Why don’t I watch the football?

Several years ago, a few more than I can recall, I took the decision not to watch the England men’s football team play. I enjoy football, though don’t really understand the obsessional nature of it. I certainly appreciate the skill, tactics, psychology and drama of a regular football season, but this changes for me at a national level.

Football to me is a team sport, playing together to score more goals than your opponent, playing by the rules and doing so fairly, where hopefully the better team on the day, wins. Yes, you are right, that is very naïve. There is something about “the beautiful game” that is nostalgic, taking many of us back to childhood and the misguided belief that perhaps we could be as good as our heroes (in my case Dalglish, Souness, Kennedy, Coppell (yes a Manchester United player), Keegan, Hughes and so on). There was a sense that being the best or winning the World Cup was not simply possible, but probable.

As an adult, I often watched England matches in despair, the collection of normally very good players rarely seemed to perform at the level of expectation.  They seemed laboured, dull, lacking creativity and attack; it seemed that it was more important not to lose than it was to win, resulting in many drawn matches, decided by a penalty shoot out. After various disappointing tournaments, I decided to stop the self-inflicted misery.

As every tournament comes around our media has very slowly learned to be a little less unrealistic about “football coming home”, until England progress to the next round and then suddenly hope and expectation surface in a weird xenophobic-tainted jingoism that feels rather contrived.

To me, the experience became joyless, stressful and disappointing. The inane commentary, constant discussion and assumption that this is all very patriotic and ‘normal’. The wasted time and money all in the hope that “this time it will be different”.

I observed the obvious. A football competition has only one winner, everyone bar the final winning team is ultimately left disappointed. The chance of winning is not purely mathematical, the competition is designed to attempt to eventually pit the better teams against one another, it has deliberately inbuilt bias. The typical experience has the resonance of a gambler who continues to return in the hope of the big win, despite the system being designed for loss.

You might say that it’s good to be optimistic and that we should all be patriotic; wishing our team success and supporting them. Well I do… and don’t. However noble the players are, I don’t know them (I have a media impression) and they do not really represent me at all, they represent a nation I was born in, live in, work in and pay tax in. This is true of any national sport. I find myself wanting the best team to win, but occasionally wanting a team with a particularly interesting story to win. Is that wrong? I would rather play at my best and lose to a better team than cheat, play cynically and win.

I don’t have any ill feelings towards the players, they are young men, trying to do their best for the few moments that they truly get to influence terribly much. They carry huge expectation and face venomous criticism, mostly misplaced and unfair from ‘fans’. However, I have always struggled with the concept of winning at all costs. The first World Cup I remember (which made an impression) was Argentina in 1978. Watching the fouls, diving, feigned injury, ham acting and general cheating was shocking to me at that point. Today it’s normalised.

The notion of fairness or fair play is hard to really quantify or even succinctly define, yet we know it when we see it. It’s why I have struggled with investing, knowing that many companies are far from ‘fair’ in how they treat their staff, contractors, suppliers, customers and the planet. I cannot pretend that they are “great companies”; they are not; they are successful ones in a rigged system. In the same way that a number of world leaders and politicians are ‘successful’ but it’s all based on deceit and corruption.

In the end, records simply show results, who won and when. They don’t capture context, struggle or any of the human aspects of what occurred. We have to do the remembering, which is flawed and full of bias and probably error. Over time the record is increasingly the only truth.

I am often accused of being too much of a purist, that this is simply how the world has always been and it’s not changing, so I must accept reality. The older part of me understands this, but the younger part is disappointed in my apparent willingness to accept unfairness and stop trying to make things fairer or better.

We collectively tend to delegate the role of making the world better to our elected “representatives”, but are reminded that being disappointed by politicians is normal, yet we continue to hope and have those hopes dashed. We will witness whether the new Prime Minister will be any better, fairer, just or empathic than his predecessors, we can hope, but the depressingly familiar reality is that words are cheap and positive, attacking, organised, thoughtful strategies to actually ‘win’ (improve our lives) are rare. It is sadly more likely that behind the scenes money and power will shape the results precisely how they intend. Just like in the World Cup.

But just so that you know, I live in the hope and belief that things could actually really be much better for us all, not simply for a powerful few. What I can tell you is that we don’t have as much control as we would like, a financial plan is an active attempt to regain some, where we can, determining how we live and the values for which we stand so that we can make the best of the limited time we have, our equivalent 90 minutes; and then we ourselves are history.

I work with real people who understand their values, want to live by them in a complex, imperfect world and that winning is about how you live, not the amount of gold you amass.