monday morning
Slept a bit better. I work this week. I have a call at ten local that shouldn't go longer than an hour. They're paying me for the call, which is amazing and way outside the norm. I'll take it. The work itself is Tuesday through Thursday. I'm basically facilitating group conversations and taking notes. As jobs go, this is a good one. Especially the pay.
I lived in the UK, in London. I realize how much of cliché this is, but it's true, when I look back at that time, this was the early 2000's, it was a different time, a different life. In just about every single way. Nearly everything from that time is ash. There's very little I can look back on without pain. Remember, this was pre-smart phones and the internet was still kinda new. It was very new in Europe. About the only place you go to get internet was an internet cafe. I had no TV. No friends. Eventually I would find a job that I hated. I don't want to dwell on all that other than to set context and say there was one pleasant thing to come out of that time, Chelsea FC.
I was desperate to make my life work. I needed something fun, escapist, something connected to the place. Football (What we in the U.S. call soccer.) is more than a sport in the rest of the world. Only within the past couple of years has the U.S. woken up to it. (And U.S. teams (apart from the Women's National Team suck, and if there's one thing folks in the U.S. can't stand, it's not being "#1" at something. And if they can't be "#1" then, it's not worth doing, a joke, something to be ignored, laughed at, not taken seriously. But I digress.) I wanted to start following a club. To this point in my life I was a huge Chicago Bears/NFL fan. I was completely cut off from that now. If I was going to pick a club to follow though, I wanted to have some kind of connection to it geographically. I was living in the Chelsea part of London at the time, just a few blocks from the stadium, known as The Bridge. I flirted with following Fulham, but...Chelsea seemed to my American eyes a bigger, better, yes, more successful club. They were on top of the world at this point. I would come to find later that this success was built on a Russian oligarch's money, that Chelsea were the first of a new kind of team in the UK, fronted by the super rich. Sadly, something now ubiquitous in world sport. I didn't know all this at the time. I just thought they were a cool club. When I would tell people that I was a Chelsea fan I was surprised to find a reaction of disgust. A reaction I still get...
Why am I going on (and on) about all this, why the long winded context/exposition? Well, fast forward. It's the future. There is renewed talk of starting a "Super League" in Europe, destroying the, albeit, flawed country/league systems currently in place. Who cares? I've seen it best expressed here. Basically, the super rich take all the profits in a league with no competition that very, very few others are allowed to participate in. I'm ashamed of my club, Chelsea, wanting to take part, but, sadly, not surprised.
(Put another way, again, from The Guardian: "The Champions League is already being cast in the glow of nostalgia for purer times, when in reality it is one of, if not the main reason why these greedy clubs are as rich as they are.” This is true - similarly, the Premier League and Sky playing wounded parties is a touch. But what’s happening now is exponentially worse, and anything that gets the players agitating is worth having at this point.")
It's been a long year and a half. Year two of a pandemic. Now this. Is it as horrible as the pandemic or race riots, or Trump? No, but something like footie made dealing with all that a little tiny bit easier. The impending civil war in European football is going to be long and ugly. One of the few feel-good escapist activities has been the footie. Now that's a gigantic lake of shit too... Death by a thousand cuts. This one hurts.
I lived in the UK, in London. I realize how much of cliché this is, but it's true, when I look back at that time, this was the early 2000's, it was a different time, a different life. In just about every single way. Nearly everything from that time is ash. There's very little I can look back on without pain. Remember, this was pre-smart phones and the internet was still kinda new. It was very new in Europe. About the only place you go to get internet was an internet cafe. I had no TV. No friends. Eventually I would find a job that I hated. I don't want to dwell on all that other than to set context and say there was one pleasant thing to come out of that time, Chelsea FC.
I was desperate to make my life work. I needed something fun, escapist, something connected to the place. Football (What we in the U.S. call soccer.) is more than a sport in the rest of the world. Only within the past couple of years has the U.S. woken up to it. (And U.S. teams (apart from the Women's National Team suck, and if there's one thing folks in the U.S. can't stand, it's not being "#1" at something. And if they can't be "#1" then, it's not worth doing, a joke, something to be ignored, laughed at, not taken seriously. But I digress.) I wanted to start following a club. To this point in my life I was a huge Chicago Bears/NFL fan. I was completely cut off from that now. If I was going to pick a club to follow though, I wanted to have some kind of connection to it geographically. I was living in the Chelsea part of London at the time, just a few blocks from the stadium, known as The Bridge. I flirted with following Fulham, but...Chelsea seemed to my American eyes a bigger, better, yes, more successful club. They were on top of the world at this point. I would come to find later that this success was built on a Russian oligarch's money, that Chelsea were the first of a new kind of team in the UK, fronted by the super rich. Sadly, something now ubiquitous in world sport. I didn't know all this at the time. I just thought they were a cool club. When I would tell people that I was a Chelsea fan I was surprised to find a reaction of disgust. A reaction I still get...
Why am I going on (and on) about all this, why the long winded context/exposition? Well, fast forward. It's the future. There is renewed talk of starting a "Super League" in Europe, destroying the, albeit, flawed country/league systems currently in place. Who cares? I've seen it best expressed here. Basically, the super rich take all the profits in a league with no competition that very, very few others are allowed to participate in. I'm ashamed of my club, Chelsea, wanting to take part, but, sadly, not surprised.
(Put another way, again, from The Guardian: "The Champions League is already being cast in the glow of nostalgia for purer times, when in reality it is one of, if not the main reason why these greedy clubs are as rich as they are.” This is true - similarly, the Premier League and Sky playing wounded parties is a touch. But what’s happening now is exponentially worse, and anything that gets the players agitating is worth having at this point.")
It's been a long year and a half. Year two of a pandemic. Now this. Is it as horrible as the pandemic or race riots, or Trump? No, but something like footie made dealing with all that a little tiny bit easier. The impending civil war in European football is going to be long and ugly. One of the few feel-good escapist activities has been the footie. Now that's a gigantic lake of shit too... Death by a thousand cuts. This one hurts.