A Total and Utter Embarrassment

EMBARRASSING!

"That was embarrassing"

In my quest to work out why so many football fans are increasingly unhinged, social media has always seemed to be the main driver, where outrage and hysteria puts pressure on clubs, players and many match-going fans, resulting in a negative feedback loop from (and to) hell.

It struck me that the language used by many pundits recently taps into the new dynamic. Yet being publicly shamed (as seen in the books and research of Jon Ronson and Brené Brown) is often felt as worse than physical pain.

Being in the town square stocks was an utter humiliation to the point where places that still hanged people removed this form of 'barbaric' punishment; now, people go to football matches to not throw fruit, but plastic bottles and coins at players, and to boo and barrack individuals on their own team.

And yet you can't shame anyone into being more creative, or into caring more.

Often players freeze with fear when the atmosphere gets toxic and hostile, rather than raise their game. Humiliation tends to just have people retreat into their shells.

Whereas guilt can motivate (“I feel bad, I need to try and do better”), shame is debilitating (“I am bad, I need to go and dig a hole and jump in it”).

But it comes back to the word 'embarrassing', that I must have heard or read a dozen times this past week or two.

And not embarrassment in the sense of you've left your fly undone, or have attended a work meeting with smudged lipstick. This is embarrassment used as a synonym of shame. That was embarrassing.

Maybe it's been in the water for a while, but last week I started hearing several times over the same weekend.

Live in comms on Sky, Jamie Carragher said that Arsenal leaving space at the back post for the first West Ham goal last week was “embarrassing”.

Really? I thought it was sub-optimal defending – poor, yes, but not embarrassing. Yet this was a title-chasing team, conceding one goal to a far-post overload when 2-0 up.

Jermaine Jenas then twice called Spurs “embarrassing” on MOTD, when they let a late lead slip against Bournemouth, to lose 3-2. Now, it involved far worse defending than the Arsenal situation, but 'embarrassing' seems to now be the go-to word.

Embarrassing. Maybe even shameful. Don't show your face in public.

But to me, the booing and then cheering off of Davinson Sanchez, when the substitute was duly subbed off, was the most extreme thing I saw that weekend.

How was that going to help Spurs as a team feel confident and not in a spiral of shame?

What did it lead to? Spurs being 5-0 down in 20 minutes in the next game at Newcastle and Sanchez subbed on to stem the flow.

Now, that was embarrassing.

“It's embarrassing” said Chris Waddle, an ex of both clubs, on the BBC.

“Very embarrassing,” said the Spurs keeper, Hugo Lloris.

Lloris, who dived out the way of every shot (at least the ones he bothered to dive for) before being going off 'injured', was probably correct.

Yet it came on the back of not only Sanchez being publicly humiliated, but incessant calls for Spurs to change to a back four. Which the coach finally did.

(I saw one report saying that it didn't look like they'd worked on it in training, as if you can just perfect a system you haven't used in years in a couple of days, and then try to apply it whilst utterly bereft of confidence and swimming in shame. Granted, it may have been the wrong game to switch to a back four, with the wrong personnel, but it came about because of pressure on the caretaker manager. Fans wanted a back four. They got one. Well, kind of.)

Spurs would clearly be anxious going into the Newcastle game, after the public shaming of Sanchez.

I remember a '90s/early 2000s television documentary on the porn industry in the pre-Viagra days, where the female talent stated that every big-bravado bloke off the street thinks he can do the job ... until the cameras turn on. Then the camera panned to a line of hitherto macho guys sitting forlornly with their sad flaccid manhoods.

Pressure is hard to endure, if you’ll pardon the pun. People can be paid to handle the pressure, but the more it ramps up, the fewer who will remain upstanding, as it were.

You can pay them more and more and more, but if they are shamed and humiliated, money won't make a difference (other than they need to get out of there, and earn that kind of money somewhere where they'll be appreciated).

All the other Spurs players saw that and will have thought “we're just pieces of meat to be thrown to the lions”; and that the fans don't care about the players, especially as Sanchez is not some lazy dickhead but just a struggling colleague.

Spurs, of course, arrive at Anfield at the weekend, complete with Paul Tierney.

(As an aside, given this is a running topic of mine, but … excluding VAR, Tierney is reffing Liverpool for a ludicrous seventh time this season, and is still the least generous ref for the club when it comes to big decisions; and a man who gave perhaps the worst officiating performance ever at Spurs in late 2021 when absolutely stiffing the Reds. Last time out he booked Andy Robertson for being elbowed in the face by his own linesman. At this point you have to wonder where the integrity is in the sport, in terms of ignoring an even distribution of the radically different refereeing styles – and baggage – and just giving Liverpool the ref the fans, players and manager hate the most almost every game now; a figure of seven games being matched only once for any club and any ref in recent seasons, with Kevin Friend doing Norwich seven times, for Covid-locality reasons in bubble-times; stats from Andrew Beasley at my request, and he says that two games per season is the average distribution for refs and clubs. Meanwhile, last week, Michael Oliver got sent to referee a match in Saudi Arabia, at the specific behest of the Saudis, who own Newcastle, the club that Oliver – the best ref – avidly supports. Are we getting closer to the maxim “F1 is not a sport, but entertainment” for football too? While that’s for another day, clearly it has to be both; but to count as anything legitimate, football must first and foremost be a sport, with integrity. Anyway, I digress…)

Toxic home crowds have forced Spurs to sack various managers now; the same has happened at Everton at least three times during the mega-spending period, albeit by the time they turned on Rafa Benítez he was trawling for free transfers; his total spend was £1.7m. Four years ago they had a sit-in protest against Marco Silva, one of the most exciting managers in the Premier League this season.

Now they have Sean Dyche.

Chelsea fans hounded out Graham Potter, since when they've lost to Wolves, Real Madrid twice, and Brighton, with the latter having nearly 30 shots at Stamford Bridge.

(Then again, they seemed happy with Thomas Tuchel, and fair play for backing him, with his sacking down to the crazy owners.)

The again, owners who have spent fortunes – £500m in a few seasons at Everton and almost £600m in a season at Chelsea – have been harassed and abused; for not spending the fortunes wisely enough, even if fans absolutely loved the fortunes being spent in the transfer windows, on those very players, in the orgiastic glee of online reveals and window-winning coups.

Owners and head figures are now seeking to slip the blame onto the players.

The language of “embarrassment” makes everything feel more personal; that fans must then feel a deep sense of shame about their club – ramped up by comments like that, and the never-ending spiral of schadenfreude that is online life, and which, like harbouring hate, only leads to to your own distress (like drinking poison and hoping it will kill someone else).

If your club fucks up, the mob will be coming for you, as with any social media retribution, pile-on, dragging or shaming.

You'll get laughed at, mocked, abused; all as if it’s your personal fault. You’ll fear the backlash.

(That said, if you put out mockery, expected back mockery, and there's always more of them than you; more who hate your club, even if global giant of a club, than love them. If you laugh at lolcows, you may become the lolcow.)

The stakes are so high, in that people no longer seem to support their club but identify as their club. Just as people no longer vote for political parties, but are those political parties; or are those identity groups, seeing only differences, not what unites us as humans.

I think this is the result of becoming avatars, putting all our opinions out there; often just normal people using Twitter and Facebook, who previously would have just quietly gone about their business, maybe with no one knowing who they supported or which party they voted for, and therefore, no backlash coming their way every single day on issues surrounding football and politics.

Fans have always been passionate. But the passion has mutated.

Because we take everything so personally now.

I no longer really use any social media (other than to post links, when it lets me, which Twitter seems to have stopped from Substack, which seems like a real dick move), as I don't want to be part of the shared madness, either about football and Liverpool, or just the general air of Us vs Them on just about every issue possible, that reduces everything to overly emotional, irrational soundbites.

(That said, Liverpool's results affect subscription levels and over the years, book sales too; so this is my living, not just my hobby and my passion. I accept that I am a very public Liverpool fan, albeit one now defrocked of my 2010 Twitter blue tick, which means I no longer officially exist as officially Paul Tomkins; henceforth I am unofficial Paul Tomkins, who will only talk about himself in the third person.)

The more we identify with something, the more our whole sense of identity and our ego can feel absolutely obliterated in moments of 'shame'.

We feel 'destroyed', as people look to destroy. We feel 'owned', as people in those moments seem to own us. It feels hideous. Defeat is a personal slight, a knife to the heart.

Yet victory is not enough.

This is the key: victory alone is never enough.

It needs to be a beautiful victory.

A lucky or undeserved victory feels hollow to many; the jibes will follow, that you should feel ashamed that your team was so lucky. And if you beat a team you should be beating anyway, so fucking what?! Losers!

(I saw Liverpool fans underneath an article moaning that Liverpool only beat Leeds and Nottingham Forest this past week or so, so it didn't really count. It's been a tough season, for sure; but if you can't be happy after a week with two wins and nine goals scored, why even bother? If you want to squeeze all the joy out of wins, what's the point?)

Indeed, a win needs to be perfect, flawless – and against an elite side or big rival – so no one can say a word.

Basically, a 7-0 over Man United or a 4-0 over Barcelona; super-rare results, that provide only euphoria and nothing else. But then we live in an age of perfectionism, and entitlement. (“Well, Man United are shit anyway. Brentford thrashed them”.)

Wanting something is normal. 'Wants' motivate us to get out of bed. Needing something is dangerous.

Too many people need their team to win, or their sense of self (publicly-facing via social media) will be obliterated. And to win in style, by big margins, with zero stress.

Fans are also only satisfied with clear progress, and yet progress is not linear, and it's rarely in nice, satisfying season-by-season increments. It's up and down; sometimes two steps forward with one back (but when you don’t know for sure that a backward step is not a proper backwards step, as the future hasn’t unfolded to reveal the true course.)

And here's the rub:

If you do too well in one season – if you overachieve, perhaps as your strikers had a good season or your keeper was on fire – then you've simply made regression more likely (and with regression comes an extra sense of panic, that ramps up the anxiety and makes it worse), as it can't just be an ever-expanding upward trajectory, unless you have limitless money.

And then you can be like PSG, and make winning the league seem utterly joyless; the best players in the world booed and jeered, as they're there for the money and lifestyle, and the league is a cakewalk.

Unless you're at a very slow starting point, or well below where you would be had things gone right (you took more of your big chances, had fewer injuries) this season, the chances are that things could be worse next season.

As I noted before, Leicester, West Ham and various other clubs thought they were on upward trajectories last season. Instead of building, they flew too high; overachieved, overexerted, and fell to earth with relegation battles. (West Ham, tomorrow’s opponents, appear to be pulling clear.)

Ideally, your club is non-league.

Maybe it's Wrexham. Next year, mid-table in the fourth tier. The season after, play-offs defeat. The season after, promotion. Repeat that level of improvement for League One, but slow it in the Championship to finishing 15th, 12th, 9th, 6th and 2nd, and then look to get 17th in the Premier League ("result!") – then creep up the table – and maybe, all told, you'll get 20 years of satisfaction ... unless at any point there's a mid-season overachievement, and people get carried away, and an improved finish on the previous season is judged not as progress but as regression.

Expectations don't help.

I mean, Spurs fans, in the fanciest stadium in the world, seem far more miserable and angry than in some mid-table seasons. (I get that they pay a lot for the privilege, but taking the anger out on the players is irrational and unhelpful and counterproductive, yet also hard to stop within the mindlessness of a crowd.)

Are they ashamed of their club being ‘Spursy’? – a somewhat unfair sobriquet, I feel, given that their close brushes with success under Mauricio Pochettino were exciting and thrilling and impressive and joyous, certainly when compared to winning a League Cup under Juande Ramos, which they did in 2008?

Ramos won just 38.2% of his games with Spurs. Yet to win a trophy they simply had to have wins against Middlesbrough, Blackpool, pre-sportswashed Man City, Arsenal (okay, that must have felt nice!) and Chelsea in the final (ditto).

With an added draw at Arsenal in the first-leg of the semi, it was basically beating Arsenal at home and Chelsea in a final. Three meaningful games, two of which were won, to win a trophy.

That season, 2007/08, they finished 11th in the league, drawing more games than they won, and losing even more games than they won. My point is not to knock the League Cup (especially for smaller clubs), but no one thinks fondly of Juande Ramos; it was a random couple of results, and a nice day out at Wembley.

But what Pochettino offered was far more impressive and enjoyable.

So no, we can't have it all. Especially with some clubs stacking the decks with state wealth funds.

(At what point does football just become entirely about who has the very richest owners, and not just 85% about who has the very richest owners? When will it feel like taking the best F1 drivers and giving one a Ferrari SF-23, another a Porsche 911, the next a mid-range family BMW, the one after that an ageing Volkswagen Golf, another a 1973 Skoda, and the last poor sod, the rusted, wheelless chassis of a Ford Model T?)

We're more emotionally and psychologically invested than ever, yet the game has possibly never been less fair in sporting terms, at least it terms of how it’s funded.

We're all guilty of using un-nuanced, hyperbolic language as there's not the time or scope to find better words, or more detailed descriptions (it's quicker to type or say “great goal” than “very good goal”).

But extreme go-to language is not helping anyone. And the rise of shame and embarrassment is disturbing. No wonder the western world is in a mental health crisis.

Now we have club owners going into dressing rooms to shame their players.

A Guardian article stated:

“Todd Boehly attempted to rouse Chelsea’s players before Tuesday’s Champions League tie against Real Madrid by delivering a speech in the dressing room after the defeat by Brighton on Saturday, during which the American described the club’s season as 'embarrassing'.”

What's embarrassing, surely, is signing so many players and sacking so many managers – without a clear plan, to the point that you don't even have room to house the squad, and to train them properly; to not have considered how the basics of modern football squad management is to keep the size down to 20-24, not 35-40.

And going in to tell the players that they are embarrassing is itself a threshold being crossed into clownship. All these are much more grievous and avoidable errors than a player miscontrolling a football or being out of position, as 60,000 people watch on in the stadium and hundreds of millions more view on TV or online.

Next, Daniel Levy went into the Spurs dressing room after the 6-1 defeat at Newcastle.

Is Levy, after appointing various “big-club managers” (unsuited to their style) as if to prove a point, going to help? To me, Levy was doing an impressive and relatively humble job at Spurs until he got delusions of grandeur in 2019, it seems.

Again, ‘shaming’ is not how sporting motivation works.

Shame may increase work-rate, via fear (albeit nerves can tire players out); but it cannot improve creativity and expression. It cannot create good football, just perhaps provoke more headless running around.

Fearful sportspeople fare the worst as sportspeople.

Fear is what makes us choke; makes us play it safe; makes us avoid the big moments where we could cost the team.

Fear creeps in of its own accord; see Arsenal lately, when the reality of the title being almost in their hands hit at Anfield – 2-0-up! – and then starting to slip away after Granit Xhaka needlessly elbowed Trent Alexander-Arnold, and within moments Arsenal had lost a grip at a now riled-up Anfield, not only on the game but their season (as impressive as the season will remain, whatever happens from hereon in).

Fearful footballers play it safe; percentage football. Get rid. As seen with Spurs at Newcastle, they can make mistakes by trying not to make mistakes: simple, nervy passes rather than doing anything that risks abuse.

Percentage football has fallen away in recent times as the best managers remove fear, they don't instil it.

(Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte seemed to try and win via fear. Don't make mistakes, play it safe. Their football at Spurs was horrible, once an initial bounce of new energy wore off. Nottingham Forest's long throws were perhaps the best example of successful percentage football I've seen in years: utter chaos, almost impossible to defend – as the second ball could literally end up anywhere. But it's not necessarily a sustainable tactic, and not something you’d want to watch your team aim to do every game for 90 minutes.)

When the ex-player and pundit Rob Key took the main job in English cricket a year ago, the nation – one of the sport's 'big three' (with India and Australia) – had won just once in 17 Test matches.

What did Key do? Try to embarrass and shame the players? Go into the dressing room and bollock them? No. (Albeit as an ex-England player, he has the right to go into changing rooms.)

“I wanted to change the mentality most of all," he told Michael Atherton in the Times.

"When sports people fail, most think it’s because they are not trying hard enough or they don’t want it badly enough, or they are not tough enough, all those things. I felt they [the Test team] were trying too hard, and wanted it too badly and were almost suffocated by it. I felt they needed to have a bit of pressure taken off them and to think positively; not to play a certain way necessarily, but just to have the right mentality.”

The new mantra was to forget the fear of failure, and go at it hard. Enjoy the game. Be positive. Any honest gaffes trying to play this way, and we've got your back.

England won nine of the next 10, and lost the 11th by trying to be even bolder, to make the game more exciting, and in a way, risk defeat by making it less about winning. (And to me, should still have won it due to a non-called no-ball for a bouncer, but that's by the by.)

Some England fans were furious, but the England players seemed genuinely pleased for New Zealand's incredible win, rather than feeling any shame for the loss (and there was nothing meaningful riding on a win in terms of trophies).

The attitude has made them the best team in the world over the past year. That game was great fun. And football should also be about fun (but sport should also be about excellence, and desire, and trying to win; but full of integrity too. England didn't 'throw' the game, but just made it more likely for there to be a win or a loss, rather than a draw.)

This is essentially what Jürgen Klopp did a couple of games into his reign at Anfield, when he had the players go celebrate a late-earned 2-2 draw against lowly West Brom with the Kop.

Get unified; try to break the cycle of fear.

“Embarrassing!”, the mockers said.

Ludicrous, was my response to anyone who couldn't see the wisdom in what he was doing, in a stadium where the fans hard got into the habit of leaving early, suspecting more failure.

In football there has to be a geeing-up and a constant reminder of the standards required; because you can't slack off for even half a second in a sport like football.

But you can't shame players, hang them out to dry, make them feel worthless. (The crowd do enough of that.)

The managers are the ones who should motivate players; discern at close quarters the need to inspire, or to cajole, or to ask for more effort.

But online, everything gets ramped up. And increasingly, fans abuse their own players, and now do things like run onto the pitch to attack opponents and even those they are supposedly there to support.

As such, we need to be using de-escalating language. Disengaging from outrage. De-escalating in general in life. Stepping back from emotions and taking a minute to think. (With deepfakes and exponentially-advancing AI, more and more convincingly realistic fake content will pop up on places like Twitter, where the natural response is to react in nanoseconds. It’s terrifying.)

More and more sportspeople are deleting their social media apps, and I can't believe it's taken so long.

Some young Liverpool players like Curtis Jones and Harvey Elliott have got stupid levels of abuse this season, before getting onto the more hateful abuse vile online trolls dispense (but vile online trolls will always exist, as destroying someone or something is easier than creating something; and are genuinely best ignored, if possible).

All the while, it's harder for honestly-run clubs to thrive, and everyone gets dragged down by the fact that state-funded clubs will now take up two of the lucrative top-four slots, meaning that state-funded wealth continues to be rewarded with game-funded wealth.

Meanwhile, Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish wants more of UEFA's money to filter down to clubs like his – which may be a fair point – but I doubt he's leading the drive to give us much of Palace's money to the second, third and fourth tiers; just as the 14 clubs outside the traditional Big Six have often voted against proposals to help the lower leagues, and I imagine the lower leagues are not overly eager to fund non-league football, and non-league football will not use its budgets to fund grassroots football.

But Palace aren’t being the ones squeezed out of the Champions League.

In those lower league tiers, it also seems that almost everyone is overspending irresponsibly, to try and appease their fans (and/or to make the club rich by speculating to accumulate), and no turkey has ever voted for Christmas. (Meanwhile, ‘great’ story at Wrexham, but “Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have lost a staggering £3m in a year since taking over.”)

Yet there are still 92 clubs, and close to 90 will win nothing each season.

More and more is promised, by showman owners and broadcasters, and the dream of better days, but at the top, we have Spurs in an absolute meltdown when 5th in the league, having been melting down since being 4th in the league, and with two state-owned clubs squeezing them out of what would otherwise have been a “good” (if not thrilling) season.

Arsenal may end up trophy-less, but have impressed, even if they're choking a bit now. Maybe now they'll see the cruelty in losing out to a state-funded entity who, on top of everything else, didn't have to pay for a stadium; while Spurs and Arsenal had to pay for theirs, at the cost of squad building.

Liverpool were two games (two goals, even) from winning the best Quadruple in football history last season, and this season the manager was questioned as if he had lost the plot; after 97-, 99- and 92-point finishes and three Champions League finals since 2017/18. Apparently even that doesn't spare you some snide mockery.

Maybe what's going on at Spurs is embarrassing, after all (as an outsider, anything I say about any other club is couched in large doses of ignorance), but the whole sport seems lost in a crisis of meaning.

Maybe Spurs fans wouldn't be happy being 3rd playing rubbish football, albeit had they been safely 3rd with no state-funded rivals, maybe everyone would have relaxed, and the football would have been better. Finishing in the top four would have allowed them to strengthen, to make money from success, instead of that money going to oil-state nations.

(BTW, why don’t anti-oil protesters who disrupt working-class lives and pursuits go and cause civil disobedience in Saudi Arabia? Hmmm… 🤔)

I often think of football as getting to the point where state-run clubs just buy their own trophies.

After all, it's more-or-less what PSG do in France, and the fans seem to get about as much fun from it as they would a visit to some Godforsaken out-of-town industrial estate that sells little gold-painted plastic footballers mounted on fake-marble plinths.

But no, perhaps it's more like this, with Simon Day's character representing Manchester City, and maybe in 5-10 years' time, Newcastle United too:

All of which means football is fairly fucked, but at least while Klopp and most of these players are around, the next few years should at least be worth following, before we can go and find other things to obsess over, as Qatar joins the top-four party.