The interesting thing about Liverpool’s struggles over the last few weeks is not the struggles themselves, which have lost the power to surprise. It’s how angry the fans have become with the players for reasons other than their poor on-field performances.
These issues came to a head last week as they lost 4-0 to Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium. First Hugo Ekitike swapped shirts with Rayan Cherki after they had been subbed off, and Cherki, who has a real sense of theatre, proceeded to don the shirt and wear it on the City bench, like a warrior displaying the scalps he had brought home from battle.
This was a bit much even for the others on the City bench, who told Cherki to take the Liverpool shirt off. But then, at the end of the game, Dominik Szoboszlai, who has been Liverpool’s most consistent player all season, appeared to remonstrate with the few away supporters who had stayed to the bitter end. It looked as though he was rebuking the fans for not giving the team more on the day.
This went down poorly. A few days later there was a super-viral clip from the Anfield Wrap podcast in which co-host John Gibbons summed up the disconnection between the fans and the team.
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The essential point was that the Liverpool players no longer have any sense of the people they are supposed to represent.
How else could Szoboszlai, a couple of days after losing 2-1 to Brighton, have posted an Instagram picture showing off his €90,000 Audemars Piguet Royal Oak in 18-carat pink gold? (It’s a watch.)
Gibbons argued that if Szoboszlai understood Liverpool fans he would have known that ostentatiously displaying his expensive watch would make them think he was a “flash c**t”, and not in a good way.
You may ask, why should it matter? Szoboszlai is a young athlete who lives in a foreign country and earns a large amount of money. The luxury economy is one of Europe’s most dynamic industrial sectors and its whole purpose is to invent ways to separate guys like him from their money. He’s worked hard to be able to afford that watch, so why not let him enjoy it?
The answer is that Szoboszlai is rich not just because he’s a top athlete. It’s all about the social context. Szoboszlai works hard, but does he work as hard as Kristóf Milák, who won the 100m butterfly gold for Hungary at the Paris Olympics? As reward for winning that gold, the culmination of a lifetime of unimaginably hard training, the Hungarian sports ministry paid Milák a bonus of 55 million Hungarian forints. It converts to £128,000, or about what Liverpool pay Szoboszlai in one week.
Footballers earn a lot more than athletes in most other sports not because they work harder or have superior skills. It’s because their sport has become one of the last remaining social institutions that allows people to experience collective meaning, tribal belonging, and the thrill of organised group conflict.
People need these things and in our societies, football has become an accidental solution. But it has to feel like the group stands for something, or the illusion collapses.
It’s not that fans are envious of players’ money – actually, given the exaggerated importance we all place on the game, it seems logical that they should be rich. Unlike many other kinds of rich people, top footballers display skills that people can relate to and admire.
But when it becomes apparent that the players don’t understand anything at all about the people who pay to watch them, that the respect flows in only one direction – that we are not, in fact, all in this together – disappointment quickly gives way to anger.
At the same time, Liverpool supporters have been told their ticket prices will be going up for the next three years.
There were protests against the price increases at Anfield on Saturday, including an organised effort to boycott the stadium bars and food stalls, and the only banner that appeared on the Kop all day was a giant one reading “NO TO TICKET PRICE INCREASES”.
Liverpool’s chief executive has explained that actually the club’s ticket prices have not increased as fast as some rival clubs’ prices have, that inflation means the club’s operating expenses have increased, and so on.
The Anfield protests are currently less about the sums of money involved – the planned 3 per cent increase translates to a maximum of an extra £27 on a season ticket – than they are about a sense of disrespect. The club seems to be saying: your job is to keep singing for us even as we lose 4-0, then shut your mouth when we charge you more.
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But the sums of money involved are also a problem – one which looks likely to get worse, fast. The latest Deloitte Football Money League report showed that, after years when football’s economic growth was mainly driven by bigger broadcast rights and commercial deals, match day revenues have become the fastest-growing income stream for Europe’s elite clubs, increasing by a remarkable 16 per cent since the previous year’s report. European club owners are acutely aware of what fans are getting charged these days in American sports and they are thinking they’d like a piece of that action.
Fifa’s gouging of supporters with their extraordinary World Cup ticket prices and resale commissions tells you where the game is going. If that’s how the world governing body is willing to treat fans, why should billionaire club owners be any different?
