Who Are The Winners?: Fans Vs Customers: Money In Sport

 

 

Often, when one turns on the radio for a sports’ phone in one will hear people claiming that they are ‘real fans’ and that others are not ‘real fans’, to which they then offer a wholly subjective definition and explanation of ‘real’ and why they qualify for such a term.

 

Whilst one, dear reader, may say, ‘wait, how can you argue about money ruining sport and how can you say if one is a real fan or not, as it is, as you yourself say, wholly subjective?’ I will conceded that, yes, the money from sport has gone to help many lives. Often in Brazil and parts of Africa, for example, the money from their sports stars in Europe will be the sole form of income for the family and to this it is a wonderful thing (and a damning indictment of the local economies, the World Bank’s regulations and equality). My argument is not with the life changing nuances of money but rather as money in the sport as a whole.

 

Since the advent of the Premier League in 1992, the money in the top levels of English sport have become more and more vulgar until now the costs of not being in the League overrule all other concerns, namely those of the fans’ expectations. Whilst one might, justifiably, say that to be a fan is to support your club through thick and thin (as a Leicester City fan I can say I’ve seen some pretty high highs and pretty low lows) the question comes down to definition of what the club is and how this relates to its supporters. In German football there is a 50+1 rule which means that clubs are, essentially, owned by and for the fans. Ticket prices are low and most stadiums sell out with wonderful support. Even with Bayern’s domestic dominance, the league has a high level of technical ability (just look at the German national team) and the product, football, is of a high quality. The same cannot be said of the English game. With domestic and foreign investment and ownership of the clubs the clubs have become increasingly commercial businesses which, despite the billions poured into the game by Television rights etc, charge incredibly high prices for the tickets, so much so that the average ‘fan’ is priced out of attending many, if any, games.

 

As the model of the clubs is a commercial business model (Arsene Wenger is an economist) one must consider the relationship between the club and its fan base as in terms of a business relationship. The club offers a product (football matches) and advertises the product with the aim of making money from secondary advertising and from ticket sales. People then see the advertisements and decide whether or not to buy into what is being offered. If they decide to then they buy their ticket. The clubs then offer extras, such as programs (although they will soon be phased out), replica shirts, key chains and so forth to maximise the profit margins. They then will also be bombarded in the ground, in the program and to and from the game by the secondary advertisers some of which they may partake in, be it a burger from a burger van or a new car and everything in between.

 

Let’s consider this from a different perspective. If a new film opens at the cinema it is advertised from primary and secondary sources and one has the option to go or not. One enters into the film with the understanding of a contract, that they will be entertained for the two hours or so. Even after entering the screen one is bombarded with more primary and secondary advertising to maximise profits, both to sell advertising and to make inhouse profits. Now comes the notion of definition. Is one a film customer or fan? I would say that I am a Star Wars fan but as the latest direction of the franchise (damn you, Disney!) has not reached my expectations as a fan I feel that I can criticise the product as a paying customer and opt not pay my money and give my support to commercial businesses that I no longer feel is meeting my subjective demands as a fan. This, I think, illustrates the difference between fans and customers. One might counter this by saying ‘but sport is different, silly’ but it really isn’t, it still follows the same principles. Since the English Cricket success of 2005 when it was showed on free-to-air television it was then sold to Sky. Since then participation and viewing figures has decreased so that Andrew Strauss, the director of Cricket and former captain, has proposed a new 100 ball format so that ‘mums and kids’ can understand it (although it seems the ECB (England and Wales Cricket Board) cannot) as a desperate attempt to generate new fans and obtain new customers. This, I think, offers conclusive evidence that given the influx of money in sport the fan no longer is a fan, rather is, in the eyes of the clubs, a customer and probably always has been.  Sport is no different from any other business no matter what we tell ourselves (Nietzsche said that lies to others is relatively rare compared to lies to ourselves) and unless we, the people/supporters, accept this and hold them to the same standards as any other business we will continue to delude ourselves, after all, sport, as a whole, is far more interested in being a business with customers than in being a club with fans.

 

 

‘till next time

Time, Frames And Poetry

This Week, for a change, we will have two short entries. Don’t for get you can contact me any time at thegreaterfool2016@yahoo.com be it to say too short is too long or two short is not too long or any variance on that theme!

 

ps. bonus points for anyone who can see the link

 

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Understanding Poetry

 

 

Poetry is one of those mysterious things. Many people are experts of poetry, there are ‘Poet Laureates’ and poetry has become one of the central tenements of culture whether one knows it or not. The ‘mad’ neglected poet William Blake’s (or as he lets me call him Mr Blake, Sir) poem Jerusalem has become the unofficial English National Anthem and you would be hard pressed to find bigger influences on Western Art than the Christian Bible, Shakespeare and Ovid.

Experts will tell you that a poem, and by extension a poet, succeeds only if certain criteria are met i.e. symmetry in stanza lengths, metres, syllables etc. but what is not taught by experts is the real nature of poetry, its true essence.

 

Poetry is emotion and thought become language.

 

When Poe ‘loved with a love that is more than love’ one does not read or hear the line and declare, ah! He rhymed love with love therefore he succeeds! No, as one listens to the words one feels the words and the words ring true as they touch on a universal notion, that of love. The impossibility of the sentence, love is an absolute so how can it be a love more than love?, is irrelevant for, even though it goes beyond the conventions of language and logic, it is understood perfectly, not because of the number of syllables or the repetition but because the emotion. The poem is expressing something which is universal but is also known on a personal level by most of the people in the history of the world past and future.

 

Poetry is the personalisation of universal thoughts and feelings and vice-versa. Although there may be cultural divides, the aforementioned Jerusalem would be, arguably, better understood by a British audience, and Han Shan would be better understood by an Asian audience, Rumi Islamic and so forth, there is no denying that even if they cannot be wholly understood contextually, they can be wholly understood in terms of the thought and emotion which comes from them

 

‘Bird-song drowns me in feeling.

Back to my shack of straw to sleep.

Cherry-branches burn with crimson flower,

Willow-boughs delicately trail.

Morning sun flares between blue peaks,

Bright clouds soak in green ponds.

Who guessed I’d leave that dusty world,

Climbing the south slope of Cold Mountain?’

(Han Shan)

‘Suddenly

(yet somehow unexpected)

he arrived

the guest…

the heart trembling

“Who’s there?”

 and soul responding

“The Moon…”

came into the house

and we lunatics

ran into the street

 stared up

 looking

 for the moon,

crying for him

like mourning ring doves

“Where where?”

He is with you

closer to you than yourself

be like melting snow

wash yourself of yourself’

(Rumi)

 

 

And to all of the poetry experts   out there who say that poetry is only successful if it fits into a mathematical formula I think that you may have missed your calling as accountants!

 

‘till next time

 

——–

 

Frames, Time, Knowledge And Existence  

 

 

We live our lives in frames. Everything has a frame, work, family, the food in the fridge, everything, especially time.

 

There are two main arguments about what time is although I feel it is best to say that these only cover how time is perceived. The two positions can easily be summed up by a calendar, which makes me wonder if I had a physical calendar I would have realised this long ago, more fool me.

 

Newton proposed that there was one time frame and everything existed within it, Einstein then came along and said that ‘hey, time can be broken down into smaller frames, independent, and non-transferable to what happens without the frame. Essentially Newton says that time is a house and Einstein says that time is broken down into little, individual frames such as rooms in the house. What happens in one room cannot effect what happens in another. This is the same with knowledge. If you are in the bathroom you know what is going on and anyone outside has no idea (where else can you, like Kerouac, find the peace and quiet to read Shakespeare and the Bible?) however, if you leave the bathroom you know what is happening in the corridor but you no longer know what is happening in the bathroom as your frame has changed, your frame (time) is still the same but it has been shifted. Imagine, if you will, a grassy field. Before the left side there are three lampposts and on the right, likewise (see my brilliantly technical drawing).

 

 

Standing on the left-hand side by the third lamppost you can see all three on the left and only one on the right, that is your frame and everything which happens within it can be known, by you. Step forward to the second lamppost and suddenly you can see two on the other side, however, you can no longer see the one you just left as your frame has shifted.  Continue this until you have reached the other side and suddenly you can see the three lampposts on your side but only one on the other. The frame has shifted and now you can only have knowledge of what is within your frame.  These frames, in terms of a calendar, are days and you can see each day in its little frame going from the beginning of the week until the end. Simple enough. But what is not covered is what happens within each frame (day).

 

Henri Bergson said that time is that of consciousness and thusly wholly subjective. It would be a mistake to say that Einstein’s time in not subjective, as the frame moves with the subject and is dependent upon arbitrary markers for each end of the frame. Bergson’s model says that what you think, feel, or, more concisely, experience internally is time, wholly personal, within the frame of your own existence. Knowledge can be acquired within the frame, however, without cannot, as with Einstein, be known the same way. On your calendar, you might write Monday 9am Dentist, your Sunday self cannot know how you will experience it, the Tuesday self can as it is now part of your personal frame and knowledge but either way, your time, knowledge and existence is wholly dependent on frames, as with Einstein. Whatever time really is it cannot be remotely subjective, thusly one must conclude that what we call time is limited to our own frames and cannot be real time, rather a form of pseudo-time which is created by own subjectivity and limitations.

 

Ah, lunchtime!

 

 

‘till next ‘time’

 

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Be Brilliant

 

 

A friend of mine has a slogan which he uses, not by wrote but because he really believes in it. Be Brilliant. An incurable optimist he likes to see the best in situations. However, not everyone in the world agrees with his opinion, not even the world.

 

Hemmingway wrote in his war novel A Farewell To Arms

 

‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.’

 

And Victor Frankl writes in his brilliant memoir of surviving Nazi concentration camps, Man’s Search For Meaning 

 

‘The best of us did not return’

 

Yet, in a world where the good, brave and gentle are slowly destroyed, not through any particular event but rather by the mediocrity and nastiness of the world wearing them down,

‘Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.’

(Anton Chekhov)

 

there still are remarkable people of such gentleness and tenderness that it defies belief.

In his book, Frankl remarks that it was often the seemingly weakest- the quiet introverts- which survived, not because they had physical strength but because they could go within themselves and escape, so to speak, the horrors of reality and retain their own notion of self. In the face of something which wanted to completely annihilate them, even from history and memory, they managed to find the inner peace to survive. Nietzsche wrote

 

‘One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.’

 

In which he means that one must not be defined/determined/created from without, rather one must, in the words of Aristotle, ‘be as you wish to seem’. If you want people to think you are great, be great, kind, be kind, brilliant etc.

 

Civilisation is made by weak, scared people. As Henry David Thoreau wrote ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ And it is this desperation for status, for appearance, for all things not real, being normal for one!, which creates a world in which ‘It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially’. But, hang on, the world does not care about any person good or bad. It is people who destroy people. We are living in the aftermath of the financial bust, the world is full of people who rape children, serve only themselves and cannot comprehend or conceive true goodness. Whilst it is an adage that ‘the good finish last’ and to succeed in the world you must be an ego driven b*****d have you ever asked, what are they finishing last in? and is this something in which you wish to win?

 

When Muhammed Ali passed away Dylan posted on his website

 

‘If the measure of greatness is to gladden the heart of every human being on the face of the earth, then he truly was the greatest. In every way he was the bravest, the kindest and the most excellent of men.’

 

And in one of his songs about the American Civil War

 

‘It’s the last day’s last hour

Of the last happy year

I feel that the unknown

World is so near

Pride will vanish

And glory will rot

But virtue lives

And cannot be forgot’

 

So, maybe what really matters is not money, status, fitting in and the other arbitrary measures of success, maybe to be a success one must not be brilliant but rather be brilliant. However, it will not be easy and, as Hemmingway says, it may kill you but nothing can destroy who you are within and if you can reach the end and live up to the final verse of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah

 

‘I did my best, it wasn’t much

I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch

I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you

And even though it all went wrong

I’ll stand before the Lord of Song

With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah’

 

then

 

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,  

And—which is more—you’ll be (brilliant), my (friend)

 

(Kipling)

 

‘till next time

 

 

Moral Decay And Tea

 

 

‘My house is your house”, his brow suddenly furrowed and he looked worried, “although only in a metaphorical sense, you understand, because I would not, much as I always admired your straightforward approach, and indeed your forthright stance, actually give you my house, it being the only house I have, and therefore the term is being extended in an, as it were, gratuitous fashion –”

Owlglass was clearly having some trouble getting to the end of the sentence. Glurk tapped Pismire on the shoulder

‘he’s a philosopher too, is he?’ he said.

‘you can tell, can’t you,’ said Pismire’

 

Terry Pratchett

 

 

St Augustine was an interesting man. In his 40s he wrote his memoir (Confessions) after renouncing the ways of the flesh and becoming a holy man. In Confessions he wrote ‘the world is drunk with the invisible wine of its own perverted, earthbound will’. Kakuzo Okakura, a 19^th-20^th Century Japanese writer wrote in ‘The Book Of Tea’, a book about the history, philosophy, proper preparation and western misconceptions of tea, in relation to modern man, ‘the long woes…have robbed him of the zest for the meaning of life. He has become modern, that is to say, old and disenchanted. He has lost that sublime faith in illusions’.

 

Thus we have two great minds agreeing with me (tee hee) that we have lost our way due to the prevailing normalcy of the world. A world full of teachers, politicians, philosophers, academics, physicists and so forth who, in the words of Okakura, ‘…never put their teachings in systematic form. (who speak) in paradoxes, for they (are) afraid of uttering half-truths’, or to put it simply, who are afraid to speak the ‘truth’ from fear of being wrong and/or questioned, ignoring what Okakura then says ‘Laoste himself…says…’it would not be the Tao (truth/path etc) unless (people) laughed at it’’.

 

In this Okakura is saying that the truth may seem foolish to some people but that is because it is the truth. Okakura later says that this is to do with language as ‘in ethics the Taoists railed at the laws and moral codes of society…definition is always limitation…a stoppage of growth’ whereas ‘Zennism, like Taoism, is the worship of relativity…truth can be reached only through the comprehension of opposites’. In this Okaura highlights, something which I have written about extensively, maybe I should have found his book sooner!, that normalcy is a concept which is created as a fixed notion and, rarely, can be changed. If something is considered ‘true’, say that blue is actually pink or that free people are actually slaves or choice is actually predetermined by genetics, culture and so forth then anyone who disagrees with the perceived normalcy will be considered mad, strange or other synonyms for not normal. This ‘drunkenness’, to continue Augustine’s point, is then continued and fed (fed? Maybe watered would be more appropriate for wine?) by those who are supposed to question everything and stand up to notions of normalcy being too scared to stand up for the sake of their own reputations and will continue ad nauseum (pun intended- see Sartre’s existential crisis of a novel Nausea) with no respite from the intoxication of its ‘own perverted, earthbound will’.

 

The Tao/path may be, as it says in the Christian Bible ‘narrow’ and you may be mocked for walking upon it, but unless someone has the strength to attempt to walk the Tao everything will continue as it is and all the tragedies you read about in the papers will continue until the world is returned to the nothingness from whence it came.

 

Who’d have thought that drinking a cup of tea would be such a perspicacious experience?

 

‘till next tea time

Time Again…Really?

 

In the mid-20^th century there emerged a ‘new’ school of philosophy spearheaded by Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, shaped by the war and the writings of Husserl and Heidegger, ‘created’ what is known as existentialism. Existentialism is the thought that one is free and that life comes from one’s own impulses.

 

However new these theories might have seemed in post-war France, they actually carry a great, often overlooked or unknown, historical weight. Sartre maintained that one was ‘condemned to be free’, by which he meant that one was wholly responsible for their own existence. In Dostoyevsky’s novel ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ it is said that if there is no higher law then everything is permitted. By this, it is said, if there is no higher law/judge i.e. a God, then there cannot be inherent moral laws or correct applications of one’s behaviour. Ethics and morality become entirely to provision of the individual, wholly subjective. The relation in which Sartre used this concept was in relation to one’s involvement in society, whether one’s involvement was authentic or inauthentic. Sartre maintained that one does not need to be invited into the society or to choose to be in society, but rather that one was already part of it whether one knew it or not. Pericles, the founder of Athenian democracy which, with the Spartan system, underlines all western democracies said that just because one has no interest in politics does not mean that politics has no interest in you!

 

Often one finds one’s self reaching some great epiphany of one’s, and other’s, existence and writes it down on scraps of paper thinking that one has solved the greatest mystery of being yet if one takes a breath one can see that many of these thoughts and revelations have come before and are often repeated and just because you cannot read them attached to a famous name does not mean that a non-famous person did not have them prior. For all we knew the greatest person of all has lived and died unknown to the masses. This is the way of things.

The most concerning aspect of this is why do these thoughts have to be rethought? Although Sartre would maintain that the thoughts come from him and/or others independently it is quite apparent that these thoughts, generally, stem from some prompting, be it individual curiosity or part of the spirit of the times. Although one may protest that one is free in thought, it is clear that even the freest minded person is limited in their freedom of thought, why? Well, as Camus said, because everything becomes a concept and loses its freedom. The fact that these thoughts are created by the environment in which they find themselves should concern one for it is more evidence that, although it appears that history repeats itself, I myself wrote that it did on here a few weeks ago (how young was I), there is little evidence that it can repeat itself as we have moved on to a stage when it is the past and can be repeated.

 

Our thoughts are important to use and help to create/shape who we are. However, this should not be taken in isolation for who we are, if these thoughts are to be of substance, they must transcend who we are and expand into the wider consciousness of society. Only then can we move on far enough for history to have the potential to repeat.

 

‘till next time (or as it may seem)