Not All Football is Meaningful

#2.02 — Giving footballers more time with their loved ones might involve us giving less attention to football sometimes.

This week, I’d planned to write about how Liverpool’s tactics might look in 2025-26. For obvious reasons, I don’t feel like doing so now.

Diogo Jota’s absence will have an enduring impact on many levels, of which tactics and recruitment are the least significant. But it is still real. Many people who have lost loved ones reach a place where they say that the best answer to death, the best way to honour the dead, is for the living who remain to live the best life they possibly can. Thus, there will be a time for playing and winning football matches, and for feeling excited about it. For analysing and enjoying the most important of the least important things.

But it is not for me to say when that time will be. It will be different for everyone. But it will happen. Liverpool is a club, a city, a people, who are accustomed to facing and overcoming tragedy. I trust it will happen again.

That said, I expect next season to feel different for Liverpool. It will probably take some time for football to seem ok and normal again. If it impacts results, I will think no less of the players and coaching staff. If it galvanises them to win for their fallen friend, I will think no more of them. I will love them just the same, whatever happens.

I’ll write about on-pitch football again as soon as I feel like it. For the foreseeable, it will be off-pitch matters that feel meaningful to me. Starting with the below — some reflections on there being too much football, an issue that recent events have brought home in a new way.

You have permission not to read or think about football until it feels normal and ok again. Life is short. Make it meaningful.

May you never walk alone — Josh.

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There is too much football…

I have read many sad and beautiful tributes to Diogo Jota and André Silva in the past few days. Something jumped out at me from the one by Kyle Boas at Tactics Journal. He says:

But it angers me that these players don’t get enough time to get away from football. Diogo Jota, with his little brother, drove back to Liverpool for the start of preseason when this accident occurred.

(…)

Football is a passion but is a job that allows for no true breaks at this moment in time. It is a nonstop, 365-days-a-year, never-ending grind. Not only is the health of the players at risk; they don’t get enough time with their families, with their wife, or with their kids. It is past the point of inhumanity the way the football calendar is run by money-hungry corporations to have tournament after tournament, competition after competition, and match after match on repeat. A season that never ends.

I think he is right to say this. Right to make a connection between an individual tragedy and systemic immorality. He is not ‘using’ Jota and André’s death to inappropriately #MakeAPoint. There is a real connection here with which I think we all need to reckon.

There’s a horrifying sense of cruelty in the way an unlikely accident can remove a human from the world. But what of the cruelty that exploits and pushes the human body to its limit? That imposes on the amount of time someone can spend with their loved ones? Is this not just as — if not more — horrifying, when the cruelty comes not from impersonal forces, but personal ones?

I am not saying — and I assume Kyle Boas is not saying — that anyone at Liverpool was being directly cruel or inhumane to call Liverpool players back for pre-season on the 7th July. Or that anyone involved in fixture scheduling is callously responsible for a tragedy.

But I am saying that death reminds us of life’s fragility, and what means more when we come to its end. People mean more. Love means more, not football. The two are deeply inter-related, but we should not confuse one for the other.

We live in world of increasingly complex systems and arbitrary value. The whole point of things is just to make them bigger, regardless of how meaningful they are. More football. More tournaments. More matches. Line Go Up and the whole word must be involved.

IMO, missing the word ‘unregulated’. Otherwise correct.

Our old friend Jürgen Klopp nailed it when he described the FIFA Club World Cup as “the worst idea ever”. His full comments identify the key processes involved (emphasis added):

It's all about the game and not the surrounding events - and that's why the Club World Cup is the worst idea ever implemented in football in this regard.

People who have never had or do not have anything to do with day-to-day business anymore are coming up with something.

There is insane money for participating, but it's also not for every club.

Last year it was the Copa [America] and the European Championship, this year it's the Club World Cup, and next year the World Cup. That means no real recovery for the players involved, neither physically nor mentally.

In summary, people who don’t love or understand football are creating events that are not about the football, but the surrounding pageantry that is designed to make insane amounts of money for a select group of shareholders. A spectacle designed to make money and project power. The first victims of the exploit are the players.

But fans will be next as the sport they love is degraded, no longer able to provide the joy it once did. Things become valuable by virtue of being rare. Making things common makes them cheap. Familiarity breeds contempt, or at least disinterest. In a world where football is too frequent, love will falter and fail. Each man kills the thing they love.

…And we don’t have to watch it.

With great power comes great responsibility. The major power brokers in football have a greater responsibility to address this issue that the average supporter. But the saying works the other way too — with responsibility comes great power. And responsibility can be taken up at anytime. You don’t have to wait for someone to give it to you.

I have a friend who did not watch a second of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. This is not because he is a woke snowflake (he very much isn’t) or because he is into performative morality (he told no one at the time). Or because he’s not really that into footy (he really is). It was because he thinks it’s ok to be gay and hates corruption and sports-washing. So he quietly boycotted a whole World Cup. Last time I asked, he has no regrets.

My points is not that he is a better person that the rest of us, or that he somehow ‘made a difference’, because neither are true. My point is more simple — you can just do things. And if you think there’s too much football, you can just not watch some of it.

It isn’t possible to nod and say, “yeah, there is too much football, they should do something about it”, and then watch or engage with all the football anyway, and be anything other than a hypocrite. At some point, we have to accept that they includes we includes me.

It can be trendy to complain about how powerless we are compared to all the billionaires and other elites. But most of the ways they make money — particuarly in football — is by monetising our attention. And our attention is one of the few things that it is impossible for anyone else to control. We don’t have to give it to bullshit summer tournaments or other puerile money-spinners. We can just do things. When they lose our attention, they lose money.

I say this as part of the problem. It is easy for me to ignore gimmicks like the FIFA Club World Cup when Liverpool aren’t in it. Choosing not to watch Liverpool would be hard. But I need to look in the mirror and ask, Do I want the lads to get to spend more time with their loved ones? Then I need to act accordingly.

We do not have to watch football we don’t agree with. Life is too short. Make it meaningful.