Read, if you haven’t, my new Slate piece on Wayne Rooney, which is less ROONEY CONTRACT PANIC than a look at how the notion that he’s some kind of half-formed man-child, or an eternal adolescent, has followed his career. The gist is that for all the (sometimes justified) criticism he’s received for being immature or childish, what’s really infuriated his fans this year is that he’s acted too much like an adult, particularly in taking a view of his career that didn’t simply give everything up to the greatness of Manchester United. Obviously, that assumes that it’s not just his streak of poor form that’s alienated his supporters. But even there, you could make the case that what’s holding him back—injury; constantly having to adapt to different positional responsibilities—is disconcertingly grown-up for a player we’re more comfortable imagining as a permanent teenager.
Since I wrote the piece, I’ve been thinking about where the idea of loyalty fits into that argument. Simon Kuper raises the same point in his terrific FT Magazine piece on the Rooney situation, which argues along the way that loyalty is essentially irrelevant to modern players. Here’s a long quote, but the piece is worth reading in its entirety:
This dichotomy drawn by fans and media – you’re either loyal or greedy – misunderstands how footballers think. The word footballers use to describe themselves is “professionals”. Professionals—whether they are footballers, academics or bankers—don’t choose between love and money. They pursue success in their “careers” (another favourite footballers’ word). If they can get success, then money will follow….
Footballers regard clubs not as magical entities but as employers. Like most professionals, they will move if they can find a better job. The better job isn’t necessarily a better-paid one. Rooney could reportedly have earned more than £180,000 a week at Manchester City, and if he had put himself on the market, Real Madrid might have offered him more too. But United’s total package—the chance of prizes, the familiar surroundings, plus pay—seems to have appealed most. This is careerism rather than greed.
Footballers hardly ever come out as careerists. That’s because the game is pervaded with the rhetoric of lifelong love for club: players are always trying to keep fans happy by kissing their club’s badge or talking about how they have supported the club since childhood. Yet probably no professional footballer is “loyal” in the sense that fans use the word. Even Jamie Carragher, the Liverpool defender who is considered “Liverpool through and through”, supported Liverpool’s rivals Everton as a boy, and says he would leave Liverpool if he ceased to be a regular starter. Pundits sometimes rhapsodise about the old days, when players often spent their entire careers at one club, but that was because clubs could then simply forbid them to move. No longer.
Contrary to popular opinion, Rooney isn’t especially selfish. He’s simply typical of his profession. Nowadays he is often contrasted with teammates like Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville, who have supposedly stayed “loyal” to United all their careers. But it would be more accurate to say that these men have a happy employer-employee relationship with United. Had United benched Giggs in his prime, he would surely have been out the door fast. Instead United was the perfect workplace for him. It didn’t suit Rooney as well.
When you see it spelled out in this way, this just seems obvious: players are professionals, clubs aren’t transcendent causes, the golden age never happened. So why is it so important, for many fans, to believe that none of that is true? The “loyal/greedy” dichotomy Kuper writes about is inescapable in soccer—especially English soccer—and seldom does a dissenter arise to say, “I, Herman Crump, am a dentist, and as I would not like to be burned in effigy for seeking better terms for my dental practice, I will not fashion and burn an effigy of Wayne Rooney holding a giant bag of cash when he seeks better terms for his football.” Wayne Rooney makes a lot of money, obviously. But then so do some dentists.
The simple answer here, which is also more or less the right one, is that fans want players to be loyal because fans are loyal, and because we don’t want the game to be reduced to mere technique. The difference between soccer and dentistry isn’t that soccer players and dentists think about what they do in fundamentally different ways, it’s that their audiences think about what they do in fundamentally different ways. Being a fan, particularly in the hardcore club-loyalist sense, is in many ways a matter of deliberately sustaining a set of fictions. When players let us know that they see the game as a set of skills they practice for money, rather than as a midnight war of meaning waged for the soul of the universe, or whatever the guy says in the latest Adidas commercial, it becomes harder to sustain some of those fictions, so we get mad.
But the fictions themselves are basically childish, aren’t they? I don’t mean puerile or selfish, exactly just basically congenial to the consciousness of a child. Childlike. After all, that’s the consciousness that many of us possess when we first become sports fans and that we frequently turn to sports to help us sustain. You can call the Fever Pitch model of fandom—the OMG ARSENAL ARE THE GREATEST CLUB EVER AND I HAVE THEIR POSTERS AND I LOVE THEM model—a lot of things, some good and some bad. But in its preoccupation with heraldry and its belief that the arbitrary group you happened to join possesses uniquely redemptive qualities as compared to other arbitrary groups that are self-evidently almost identical to it, it is paradigmatically nine years old forever.
So maybe that’s where the idea of loyalty fits into the “Rooney as eternal adolescent” narrative. As long as he’s acting in a way that makes him seem 16, as long as we can think of him as essentially locked in a teen melodrama (cheating on Coleen, sneaking out at night to drink too much, etc.), it’s easier for us to believe that he thinks of himself as Sir Alex’s loyal son and soldier, and thus that our sense of the meaning of fandom is real. But when he issues press statements and thinks about contracts and threatens to move to a different work environment, we’re confronted with professionalism in one the last places we expected to find it, and the meaning of fandom suddenly looks a little thin. Maybe that’s why, for all the tutting about today’s pampered players and spoiled children and the fences you built in your day, fans almost never really hate a player for acting like a reckless teenager. When they get to be kids, so do we.
There’s a comparison to be made here with the way American sports have evolved a sort of secondary mythology of “getting paid”—the kid from the projects winning the max contract and buying his mom a house. That might not make it easier for fans to take a star leaving their team, but it gives the star a sort of existential defense against charges of greed. The fantasy of the game is the dream of lifting yourself up and winning incredible riches. Obviously hip-hop culture has had something to do with formalizing that narrative, which is also obviously basically a version of the American Dream. But it’s still interesting it doesn’t seem to have any real equivalent in soccer.
Read More: Manchester United, Wayne Rooney
by Brian Phillips · November 5, 2010
Awesome stuff, Brian. How do you see the role of the press in sustaining these child-like (I hesitate to say “childish” for some reason) identity formations? Are they a crucial part of the discourse, or would it work this way even without the press? Do they simply repeat the fictions, or do they help construct them?
I’m with you in general, but I think Rooney is a bad example. He claimed he was different. He’s the one who spoke of loving the club, of wanting to stay for his whole career, of wanting to break Giggs’ and Charlton’s records, of caring about MUFC beyond the employer-employee level. His comments went well beyond the typical stuff a player says about his latest employer. I think many fans respect it when guys such as BAE call a spade a spade. But when the professional himself swears loyalty to the club, he’s changed the dynamic.
By your standards, Assou-Ekotto is the most professional player out there, and I can’t argue with that at all. Rooney did take it too far with his promises though, and he’s not the only one guilty of that. You talk big, tattoo the club’s crest on your face and then say “not really feelin’ it”.”
It’s funny how this whole thing ties with foreign players. Foreigners have been blamed for everything, from England’s crap performance in the world cup, to taking academy spots from English youth, firing Mark Hughes and screwing up Liverpool. One other accusation made against foreign players, not only in England, but in Italy and Spain too, is that they don’t respect local rivalries. Meaning, they switch clubs without caring about the history of the rivalry between former and latter clubs. The expectation is for Torres, Malouda and Pienaar to act more like Gary Neville, and less like Carragher, Lampard, Rooney, the three Coles, etc. or anyone who changed clubs as a career improving move.
This reminds me of a Gore Vidal quote: “He states the obvious with a real air of revelation.”
The notion of “lifelong loyalty” stems from the pres-Bosman era and also the fact that European clubs have very deep roots, more akin to college basketball programs than professional “franchises” stateside. I have no problem with Rooney manipulating the media (myself included) to 1) Get a good payday and 2) Get assurances they will seek a good supporting cast, but I also can’t accept this short-term “cut throat competition/daggers out/free trade zone” philosophy and ideology as objectively neutral or inevitable. Also, loyalty has brought extended professional success to several of the top Serie A clubs and their players.
I’ve just read that Simon Kuper article and it’s really odd, like listening to a patronising anthropologist explain the actions of a member of an exotic tribe to a curious and uncomprehending outside world. Which is probably what he is doing. “Had he been a great Spanish or German footballer, life would probably have been easier.” Yeah, probably…
Yet, having said all this, we love and admire loyalty as a quality in a player whenever she or he displays it: I don’t think this is a value that exists independent of context or history. I mean, it’s like fair play, which assumes at least some sportsmanship that is not based on self-interest (or team interest. Gruesome).
But Kuper’s point about the employer-employee relationship is quite demonstrative of how the expectation of loyalty is a privilege that, while at surface seems to be a value that should have grown and flourished out of a democratic sense of justice that benefitted and protected those teams who most dearly need to hold on to valuable players, really only applies meaningfully to fans and players from a small top bracket. (I just read someone talking about how the values of fair play or sportsmanship in a game like cricket came embedded in a deeply unfair racial and class context in imperial Britain, which is totally accurate — perhaps the football free market is just another context in which to falsify a real value).
Elliott’s point about Serie A is interesting. The generation of one-club and standard-bearer type players who are retiring out of the league have generated as much cynicism as they have love (well, maybe a little less cynicism), so its possible to see the hothouse circumstances of their success: family-owned clubs, tremendously successful in the era in which these players came of age, the offer of roles that extend beyond responsibility and power on the pitch, a growing tendency to keep ex-players employed in the ranks. Yet, for all their faults — and there are many — the clubs created conditions in which that loyalty could flourish, and it repaid them handsomely more often than not. That’s not to diminish the history of Juve or Roma and their tradition of loyal players – but there are reasons that the tradition continued beyond football’s liberalisation.
/tl;dr Great post – and I loved your Rooney piece, thanks for both, Brian.
Rooney was Everton’s player. If he had any loyalty, he would stay with them. Or does loyalty apply only to bigger clubs? Why is it OK to leave Everton, and at the same time, it is not OK to leave MUtd.
I agree with JLC21. The Rooney example seems to be an exception. This is a case where the player himself has professed may be a bit too much. He was the one kissing the badge too many times, and talked of following Giggsy, Scholes and Charlton. That bit certainly does not look like the usual ‘player-endearing-to-the-fans’ antics. And it clearly shows the difference when Cristiano Ronaldo left United. Though we did feel bad about him leaving the club, it certainly wasn’t as bad as Rooney’s because of the aforementioned fact.
@ZZ I think this has to do with narratives associated with the clubs, still fitting in with the concept of the fan – Man U is a “step up” from Everton and fans of both will expect Rooney to move (mind you, not be happy about it, or want him to move early). I think a very strong element of the dissatisfaction with Rooney had to do not only with the lack of loyalty to leave any club, but in particular whose fanbase conceives of it as not having a higher level, at least for an English player. It’s an interesting contrast with C. Ronaldo, whose departure saw pieces about the role of Real Madrid in the Latin context, which seemed to hint at the idea that he still saw a next step to take; Rooney is denied that option.
I think it also plays into the questions about Gareth Bale/Inter – if the same matches were played by Garetto Balio, easily, or even Gara Balic, there wouldn’t be so much question about whether he “needs” to go to Inter to realize his potential; that would be a natural step up. However, for a British player, the idea is that Spurs is close enough to the top, in terms of spending, history, and success, that it should be enough for him.
So while I agree with Brian emphatically overall, I do think that there is a degree of nuance in the interpretations of and expectations for “loyalty” as a player develops his career, which is not equal to every club and player background.
Thanks for the comments, all. I’m not sure Rooney’s actually all that different in his degree of badge-kissing—maybe he did it a bit more, though there are also plenty of Man Utd forum threads from 2008 about how loyal Tevez is and how great it is that he’ll be at United for life. If anything, I’d say the difference is that people sensed that Rooney really meant it, and got invested in his sincerity. To me, that makes him an especially interesting example for a lot of reasons, one of the big ones being that it suggests that the idea of immaturity (which, again, has always played a big role in the Rooney narrative) and the idea of loyalty may go hand-in-hand.
@Ted Harwood I’d say the press is exploiting a phenomenon that already exists and intensifying it by exploiting it. The fictions of fandom clearly precede the press, but—this is just an intuition, really—the particular kind of rage we experience when those fictions are threatened may be an artifact of the media.
And despite all the guff about loyalty to clubs, if a player ever seems to prefer playing for their club over their country, they are accused of being mercenary. Because the only possible reason for having a stronger commitment to a club team than the national team must be money.
“People question a player’s loyalty, I always question the club’s loyalty. It’s like a business to them. When they’ve had enough of you, you’re out the door. And that can happen in ten minutes. I’m speaking from experience. So, don’t have clubs throwing loyalty at players, it works both ways.”
- Roy Keane
@Shane Murray spot on keano
One thing we need to look at is the fact that these one club players or loyal players are already in an ideal situation to begin with. For example, situation 1: If I’m a young player who happened to make it through the Real Madrid ranks(a rare feat) to the first team, why on would I ever want to change? The pay is great, the club is top tier/successful and I most likely grew up here, it’s too convenient. Think Paolo Maldini, Del Piero, Stephen Gerrard, Francesco Totti, Gary Neville, Paul Scholes. Can you think of any other player like these guys that have left?If I was to leave, I’d have to be pushed out or go to another club of the same or even higher level. David Beckham and Steve McManaman are the guys I can think of at the moment, and they left for Real Madrid.
Situation 2: I was born in London, support West Ham Utd and made it to the first team. I’m good enough that Chelsea offers me a great contract, I’d have to be insane not to accept it right?
So for me in order to see a loyal professional footballer, the conditions must be perfect. Which takes the spark away from the concept for me.
I migh be wrong, but I can’t really think of a footballer these days who defies that logic, can anyone help me out?
according to some, one way of understanding the frequent bouts of overzealous religiousity amongst the muslims of the sub-continent is looking at the ‘curse of the convert.’ because south asians, unlike the arabs, were converted to the religion, they feel like they have to go an extra length to prove their religious credentials.
in much the same vein, do the rooney fans who claim that his loyalty felt more genuine remember when he celebrated a goal for everton with a shirt saying ‘once a blue, always a blue’? perhaps his ‘love’ for man u came from the realisation that he didn’t actually love them from the start, but had to invest in that fiction once he was employed by them.
if this was indeed a reason, he shouldn’t have bothered since it appears man u fans believe sir alex was the midwife at his birth and took him straight from the cradle to old trafford, having forgotten all about his everton past.