“Preposterous arrogance”

It’s good to talk, they say, but there’s no ar­gu­ing with some peo­ple. Talk­ing is gen­er­ally seen as the best so­lu­tion to con­flict, whether be­tween in­di­vid­u­als, or­gan­i­sa­tions or even coun­tries. We only have to look at the ’Sit and Talk’ cam­paign to pro­mote di­a­logue be­tween the Span­ish and Cata­lan au­thor­i­ties on the in­de­pen­dence issue to find a re­cent ex­am­ple. But what hap­pens when there is no pos­si­bil­ity of talk lead­ing to a sat­is­fac­tory res­o­lu­tion?

I came up against a brick wall of this type the other day. The talk of the town these days has been the at­tempt by 12 elite foot­ball clubs to set up a Eu­ro­pean Super League (ESL). The pro­posal launched by these clubs as a fait ac­com­pli was roundly re­jected by much of the foot­balling com­mu­nity, only for it to crash and burn within 48 hours. If you want to know more about the fi­asco, check out Bar­ney’s ar­ti­cle on page 40, which sums up the sorry saga.

Like many, I’ve had con­ver­sa­tions about the issue with fel­low foot­ball fans, but not in every case has the will­ing­ness to dis­cuss it led to com­mon ground. One chat in par­tic­u­lar springs to mind, with a friend who until now has al­ways been a joy to talk to, about any­thing. In­tel­li­gent, thought­ful, ar­tic­u­late, one of the rea­sons he is my friend is that he is easy to con­nect with and is some­one who, even while coun­ter­ing your ar­gu­ments, is nev­er­the­less able to un­der­stand your po­si­tion, ad­dress it, and work it into his think­ing and con­clu­sions.

But not the other day. I was eager to get his take on the ESL issue and I got an op­por­tu­nity while out walk­ing the dogs. We went back and forth, spar­ring opin­ions, lay­ing the ground for the de­bate that was about to take place. But I quickly re­alised that we weren’t going any­where. I per­sisted to knock on the door but there was no an­swer. Some­thing was amiss.

And then it struck me. For him, Barça is foot­ball. They are syn­ony­mous. If Barça fails, foot­ball fails. Barça makes peo­ple watch foot­ball, and so it is on a higher level than other clubs. That even jus­ti­fies doing ir­repara­ble harm to other clubs, and if nec­es­sary even en­tire na­tional leagues.

My club, Ever­ton, took an un­char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally hard­line stance against the ESL. In a state­ment, the club de­scribed the at­tempt by a small group of top clubs to break away and form their own league en­tirely for their own ben­e­fit and to the detri­ment of other clubs as “pre­pos­ter­ous ar­ro­gance”.

But talk­ing to my friend I began to won­der. Rather than ar­ro­gance, was it per­haps a form of ex­treme ex­cep­tion­al­ism, born from a be­lief that you have be­come too big to fail and a con­vic­tion that every­one finds you as in­dis­pens­able as you see your­self. Is it a case that if every­one is con­stantly telling you how great you are, then you even­tu­ally come to be­lieve it? I saw that my friend was trapped in this blind faith and that try­ing to budge him would be use­less. I quickly changed the sub­ject.

As Pep Guardi­ola pointed out the other day, the real prob­lem is a lack of com­pe­ti­tion, which means that win­ning can­not be a fore­gone con­clu­sion and that los­ing must al­ways be a pos­si­bil­ity. When Flor­netino Pérez claimed that the ESL would save foot­ball, what he re­ally meant is that it would save his club Real Madrid, be­cause the two are the same in his mind. To me, such at­ti­tudes do in­deed seem pre­pos­ter­ous, but not pre­pos­ter­ous ar­ro­gance so much as pre­pos­ter­ous hubris.