Clearly this is far from fashionable, but among my most detested of modern words are “pampering” and the indefensibly atrocious “wellness”. I don’t imagine this will have the wellness brigade crying into their kale daiquiris, but the world can be easily divided into people who would use the term “wellness”, and people with whom I should care to spend a second of time.
I don’t think I’ll ever warm to “lifestyle”, either, which conjures up showhomes with bar-stooled breakfast nooks, artist’s impressions of “retail experiences” that have yet to be built, and generally ignores the filthy magnificence of human existence in favour of a narcotising consumer advert for which you’re the mark. The Ski Yoghurt family – ask your parents, kids – had a definite lifestyle, and an advertising executive who had run the Ski account once explained to me that this was simply because they had to destroy the historically embedded idea that yoghurt was “a product only neurotic secretaries bought”.
And so to Major League Soccer – once a product only Americans bought, like Twinkies or line-dancing records – but now on such an upward trajectory that some wonder if it will eventually overtake Serie A. Before we go on, I should say that I am keen on MLS. I’ve been to several very enjoyable games, and have been lucky enough to meet some particularly wise and funny people who cover it, to say nothing of countless charming fans. I have even encountered some of the chaps involved with running it, and they are not what the likes of Ken Bates or Doug Ellis would call “football men”. There could scarcely be a better recommendation.
But I can’t help feeling that the glorious ascent of MLS will be delayed if its biggest signings continue to give the unfortunate impression that the league’s USP is everything that happens off the pitch. Consider the utterances of recent emigres from this septic isle. This week, the LA Galaxy captain Robbie Keane said he now constantly fielded calls from European players “really desperate to come over here”, because they can see how the league has improved “and because of the lifestyle too”.
Last year it was Keane’s team-mate, Steven Gerrard, who stated: “The attraction of America was the different lifestyle.” There was the New York Red Bulls’ Bradley Wright-Phillips, too, who explained: “A lot of people, they know that when you come to America you have a good lifestyle.” Asked to assess the future draw of MLS for Cristiano Ronaldo, Frank Lampard judged: “I think the lifestyle would suit him.” MLS is assessed as Holly Golightly judged Tiffany’s: nothing very bad could happen to you here.
Of course, you can hardly blame players for feeling this way, particularly at that stage of their careers at which they currently tend to be drawn to an MLS move. I know Samuel Johnson said that to be tired of hearing people wish your kid got cancer is to be tired of life – but we all get a bit tired in the end, don’t we, and there is little more amusingly one-eyed than those fans wondering furiously why a player would want to leave all this rain-sodden, spittle-flecked hurly-burly to see out his playing days in reach of palm trees and the Pacific Coast Highway. Or the Empire State building, or wherever.
Of MLS offers, Ashley Cole once sniffed: “I didn’t want to sit on the beach just yet.” He made his debut three weeks ago (that’s his LA Galaxy debut – I imagine he’s already been to the beach a few times.) Even New York City FC’s Andrea Pirlo this week favourably contrasted “being able to go out to dinner at the trendiest restaurants” with being corralled in a Serie A dressing room half the night for safety reasons, and having the team bus tyres slashed. We have yet to really hear of players not “settling” in the States, whereas the list of those foreigners who found themselves immune to the charms of various English industrial towns is as long as it is poignant.
I remember being at the LA Galaxy ground on the morning David and Victoria Beckham stepped on to the pitch for the latter’s formal unveiling. Victoria was wearing a fitted candy pink outfit and was perfectly described by the radio reporter Nigel Adderly as having come as an exact cross between Jackie Kennedy and Paris Hilton. No idea whether she meant to. But then, consciously or otherwise, so many of us tourists to the US are keen to knit ourselves into the sort of Americana at which Europeans have gazed – in admiration, in horror, but always mesmerised – from these shores since at least the end of the second world war. And if you dispute that rare use of the journalistic “we”, then I must conclude you missed out on the American Century, and congratulate you on your piety, purity, and better-than-thattery. At the same time as offering my condolences that you missed almost EVERYTHING.
Still, if MLS is itself to get bigger and brasher and better, in the exhilarating American fashion, then the “lifestyle” stuff has to go. League bigwigs must have a stern word with the highest-profile signings, whose perpetual foregrounding of this aspect gives a very good impression that MLS is a bespoke kitchen island in the Hollywood Hills with a football contract attached. Furthermore, the frequent emphasis on the league’s “family friendly” qualities as a player destination does rather make it sound like a restaurant that provides crayons. A relief, certainly, but you’re not going for the food.
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