Good news in world football

Opinion

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This article was published 10/02/2023 (940 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In case world football’s been getting you down, good news! Manchester City’s Sunday match at home to Aston Villa has become a children’s observation activity.

“I spy with my little eye, something that is… blue.”

“Like, blue in their thousands?”

“I’m still counting!”

City, you see, hasn’t sold out a Premier League game since 2017. And so, given the hundred-plus financial doping charges they incurred this week, those empty blue seats are suddenly a symbol of a club whose sky has fallen.

Now, there’s a German word for how City rivals not named Chelsea and Newcastle are feeling about all this. Meeting at London’s posh Churchill Hotel on Thursday, they presumably clinked glasses, high-fived one another and considered what a unified front might look like when the violations are inevitably tested in court. And then rang for another crate of champagne. (The word is “schadenfreude,” by the way.)

Not that there’s anything to be giddy about.

If successful, the prosecution will have potentially re-written an entire decade of English football history. City could see multi-season points deductions, the loss of their trophies and even expulsion from the top flight. Those six Premier League titles essentially come with asterisks already.

Fair, yes. Funny, no. Although, in the defense of the vast majority of fans who don’t support a financial rules-breaking team or sportwashing enterprise, humour is about the only thing that can tether an increasingly out-of-touch industry to the real world.

Those suspensions of reality and conscience so necessary to following professional sport are currently stressed to the point of cracking, and if they break, you fear the game is up for good.

A Saudi-sponsored Women’s World Cup? The tether stretches. A European Super League? Stretches some more. Winter transfer fees in excess of a billion euros?

Ever had a tow rope snap and break your windshield?

And so we make fun of Ronaldo’s inability to find a job in Europe, or laugh at Neymar’s tantrum when he doesn’t get a birthday party. Or watch in fascination as the Manchester City locomotive careens off a cliff. We play eye spy.

We also seek out stories that ever so gently restore our faith, that strengthen that tether, at least for a moment. Like Jadon Sancho’s Wednesday goal against Leeds.

Nevermind that his tally completed Manchester United’s second-half comeback. The 22-year-old had been away from the club for more than three months when he made his return the previous week. Basically, he had needed a mental and physical break, some time away. He was brave enough to ask for it, and manager Erik ten Hag progressive enough to sign off with his blessing.

You could see what it meant when he scored, the relief on his face, the triumph. That’s football.

In much different circumstances, the Ukrainian Premier League will soon be restarting after its winter break. Despite Russian shelling, shifting fronts and players’ families often relocating outside the country, the 16 participating clubs just about got the first half of the season in the books by the late-November dispersal.

As Shakhtar Donetsk CEO Sergei Palkin told CNN last month, the league has continued for no other reason than to support the Ukrainian people, its army and the invasion’s refugees. Kyiv, Lviv and Uzhhorod have welcomed numerous teams from the illegally occupied enclaves, and Shakhtar have donated a third of the €70 million paid by Chelsea for playmaker Mykhailo Mudryk to the soldiers who defended Mariupol.

Given that Chelsea were recently owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovic, the Blues are indirectly funding the Ukrainian military. Joke’s on you, Roman. That’s football.

Finally, on Thursday morning Espanyol vehicles delivered emergency supplies and shelter materials to the Turkish consulate in Barcelona — a donation that will shortly make its way to the region devastated by Monday’s earthquakes in southeast Turkey and northwest Syria. It was humble, helpful assistance from a club developing a reputation for it.

Last winter, the Spanish outfit’s team bus drove to the Poland-Ukraine border with a cargo of food, medicine and football gear. Then it evacuated 40 refugees. That’s football.

Incidentally, this latest Espanyol delivery was made while the Premier League big wigs were stepping out of their limousines at the Churchill Hotel.

In case world football’s been getting you down, there’s also good news.

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