Talking Snooker podcast, alluding to the impact the teenager has had on darts since winning the world title earlier this year. “While we appreciate the magic of the older guys, seeing them in the big finals time after time is not necessarily a great sign.”

Neither, perhaps, is snooker’s tendency to revere its past. That nostalgia is sure to be on display with the imminent 40th anniversary of the 1985 “black ball final” — when 18.5 million TV viewers stayed up past midnight to watch a bespectacled Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis to become champion of the world.

Taylor and Davis have recreated the famous match countless times over the years in exhibitions, featuring novelty wigs, oversized glasses and exaggerated finger wags. For Ferguson, “it’s a key milestone in the sport that we’ve got to milk.” But others believe the reminiscing has been done to death.

“I think this constant harking back to the Eighties is a real problem,” says Lewis Pirnie, a snooker analyst and frequent visitor to events in China. “The game has moved on and we should be championing the younger players. We have multiple event winners from China and there are still commentators who can’t pronounce their names correctly.”

Pirnie is obviously right. Every sport needs to regenerate if it wants to thrive. You might even say the state of snooker in Britain serves as a microcosm for the country at large: stuck in an endless Thatcherite hangover and in urgent need of renewal. All the while, a conveyor belt of talented young players continues to whir away in China, as the country enters an exciting new chapter.

Yet amid these bewildering geopolitical shifts, and a world where we want things faster and louder, snooker’s immutability remains part of the charm. You can tune into a tournament safe in the knowledge that the same old faces will be there — the same stalwarts as when TV had four channels and Neil Kinnock vied to be prime minister.

Visiting the Penarth Road Snooker Club is to be enveloped by the same kind of nostalgia. Who needs the world outside, with its natural light and unspeakable problems, when within the perpetual gloam there awaits the promise of cut-price lager and a black ball finish?

As I go to pay up, I’m drawn once more to that old photo of the Whirlwind, shrine-like behind the bar. “He was a real character, wasn’t he?” says one punter returning a tray of balls in an enormous splayed hand to the counter. “But then there were lots of them around back in those days.” As I step back out into the starry Welsh night, I can still hear the gentle click of balls as another synth classic strikes up.

It had been 70 years since that FA Cup victory in 1955, 70 years in which a once-mighty club had swapped trophies for atrophy. It was a story all the more poignant for it mirroring the simultaneous industrial decline of the city and region. And now the story had a happy ending.

This is a city whose football club is its spiritual heart. Walk out of Central Station and you will see St James’ Park, a vertiginous and imposing old stadium, towering over you. In Newcastle, the club is at the center of civic life. As Wembley basked in the glow of regional pride, one could imagine Sir Bobby Charlton, his brother Jack, his uncle Jackie Milburn as well as the likes of Sir Bobby Robson, English football legends all, looking down with pleasure. Nobody could have appreciated this victory more than Newcastle United fans. Only an extreme curmudgeon, or a Sunderland fan, would have remained unmoved.

We might never know whether the news of Newcastle’s win reached Malaz Prison, in Riyadh. Here, the fitness instructor Manahel al-Otaibi is serving 11 years, some of it in solitary confinement, for opposing male guardianship, campaigning against the hijab, and, according to her prosecutors, “going to the shops without wearing an abaya, photographing this, and publishing it on Snapchat”.

So much for the reforms promised by Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. MBS. His close ally, Yasir al-Rumayyan, is the governor of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund and the chairman of Newcastle United. As al-Otaibi sat in jail, al-Rumayyan lifted the League Cup.

It is an uneasy contrast, and the imprisonment of al-Otaibi is only one example of the MBS regime behaving barbarically. Take the dismemberment, in 2018, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi: an operation approved, according to the USA’s Director of National Intelligence, by MBS. Or the 2017 “Sheikh-down”, when the nation’s billionaires and captains of industry were corralled into Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel. Amid accusations of abuse and torture, they handed over their assets and paid fines to the state, now embodied by its Crown Prince, in return for their freedom.

Al-Rumayyan is the Crown Prince’s henchman in matters of sport, in which the Saudis are heavily invested. There is the LIV golf tour, viewed by critics as a hostile takeover of the sport, and there was the successful bid to host the 2034 Football World Cup. The kingdom has thrown money at the Saudi Pro League, signing expensive luminaries such as Cristiano Ronaldo, and has hosted numerous boxing world title fights and Formula 1 Grands Prix. One of MBS’ ambitions appears to be that young Saudi nationals — 60% of the population is under 30 — consume sport as a quasi-religion, it being a safer opiate than the extreme Islam that forged the nation’s most famous citizen, Osama bin Laden. Adherents of this kind of worldview might ask awkward questions about the legitimacy of the al-Saud dynasty.

Given that all this is taking place in a faraway land over which we have little influence, it is hard for football fans to know what to feel. Is the appropriate response revulsion at the sight of another British cultural institution being hawked to the highest bidder, regardless of human rights concerns, as the nation accepts its status as a post-imperial supplicant? Or should fans accept that they can’t change these circumstances and allow themselves to revel in a glorious sporting storyline?

Understandably, most Newcastle fans settle for the latter. A few, including the lifelong fan John Hird, have set up a campaign group called NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing, which campaigns for al-Otaibi and the like. The group holds vigils outside St James’ Park – vigils that are often lonely.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is playing a central role in current geo-political stakes. Last week, in the run-up to the final, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, was meeting Mohammed bin Salman, and Saudi Arabia was hosting talks between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Ukraine delegation. The Saudis, in short, were brokering peace between Russia and the West. In that context, the Carabao Cup seems a tiny footnote in the kingdom’s broader project.

In keeping with this central role for Saudi, President Trump directed his first phone call after his election victory to MBS. Trump’s first foreign trip, as it was in 2017, is likely to be to Riyadh. The world genuflects at the court of MBS, including the former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister, who visited in December, has said his “No 1 mission is for economic growth and for that we need Saudi Arabia”. Indeed we do, especially in a volatile world of Trumpian tariffs and a downgraded economic forecast from the OECD.

Suggested reading

How MBS won the peace talks

By Malise Ruthven

Newcastle fans, though, have been burdened with the outsourced moral angst of a nation. Governments can sup with the Saudis with near-impunity, but football is held to a higher standard, castigated when it joins the gold rush to Riyadh. Naturally, Newcastle fans resent those questioning their joy. The country accepts Saudi money for its regeneration projects in the north of England, clean energy investments and stakes in Uber, Heathrow and Selfridges. Newcastle United happens to be the most visible target.

Newcastle City Council, controlled by Labour until a spate of resignations last November, recently met ALQST, a Saudi-focused human rights organization. But we shouldn’t expect the council to issue excoriations of the city’s new overlords. Aside from needing the votes of Newcastle United fans, the council is hoping that the Saudi state might emulate what Abu Dhabi did in east Manchester when the emirate bought Manchester City.  The area around the City of Manchester Stadium has been transformed: new housing, a health center, and sports facilities, as well as the Co-op Live Arena. The projected PIF takeover of Newcastle Airport may be the first local dividend outside of the football club.

Five years ago, when campaigners tore down the statue of slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston in Bristol, many cheered, not least those on the Left concerned with human rights. It is easy to be clear-sighted, 300 years later, about the awful contradiction of taking money from slavers to build wonderful churches, schools and civic amenities; it is harder to turn down Saudi money now. That money might improve the lives of ordinary people and regenerate the local economy – just as Colston’s money once did in the South-West.

Though Britain can seem a mere vassal state, the relationship isn’t quite as clear-cut as it appears. In his book States of Play, Miguel Delaney quotes the human rights activist Iyad el-Baghdadi on MBS. “He wants to be loved. And he wants his image [as a reformer] back.”  Another campaigner told me: “The Saudi authorities really don’t like it when you write about human rights issues. They want to be seen as reformers.”

Therein lies the contradiction. Saudi Arabia looks to Mecca in its prayers, but for investment assets and a degree of approval, it looks to London, New York and Paris. This approval is the only leverage that remains. Resisting the lure of Saudi money is like shouting at the moon: all well and good for purists, but ineffectual. Newcastle fans, being impotent, have little option other than to enjoy their moment. But our society should ask tougher questions of the Saudis, and we should not give in to the temptation to ignore the kingdom’s manifold human rights abuses. It is that Saudi longing for approval that provides the best hope of change.

In a sober moment, after the cup final hangovers have faded, perhaps we can remind ourselves that we have been here before. Not so long ago, we embraced an exciting geopolitical and trade partner. Its leaders’ henchmen were investing in soccer clubs and transforming London’s economy. That President Putin seemed such a nice guy.

To this day, only the 1969 Moon landing has drawn more American eyeballs than the Super Bowl, with the 57th set to be played between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night. Now, though, the old college teams want to attract the eyeballs too, together with the billions in advertising revenue they inevitably bring. In practice, that means marketers, and trainers, and wages, and the end of an amateur tradition that’s survived, in one form or another, since the end of the Civil War.

This matters, and not merely in the way it transforms college football into a disfigured, commercialized echo of the NFL. For in the professionalization of university sport, there’s a broader story too. I mean how, in modern America, money burrows into every facet of life, a process that squashes the variety from our continent-wide culture — even as it hints at the hard limits of our big-is-best mentality.

Americans love competition. Every year, 100 million of us attend a professional baseball, football, hockey or basketball game. Yet in this sports-crazed republic, amateur college football is distinct — not least in the passion of its fans. In 2024, the 10 highest-rated games had a collective TV viewership of 122 million, while 31 teams averaged a remarkable 100% in-person attendance rate. Yet even these numbers don’t really do the sport justice. Visit somewhere like the University of Alabama and you’ll soon see what I mean. Starting at breakfast, 100,000 fans get stuffed and buzzed at “tailgate” parties outside the ground. Expect an orgy of beer, hickory-fired ribs and Krispy Kreme donuts. Once you’re good and full, dash into the “Walk of Champions”, where fans greet the team as they enter Bryant-Denny Stadium. You’ve already had a packed day, and it is not even kickoff.

More from this author

The revolt of the Rust Belt

By Jeff Bloodworth

How, then, to explain this mania, one that fires spasms of emotion from Alaska to Maine? For Kurt Kemper, the answer begins less with the teams — and more with the universities that host them. “College, to Americans, is synonymous with the middle class,” argues Kemper, a professor of American history at Dakota State University. “College football is an idealized part of the college experience.” That’s partly a function of history. Rutgers played Princeton in the first-ever college football game way back in 1869. Today, though, college football is mostly a working-class game, one particularly popular among African-Americans. It doubtless helps, Kemper adds, that university, and university football, have long been admired as engines of social mobility. Compared to their classmates, football stars disproportionately hail from disadvantaged backgrounds, and graduate at higher rates than average.

In the end, though, college football is about more than a path to a picket fence. As Randy Roberts, a Purdue University historian explains, the institution ultimately speaks to America’s bewildering range of regional identities. Who you root for doesn’t just denote your alma mater: but rather your local sensibility and class. Forget those Alabama ribs — at Presbyterian College, in South Carolina, the team mascot is a Scottish highlander, blasting the bagpipes as he leads the team on. In America’s heartland, meanwhile, teams are famed for embracing the Midwest’s agricultural heritage. In Wisconsin, for instance, fans wear cheese hats on their heads, appropriate enough in the Dairy State. In Nebraska, for its part, supporters swap camembert for corn. Little wonder their team is nicknamed the Cornhuskers.

I don’t wish to insult readers in Madison or Lincoln — but this regional spirit is undoubtedly clearest at Appalachian State University. Nestled amid the hills and hollers of Boone, a hardscrabble town in North Carolina’s High Country, App State boasts the highest average attendance percentage in college football: a spectacular 115.78%. To zoom past capacity, students cram onto the “Grassy Hill” overlooking the field. They’re joined by 25,000 alums, who drive hours down treacherous two-lane highways to return “home” for six Saturdays every fall. Between the third and fourth quarter, millionaires, college kids, and working-class locals all celebrate their rough-hewn identity through a 35,000-person sing-along of an iconic rock-country anthem.

For Adam Cole, none of this is surprising. “Maybe you love your hometown, maybe you hate it,” says the beat reporter covering college football in the southeast. “But it sticks with you.” It’s a love that can easily veer into hatred. A case in point is when the University of Michigan plays their next door neighbor and Big Ten nemesis Ohio State University, in a matchup ominously known as “The Game”. In one recent meeting, the players started a melee, a battle complete with pepper spray. He’s never got quite that angry, but Cole understands the red mist himself. A native of Topeka, Kansas, he once overheard a passenger at an airport insult a local university. As he puts it: “It took everything in me not to say, ‘Hey fucker, don’t talk about my town!’”

Now, though, this lively amateurism is threatened — by the mighty greenback. Already, the top 10 grossing college football programs collectively earn $571 million a year, largely through free media exposure when big games are shown on TV. It’s a bonanza that smaller teams can sometimes grasp at too. In 2007, for instance, Appalachian State shocked the college football world by defeating the University of Michigan. Practically overnight, enrollment jumped by 6,000. No wonder Joey Jones, the Appalachian State football team’s director of strategic communications, calls college football the “front porch” of his university.

With figures like these floating about, it’s equally unsurprising that cash now stalks other corners of college football too. For decades, student-athletes were mostly unpaid. All they could expect was paid tuition and a tiny dorm room, alongside drab cafeteria meals. But, in 2015, federal courts finally cut students in on the action. These days, college athletes secure compensation via “Name, Image, and Likeness” (NIL) deals. By appearing in commercials, or signing a jersey, a top-flight college quarterback can earn $1 million a year; elite teams altogether cost upwards of $10 million. All the while, universities increasingly employ “general managers” to raise money from wealthy donors and ink deals with the private sector.

There’s plenty more where that came from. Since the launch of an NFL-style playoff competition, in 2014, a system that’s since expanded to 12 teams, the biggest universities together gorge on media deals together worth $7.8 billion. And with a gaggle of lesser schools keen to get in on the action, the top sides have fought to control their monopoly by forming into 11 mega-conferences. Strikingly, these groupings no longer correspond by region: the Big Ten has transcended its Midwestern roots to encompass 20 schools, spanning from Jersey to Cali, securing it a media footprint in five of the nation’s seven biggest markets.

With so many potential viewers, the Big Ten TV network fills the coffers of its members with $100 million a year. Yet if that makes general managers rich, and ensures students are fairly remunerated, it’s also having a real impact on how college football actually feels from the stands. One good example — you might almost call it NFL-lite — came last month. One chilly Monday evening, the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame played the Ohio State Buckeyes in what’s increasingly known as the “Super Bowl” of college football. Each team bagged a cool $20 million from the game, but beyond the dollars and cents, the professionalization practically oozed from the touchline. Players and coaches are hired guns who move from team to team in search of greater pay. Will Howard, Ohio’s winning quarterback, had just transferred from Kansas State the previous January. Days after Ohio State’s victory, the team’s defensive coordinator jumped ship to Pennsylvania State, lured by an annual paycheck worth $3.2 million.

More from this author

How mailmen saved rural America

By Jeff Bloodworth

It goes without saying, meanwhile, that those mega-conferences are bringing their own changes. “Conferences are losing college football’s parochialism,” says Roberts, adding that the passion animating games like the Ole Miss-Mississippi State “Egg Bowl” is ultimately down to the narcissism of small differences. Kemper agrees. Until the inception of the college football playoff, he suggests that crowning a national champion wasn’t really the sport’s primary aim. Rather, beating a rival defined a “winning” season. Nowadays, though, with teams duking it out for a national trophy, college football risks becoming a clinical, antiseptic game, one devoid of the parochial hatreds learned at your grandfather’s knee.

Of course, this heady blend of nationalization and money isn’t limited to college football. Post-1945 America has been standardized by transport and telecoms, which together flatten regional accents, dump regional foods, and altogether homogenize the American experience. As late as the Carter presidency, you could visit Nebraska to watch the Cornhuskers, munching a runza from a dairy bar as you went. No longer, even as Kemper argues that the arrival of a winner-takes-all college Super Bowl speaks to a broader economic model that lavishes rewards upon a select few. “In the old system,” he says, “10-15 teams finished a season feeling like a winner. In the new system there is one winner.”

To be fair, greed has yet to fully crush the college game. “Tough people who work with their hands and football is their way out,” is how Roberts characterizes it. “Football is a tough game. You see where the players are from.” At Appalachian State, certainly, that toughness is epitomized by quarterback Chase Brice. Failing to achieve on-field success at two bigger schools, the burly blonde transferred here in 2021. Self-effacing and eager for success, Jones says that the mountain people here “saw something of themselves” in the 27-year-old Georgian.

That’s just as well — for college football can still be special. On 7 September, 2022, Appalachian State hosted ESPN’s College GameDay show. Broadcast live from the university’s campus, it brought the university $500 million dollars in free advertising. Not that the fans cared much about that, as tiny Boone became the center of the football universe. A back-and-forth game against a conference rival came down to one final play. Behind two points, with two seconds remaining, Brice heaved a 53-yard “Hail Mary” touchdown for a remarkable victory. The crowd exploded. Yet amid the mayhem, Brice, the star quarterback on the national stage, ran straight past reporters. Instead, he rushed to the student section of the stands, where he helped classmates climb down onto the field. A wonderfully intimate moment, amid a sport that grows and grows.

Dear Mother and Father,

Shame you can’t congratulate me. I am, I know, a disappointment to you. You hoped I would follow in your footsteps and become a literary critic or expositor of abstruse texts. Instead, I stand before you as winner of the 2025 Paddy Power World Darts Championship, for which the prize-money far exceeds all you’ve earned from the 22 books you’ve written together over the course of 40 years. I don’t gloat. I seek only your approval and your love. Millions of adoring fans around the world applaud my skills and call my name — Frederick “Fatboy” De Selincourt — but you hang your heads in shame every time I enter the arena to Morrisey’s You’re the One for Me, Fatty. I have dedicated every nine dart finish I’ve ever thrown to you, yet still you disown me.

Where did it all go wrong, you ask. Well, the answer to that is straightforward. It went wrong when you, daddy, saw me plucking feathers from my cot pillow and throwing them at mummy. “I’ll buy the boy a set of plastic darts,” you said in an unlikely fit of populism. I remain surprised that you even knew where to buy darts from. Didn’t you once say you only ever shopped at Foyles. “And don’t forget a dartboard,” mummy said, out of concern for the furniture.

Do I need to remind you that I threw my first maximum from the pram and regularly hit nine dart finishes before I could walk. “One hundred and eighty!” were the first words I ever spoke. You could have stopped me then but you were too busy touring Third World universities for the British Council. Faute de mieux, I became a darts player on the altar of your careers. When I told you I was to be apprenticed to Jocky Wilson you raised no objection, thinking horse riding — while not exactly the career you’d wanted for me — at least opened doors to a better class of person than I was ever likely encounter in the Ally Pally.

For 18 months I sharpened Jocky’s arrows and fluffed his feathers and for a further 18 sat at the oche to watch where he placed his feet as he threw. I know what you’re thinking, but had those been Nureyev’s feet you’d have applauded the conscientiousness of my studies. But what’s the difference?  Is not excellence excellence? When people refuse to call darts a sport or even an art because — they say — it amounts to no more than chucking a primitive missile at a narrow strip of sisal fibre, I remind them of Jane Austen’s description of writing as painting with a fine brush on two inches of ivory. How often did you read me that passage when I was growing up! How well I remember you arguing with each other about its applicability to Jane Austen’s prose at its best. You scoffed at me when I said I believed Jane Austen played darts with her sister Cassandra in the garden of the Austen house at Chawton. But could she have described those two inches of ivory had she not been familiar with that narrow band of dartboard in which I earn my living? How many maximums did Jane Austen throw? Which was her double of choice? Those are discussions for another time.

Let’s not argue about nomenclature — sport or art or neither, darts enable the human spirit to achieve greatness not by spraying grand gestures around but by fixing on a fine detail of existence and concentrating all its fire power there. Jane Austen or Tolstoy? Your preference was always for Jane Austen. As is mine. You can keep your Olympics and your Test Matches and your Cup Finals. Give me darts at the Alexandra Palace any time. Precisely because of their smallness, those tiny treble bands on a dartboard are more challenging to creativity than a wicket, a goalmouth or a finishing line. Or the Battle of Borodino, come to that.

Suggested reading

Saudi Arabia is stealing snooker's soul

By Brendan Cooper

You have commented over the years on my adiposity. How can a pair of fleshless neurasthenics such as you, who chew their fingers to the bone for art’s sake, have produced someone my size? Eat less, you have pleaded. Exercise more, you say, forgetting how many miles I walk every day from the oche to the dartboard and back. My dear mother and father, do not think I am fat because I am indolent or because I cannot say no to cakes and ale. I am fat because I love darts.

You don’t need me to tell you that Julius Caesar wanted men about him that were fat. “Sleek-headed men” he feared because they thought too much. Sleek-headed men, for that very reason, make poor darts players. There comes a moment in the life of every darts player when he loses his instinctive rhythm, cannot remember how he throws, how tightly he holds his darts, how much flight he gives them.  Many a promising career has ended that way.  Had listened to you, I would not be Champion of the World today. Let a darts player lose his insouciance and he’s finished. And whoever saw an insouciant thin man?

Our bulk belies our subtlety. More than that: our bulk is integral to our subtlety. Some law of nature decrees that for one dart to follow another into those two inches of darting ivory which determine the difference between success and failure, between genius and mediocrity, they must be thrown by fat men. You cannot think darts into a treble or a bullseye. You dare not pause long enough to give reflection a sniff. You must throw with a sort of cultivated disdain that is not given to the thin.

If only, my dear parents, you had snatched enough time from your cerebral labours to watch a game of darts. Actually watched one. You would, had you done so, I am sure, have marvelled at the contrast between the overflowing physical abundance of the man throwing and the refined and dainty precision with which he throws. It is a contrast at once aesthetically satisfying and philosophically baffling. How can it be? See an arrow fly in slow motion, see how much it arches and how far it deviates, and it is a miracle it ever finds its target. Would you not imagine the thrower of such a missile to be a person of near supernatural exactitude? And now look who he is!; ‘Tis I, your clumsy and in all other regards bumbling and maladroit son.

The crowd who cheer me don’t bother their heads with any of that. They pour beer down their throats and sing Stand up if You Love the Darts. But you, mother and father, aficionados of art in all mysterious manifestations, are just the people to understand dart’s artistry and yet, out of small-minded snobbery, you look away. And so you miss the marvel and the rare beauty of it. A cheetah can run, a tiger burns bright in the forests of the night, but only your fat, clumsy son can, without raising a sweat, hit a treble-20 from eight feet away whenever he wants to.

Shame you aren’t here to see me lift the trophy.

Your loving son and Champion of the World,

“The Fatboy”

Adapted from Howard Jacobson’s substack, Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.

While the players themselves stayed at a remote castle, the WAGs and other family members were billeted at the luxurious Brenners Park Hotel, on one side of which green screens, reminiscent of those they put around stricken horses at the Grand National, were erected so they could sunbathe on the lawns unmolested by the paparazzi. Which meant that when they did venture out, there was a feeding frenzy.

It was unlike any other tournament I’ve covered. On one morning, I went for a run along that path and was almost flattened by a photographer falling out of a tree as he strained for a shot over the screens. At the time, it seemed an entirely mundane occurrence. Every night, after hearing rumours about their location, we’d rush off to see a large group of WAGs at a club or in a bar or dancing on the table at an unsuspecting Italian restaurant, surrounded by their entourages and photographers and reporters, as the well-heeled elderly tourists who comprise much of Baden-Baden’s regular summer population watched on in bemusement. Occasionally, the players would come to visit. Rio Ferdinand pushed in front of me in the queue at a gelateria.

For those journalists fortunate enough to be staying at the Brenners Park — how long ago expense accounts like that seem now — there was a rich harvest to be reaped by hanging around the bar, listening to second-hand accounts of what the players were saying, who was slagging off whom and who was sleeping with whom. It was gossipy, bitchy, enthralling and exhausting. It was the moment when English football definitively became part of celebrity culture, and totally unsuitable for the business of winning a major football tournament. Perhaps in hindsight, even though 9/11 had happened and Iraq had been invaded, there was an air of complacency, everybody high on Germany’s Sommermärchen in the days before the Crash.

England went out in the quarter-final and Eriksson, who died yesterday aged 76, resigned soon after. By then, there was a sense of frustration, a feeling that he had not quite got the most out of a fine group of players cursed by Adam Crozier, the chief executive of the Football Association, with the Golden Generation tag. It felt the off-field activities had become too big a distraction — the affairs, the endless endorsements, the Fake Sheikh sting. Certainly, Eriksson didn’t seem able to deal with the fact that the Golden Generation didn’t really make sense as a team, that one or more needed to be dropped so a less glamorous figure could offer defensive cover, a coherent midfield sacrificed on the altar of celebrity.

But there was no great sense of bitterness. Eriksson was too charming for that. His great strength had been that he didn’t ever seem that bothered by anything, that he treated triumph and defeat alike with a sigh and a drawn-out, “Welllll….” Given his predecessor as England manager Kevin Keegan had tearfully quit in the Wembley toilets after a World Cup qualifying defeat to Germany, such calmness was both welcome and invigorating. What if we treated players like adults? What if management was not about spittle-flecked sergeant-majorly bellowing but about consensus?

More from this author

Don't blame football for the riots

By Jonathan Wilson

Turning to a foreign manager was, effectively, an admission of defeat by England, a recognition the system had failed. Justifiable concerns about whether it was really the done thing for a major footballing nation to appoint a foreigner bled into base xenophobia. Others might have quailed before that. Eriksson shrugged. And it helped, obviously, that he got results.

Towards the end of his first year in the job, in September 2001, 10 days before 9/11, England went to Germany needing a win to have any chance of beating them to the one automatic qualifying slot. Given England had not won in Germany since 1965 and Germany had lost only one of their previous 60 World Cup qualifiers, few gave them much chance. But it was one of those hallucinatory games in which the usual rules seem not to apply. England went behind but then equalised, then took the lead, then kept on scoring, eventually winning 5-1.

Sven, as everybody by then called him, suddenly became a messianic figure who transcended football. Sales of Ericsson mobile phones went through the roof. A 10-year-old boy had his hair cut to resemble Eriksson’s. It took an injury-time David Beckham free-kick against Greece, but England did qualify for the 2002 World Cup ahead of Germany. It was, though, Germany who, having gone through the play-offs, late got through to the final, while England went out to Brazil. Had Beckham not just returned from a fractured metatarsal, might he have made a better fist of stopping the break that led to the equaliser? Perhaps, but Eriksson was never going to drop Beckham.

Yet alongside the celebrity worship, there was a willingness to embrace youth. It was Eriksson who made Wayne Rooney the youngest ever England international before Euro 2004, and until Rooney broke his own metatarsal in the quarter-final, he looked capable of dragging England to glory almost single-handed. As other major names faltered, England looked like potential winners, even if a midfield of Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Paul Scholes lacked width on the left, pace on the right and solidity in the middle.

Suggested reading

Gareth Southgate's ruthless reign

By Jonathan Wilson

By 2006, in truth, it had all gone a little stale; the porous midfield had become a little too familiar. Eriksson was the first manager to lead England to three successive quarter-finals, but the last was by far the least impressive of them. Treating players like adults, it turned out, led to Baden-Baden. Gareth Southgate’s assessment from the Brazil defeat in 2002 seemed damning: “We needed Churchill but we got Ian Duncan Smith.” England, seeking difference, turned to an Englishman and then to a martinet, but miserable reigns of Steve McClaren and Fabio Capello only served to cast Eriksson’s stint in a rosier light.

To remember only Baden-Baden, though, is to ignore what a great manager Eriksson had been. He was only 30 when, in 1979, he was appointed manager of IFK Gothenburg. He was a revolutionary, heavily influenced by English football and, in particular, by the success of Bobby Houghton with Malmö and Roy Hodgson with Halmstad. It was one thing for English managers to come to Sweden, bin the libero and play with a zonal system, but when a Swede started doing it, it caused an outcry; to some, he may have been too Swedish for England, but he had once been too English for Sweden. One newspaper jokingly printed an advert offering the middle of Gothenburg’s pitch for rent, given Eriksson’s direct style meant it wasn’t much used during games.

But it brought two Swedish Cups and a Uefa Cup — the first European trophy ever won by a Scandinavian club — and earned him a move to Benfica, where he won three Portuguese titles and reached a European Cup final. He capped two decades of success in the club game by leading Lazio to only the second Italian league title in their history. And he did it all with a sense that life was there to be lived and that it wasn’t really worth getting too worked up about anything.

Perhaps the most emblematic story came from Didi Hamann, the German midfielder whose goal at Wembley led to Keegan’s resignation and Eriksson’s appointment. He played under Eriksson at Manchester City and recalled one morning on tour in Thailand in 2008. Everybody knew Eriksson was on his way out of the club and Hamann, considering his own future, was sitting pensively alone on a sunlounger by the hotel pool. He looked up and saw Eriksson approaching, carrying a tray on which sat two glasses of champagne. He handed one to Hamman, who asked what they were celebrating.

Eriksson touched his glass to Hamann’s. “Life, Kaiser,” he said, “Life.”

Yet as it happened, fears about an orgy of racist violence proved unfounded. It may even be, as a couple of official bodies acknowledged privately, that the return of football helped mitigate the threat of further discord.

It might seem flippant to suggest that there’s no time to riot when you’ve got Coventry away, but the links between football and the far-Right can’t be denied. The English Defence League (EDL) emerged in March 2008 when a group calling itself the United People of Luton organised against local Muslims protesting the return of troops from Afghanistan. Common cause was found with various hooligan firms associated with football clubs, and by the summer there were EDL branches run by firms across the country.

This sporting symbiosis is not unusual, and certainly not unique to Britain. For those seeking to deploy bodies on the streets, hooligan groups are enormously useful: they are organised, have a clear leadership structure and are used to fighting the police. In 1997, for instance, when the mayor of Cacak, Velja Iljic, led the march on Belgrade that culminated in the toppling of Slobodan Milosevic, he was joined by the Delije, the hardcore fans of Crvena Zvezda who had formed the core of Arkan’s troops during the civil war. In Argentina, meanwhile, the barras bravas football gangs have essentially become muscle for hire.

Even so, it would be wrong to see Britain’s recent riots as eruptions of football hooliganism — or at least to see them purely as such. As Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said last week, while some of those who have been convicted have football banning orders, around 70% “have previous convictions for weapon possession, violence, drugs and other serious offences”.

Rowley spoke of “thugs and criminals”, but there is a sense of groups intersecting. The riot in Sunderland came the night before three skinhead bands were scheduled to play in the city at a “Blood and Honour” gig which, according to Hope Not Hate, drew neo-Nazis from as far away as Stoke-on-Trent. A sense of being left behind seems to play a part: according to the Government’s Indices of Deprivation, seven of the 10 most deprived towns in the UK have witnessed riots, although it may be that Right-wing groups have targeted those areas rather than the violence being a spontaneous outbreak of despair or nihilism. Covid vaccine-scepticism seems to have radicalised another tranche of society, sending them into the orbit of the far-Right.

More from this author

Gareth Southgate's ruthless reign

By Jonathan Wilson

But it’s also the case that some find rioting intoxicating. Talking to hooligans in Eastern Europe for my book Behind the Curtain, a recurring theme was how many just enjoyed fighting: it wasn’t a by-product or a means to an end; the fighting was the point. In a Czech bar near Moscow Zoo, I met Oleg, a heavyset member of a Spartak firm in his forties. “The best thing,” he explained, “is fighting with police in other countries. You throw things at them and then they run at you and you fight.” This is also one of the key insights of the US academic Bill Buford’s 1991 book Among the Thugs: for some, violence is fun.

The easy mistake is to see far-Right attitudes as characteristic of football. Given how violence has largely been eliminated from stadiums, it’s debatable to what extent the remaining hooligan groups can even be considered a football problem. The yob fan was always a lazy and misleading stereotype, even in the days when stands were urine-stained theatres of violence, neo-Nazis a visible presence at games and racist chanting commonplace. Leeds United fans, for instance, ran a successful campaign against the National Front in the late Eighties, based around the fanzine Marching on Together. Today, Britain’s most influential national football campaign is arguably Kick It Out.

In reality, football has always been too big to be defined by one outlook alone. Rather, particularly in post-industrial provincial cities, it has become a signifier of a place’s identity. If, say, Sunderland or Leicester are thought of at all by the wider population these days, it tends to be in the context of football. Even large British cities are now best-known globally for football: ask a taxi driver in Beirut or Bangalore what he knows of Liverpool, and he’ll probably be aware of the Beatles but will almost certainly have heard of Mohamed Salah.

That gives football a curiously powerful role that still hasn’t been fully appreciated. Take the Indices of Deprivation: of the 12 most deprived towns in its list that have suffered riots — Middlesbrough, Blackpool, Liverpool, Hartlepool, Hull, Manchester, Blackburn, Nottingham, Sunderland, Stoke, Bolton — only Hartlepool has not had a Premier League club in the past two decades.

And perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise. For all that it’s gentrified over the past 30 years, for all the glamour at the elite level of the game, for all the domination by overseas investment, football remains the great sport of the industrial heartlands. When there is nothing else, with churches, trade unions, even political parties in retreat, football becomes pretty much the only marker of identity. If you were an agitator wishing to gain ready acceptance in one of those towns, the easiest way would be to pull on the shirt of the local team.

Suggested reading

The Machiavellian cause of Britain's disorder

By N.S. Lyons

That has led to a curious subtext over the past fortnight: the attempts to control the message of the shirt. While a handful of the rioters in Sunderland were wearing SAFC shirts, the following day a far greater proportion of those who volunteered for the clean-up were wearing them. It’s an issue of which the MP for Sunderland Central, Lewis Atkinson, who turned up for the clean-up in an away shirt from the Seventies, is acutely aware. “When I got dressed that morning,” he said, “I just knew I wanted to wear that shirt. To me it stemmed from a determination to not allow a minority of thugs to own the most precious identity in Sunderland, to show that it was those of us sweeping away the shards of hate who were the true Sunderland.”

The point here is that while there is a relationship between football and the far-Right, there is a stronger relationship between football clubs and their local communities — even as top-level clubs increasingly come to feel like quasi-global franchises. And those communities, as the clean-up operations and the anti-racism demonstrations have shown, are opposed to the riots.

At 11.19pm on the night of the riots in Sunderland, Sunderland AFC posted a message on X condemning the violence, saying it did not “represent our culture, our history, or our people. Our great city is built on togetherness and acceptance, and Sunderland will forever be for all.” This was a club not as an inadvertent projection of regional identity, but one embracing its role as a community leader. And in doing so, it confirmed something important: the rioting is not a football problem, but football has a role to play in the aftermath.

This is nothing short of a miracle. There was disruption on every level in the run up to the Games: roadworks, metro stations closed, massive fences thrown up across every pavement, the filthy pollution in the Seine. As for the audacious opening ceremony: how safe could a 6km-long floating stage and a roving ceremony through the middle of a capital city be? Alain Bauer, a respected police and terrorism expert, sent shivers down everyone’s spines when he declared that “such ceremony on such a scale is criminal madness”.

With their inimitable petulance, Parisians planned to flee the follies. If something was going to go horribly wrong, they didn’t want to witness it first-hand. “I will be like an ostrich with my head in the Normandy sand for three weeks,” my neighbour joked as he left just after Bastille Day.

Suggested reading

The Olympics are not safe for women

By Sarah Ditum

Was he right to make his exodus? Perhaps, we thought, as residents of the “grey zone” on either side of the Seine were told they could only access their homes with a QR code. Shops, cafés and restaurants emptied — and closed. My local café remained open but only so its manager could complain all day long about the lack of consumers to the few remaining die-hards like myself… and claim compensation after the Games. It felt just like lockdown.

As if our patience hadn’t been tried enough, we then had to contend with rail “sabotage”, stranding nearly a million passengers, and an attack on fibre-optic cables, creating mobile and fixed-line outages across the country. While Russians were initially suspected, leaks from the investigation showed the culprits might have been homegrown. “The modus operandi is that of far-Left groups,” said the Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. That same weekend, he announced that dozens of activists from the self-styled eco-warrior group Extinction Rebellion had been detained on suspicion of fomenting violent actions against the sporting competitions.

Astonishingly, none of this actually derailed the opening ceremony, which was a wild and idiosyncratic combination of the universal and the quirky, including Lady Gaga, Céline Dion, drag queens and a “naked blue smurf” who, we learnt later, was meant to portray the Greek God Dionysus. But as British commentators sneered — The Times  called it “a damp squib” — the French were “dazzled” (a happy 86% of them according to a poll). Never had an opening ceremony been done like this, on such a scale. That night, a reset button was pressed in France. There would be a before and an after Paris 2024.

Before Paris 2024, shortly before the Olympic chaos landed, French voters caused chaos themselves in the first round of a snap election. Only to then distance themselves from Marine Le Pen’s hard-Right party in the second. There was some relief as a coalition of the Left and centrists were victorious. But we were left with an overriding feeling of uncertainty. France has become such a divided country, with two very vocal and disruptive political extremes, that it has become almost impossible to imagine politicians rising to the challenge for the sake of national harmony. President Macron declared a political truce during the Games. We would deal with this later.

And then the heavens opened, along with the Games, and with it came a new joie de vivre. As Raphaël Enthoven described it: “Collective happiness, shared jubilation, Paris both deserted and full, a sublime opening ceremony, triumphant athletes, French champions who love their President, the far-Left suddenly silent… Ah, if only the Games could last forever.”

Obviously French victors have helped the French mood. But another thing has cast a compelling spell. The Olympic decors are breathtakingly beautiful. The beach volley beneath the Eiffel Tower built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the fencing under the glass dome of the Grand Palais built for the Exposition Universelle of the following year, the triathlon athletes diving from Alexander III bridge into the Seine, the BMX competitions on the 18th-century Place de la Concorde, the cycling races going up and down Montmartre, through the Left Bank boulevards, the equestrian competitions in Versailles. “There is a perfect harmony between those historical settings and the Olympic achievements of the world’s greatest champions,” wrote Pierre Chausse in Le Parisien. “Long ago Parisians stopped believing their city was among the most beautiful in the world. It’s as if the Games have reignited their love for their city.

More from this author

Why the Southport suspect's identity matters

By Agnés Poirier

International broadcasters concur. NBC Sports published its figures for the first week of the games showing that 4.5 billion minutes had already been streamed, more than the entire Tokyo Games of 2021. Warner Bros Discovery reached in two days more visitors to its platform than for the entire 2021 games. And the Paris Games has sold 9.1 million tickets so far, already breaking the record held by Atlanta 1996.

Paris is, indeed, both deserted and full. The grumpy and worried have left in droves, leaving the sport fans who are simply happy to be here. Tourists and locals alike, those left roam the streets with one thing in common: they can’t stop beaming and marvelling at everything. The Parisians who have remained out of curiosity have unexpectedly fallen back in love with their home. Optimism is a heady feeling. France should always remember what it feels like. It will come handy when we form our next government.

It looked like a man punching a woman because, according to the International Boxing Association, Khelif is not a woman. In 2023, Khelif was disqualified from the World Boxing Championships along with Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting  — “a result of their failure to meet the eligibility criteria for participating in the women’s competition”. This decision was based, not on testosterone levels, but on “a separate and recognised test, whereby the specifics remain confidential”.

A Russian-language statement (the IBA is Russian-led) put it more bluntly: “Based on the results of DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women. Based on the results of the tests, it was proven that they have XY chromosomes.” Lin did not appeal, while Khelif initiated an appeal and then withdrew it, meaning that in both cases, the judgement became legally binding.

But not binding on the Olympics, which withdrew recognition from the IBA earlier this year over multiple concerns over governance. That means the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is free to apply its own rules on sex categories in sport. IOC spokesperson Mark Adams warned against starting a “witch hunt… These are regular athletes who have competed for many years in boxing; they are entirely eligible and they are women on their passports.”

Which would be a totally acceptable way to classify sex, if the fight was between passports, rather than two bone-and-sinew bodies. Khelif is apparently not female, in a category designed for female athletes. And while the IOC has been keen to emphasise that this controversy is wholly unrelated to the contentious matter of trans women in sport, that is an impossible separation to maintain. The question of how sex should be defined — by chromosomes, by hormone levels or by legal marker on a passport — is the heart of the argument over inclusion.

What happened in the ring in Paris is a riposte to all the absurd claims that sex is immaterial to athletic performance. Witness, for example, the writers Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis, who argued in a 2012 New York Times op-ed for “letting go of the idea that the ultimate goal of a fair policy is to protect the ‘purity’ of women’s competitions”. If inclusion is the objective, “then sex-segregated competition is just one of many possible options, and in many cases it might not be the best one”.

And anyway, doesn’t the enforcement of sex categories simply re-instil bad old stereotypes about female weakness and vulnerability? That, at least, is what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) believes. “Excluding women who are trans hurts all women,” says the organisation’s self-identified factsheet on sports. “It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being ‘too masculine’ or ‘too good’ at their sport to be a ‘real’ woman.” History professor Johanna Mellis even suggested in The Guardian that women’s sports categories might have been invented by men “to limit our athletic success and opportunities by reinforcing sexist notions of cisgender girls and women as the ‘weaker, slower sex’”.

From there, it’s a short distance to travel to the often-repeated claim that, as an article in LGBTQ+ magazine Them put it, sex differences should be viewed “much like the way we view Michael Phelps’s abnormal wingspan”. Athletes are, by definition, physical exceptions. A male person who has been legally recognised as female is simply another example of biological variation, and — claimed sports correspondent Jonathan Liew (now of The Guardian, but then writing in The Independent) — perhaps one to be celebrated: he claimed that, “in a way, it would be inspiring” if trans women came to dominate women’s sport.

More from this author

The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

So far, chromosomes notwithstanding, Khelif has not dominated women’s boxing. XY chromosomes notwithstanding, Khelif lost in the quarter-final of the Tokyo Olympics to Kellie Harrington of Ireland, who went on to take the gold: BBC 5 Live boxing analyst Steve Bunce pointed out that Khelif is “not a devastating puncher” and has ever only achieved five stoppages. The implication, perhaps, is that Carini could have fought on, and maybe even beaten Khelif if she’d been good enough. Maybe so.

But genetically male athletes do not only become a problem in women’s sport when they’re successful. Every XY athlete “included” means an XX athlete pushed out. In combat or collision sports, they also imperil the female athletes they compete against. According to the organisation Women in Sport, male athletes have (on average) 40-50% greater upper limb strength and 12kg more skeletal muscle mass when compared to age-matched female athletes at any given body weight.

A technically accomplished woman might win a fight against a man, but the risk of injury she takes in the process is immense. So Casini had every right to weigh her own safety. After the bout, she said: “It could have been the match of a lifetime, but I had to preserve my life as well in that moment.” Boxing is inherently dangerous — but there is a very different level of exposure in agreeing to be punched by another woman, and agreeing to be punched by a man.

This is the difference that proponents of eliminating sex categories in sport cannot acknowledge. Some, like Liew, may tacitly accept it while being fundamentally unconcerned about what that would mean in practice for women in sport — perhaps because they consider women’s sport to be fundamentally unserious. (“Sometimes we forget that there are bigger things than sport,” wrote Liew in his Independent piece, which is not an observation he ever appears to have made about men’s sport.)

Suggested reading

Do we need a Trans Olympics?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

But for others, particularly for women, and perhaps most particularly for women who are not actively involved in physical pursuits, there is a kind of hope in this denialism. They would like to believe that women’s physical disadvantage compared to men really is a purely, or at least largely, social phenomenon. They recognise women’s inferior status, and they understand that this is tied to the body; but they believe that the body is the cause of the inferiority, and so the body becomes politically inconvenient. They choose instead a tactful fiction of physiological equality — if not in the here and now, then in the inclusive Jerusalem to come.

The female body can, certainly, do more than the male authorities who run sports have historically liked to believe: there is a long and weird tradition of claiming that exercise will cause a woman’s uterus to fall out. Given fair access to training and competition (something which is still very far from assured), women do become faster, stronger, more aggressive. I know this from personal experience. I started powerlifting in my late thirties, and in my forties can pull weights I once thought cartoonishly huge. But I also know that the same weights pulled by a man would be much less impressive, which is why comparing myself to men tells me nothing at all about my progression.

Mixed-sex sports simply lead to exceptional women being forced out by mediocre men: brute strength besting accomplishment. The Olympics’ failure to protect women’s sport is a tragedy for female athletes, but it also makes a travesty of the competition overall. What should be a celebration of excellence becomes, through the IOC’s contempt for fairness and safety in women’s sport, the elevation of the mediocre. After decades of obfuscation and inanity over gender and sport, the truth of it all became clear in an entirely unnecessary meeting: between an apparently male fist and a female face.

Last week, airport world deposited me in Boston for a few days, during a heatwave that reached humid highs of 36°C. But the heat barely registered as such, thanks to America’s ubiquitous climate control, which helpfully kept my seminar strictly in the productivity zone.

On the rare occasions when I did venture outside, feeling my mind, skin, and limbs adjusting to the solid presence of heat, I found myself mulling over the meaning of air conditioning. What kind of culture sets about engineering away every local variation, even those of the air itself, in pursuit of a maximally standardised, rational and productive environment? The answer was, of course, originally America — but now, increasingly, that aircon culture has propagated worldwide.

A glance at the history and implicit ideology of air conditioning reveals that this technology began as industrial machinery, and swiftly became (at least in the United States) a domestic amenity for Everyman, on a par with indoor sanitation. It has flourished worldwide, as an enabler of economic development. And it expresses, in microcosm, the internationally homogenising power of American culture and technology.

The habitual denizens of the air it conditions, especially in airports, comprise a now-global supra-bourgeoisie. This class has come into its own in tandem with the digital and financial revolutions; its allegiance is, as conservative commentators are fond of complaining, often less to a nation than a placeless international culture of information work, buoyed by air-conditioned flights, offices and hotels, all linked by air-conditioned taxis, and facilitated by frictionless apps. Its members probably studied at Ivy League universities, but may originate from anywhere: for this aircon class, “diversity” genuinely doesn’t mean much more than minor variations in food preference, and the accent with which International Business English is delivered. This group is also, paradoxically, often at the forefront of climate-conscious and passionately egalitarian calls for global emission reductions.

Suggested reading

The arrogance of scientific history

By David A. Bell

But this poses a challenge: for as well as being a principal delivery mechanism for the placeless, timeless, frictionless diverse-but-homogenous and climate-controlled culture of the international bourgeoisie, aircon is also incredibly resource-hungry. Depending on how hot the ambient temperature is in any given country, cooling the air to the temperate productivity zone can be hugely expensive, in energy terms. Should it come down to a contest between Net Zero and air-conditioned comfort, which will prevail?

The story of aircon is also the story of American global hegemony. Invented in 1902 by American engineer Willis Haviland Carrier, to address summer humidity problems in a Brooklyn printing factory, aircon swiftly spread first to other factories and then to private homes. The first mass-produced domestic aircon units cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars; but by 1947 it was already so widespread the British scholar S.F. Markham hailed it as “the greatest contribution to civilisation in this century”. By 1979, Time reported many Americans simply took it for granted: they “no longer think of interior coolness as an amenity but consider it a necessity, almost a birthright, like suffrage”. No wonder, then, that half a century later the American Olympic team should react with horror to news that the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris proposed achieving “the greenest Games yet” by providing athletes only with passive, air-source underfloor cooling and fans.

US Olympic organisers were among a number of countries that responded by promising to supply their own air conditioning. By contrast, the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge hailed the aircon-free Paris Olympic village as a positive step in emissions reduction. But perhaps this just reflects just how unevenly distributed airport world still is: Kipchoge grew up in (and still lives in) Kenya, where only around 15% of homes have air conditioning despite average summer temperatures of 35-40°C. It’s reasonable to imagine he is less alarmed by the prospect of a warm night or two, than someone from a country where 88% of homes have it despite far lower average summer temperatures.

Kipchoge’s relaxed response to the prospect of heat also points to something discreetly masked by the seeming neutrality of aircon: the way it flattens local differences. Heat doesn’t just affect comfort: it shapes whole cultures. When you don’t have access to aircon, beyond a certain level of heat, the air stops being a backdrop to everyday life; instead, it becomes something elemental. Even well before the level of heat that threatens health, in the absence of climate control it transforms what is possible — even what is thinkable.

This is obvious at the level of architecture. For example, “riad” palaces, built for wealthy Moroccan traders before the aircon era, are constructed to maximise shade and curate hidden, refreshing luxury for the chosen few. Such buildings have few or no external windows where the sun hits, but look inward instead, to an internal courtyard usually built around a pond or fountain. It’s obvious in the way climate shapes behaviour, too: even in relatively temperate Spain, before aircon the hot summers impelled a norm of working in the early morning and late evening, with a “siesta” during the hot part of the day. (Spain has only begun to abandon this practice since the spread of aircon.)

More from this author

Nigel Farage's post-democratic revolt

By Mary Harrington

Nor is it just cultural practices. Decades of research support the conclusion that mathematical ability, academic performance, and clarity of thought in general, are most easily sustained at airport temperatures: that is, in the mid-20s. Heat affects our emotions, too: as the New York Times put it, over a comfort threshold (again, roughly consistent with airport world norms) being hot makes us “irritable, impulsive and aggressive”. Murder, assault, and domestic violence all rise when the weather is hot.

In his travelogue A Passage to England (1959), Nirad Chaudhuri suggests that the English temperament is formed by the comparatively mild and changeable climate of the British Isles, speculating that this made the English “responsive to changes in the environment, capable of meeting surprises of all kinds […] and of taking contretemps with good humour”. Conversely, Chaudhuri argues, for the British imperial administrators, the extreme Indian heat turned a habitually temperate people into “extremists with an incredible stridency in their opinions, which became raw and crude”.

If, in Chaudhuri’s view, the heat was capable of affecting otherwise self-controlled Englishmen in this way, it invites the question: how much more of the rationalism, the work ethic, and the low-time preference commonly associated with “Western” cultural norms is at least in part the product of relatively temperate European and North American climates? Whatever the answer, studies on temperature and productivity suggest the converse is already demonstrably true. If you want rationalism and productivity to be normative, even in a hot country, you need to engineer ambient temperatures to suit.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the American empire of technology, commerce and global homogenisation began to spread roughly concurrently with the spread of air conditioning. For in practice, that’s really what “development” means: the global rollout of temperate-world lifestyles, behavioural norms, and commercial practices, underwritten by artificial climates adjusted to enable that mindset. The great Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew understood this: in a 2010 interview, he said: that, along with Singapore’s signature style of pragmatic multiculturalism, air conditioning was the single most important factor in its success, “by making development possible in the tropics”.

But this raises uncomfortable questions about the real meaning of “climate justice”. If, as Lee Kuan Yew suggested, an artificially engineered temperate climate is a precondition for the “development” referenced in the phrase “developing world”, then the unevenness of global climates is itself an injustice. As long as you understand “justice” to mean widening access to economic development, the world’s variable temperature is discriminatory to the extent that it impedes populations from being more like the denizens of airport world.

Once you add the fact that climate change is driving dangerous increases in summer heat across many parts of the world, access to cooling seems a matter of global justice for progressives. But the emissions generated by climate control are also part of what is causing temperatures to rise. Today, around 8-10% of Indian households have aircon, but International Energy Agency projections expect this to grow to 50% by 2037, impelled by steadily-rising temperatures in the country — even as the power required to operate these new units helps to accelerate the rise.

How, then, does widening access to aircon square with the need to rein in global carbon emissions for climate reasons? Is the solution a global redistribution of climate control in favour of hot countries? I suspect the US Olympic team’s response to the prospect of doing without is emblematic of the one you’d get, if you proposed to the 88% of American households with aircon that they sacrifice their cooling systems for the sake of people in Uttar Pradesh. And I also suspect that such a reaction stands as a metonym for the way “emissions reduction” will play out overall, between the aircon class and the rest.

The denizens of airport world may currently profess to be both climate-conscious and egalitarian. But this lifestyle cannot sustainably be generalised to the whole planet. And as this becomes more obvious, even the most progressive among their number will surely abandon their egalitarianism long before they switch off the aircon. After all, the only other solution would be to try and move the planet’s entire human population to the temperate zones of Europe and North America, before retreating into (presumably air-conditioned) enclaves a safe distance from the resulting chaos. And surely not even an elite blinded by aircon culture to the real depth of global human cultural differences would consider something as reckless as that.

Partly you know who a politician is by what he says he wants, but here things get especially murky. As has been detailed by Jon Cruddas in his recent book, A Century of Labour, Starmer ran his 2020 leadership campaign by appearing to embody every historical Labour-associated tradition simultaneously. Liberalism, ethical socialism, pluralism, welfarism, and statism were all in the mix somewhere. Since then, to the fury of some who reluctantly supported his leadership, he has reneged on many of the more socialist-sounding pledges. Now nobody seems quite sure what role he is adopting any more.

Interpretations of his background commitments differ wildly. Peter Hitchens thinks he’s “far-Left” bordering on Trotskyism; Jordan Peterson predicts that should he win, Britain will be “Venezuela for 20 years”. The New Internationalist says Starmer is a “cold-hearted Blairite”, and Corbyn’s former advisor Andrew Murray scornfully dubs him a “centrist liberal”. Bequeathing us a particularly distressing image, George Galloway has declared that “Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are two cheeks of the same backside”. In terms of sheer range, then, Starmer appears to be the Cate Blanchett of British politics.

This week brought a new performance to pore over, in the form of a filmed walk-and-talk with Gary Neville in the Lake District, a location for Starmer family holidays when he was young. “How did you find this place?” marvelled an incredulous-sounding Neville, as if Sir Keir had hacked through dense jungle foliage rather than trundled up the M6 like everybody else.

Here again, though, the video signalled as little information as a plain white T-shirt worn on matchday. Along with a few repeated manifesto pledges, we learnt that the Labour leader puts “country first, party second”, believes in “action not words”, wants to “return politics to public service”, and is aiming for a “decade of national renewal, fixing the fundamentals”. On “day one, sleeves rolled up”, he plans to “hit the ground running”.

In fact, this is Starmer playing the fictional character created during focus groups before the Labour leadership election, as described in Deborah Mattinson’s book Beyond The Red Wall. In 2020, at the behest of influential policy group Labour Together, Mattinson drew together Northern town-dwelling former Labour voters (dubbed “Red Wallers”) and more prosperous city-based current Labourites (“Urban Remainers”). Each side was separately asked to create its ideal political party, complete with its top three possible leaders. Red Wallers chose Sir Alan Sugar, internet finance guru Martin Lewis, and Wetherspoons founder Tim Martin. Apparently unafraid of looking clichéd, the Urban Remainer team chose Michelle Obama, Hugh Grant, and “a young David Attenborough’”. The two teams were then brought back together in a “citizens’ jury” in order to thrash it all out.

Suggested reading

Mama Swifties need to grow up

By Kathleen Stock

Discussion began unpromisingly with Simon, an accountant from London, confiding: “I literally can’t believe that I’m spending a whole day in the same room as a group of people who’d like that awful Wetherspoon’s bloke to be Prime Minister.” Eventually, the whole group were able to come up with a joint wish list for party priorities. And it was one that noticeably skewed towards stereotypical Red Wall concerns: more investment in the NHS, housing, education, and police; getting tough on tax avoidance, and placing restrictions on immigration. The group’s ideal leader, meanwhile, would be someone who demonstrated “strong and purposeful leadership”, “winning back the disaffected” by “identifying a smaller number of defining policies”, and who did not “shy away from or fudge difficult or challenging issues but rather tackled them “head on”.

Mattison would eventually become Starmer’s Director of Strategy. Labour Together’s then-director, Morgan McSweeney, would become the party’s new campaign director and the mastermind of Starmerism. Four years later, a strong and purposeful Starmer entered stage right, jaw set and sleeves rolled-up, ready to hit the ground running on the NHS, housing, education, crime, tax avoidance, and immigration — as instructed.

Apart from suggesting that affluent urban liberals are pathetic pushovers in negotiations with working-class Northerners, what else can we glean from this episode? It seems that the chief aim of Starmerism is now to listen to what “working people” actually want and then try to give it to them. Guided by McSweeney, Starmer’s team reputedly eschews top-down technocracy, veering in a superficially communitarian direction. Liberal attitudes to immigration and radical social justice demands are out, while community and family and fairness are in: stop the boats, save the little platoons.

Suggested reading

Who is Liz Truss kidding?

By Kathleen Stock

Some commentators are emphasising that despite — or perhaps because of — the ideological vagueness, the new ethos is neither populist nor paternalistic; it doesn’t whip the people up nor does it talk down to them, but rather treats them as sensible, decent, and best able to work out their own needs from the grassroots. And the approach is also being presented as pleasingly nimble in response to new events. The current director of Labour Together and a prospective Labour MP, Josh Simons, underscored the benefits of flexibility in an interview last month: “While you can and should draw on thinking and traditions, New Labour, Blue Labour, Old Right, or whatever, if you allow yourselves to be seduced into thinking that any one of those frames can generate the politics, strategy, and policy agenda that you need, then you’re probably not taking the novelty of this moment seriously enough.”

Compared to the fantasised projections of some politicians upon the electorate, this doesn’t necessarily sound bad. Still, it has obvious weak points. One issue is that, without an accompanying positive and well-articulated vision of what human flourishing looks like, communitarianism is only as Left-wing as the community whose desires are currently being accommodated; that is, it will be contingently on the Left of the political spectrum rather than essentially so. And perhaps more seriously, a lack of accompanying discussion about ethical values will leave the electorate chaotically chasing its own tail.

Voters won’t know what Starmer really stands for, because voters won’t know what they themselves really stand for. In his interview, Simons cited political philosopher Michael Sandel as a key influence on his current thinking. Yet one of Sandel’s insights is that you cannot divorce either politics or economics from underlying moral commitments and preferred values. To pretend these things are separate is to implicitly capitulate to a particular moral outlook anyway. To take an obvious example: decreeing that people should be free to do what they want without harming others downgrades the importance of inherited social bonds.

It seems to follow that Labour can’t do an electorate-chasing version of communitarianism without outsourcing its moral conscience in the attempt. Darker economic times even than present ones may soon be coming; and sensible and decent people sometimes get less so under duress. It would be good to have a concrete idea of what Labour’s moral limits are, expressed in plain terms.

And Sandel is also clear in his writing that a viable, explicitly morally inflected communitarianism which prioritises particular values over others requires genuine democratic participation to make it work. In reality, Britain is not just made up of salt-of-the-earth, Brexit-voting social conservatives, obviously. Hugh Grant lives here too. As in a scaled-up version of Mattinson’s citizen jury, ideally the opposing teams would thrash out their ethical differences in civic deliberation — not just because it would tell politicians what they might write into election pledges; but also because it would arguably bring greater clarity about personal values, increase social cohesion, and widen acceptance of any eventual policy outcomes too.

In the past few months, there have been rumours that Labour may introduce citizens’ assemblies for socially divisive issues, which would perhaps be a step in the right direction. Certainly, they need to do something. In the end, being vague about the party’s concrete ethical worldview, while deferring to the sensibleness of the British voter, just won’t be enough.

In Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn, an insider said of Starmer’s tricky stint as Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union: “He said he could only go as far as the rope would let him. He was constantly seeking to increase the radius in which he could roam.” If we are to be in charge of holding Starmer’s rope in future — and perhaps stopping him from increasing the radius, if needed — we had better find adequate ways of working out where the centre should be.

Southgate’s contract expires in December, an enlightened piece of timing that means a decision on his future, whether he will lead England into the next World Cup, does not have to be taken in the emotionally heightened circumstances of the immediate aftermath of the Euros. The sense of stability is unprecedented in English football; the contrast to what is going on in British politics unavoidable. Barring something remarkable between now and the election on 4 July, Southgate will have been manager under five different prime ministers — and he missed David Cameron by only a couple of months. Even Alf Ramsey, who spent more than a decade in the job, only got through four. 

But perhaps the inversion makes sense as politics has become increasingly footballised. As Westminster has become characterised by hyper-partisanship, leaders playing to their base with outrageous claims and demands for a change at the top as a panacea to any ill, so the England manager has become increasingly statesmanlike. 

And yet, it is precisely because of Southgate’s achievements that there is pressure, precisely because he has been there for so long that there is some impatience. If England can’t win something now, then when will they ever break the drought that has endured since 1966? Since the 2018 World Cup, the narrative has shifted: Southgate is no longer the waistcoated magus, conjuring remarkable performances from an unexceptional squad; he is the dull bureaucrat holding back a generation of unprecedented creative talent. Perhaps a Keir Starmer parallel is a stretch, but sometimes the country just needs a refreshing dose of dullness.

The boring truth, as ever, lies somewhere between the two extremes. Southgate’s three unexceptional years in charge of Middlesbrough — which ended in relegation — would never have been enough to have made him a serious candidate for the England job in normal times. But in the context of Sam Allardyce having been forced out just 69 days after his arrival by the Telegraph’s underwhelming sting — which revealed nothing more than his willingness to accept huge sums of money to give speeches overseas and to offer advice to agents seeking to comply with the Premier League’s third-party contract regulations — England just needed somebody available and uncontroversial.

Southgate had been England’s Under-21 manager and was working with the FA on its various development programmes — making him at least partially responsible for the glut of attacking talent he is now supposedly restricting. He never sought the top job, rather it was thrust upon him. As he led England through qualification and then to the semi-final of the 2018 World Cup, there was a sense of him as a Richard Hannay figure, an accidental hero. Set against the chaotic backdrop of the Brexit negotiations, Southgate seemed an old-fashioned English hero, modest and decent in his waistcoat, his strength nothing flashy or extravagant but a quiet determination, backed up by dogged research. 

For the first time at a World Cup, England won a penalty shoot-out, the result of diligent practice and work with psychologists. Set-plays became a major weapon: again, something planned, but an unglamorous way of winning. The country was gripped by a strange euphoria. England had been dismal in every tournament since Euro 2004; this was the unleashing of a great pent-up patriotic wave.

More from this author

Thomas Piketty and the decline of football

By Jonathan Wilson

Tournaments are deceptive spaces, their place in the popular consciousness far more down to their vibe than any actual detail. In the aftermath of their elimination by Iceland at Euro 2016 under Roy Hodgson and then his successor’s rapid departure after being caught on camera apparently drinking a pint of wine (Allardyce was obviously drinking water, but reputation sometimes skews the perspective), England were a laughing stock and so to reach the semi-final was a remarkable achievement.

But England did lose as many games as they had won in that tournament and the draw had been very kind. There was also a sense that the semi-final against Croatia represented an opportunity missed. England had gone 1-0 up and then had apparently frozen with the line in sight. Southgate had responded slowly to Croatia taking control of midfield. Both issues would be raised again at Euro 2020.

That competition really was a golden chance squandered. Again the draw was relatively gentle — even offering up a fading Germany for a cathartic 2-0 win. The tournament was spread across Europe but, because of differing Covid regulations, England ended up playing six of their seven games at Wembley. In the final against Italy, they went 1-0 up. But again England froze as their fingers closed on the prize and again Southgate was slow to react. 

Even then, they might have won on penalties. Southgate was meticulous. He had done more work on penalties than any previous England manager. He had ended the hoodoo. If Marcus Rashford’s penalty had gone three inches to the right, England would probably have won. But it hit the post and bounced to safety, then Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho missed. England had fumbled the opportunity again. 

This time, there was far less sympathy. This time, as the three players who had missed were subjected to racist abuse on social media, there was a reckoning, less of Southgate than of fan behaviour at the final. A day of heavy drinking, cocaine openly consumed on the street and a fan sticking a flare up his arse culminated in a surge on Wembley and several hundred fans getting in without tickets, and fighting on the concourses. The glee of 2018 had curdled.

Southgate had begun to lose support on the political Right because of his support of players taking the knee. Then, at the World Cup in Qatar in 2022, he lost support from the Left because of his reluctance to be overly critical of the host nation.

But perhaps what is most striking is how calm he has remained discussing such subjects. He has never attacked the questioner, never sneered, never become flustered. He’s always been quite willing to discuss wider issues, when it would be very easy for him to insist that he’s just a football man. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to recognise a value in his tone, to wonder whether life mightn’t be better if more press conferences were conducted with similar consideration, thoughtfulness and graciousness.

Suggested reading

A Euros election is a gift to Starmer

By Anthony Broxton

In terms of the football, England played well in Qatar. They were more expansive than they had been at the Euros, seemingly more confident in their creative abilities. They lost in the quarter-final but in a close game against France that could have gone either way. Maguire headed against the post at one end then Olivier Giroud’s effort at the other flicked his head and flashed in. Harry Kane missed a penalty. Another referee might have decided Saka was fouled in the build-up to France’s opener. 

Perhaps Kane’s miss from the spot eight minutes from time was a result of anxiety but this was a different quality of exit; there was no real sense of a chance wasted, just two good teams going at each other and the margins favouring France. To an extent, it was a measure of how far Southgate had brought the side that England went into a game against the reigning world champions as their near equals. And yet, the nagging thought remained that England always lose when they face good sides; it’s a thought that is not entirely explained by the fact that few teams look particularly good once you’ve beaten them.

And so Southgate goes again, into a fourth tournament. There is real expectation. Germany, Portugal, Spain and Italy, possibly the Netherlands and Belgium all look dangerous, but England and France have the best squads. Southgate’s selection has prompted talk of his ruthlessness in leaving out Marcus Rashford, Jordan Henderson, James Maddison and Jack Grelaish, as though this was a new decisiveness.

The truth is he has always been ruthless, as Joe Hart and Wayne Rooney discovered when they were left out of the squad for Russia in 2018. Southgate has always been his own man, ignoring the clamour for certain players and claims he is over-loyal, never afraid to dispose of a player if necessary; it’s just that his air of reasonableness means it often goes unnoticed. He said very early on in his reign that he wanted to stand or fall on his own terms and to that ideal he has remained true.

He has been an excellent England manager, the best since Alf Ramsey, who also battled constant accusations of overcaution. If he could only react quicker to in-game problems and get his players to lose their fear of success, he might actually win something.

Once, the rich and powerful built cathedrals or temples; now they build stadiums. The Olimpico in Rome was Mussolini’s reimagining of an amphitheatre, positioning himself as emperor. The concrete sweep of the Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro was modernism tempered by a Latin sensuality entirely in keeping with the optimistic Brazil of the late Forties. Al-Bayt, a tent emerging from the desert north of Doha, was a vast symbol of Qatar’s welcome to the world. The Groupama Arena, you suspect, is how Viktor Orbán’s Hungary likes to see itself: energetic, modern and yet rooted in history; before the main entrance are three statues, of the former players Sándor Kocsis and Flórián Albert, and of the first chairman of Ferencváros, Ferenc Springer.

As thousands mustered in support for him at the weekend, few would dispute that Orbán’s rule has been illiberal, but his achievements, at best, have been mixed. Where he has unquestionably succeeded, however, is in football. Why does it occupy so much of his energy?

Sport lies at the heart of Orbán’s project and football is his greatest love: the Groupama Arena is one of more than 40 football stadiums refurbished since he returned to power in 2010. Orbán used to play for the youth team of Videoton, a club based in Székesfehérvár near his home village of Felcsút, while his first official overseas trip in his first stint as prime minister was to the 1998 World Cup final. In 2007, when he was out of office, he founded a football academy in Felcsút, naming it after Puskás, Hungary’s greatest ever player. Six years later, the academy team was promoted to the top flight for the first time and has since qualified for Europe three times.

This was, of course, something of a political victory, too. All 12 sides in the Nemzeti Bajnokság have some sort of link to Fidész, the governing party, though none more overt than Ferencváros, who in April sealed their fifth Hungarian league title in a row. Their president since 2011 has been Gábor Kubatov, an MP and vice-president of Fidész. When we met last month, I wondered how willing he would be to get into the politics of it all — but within seconds, the familiar Fidész lines were spilling out. “We are a Christian country 1,000 years old,” he said. “We protect our heritage and history. We look after our culture and beliefs. We stopped migration at the border and we don’t allow gender ideology. As a result, Hungary has become the most secure country in Europe. You can walk safely at night in Hungarian cities.”

As for so many in Fidész, for Kubatov 2010 — the year of Orbán’s return — marks year zero. Everything is before or after that date. And for football, the picture has transformed radically for the better. It’s not just the tax breaks that have allowed the rash of new and refurbished stadiums. Before 2010, grassroots clubs were disappearing; often poorly maintained, few protested when their pitches were built over. Since 2010, however, resources have been found to build 1,590 new pitches and refurbish 2,800 others.

But why? György Szöllősi, the editor of the national sports daily Nemzety Sport, and a former head of media at the Puskás Academy, often talks of the need to reverse the underinvestment of the immediate post-communist years — but there are other more obviously important demands on the public purse, notably health and education.

Suggested reading

Inside the Orbán insurgency

By Lily Lynch

Tracing the results of investment in football infrastructure is never straightforward, but there are worse places to start than 2016, when Hungary qualified for the European Championship, their first appearance at a major finals since 1986. Although they’ve missed out on both World Cups since, they also qualified for both Euro 2020 and 2024 and will play in the highest tier of the 2024-25 Nations League, having twice beaten England in the last edition. And, for the first time in a long time, there is a clutch of Hungarian players at top European clubs — notably Dominik Szoboszlai at Liverpool and Péter Gulácsi and Willi Orbán (no relation) at RB Leipzig. Progress for club sides has been less striking but since 2010, the Hungarian league has risen from 32nd in the Uefa ranking of coefficients to 23rd.

The other big change in football since 2010 has been the crowds, which are slowly growing again. Last season, the average attendance was 3,541. That’s still well down on the mid-Fifties when 15,000 or so was standard — but, excluding the Covid lockdown, the average has risen every year since 2015, when they hit a low of 2,502.

The make-up of crowds is changing as well. Kubatov remembers with shame the monkey-chanting that greeted the visit of Ajax to Ferencváros in 1995, or the way ultras would habitually mark Hitler’s birthday with antisemitic songs and gestures. He has attempted to tackle that in his time as president, with the result that ultras boycotted Ferencváros games for three and a half years. Lighting flares and invading the pitch have been criminalised, while improved security at games, with cameras and tickets that carry biometric data, means that perpetrators can be isolated and prosecuted. “When they’ve been fined 2 million Forints (£4,400),” Kubatov said with a slightly alarming relish, “they’ll think twice about it.”

Which all sounds very much in line with Fidész’s tough stance on law and order, but it doesn’t tally with memories of the last Euros, when black-clad Hungary fans directed monkey chants at France’s players and brandished homophobic banners. Jude Bellingham and Raheem Sterling were also racially abused during a World Cup qualifier in Budapest in 2021. And when England last played in Hungary, in the Nations League a year later, it was in a stadium from which adult fans had been banned because of racist and homophobic chanting. “The committee that makes a decision like that,” Hungary’s foreign minister Peter Szijjarto said, “is a pitiful and cowardly body. They should be ashamed of themselves.”

Those black-clad fans are the Carpathian Brigade, the result of a Fidész policy that seems to have backfired. In 2009, party leaders met ultra groups from various clubs and, in an attempt to curtail neo-Nazi violence, formed the Brigade. Initially, it was supposed to bring fans together behind the national team while helping various charities. For a while it worked, but as the Brigade grew in popularity, the far-Right element took control and there was violence at games against Romania in 2013 and 2014. Which presents Fidész with a problem. On the one hand, the ultras are on their side on most culture-war issues — but on the other, they have the potential to be an embarrassment while at the same time representing a dangerously anarchic force.

Since the Fifties, football terraces have been a locus of dissent, the weight of numbers providing a measure of security, which perhaps explains why Kubatov is so keen to crack down on misbehaviour. But hooliganism also puts off the families and wealthier fans he wants to attract for business reasons; he has even discussed a fast-track system for stadium entrance for those willing to pay for it. But football, as many illiberal regimes have found, is not readily controllable; club affiliation offers an identity that can challenge the regime.

More from this author

Thomas Piketty and the decline of football

By Jonathan Wilson

This makes Orbán’s obsession fascinating. It’s not as simple as bread and circuses; even if the trend is upward, attendances at Hungarian league games are simply not big enough for anyone to think they serve as a mass distraction or opiate. Rather, there is clearly a sense that, by staging major events, Hungary, in a less dramatic way than Saudi Arabia or Qatar, is positioning itself as a major player in global sport with all the attendant benefits that brings in terms of influence and prestige. Budapest’s vast Puskás Arena, it was announced in April, will host the 2026 Champions League final.

Orbán himself overtly harks back to the early Fifties when Hungary was widely regarded as the best side in the world, as though trying to portray the present as the start of a second golden age. The problem with that, though, is both a sense of Puskás-fatigue and the fact that, while the early Fifties might have been a great era for Hungarian football, the economy was collapsing and a backlash was beginning against Mátyás Rákosi’s hardline Stalinist regime, leading ultimately to the 1956 uprising and the mass defection of players, including Puskás — something of which Orbán must be aware.

Orbán, a keen reference of the importance of 1956, no doubt knows this. In the end, his investment in football may come down to nothing more complicated than the fact that he really likes football.

Just as Rishi Sunak has now pinned his electoral hopes on changing inflation figures, Prime Minister Harold Wilson saw a small window of opportunity to go to the polls. There was just one problem: as Wilson himself recognised, “the conflict with the World Cup had to be considered”. If England were defeated just before polling day, the Government would surely suffer. But when the “mystical symbiosis”, as Roy Jenkins described it, of Labour and the England team winning in harmony was put before them, they had little option but to take it.

Wilson understood the fortunes of the England football team mattered more to people than the fortunes of his government. He had tried to use it to his advantage in 1966, when he ensured he was the keynote speaker at the launch of the tournament and made a rapid dash back from Canada on the day of the final to make sure he could bask in the glory of victory. Later, he joined the team at the Royal Garden Hotel to celebrate.

Some in the government believed victory in 1966 could turn the British economy around. Richard Crossman hoped it would “be a decisive factor in strengthening sterling” with the banks inspired by England’s “gallant fight”. But as the government continued to lose standing in the country and the polls, it proved to be a false dawn.

Rishi Sunak is the only other Prime Minister in half a century to pitch his hopes against the backdrop of an England campaign. Just like Wilson in 1970, he has been waiting for the first glimpse of economic good news to call it. And just like the England team in 1970, our boys head to Germany this summer as the favourites to win.

Had Sunak’s team looked at the Wilson campaign, however, they would have seen how quickly events on the football pitch can shape the feel of a campaign. And the omens do not look good.

Back in 1970, things started badly for the government when the arrest of England captain, Bobby Moore, in Colombia — for allegedly stealing a bracelet from a jewellery shop — derailed the launch of their manifesto. Politics was knocked off the front page for days, while Wilson attempted to intervene to release him. When Moore was eventually let off without charge, Wilson was quick to claim credit. He even accused the Conservative leader, Edward Heath, of wanting England to lose. “Is there no triviality to which this man won’t descend?” replied Heath.

On the ground, it was clear that World Cup fever had gripped the nation more than the election, as MPs wondered why people were not turning up for their meetings. Roy Jenkins even moved one rally to accommodate England’s fixtures but was furious when only a “hundred or so people” turned up. The buzz around the tournament even reached the orbit of Tony Benn. After a hard day’s campaigning, he reflected in his diary that the mood in the country was changing after England lost to Brazil and that the “political effect, can’t be altogether ignored”.

The slow-paced nature of the group stages allowed the public to dip their toe into some of the election arguments — many of which will again play out this summer. On housing, Wilson “bitterly regretted” that his government had failed to meet demand. Meanwhile, rising immigration was put on the agenda by Enoch Powell who issued his own manifesto to “halt immigration now”. Tensions boiled over at one meeting where Powell was met with 300 protestors; it was reported that “punches were exchanged” between stewards and demonstrators.

Wilson advised his Labour ministers not to engage with Powell, who had huge appeal to working-class voters in the Midlands. Tony Benn took the bait but, by and large, Labour focused on the economy. “The biggest challenge facing any industrial nation today is how to expand the economy without pushing up its costs,” read its manifesto. “The answer lies in increasing our productivity.”

Suggested reading

What did Britain do to deserve this?

By Brad Evans

At first, Wilson’s safety-first approach appeared to be working. Crossman noted in his diary that the country was ready and willing to accept another six years of Labour that would allow them to firmly establish themselves as a natural party of government. England’s football team also appeared to be dominant. On the day they were due to face West Germany in the Quarter Finals, the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, made a speech in Devon where he all but conceded defeat: “It is now clear that nationally the Labour Party is romping home.”

And as Harold Wilson settled down along with 20 million others to watch England race into a 2-0 lead against West Germany, everything appeared to be going to plan. But in a moment that would enter political and football folklore, Sir Alf Ramsey took off Bobby Charlton to preserve his energy whereupon England slumped to a crushing 3-2 defeat. In an instant, England were no longer world champions; the nation’s pride had been shattered.

On the campaign trail, MPs reported back that few seemed interested in politics; people only wanted to talk about England’s poor performance. The heatwave ended and the reality of the team’s defeat sank in. Undermining his campaign, new trade figures showed that the economy was not doing as well as Wilson had thought. Just 48 hours before the polling stations opened, the Board of Trade announced that export-import figures were £31 million in the red. The shadow chancellor, Iain Macleod, argued that it showed exactly why Wilson had wanted to cut and run. “The honeymoon after devaluation is over,” he declared.

But Heath confounded the pollsters to pull off a stunning upset. In the aftermath, people wondered whether England’s defeat had led to a change in morale that altered the outcome of the vote. And while it is impossible to pinpoint the exact causes of late shifts in voter behaviour, David Butler and Michael Pinto-Duschinsky concluded in the British General Election of 1970 study that England’s defeat “may have contributed to a switch in mood”.

Since 1970, politicians have increasingly sought to use football to create their own narratives about patriotism and national renewal. In Euro 96, as the tournament opened in England, John Major declared that the “economic prospects are bright” and that “we have a lot to be positive about in this country”. Tony Blair tried to link the success of the England team to his aim of developing a winning mentality within Labour. “Second place is not the goal,” he wrote. “The high of watching success is incomparable. In sport as in politics, a well-fought campaign for second place means nothing.”

Suggested reading

For the Tories, things can only get worse

By Tom McTague

By Euro 2020, however, supporting England had become a contested political issue. Conservative figures such as Lee Anderson boycotted the team after players took the knee in support of Black Lives Matter protests. Recent Labour convert Natalie Elphicke, suggested Marcus Rashford should have spent more time “perfecting his game” rather than “playing politics” over his free school meals campaign. By contrast, leading Labour figures such as Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan tried to claim Gareth Southgate’s “progressive patriotism” as their own.

When England kick off their Euros campaign next month, both Starmer and Sunak will look to tap into any feel-good factor that emerges in the wider country. Yet in truth, the timing of the “Euro’s election” is a bizarre one. By holding the election on 4 July, England will have only played their three group games and one Round-of-16 match by the time the voters head to the polling stations. The really big games will come afterwards, leaving the next Prime Minister with a potential golden run of a Quarter, Semi, and a Final in a frantic two-week period. Back when Euro 96 fever gripped the nation, England beat Scotland, the Netherlands and Spain in a week. One journalist observed that in the days after, you could “plunge your thermometer anywhere in England’s psyche today, and it emerges glowing red with patriotic fever”.

If history were to repeat itself, Sunak’s final act could be to gift Starmer the opportunity to spend his first few days as Prime Minister overseeing scenes of national celebration not seen since 1966. Starmer would have a free shot at pinning his arguments about a decade of national renewal to the success of a young and vibrant England side. In other words, Sunak would have scored an own goal.

And just as Wilson could always say that only under Labour have England won the World Cup, Starmer could say the same about the Euros. Faced with such a scenario, downtrodden Conservatives could be forgiven for feeling left with only one choice: hoping that England fail miserably and are out of the competition before they are out of office.

Yet beneath the superficial sheen of this success, one finds a paradox: Johnson, once celebrated for the originality and raw charisma of his wrestling character, has spent the past two decades navigating a career marked by sterile blandness. Even in a marketplace brimming with astroturfed celebrities, Johnson’s deliberate brand-construction is remarkable. Unlike fellow ubiquitous megastars — see Taylor Swift — he has managed to earn billions without generating even a single news cycle’s worth of controversy, hot takes, and “discourse”.

This is, of course, nothing to be sniffed at. Johnson now showcases a fatless, hairless and thoroughly hyper-masculine physique that far surpasses what he achieved in his youth, during his days as a college football player or as a young wrestling icon. Such hyperbolic musculature normally invites speculation, yet Johnson’s vehement denial of steroid use has largely gone unquestioned. Somehow, he is both the most jacked human to ever front action movies — far larger than Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime — and one of the least interrogated. It’s as if his massive size renders him invisible, the perfect cover for selling the self-as-content in this latest stage of capitalism.

In a similar vein, despite being hailed as one of Hollywood’s premier stars, Johnson’s solo drawing power remains startlingly nebulous. His most lucrative cinematic ventures, notably the Fast & Furious series, are ensemble pieces, while his foray into the superhero genre with the DCU’s Black Adam (2022) was a resounding dud. Only in a pair of critically panned roles in Southland Tales (2006) and Pain & Gain (2013) — in which he plays an anxiety-riddled actor and an anxiety-riddled bodybuilder respectively — does his capacity for depth and nuance emerge. Perhaps such feckless characters represent his truest self; it would explain why his attempts at gravitas and bravado have always fallen short.

The prolific nature of Johnson’s career further complicates the narrative. His relentless output — from film projects to business ventures such as the acquisition and merger of two minor spring American football leagues — paints a picture of a man in constant motion. Yet his relentless productivity, while admirable, often feels devoid of the originality and vibrancy that defined his first half-decade as a pro wrestler. Once someone who defined wrestling’s “attitude” for an entire generation, he now struggles to define anything. Even the occasional calls for him to run for president are met with lukewarm bipartisan support solely because so little is known about him; when, for instance, he appeared at the 2000 Republican National Convention, he spoke about the importance of voting.

One might think, then, that Johnson’s wrestling heritage, arising from the storied Anoa’i family that has produced dozens of all-time greats, would add a much-needed layer to his persona. Yet while his career undoubtedly benefits from nepotism — both his grandfather Peter Maivia and his father Rocky Johnson were major stars — his mainstream success outside of wrestling has been carefully curated to transcend specific cultural or racial identities, positioning him as a universal symbol of success and appeal. This strategy, however, while effective in broadening his audience, has only diluted the authenticity of his connection to his roots and the wrestling community.

More from this author

Nikki Haley's chameleon complex

By Oliver Bateman

Perhaps blind to this, the recent build-up to April’s signature WrestleMania premium live event — the largest pro wrestling show of the year — features Johnson confronting fellow second-generation star Cody Rhodes while simultaneously flaunting his heritage as the head of the WWE’s true royal “Bloodline”. This narrative, engaging as it may be, highlights the constructed nature of his public persona, blurring the lines between the authentic and the performative, the personal and the corporate. It raises the question of whether Johnson’s engagement with his cultural identity and the wrestling world is driven by a genuine connection or, now that he serves on the board of directors of TKO (which owns WWE), merely another role to be played in the grand narrative of a career devoted to the ruthless acquisition of money.

Some might retort that Johnson is simply embracing a narrative of success, but this masks a deeper, more troubling reality: his evolution is emblematic of the rise of the hyper-manufactured star, devoid of any distinguishing features that could tether them to a definable identity or cultural lineage. And while it may prove lucrative, there are obvious pitfalls: his deliberate positioning as a post-racial, cross-genre juggernaut not only obscures his own cultural heritage but also reinforces the problematic notion that true mainstream success requires a dilution of one’s ethnic and cultural specificity. In striving to be all things to all people, Johnson inadvertently perpetuates a homogenised vision of celebrity that prioritises palatability over authenticity, a troubling precedent for a society grappling with issues of representation and identity, from “pronouns in bio” social-media posting to corporate DEI training and the backlash to both.

Moreover, the relentless expansion of Johnson’s brand across various media and industries exemplifies a capitalist ethos run amok, where every facet of one’s life and identity is commodified and leveraged for maximum profit. This commodification of self is not unique to Johnson, but his case does represent a broader trend where public figures are expected to be endlessly consumable and completely anodyne, their value measured by their marketability rather than their lasting contributions to the cultural landscape. The result is a celebrity culture saturated with figures who, despite their omnipresence, offer little in the way of meaningful engagement or artistic innovation.

More from this author

Is the Marvel Universe about to implode?

By Oliver Bateman

We can even witness this sacrifice of culture for the sake of spectacle in Johnson’s sporting activities elsewhere. Consider his involvement in the revival of the XFL spring football league: while such efforts to provide an alternative to the NFL for lesser or still-aspiring players are commendable, the endeavour also reflects a focus on value, often at the expense of deeper cultural or social significance. These spring leagues have minimal viewership, with ratings lagging behind reruns of decades-old sitcoms — but they have significant value as “streaming content” for networks such as ESPN to make available to “content consumers”. Johnson, if nothing else, is a content man, producing vast amounts of “entertainment” for his entertainment-studio paymasters.

In this, Johnson’s tortuous path to the top confronts us with a disquieting portrait of modern fame: a landscape dominated by figures who, in their quest for universal appeal, lose sight of the very qualities that made them compelling. In a country overseen by a doddering octogenarian president challenged by a risible septuagenarian foe, Johnson and his ilk are quintessential end-of-empire figures; indeed, the Johnson that shows up in Black Adam or the Fast & Furious films might as well be an AI deepfake.

For this great star, then, what began as a promising blend of charisma, talent, and cultural specificity has been gradually subsumed by a sterile brand of market-driven celebrity. And while this may be a testament to his adaptability and business acumen, it also serves as a cautionary tale about the costs of such adaptability, both for the individual and for a culture increasingly bereft of authentic voices and visions. The Rock, in other words, has made himself into the perfect voice for this generation’s ears, content to say the same things in the same way until his run, and perhaps ours, has reached its logical end.

Putin, who grew up in St Petersburg, is no great fan of football — but he recognises its power. “I consider this victory,” he said at the time, “as one of the brightest acknowledgements of the rise of Russian football and, more widely, Russian sports.” Midfielder Konstantin Zyryanov, who scored Zenit’s second goal in the final, similarly recognised the broader context: “Hopefully now in Europe they will start to take us more seriously. Perhaps that is the fundamental effect of our triumph.”

And for a time, Europe did take notice. Soviet football never quite delivered on its promise; might Russian football, apparently shedding the complications of state control, be about to deliver?

In December 2010, when Russia won the right to host the 2018 World Cup, Putin turned up unexpectedly in the Zurich conference hall to witness the result. But that was the high point. In the competition that followed, Russia played well enough, reaching the quarter final. But the nation’s organisers seem to have regarded it as an end in itself; there was little legacy-planning even before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 changed everything. Today, Russian football now stands as a pariah, its clubs banned from Uefa competition and its national team from this summer’s European Championship. Average attendance at league games is down 32% on the high of the season after the World Cup. The war, clearly, is a major factor. Yet the reality is that the decline was already underway.

Back in 2008, it certainly seemed that Russian football was standing on the brink of a golden era. Three years earlier, CSKA Moscow had become the first Russian side to win a European trophy, lifting the Uefa Cup. In 2007, Russia’s national team outplayed England in Moscow, their dominance far greater than the 2-1 scoreline would suggest. Partly as a result, England failed to qualify for Euro 2008, where Russia reached the semi-final with a memorable victory over the Netherlands in Basel.

For its part, Zenit had a fleet of gifted home-grown players — seven in the starting line-up for the final — and they had the backing of Gazprom. With other oligarchs and energy giants beginning to show an interest in football, it seemed possible that Russia could become a major player; that Zenit or Spartak, the most popular of the Moscow clubs, might become one of the European elite, sitting alongside United or Barcelona or Bayern. “The important thing is that these triumphs become regular,” the Zenit president Alexandr Dyukov said. “Only then can Zenit be called a super-club.”

It never happened. Three times Zenit reached the last 16 of the Champions League, most recently in 2015-16, and three times they lost. And even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the nation’s footballing prowess was in retreat. In 2008, the Russian league was ranked sixth in Europe, a position it still held in 2019. By the time the war began, it was down to 18th. So, what went wrong? Was the dream of a Russian super-club destined to fail?

Zenit, a former club insider admits, weren’t ready for their success in 2008. For years, the club had been a punchline in Russian football, a byword for underachievement. They only won the Soviet title once, in 1984, and did nothing of note after fragmentation until a gifted young generation came together under the Czech coach Vlastimil Petržela. It was his legacy on which Advocaat built, leading Zenit to a first Russian title in 2007.

Suddenly, led by a highly respected European coach, backed by a vastly rich energy company that was building them a fine modern stadium, and because Zenit were in the hugely advantageous position of being the only club in a city of 5.5 million people, the potential seemed obvious. And in this context, they didn’t fare too badly. After Advocaat came a string of respected coaches: the current Italy national manager Luciano Spalletti; the former Chelsea and Tottenham manager André Villas-Boas; the vastly experienced Romanian Mircea Lucescu; Roberto Mancini, who had won the Premier League with Manchester City. But while they were followed by a number of high-profile international players, there was a lack of experience, particularly in terms of the sort of global marketing strategies that are necessary at the highest level of football.

Still, Zenit came close. Two of those Champions League last-16 ties were decided by a single goal over two legs. A refereeing decision here, a moment of inspiration there, a helpful bounce of the ball and they could have been quarter-finalists and then, who knows? But they had the problem all insurgent clubs have: seedings in Uefa competition are calculated using a coefficient based on five years of performances. A history of achievement provides a safety net; for challengers, one slip-up can have profound effects in terms of future draws.

More from this author

Ivory Coast is back from the dead

By Jonathan Wilson

And there were external issues, too. The sanctions imposed on Russia after the seizure of Crimea in 2014 were nowhere near as wide-ranging as those in 2022, but they still caused a fall in the value of the rouble. That in turn led to a shift in priorities. Abramovich had once covered the entirety of Guus Hiddink’s $3-million salary as national coach through the national academy at Togliatti, but he stopped funding the academy completely. A plan for 10 covered stadiums, which would have allowed football to be played even in the depths of winter, was also abandoned.

Less dramatically, in 2011, Uefa introduced its Financial Fair Play regulations, which, despite what many now claim, were formulated to discourage clubs from spending beyond their means. A largely unintended consequence of that has been to make it much harder for clubs from outside the elite to spend their way to the top table. In 2008, for instance, it still seemed possible that Gazprom or Lukoil, which was involved at Spartak, could do what Abramovich had done at Chelsea: splurge hundreds of millions on players and effectively buy success. By 2011, that was essentially impossible, particularly given the relatively underdeveloped state of the Russian market in terms of TV rights, gate receipts and merchandising and the resultant lack of revenue.

The potash billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, who in January 2011 bought FC Anzhi of Makhachkala, the largest city in Dagestan, is illustrative here. After enticing Hiddink as coach and players of the calibre of Samuel Eto’o and Roberto Carlos, he was forced to scale back in 2013 after a misguided decision to break with the Belarusian company that sustained potash prices led to financial problems just as the FFP regulators were beginning to sniff around. Kerimov ended up having to reduce the budget by two-thirds, leading to a fire sale and relegation in 2014.

There have also been wider issues of governance, with decisions taken by the Russian Football Union often for obscure political reasons without due consultation with clubs. The limit on foreign players, for instance, has been repeatedly tweaked over the past two decades, often at extremely short notice. That, for instance, scuppered deals Zenit had lined up for the Portugal midfielder João Moutinho and the Colombia forward Radamel Falcão and made long-term planning impossible.

Suggested reading

The cost of Russia's collapsing empire

By Robert D. Kaplan

But the clubs themselves are also at fault. As the former Zenit insider said, even when they weren’t corrupt, and they often were, there was a lack of expertise — understandable enough for a culture formed in the days of state control and then the wild west of the Nineties. With the exception of Krasnodar, every major club in Russia is once again owned by some branch of the state (Spartak might claim they remain a private entity but their owner, Lukoil, is heavily dependent on the state).

Allegations of match-fixing have also been levelled at Zenit and, at the very least, it looks bad that, for all but two years and nine months since 2005, the president of the Russian Football Union has come from Zenit, who have won the last five league titles. Even if it is not illicit, Gazprom, which was a Uefa sponsor before sanctions but after the invasion, and its president Alexei Miller have huge influence. In 2019, for instance, Rubin Kazan signed winger Alexei Sutormin from Orenburg, a small club sponsored by a local offshoot of Gazprom. Nine days later, the deal was mysteriously cancelled and Sutormin joined Zenit for a far smaller fee.

Does this mean Zenit could have jostled its way to a permanent place at the top table? Perhaps. Certainly it was reasonable to raise the question in 2008, given the resources that seemed available to them. But the want of institutional knowledge and a competitive league probably would have scuppered them even before events intervened. And now Russian football stands on the outside, foreigner regulations eased so teams are awash with the cheap exoticism of second-rate Brazilians, while the national team is reduced to playing any country that will still tolerate them: in the past six months they have faced Qatar, Cameroon, Kenya and Cuba and this month they have friendlies against Serbia and Paraguay. Faced with such opposition, the glory nights in Manchester and Basel seem a long time ago.

The source of this conflict isn’t so much that the Glazers borrowed the money to buy the club and secured the debt against United. Nor is it that they’re foreign: there have been plenty of football bosses who were born overseas. No, it is that they rarely go to Old Trafford and sit with the Red faithful. Add to that the club’s sustained failure to recapture the glory days under Sir Alex Ferguson, when it won every major honour and did so repeatedly, and the stage was set for a prolonged outpouring of bile and violence.

When the Glazers bought the club in 2005, many were concerned about their use of high-interest loans, secured against the club’s assets, to complete the £800-million purchase. The supporters felt their club was being stolen. Such was their anger that, after their first game, the Glazer brothers, Joel, Avie and Bryan, left the ground in the back of a police van. Since then, they have had every opportunity to explain themselves, to show that the deal, while clever, did not affect the playing side; that under them, United would remain top of the tree. But they didn’t, and the opprobrium stuck.

Such is the opaque nature of United’s finances that it has been impossible to say how much, exactly, the owners have taken out of the club in personal loans, consultancy payments and dividends. But now we have a rough idea, after Sir Jim Ratcliffe paid £1.25 billion for 25% of the club. A Manc and lifelong United fan, he’s viewed by some as a returning saviour.

For the rest of the business world, though, the deal represented an important signal as to where the Glazers think sport is heading. After all, they had the chance to sell the entire club, and end the personal onslaught, but they preferred to retain 75%. In other words, after 19 years, it seems the insults and brickbats were a price worth paying.

Why might this be? Well, despite the lack of public warmth, the Glazers adore owning United. It’s their calling card, affording them a cachet they would not otherwise possess. They attend Formula One and the cricket in the Indian Premier League. United has a pavilion at Davos, the only football club to do so, while Avie is a regular at the World Economic Forum, mixing with the world’s business and political leaders.

Then there’s the belief that United could be worth significantly more than Ratcliffe’s valuation — £10 billion rather than £5 billion. If Chelsea, not even among the top two teams in London based on commercial firepower, could be sold for £4 billion in 2022, then United must be worth at least twice that.

So goes the theory — and it’s not hard to see why. While the players have underwhelmed on the pitch in the Glazer years, United’s marketeers and salespeople have excelled. As the media spent years focussing on the players attending Carrington, United’s training facility, the Glazers were busy assembling a 100-strong sales and advertising workforce 200 miles to the south, in London. The supporters complained, rightly, that the roof at Old Trafford was leaking. Carrington, too, has seen better days. Meanwhile, The Cliff — the training ground that produced the legendary “Busby Babes”, that enabled the Phoenix-like resurrection of the team after the Munich air disaster, then saw the likes of George Best, Bobby Charlton, Dennis Law and the “Class of ‘92” — fell into disrepair. Not, however, the sumptuous premises in Pall Mall and, after they proved too small, in Mayfair.

When making their decision, the Glazers will also have considered how football as a sport is set to change. Already, players are testing micro-cameras on their shirts. The idea is that, thanks to Augmented Reality (AR) technology, we will be able to see the action unfold as if we are a particular player, or even the referee.

Similarly, avatars are in their infancy. As one City executive said to me recently: “Just think, if people are prepared to pay to watch Abba perform, knowing it’s not really Abba, how could that work for football? They could be at a stadium in Asia watching avatars of the United players playing in a match.” Online betting is also a consideration. For United, which has a massive following in Asia, where gambling is huge, the prospects are enticing.

In the US, meanwhile, which is due to host the next World Cup, the influence on English football is already sizeable. It’s no coincidence that two US-owned British clubs, United and Liverpool, were among the main drivers of an enormously lucrative new European Super League. Of course, the initial proposals were howled down by fans, the media and politicians, but they are now being floated again. United has said it is opposed, but it’s hard to imagine that, if the league did get the go-ahead, the biggest club would not take part.

All of which points to United still representing a valuable investment. And yet, it seems the Glazers still struggled to make a decision. Most obviously, they don’t like partnerships; their father Malcolm, who created the family’s wealth, preferred operating alone and so do they. They’re suspicious, keen to remain in the shadows. Hence a 241-page “pre-nup” with the British tycoon. It is revealing that, among its myriad clauses filed at the New York Stock Exchange, is an agreement between both parties to not criticise the other in public. Glazer-Ratcliffe is not a marriage galvanised by natural attraction and desire; it’s a business arrangement that errs heavily on the side of caution.

For his part, Ratcliffe receives a great dollop of kudos and positive PR. He’s a local lad, and the first in the queue for when the Glazers do decide to depart. Until then, his holding is going to deter any other potential suitors. It’s as much an investment for the future as victory now.

In a smart first move, money has been put aside to repair the roof which will earn him instant acclaim. But it remains to be seen whether he can go on and earn the fans’ affection. As with the Glazers, he is not the sort to deal with partners; he likes to be in sole control. Who decides if a transfer should go ahead, and who decides to raise the offer and blow the opposition away? It stands to reason that it will be those who speak for three-quarters of the amount being paid.

As for the United fans, at least they now have a reason to hope. Yes, it will still be money that talks at the top. But when, on match-day, they look up at the Director’s Box, it’s unlikely there will be empty seats.

And at the heart of it was Euro 96. And at the heart of that was the England manager Terry Venables, who died on Saturday. It wasn’t so much that England played well — other than the frankly incredible 4-1 win over the Netherlands, they didn’t especially. Nor was it even that they reached the semi-final, although that helped — obviously. It was about the mood and the atmosphere. After football’s years of horror and violence, this seemed the consecration of a smarter, cheerier, less confrontational age.

Before kick-off, stadiums were full of smiling fans singing along to “Three Lions”, an anthem that, unusually for a football song, looked on defeat and disappointment and found it beautiful. This was a new sensibility: knowing, ironic, unaggressive. The post-Italia 90 gentrification of football was complete. Or at least it seemed so before another penalty shoot-out defeat to Germany unleashed anger that led to street violence, to German cars being smashed and to a Russian student being stabbed, presumed German. Disillusionment when it came, came quickly.

But that summer still exists as a heady memory of what might have been. Those were the days of youth, of innocence, of possibility. Of Paul Gascoigne lifting the ball over Colin Hendry with his left foot and volleying in with his right, of Teddy Sheringham’s disguised lay-off to Alan Shearer, of Stuart Pearce and a penalty that defined the notion of catharsis. But it was also the summer of Venables — for, without him, England would not have played as they did. For everybody who despaired of the long-ball stereotype, who had watched the anxiety-ridden football of the Graham Taylor years in frustration, this was proof that England could play sophisticated, continental football.

Suggested reading

Bobby Charlton was English football

By Helen Thompson

Yet Venables could hardly have been more London. He had been born in Dagenham, played his first football with Chelsea and achieved his greatest success as a player with Tottenham. He had begun his coaching career with Crystal Palace, performed miracles with Queens Park Rangers and then won the FA Cup after returning to Tottenham. And in the middle of it all, he had been plucked from QPR to manage Barcelona, whom he had led to their first league title in over a decade and their first ever European Cup final.

But he wasn’t just geographically London; he was temperamentally London. He lived with a grin on his face and a sense that rules were always flexible. He tried out as a lounge singer, invented a wig, devised a board game and wrote detective novels. He did his business from hotel lobbies and ran a nightclub that was frequented by football hacks and Mad Frankie Fraser. By the time Euro 96 came round, the FA, worried about some of his business interests, had decided not to renew his contract. He was later banned from being a company director for seven years. And he was also for a time arguably the sharpest tactical brain in Europe.

It would be an exaggeration to say that modern football was born amid the battle between QPR and Watford for promotion from Division Two in the early Eighties, but in their rivalry was encapsulated a key fault line that continues to shape football today. Watford were managed by Taylor, Venables’s predecessor as England manager. When he took over Watford in 1977, they were in the Fourth Division. Within six years, he had taken them to second in Division One. His football then was, as he cheerily admitted, rudimentary: he had his players knock the ball in behind the opposing full-back, then had his side press to try to regain possession in dangerous areas, relying on an aggressive offside trap to offer defensive solidity.

Taylor said that each time his side got promoted he expected to be found out, but that it wasn’t until playing Sparta Prague in the Uefa Cup in 1983 that anybody did, largely because the Czechoslovak defenders had the technical ability not to panic when put under pressure. With better players, he amended his approach to an extent, but he remained always of a school that saw football as a game of chaos, and pressing as a way of guiding that. Venables, in seeking to impose order, was the cerebral Pep Guardiola to Taylor’s Klopp.

Suggested reading

Jamie Carragher: My warning to Starmer

By Tom Mctague

Venables, like Taylor, relied on the offside trap, for which he was dismissed as boring by rivals, but his was part of a possession-based game rooted in a sophisticated system of zonal marking. In that, he was true to a venerable tradition. Between 1912 and 1942, the Inverness-born left-half Peter McWilliam had two stints as manager of Tottenham totalling 23 years. Raised in the Scottish passing tradition, he established a possession-based approach that was taken on by one of his former players, Bill Nicholson, who managed Spurs when Venables was a player there. Another former player was Vic Buckingham, who as a coach spread those ideas to Ajax and subsequently Barcelona. When Barcelona came calling for Venables after he had led QPR to fifth in Division One, they were appointing from within the same philosophical tradition. That was what made the appointment of Venables as England coach after Taylor’s side had failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup so exciting, even if it’s now apparent that the FA did so with a degree of reluctance and suspicion.

Taylor was unfortunate in almost every way — an uninspiring generation of players, injuries, form, refereeing — but he had always felt a slightly humdrum appointment. To turn to Venables was to turn to ambition, to say that English players were capable of more than sweat and graft, that they could do more than hump it over the top and chase it, that they could pass and move like the best in Europe. That didn’t mean they were cavalier; to pigeonhole him merely as “an entertainer” is to misunderstand his approach. Venables pressed and worked on neutering opponents as much as anybody, but he valued ability as much as he did sweat, and he had a gambler’s instinct.

It took time, but then, given the seismic nature of the change, it was always going to. Technically gifted players were prioritised. Carlton Palmer and Des Walker were disposed of, Darren Anderton and Steve McManaman brought in, Paul Gascoigne recalled. Suddenly defenders got forward, players were encouraged to take risks and England became tactically flexible in a way they had never been before and, arguably, haven’t been since.

Suggested reading

I went to Gabon for football – and found a massacre

By Jonathan Wilson

It was a world away from the functionality and fear of Taylor’s side and, as such, it was a vital part of that golden summer. Perhaps it even helped that everybody knew Venables was leaving. He had nothing to lose, no new contract to chase, and that allowed him to be bold — not that he ever really needed much encouragement. That brought the glorious apotheosis of the victory over the Netherlands, as he pushed McManaman forward into an adventurous front three and in doing so befuddled the Dutch coach Guus Hiddink.

Venables didn’t win the tournament. Indeed, he only ever won two competitive games as England manager. But he created a vibe that matched that summer of hope, and sometimes the illusion, the feel of the thing, matters more than the reality.

For a long time, the runner Caster Semenya made for a terrific and compelling true-life underdog. In a world that was increasingly cognisant of the oppressive interplay of race, gender and class, here was a woman, black and gender non-conforming — a 2009 New Yorker article described her as “breathtakingly butch” — battling against a racist, sexist system that wanted to keep her down. Her trajectory from an impoverished running club in rural South Africa to the winner’s podium at the Olympics was Hollywood movie material, and the repeated indignities she suffered at the hands of officials and fellow competitors who questioned her right to be there were an outrage: Semenya was dogged by rumours that she was a man in disguise, and was routinely required to prove her sex by submitting to humiliating inspections of her genitals. It all seemed like the work of a snivelling patriarchy conspiring to take down an exceptional woman.

But the truth was more complicated: Semenya is a woman — by her own definition, and in virtually every social context that matters — but she is also not exactly female. Testing eventually revealed her to be intersex, possessing an XY chromosomal makeup and a pair of internal, undescended testes, which among other advantages meant she could produce performance-enhancing testosterone at levels that an ordinary female could not.

Athletic governing bodies struggled to come up with a policy that would allow someone like Semenya to continue competing: when she declined to remove her internal testes, they required her to take drugs to suppress her testosterone production. The solution satisfied no one, including Semenya, who found hormone therapy intolerable. In an essay adapted from her new memoir, The Race to Be Myself, she writes: “If I had internal testicles or whatever they were saying I had, they were mine. I was healthy, I loved my body, and it had made me a champion. Why must I go and mutilate it to conform to someone else’s rules?”

In one sense, it is only fair that someone who moves through the world as a woman be allowed to compete alongside women. “I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now what the medical findings are,” Semenya writes. “I was born a girl and raised as a girl.” But socialisation is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to defining womanhood in sports; science matters, too. And the concept of protected classes in sport also stems from a desire to be fair. Women, disabled people, the very old or very young: all of them compete on playing fields that only admit people who share certain characteristics, which is to say, certain limitations. The boundaries around these fields have always been human-drawn and hence imperfect, but they are also necessary; the alternative, as the International Paralympic Committee notes, is “one-sided and predictable competition, in which the least impaired athlete always wins”.

More from this author

Barbie is Fight Club for women

By Kat Rosenfield

Semenya, in her book, puts scare quotes around the words “protected class” as if to mock the idea that it could apply to women, but the argument doesn’t land — not least because her presence in women’s sports has more often than not given rise to exactly the sort of one-sided, predictable outcome the IPC works to avoid. Semenya mops the floor with her competitors, and the women who have raced against her have noted that it doesn’t feel like a fair fight. And while nobody likes to think that half the planet can be reasonably classified as impaired compared with the other half — that womanhood itself is something akin to disability — the truth is: the acceptance that women are weaker is the essential foundation of women’s sports. Men jump higher, run faster, kick and punch harder. And if women’s sport is a ghetto of sorts, it is a necessary one, not just for fairness or safety’s sake but for the sake of sport. Nobody wants a one-sided and predictable competition; we want drama and excitement. This is why we play sport, and why we watch other people doing it. We love to see them fight; we love a win against the odds.

There’s something viscerally distasteful about the inverse: somebody with too much strength clobbering someone who has too little. An able-bodied athlete dunking on a guy in a wheelchair; a grown man winning a sprint against a bunch of 8-year-olds. A ringer parachuted into an amateur competition. We watch in pursuit of the kind of fairness that makes for a good game.

This doesn’t mean that the line where an attribute becomes an unfair advantage is always easy to discern. Years ago, the Olympics governing body became embroiled in a debate over whether Oscar Pistorius’s bionic legs gave him an unfair advantage, leading to months of rigorous study that culminated in the following remarkable conclusion, published in The Journal of Applied Physiology: Pistorius, the scientists agreed, was “physiologically similar but mechanically dissimilar” to an athlete with normal human legs. (Pistorius was allowed to run.) But to the general public, fairness in sport is like obscenity as famously defined by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: we know it when we see it.

This is what makes Semenya’s case so complicated. The notion of her being some sort of cheater is flawed. When she balked at suppressing her hormone levels, it wasn’t because she wanted to win; it was because it felt like lying: “I wasn’t going to take on an identity that did not fit my soul because some doctors had taken my blood and images of my organs. I was not a hermaphrodite or anything other than a woman.”

In her memoir, Semenya is largely describing events from over a decade ago. But the book has been published into a world where a related, ongoing battle is raging, over the place of trans women in sports. These issues are not identical, of course: Semenya never imagined she was anything other than biologically female, while trans women are seeking admission to a category they know full well they were not born into. But both have been plagued by allegations that they’re trying to game the system, that they’re cheaters. Often, trans women are presented as just a bunch of grasping, avaricious men who’ve found the easiest possible pathway to a gold medal. When ESPN aired a special about trans swimmer Lia Thomas, her former competitor Riley Gaines slammed both the network and the athlete as complicit in the destruction of women’s sports: “Lia Thomas is not a brave, courageous woman who earned a national title. He is an arrogant, cheat who stole a national title from a hardworking, deserving woman.”

This knee-jerk demonisation has always seemed wrong to me — morally, but also logically. The humiliation, the opprobrium, the physical and mental burden of transitioning: all seem like a wildly disproportionate price to pay for the sake of a college swimming championship. Instead, what has always struck me about Thomas’s case is that elite swimming is one of the few arenas where the women celebrated are broad shouldered, long limbed, and tall. Perhaps swimming represents, to her, a chance to feel not just like a winner, but like she belongs.

Suggested reading

You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

This is the tragedy: that what is fair at the macro level is not fair, as in compassionate, to an individual person. Lia Thomas cannot fairly compete in the sporting category known as “women”, and arguably neither can Semenya, whose memoir presents this as an obscene attempt to deny her identity. No doubt it felt that way to her: to alter her body to compete with women would have amounted, in her mind, to a tacit admission that she wasn’t one.

And as long as women’s sports are seen as having the power to validate or invalidate one’s innate sense of self — for as long as we see the regulatory bodies as not just deciding who can compete as a woman, but who is one — this issue will remain intractable. The best hope is a future where the category of “woman” in sports is treated in much the same way as the IPC treats the category of “disabled”: “If an athlete is not eligible to compete in a sport, this does not question the presence of a genuine impairment,” the committee website assures readers. “It is a sport ruling.”

The truth, unfortunate but inevitable, is this: the most carefully drawn lines, the ones that need to not just include but protect, will always leave someone on the outside.