This is an article about sports as part of an ongoing series looking at games and theory.
You don't have bus parades for healthy bank balances. - Europa League champion and ex-Tottenham Hotspur coach Ange Postecoglou
Forgive me if you've already taken the off-ramp after seeing a quote from a soccer coach. I don't write very much about sports, but bear with me. On the one hand, sports' relationship to games is orthogonal. They're both comprised of players and rules. I'd actually argue that playing games makes you a better sports fan. It preps you for the actual nature of sport: the expression of rules through interactive human dynamics.
But per the landmark decision of Jocks v. Nerds (Time immemorial), games and sports don't often comprise overlapping fandoms. That's unless you play a lot of sports or competitive games. As someone who grew up in an extremely sporty family (my father and my brother both played college football) and a lover of games, I still hold a fondness for sports, and so should you. It's simply out of the joy, the hysterical joy of watching victory over defeat.
Over the last couple of years, I've turned down my American football watching and exchanged it for watching European soccer, which seems nearly infinite in its output. I find it's fun to root for a particular team, even if you're just getting started, to achieve that sense of stakes, and, given I didn't grow up with a soccer-loving family, I asked a friend for the nearest analogue to my beloved Philadelphia Eagles. "You should root for Tottenham Hotspur," he texted. In retrospect, this was a filial act of violence, and I can hear those of you who do watch soccer snickering. The argument, as it goes, is that both teams had long championship droughts in their DNA while generally boasting maddening middling form. I was skeptical of the rationale, of course, but Dunning-Kruger dictated that I should spend a year watching a bunch of Spurs games. It was tense at first, and then last year, I realized something strange about this club.
One thing you'll hear other soccer fans levy against a sports team is that "they don't know how to win" in a cosmic sense or "don't have championship DNA" in a genetic sense. It's one of those truisms like "They've just got the dog in 'em" that belies statistics or reason but points to something innately feral and chaotic about human sport that borders slightly on wish manifestation. There is something scientific about the sentiment; fans do have an impact by harangueing referees, and the brain's ability to do something is bolstered if you've done it before.
How Play Gets Corrupted
But with Spurs, there is something much deeper. They are generally not good, yes, but they really shouldn't be this bad. Tottenham Hotspur is one of the wealthiest clubs in Europe and one of the most valuable franchises in the world, yet over the last 18 months, they have posted one of the worst records in European football. "Relative to financial security, sporting expectations and basically any other metric you could care to mention, this Tottenham Hotspur season has more than a fair shout at being the worst by any team in English football history," writes Tom Chambers at ESPN.
The problem is simply that Tottenham has decided to attempt to undermine the nature of play itself. In 1958, French writer Roger Callois penned Man, Play, Games, an exploration into why we play. He, along with Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga, set up some of the formal frameworks for how we think about contemporary games, and one of his chief concerns was how play gets corrupted. Specifically, Callois called out the intrusion of mundane reality and professionalization as threats, the latter he described as "a contagion of reality." The point is that play should be free and unburdened, and introducing real-world financial stakes pollutes what should be a carefree, soul-affirming activity. One of the joys of play is that ostensibly there should be no connection between what we do on the pitch and what we do for work.
Tottenham embodies the Callois critique. Despite having enviable resources, the team's owners have decided to prioritize profit over the sole purpose of sport: winning games. Instead of signing new players, they built a stadium to host six nights of Beyoncé (who is amazing but does nothing for soccer). They charge some of the highest ticket prices in Europe. They rarely compete for "ready-made" world-class talent; instead, they focus on "investment players"—younger prospects with high resale value. They even cut their senior citizen discount. Of course, all of this would be forgiven if Tottenham could build on past successes rather than wring every last ounce of profit out of their beleaguered fans. They now face the threat of something that was once unthinkable: relegation.
How the English Relegation System Is Actually Brilliant Game Design
One of the things I really like about English soccer is its relegation system, which is super unfamiliar to Americans. In the United States, teams are functionally fixed concerns and are never really added (with the exception of college football, which is a strange edge case). In English football, by contrast, there is a long-running tradition known as the "English pyramid." Functionally, it means teams are broken into divisions, and those at the top of their division move up, while those at the bottom move down. And going down can mean missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in TV and advertising revenue.
The difference between American and English systems boils down to what game designer Marc LeBlanc calls "feedback loops." The American system is generally a "positive feedback loop," because winners can generally compound their wins over multiple seasons. There are some counter-measures, like salary caps that limit spending, but the structure of the league can feel more like a late game of StarCraft where one's resources are simply too depleted to complete. This isn't all bad—"positive feedback systems are sometimes useful for dispelling uncertainty, bringing about the climax, and creating a sense of finality and closure," LeBlanc writes.
By contrast, LeBlanc would describe the English system as a negative feedback loop. Negative feedback loops help maintain equality by pulling up the bottom and pushing down the top. So, the infamous blue shell in Mario Kart is a well-known execution of this system.
The key contribution of negative feedback loops is tension as the overall contest is ostensibly unknown until the very end. Positive feedback leaves little to the imagination, but negative feedback takes its time. English football (and European football generally) isn't just a competition for the top—it's simultaneously a survival game at the bottom. This doubles the number of teams with something urgent to play for at any given moment. It keeps more matches meaningful deep into the season. As I write this, 90% of the 20-odd teams in the Premier League are playing for something, either to win the league, qualify for bigger European competitions, or simply not fall apart. That's a product of excellent design.
But good design works both ways. "Feedback systems support meaningful play by making the game responsive to the ongoing state of the game," write Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in Rules of Play. But Tottenham, one of the richest clubs on the planet with a terrible record, may, in fact, go down a division, something that hasn't happened to them in 50 years. It's total appointment viewing at its worst, and the owners of Tottenham absolutely deserve it.
It's total appointment viewing at its worst, and the owners of Tottenham absolutely deserve it.
Why I Can't Stop Watching — And Why You Shouldn't Either
Since the Premier League was founded over 30 years ago, the amount of money invested in the top flight of English football has continued to balloon. And thus, soccer owners now have mixed feelings about the relegation system. On the one hand, the drama is obviously good for the global game, but in terms of value creation, it's a tenuous way to operate a for-profit business. If you are wealthy, nothing bothers you more than the whims of providence or defeat determining your wealth, especially in such a low-event affair as soccer.
As a consequence, you're starting to see more and more English clubs looking with jealousy at the system we have in the United States, a Congress-authorized cartel system where new teams are rarely added. The cartel system basically protects owners' investments, because there is simply no punishment for losing. Economics dictate that value comes from scarcity, and there are simply only so many tickets to own an American sports franchise. As more American owners have also started buying soccer clubs in Europe over the years, there have been attempts to mimic the U.S. and abandon tradition. (You can guess who's been part of leading this charge.)
The issue with Tottenham really cuts at the heart of what it means to play, and what we're seeing in English football is a warning to us all about what can capitalism can do to sports. The turn to abstract the game of sport into a profit-and-loss calculation is the end result of decades of neoliberal excess that atomizes individuals and reduces every human interaction to an economic transaction. Leaving aside all the values and importance of local fandoms as potential connective tissue in an era of increasing loneliness, the idea that the only value in winning is financial is a complete corruption of play, leaving me wondering what the hell we're doing here. Or put another way, "Fandom isn’t being nurtured anymore. It’s being mined," wrote Joon Lee in The Times.
The silver lining, of course, is that this particular strategy that Tottenham has pursued—winning enough to deliver returns to its shareholders but never doing anything truly daring that would deliver sustained joy to its fan base—may cost the club $260 million if its performance doesn't improve. In the meantime, I can't help but watch with sick glee. One of the wealthiest clubs in the world losing their shirt and being forced down to spend a Saturday night playing against Deadpool and the guy from It's Always Sunny. The beautiful game, indeed.