Keep it low, a splendid rush, bravo, win or die;
On the ball, City, never mind the danger,
Steady on, now's your chance,
Hurrah! We've scored a goal.
City!, City!, City!
– Lyrics to 'On the Ball City,' the official song of Norwich City F.C., originally penned in the 1800s and considered to be the oldest football song still in use
This blog was simply meant to be, as I’ve somehow stumbled my way into being a supporter of an endless series of teams that never seem to win anything. The one exception to this is the San Francisco Giants, of course, and I can think of nothing better to do on this 80° San Francisco day than go out to Phone Co. Park and watch the Jints go all St. Patrick on the asses of those dirty, nasty Snakes from Arizona. But since I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, which is about as inarable a landscape as it gets when it comes to winning, I’ve been saddled with failure on all sorts of levels – the Mariners perpetual ineptitude, the Seahawks bad Karma, the Canucks running the gamut from laughingstock to juggernaut heartbreaker during my lifetime but never breaking through, and the Sonics, of course, RIP Sonics, whose move to Oklahoma City constitutes a scar and a stain that never gets scrubbed away. And then there is Washington State, of course. Sigh …
And so I go to Great Britain as a student in the late 1980s to a lovely and pleasant little city called Norwich and they happen to have a terrific soccer club, Norwich City F.C. And I was hooked, of course, and have become a supporter for life, appreciating both the quality of the product on the field at the time and the ethos of the club as a whole. Indeed, at that time the Canaries were coming off one of their most successful years ever – a season in which they’d been top of the table in Div. 1 for most of the season, only to falter in the final month and wind up 4th, and reached the semifinals of the F.A. Cup to boot. They had a roster of top-flight talent, some of whom would be playing in the summer of 1990 in the World Cup in Italy, and they played an attractive passing game which was decidedly different than the traditional English highball style of the time. Much like their yellow-and-green American counterparts, the Oakland A’s, the Canaries have always had to do things a little bit differently to compete, being a small club compared to their Div. 1 counterparts – the urban area of Norwich has a population less than 200,000, and the Canaries’ home grounds, Carrow Road, has a capacity of 27,000. They had stockpiled their roster at the time through beating the bushes looking for players, buying low and selling high.
And they’d never won much of anything, of course, and still never have.
Norwich City has never won a league title, never won an F.A. Cup, and never even as much as been to the final of the F.A. Cup. They’re the good guys of English football, a plucky, tenacious, and proud club that’ll show up and give you a good game with a loyal throng and good-natured lot of supporters behind them. (Well, those clownshoes from Ipswich probably don’t think we’re the good guys. Pox on them.) The Yellow Army always takes an encouraging, pragmatic stance when it comes to rooting on City – enjoying the club’s achievements in the moment, and not allowing the lack of championships in the past nor the unlikelihood of championships in the future to tarnish the beautiful game at Carrow Road on a weekend afternoon.
And this past Saturday, the Canaries had match at Carrow Road with the Royals from Reading F.C., a match which took on enormous significance. After assembling a 10-match unbeaten streak earlier in the season, including wins over Arsenal and Manchester United, the Canaries’ season has completely gone off the rails. They’ve been godfuckingterrible for four months, as the offense can’t score, they can’t win on the road (1 win all season away from Carrow Road), and they’ve conceded countless numbers of late goals in losses which have led to a hideous goal difference. Daydreamy early season talk of competing for a European place had given away to a far more serious concern, as the spectre of potential relegation reared its ugly head.
Relegation is concept that is notably absent from American sports. And given some of the awful products professional clubs churn out in America, it probably shouldn’t be. (I mean, really, why should we have to put up with the 5-11 Arizona Cardinals every year?) Whereas the MLB and the NFL and such are singular entities with franchises distributed to various cities, football in England (and, indeed, most everywhere else in the world where soccer matters) is structured as a loose association of clubs in a multi-tiered system. There are 92 clubs in the four divisions of English professional football, with countless more clubs scattered in regional leagues below that. Finish in the bottom three of the league and you get demoted to a division below.
This structure serves well to keep talent from being diluted, of course, because the best players will naturally move to the highest levels of competition. For the sake of providing an example, I will make myself authoritarian ruler of the NFL and decree that the league is dividing into 2 divisions this coming season, based upon last year’s results:
XP’s NFL Division 1 (with records from last season)
13-3: Atlanta, Denver
12-4: New England, Houston
11-4-1: San Francisco
11-5: Indianapolis, Green Bay, Seattle
10-6: Baltimore, Cincinnati, Washington, Minnesota, Chicago
9-7: N.Y. Giants
8-8: Pittsburgh, Dallas
XP’s NFL Division 2
7-8-1: St. Louis
7-9: Carolina, New Orleans, Tampa Bay, Miami, San Diego
6-10: N.Y. Jets, Buffalo, Tennessee
5-11: Cleveland, Arizona
4-12: Oakland, Philadelphia, Detroit
2-14: Jacksonville, Kansas City
In XP’s NFL, only the teams in Division 1 can compete for the Super Bowl. Oh yeah, and all of that TV revenue for the league goes expressly to the top tier, because let’s be honest here, who wants to watch Jacksonville play Detroit? So if you’re in Division 1, your revenues just doubled, which also means that your budgets for players just doubled as well, and there are some pretty good players to be had down in Div. 2 there, now aren’t there?
So think about what the quality of play would be like in XP’s NFL Division 1, as XP the authoritarian decrees the 16-game NFL schedule features a round-robin format where every team played each other once. with every team basically stacked 53-deep with talent, this would make for an incredible quality of play.
But the genius of such a structure has always been that it eliminates many of those pointless endeavours in getting the season over with that you see in American sports where two teams with no realistic shot at achieving anything go through the motions in the late stages of the season. This is because being relegated is an absolute disaster with dire consequences for your club. So not only would the teams at the top of XP’s NFL Division 1 be jockeying for playoff positions, but teams at the bottom would be doing everything imaginable to avoid being dropped to Division 2, and desperation leads to some remarkable late-season doings. Virtually every significant European football league has some club that is never any good yet seems to always pull a Houdini act at the end of the year to avoid being dropped. It makes the battles at the bottom of the table as compelling for the spectator and the viewer as the battles at the top.
And don’t fret, members of XP’s NFL Division 2 – claim the Div. 2 league title and you’ll move up to the top division, and reap all of the prestige and glory that come with it – not to mention the revenues, of course. Did I mention the revenues? So all of THOSE Div. 2 games, while not being great viewing in and of themselves, also take on huge importance, because the goal for those clubs is ultimately break through and join the top level. And that achievement of breaking through, for a bunch of teams like the Arizona Cardinals or Detroit Lions who have never won anything, would be worthy of a civic celebration onto itself.
Such is the case in England, of course, where winning promotion to the EPL is a HUGE deal. Unlike the winner-take-all spoils of America, multi-tiered soccer creates multiple reasons for happiness. In the big picture, the American in me says that Norwich City F.C. has never won ‘anything,’ but winning the second division three times in their history is nothing to sneeze at. The last of those second-tier titles came in 2004, after which the club put on one of the worst displays of EPL football imaginable the following season, going months before notching their first win and quickly being relegated again. City’s fortunes further faded and they found themselves subjected to the indignity of being relegated to the third tier in 2009, at which point they righted the ship. Two successful campaigns led to two promotions, and the Canaries were back in the English Premier League come the summer of 2011, given keys to the penthouse in the most exclusive sporting association imaginable, one they had helped to found 20 years earlier and one which hadn’t hesitated to throw their ass out when they couldn’t produce any quality on the pitch.
The EPL was founded in the early 1990s, a breakaway entity that nonetheless works within the traditional, multi-tiered structure of English football. The top 22 clubs (which has been reduced to 20 since) formed their own private corporation and negotiated their own sponsorship and broadcast rights deals. Each club is an equal shareholder in the organization – with membership dependent on the on-field results, of course. The stated aim at the time of the EPL’s creation was to generate more revenue so that English clubs could both prosper and also compete on the continent, as the game was clearly trending in the direction of heightened importance of international club competitions. To that end, the EPL has been remarkably successful. The global broadcast deals now are worth somewhere around £3,000,000,000 or so, and the league generates annual revenues into the billions of pounds as well. English clubs have won four titles in the European Champions League since its inception in 1992, and finished runners-up on four more occasions.
Quite simply, the EPL has become among the greatest shows of the sporting world. With the infusion of billions in television revenue, the relaxation of international work restrictions due to the E.U., and its place as the cradle of the game, England has also seen 20 years of the world’s greatest players playing the game domestically. Some English naysayers have noted that such a prevalence of foreign talent has cost the nation dearly when it comes to creating top flight players for the World Cup and Euros, of course, as teams such as Arsenal and Chelsea have been known to field entirely foreign lineups, but there can be no doubt that the national profile, when it comes to football, has never been higher.
But with promotion to the top flight of English football comes an alarming new level of uncertainty, because the drop off between the EPL and the Football League Championship (a gussied up way of saying Division 2) is SO GREAT. Broadcast revenues alone for EPL clubs run in the £45,000,000-£50,000,000 range per club, whereas Div. 2 clubs aren’t likely to generate more than £1,000,000 or so of interest. This steady infusion of monster amounts of capital has helped contribute to the stratification within the EPL itself, as clubs which were already large to begin with, such as Manchester United and Arsenal, have grown even larger and consistently been able to support the lavish wage bills necessary to remain competitive. As the revenues have escalated in the EPL, so has the cost of doing business, as the average player salary has gone up tenfold in twenty years, and the challenge for the clubs like Norwich City is to figure out how to compete. Sure, adding £50,000,000 to your budget is a nice problem to have, but what happens if your season goes sideways and you find yourself in the so-called “drop zone” (the bottom three teams are relegated every year), at which point you’re budget goes up in smoke?
And it can happen, of course. Bad seasons happen for a number of reasons – maybe it’s a spate of injuries, maybe it’s some bad transfer decisions, maybe your club was purchased as a toy by Icelandic bankers and is leveraged to the point of being insolvent. Relegation can have disastrous consequences for your club, which is almost inevitably forced to go into fire sale mode and sell of every good player you have (usually at buyer’s market rates). Often times, relegated clubs have also accrued massive debt in the attempts to compete at the highest level, debts which come due when the EPL revenues have run dry. A good number of the original founding clubs of the EPL back in 1992 now flounder about in the third division, and one – Wimbledon – did the seemingly unthinkable and relocated to Milton Keynes.
The Canaries have focused, in their EPL return, to being fiscally responsible. A lot of the newcomers take the approach of “let’s try to get through this” in their first year in the EPL, hoping to do their best with the players who got them this far and squeak out enough points during the season to avoid being relegated again. (It’s only happened twice that all the newcomers survived.) The Canaries’ Moneyball ethos – buy low, sell high, do things differently – has served them well this time around, as the Canaries were far better prepared for the rigours of the EPL this time around and finished a very respectable 12th in 2012. Two years’ worth of EPL revenues have allowed the club to pay off debt and stand on squarely solid footing, and the club even pulled off something of a coup recently by scooping up a talented young Dutch striker from a financially flailing Portuguese club, and doing so right under the noses of some larger suitors. It was a brash sort of signing not usually seen from Norwich City, a move signifying intent to do more than just survive the EPL, but actually compete for the coveted places in European competition (with accompanying revenues, of course). Norwich City’s one foray into continental competition is decidedly memorable – the club defeated Bayern Munich in Munich, no less – and stands as the high point of the club’s golden age – an era I had stumbled upon when I arrived there as a student 20+ years ago and lasted until 1995, when the team crashed out of the EPL and promptly spent the next eight years wandering the wastelands of the second division.
And that’s what we DO NOT want to happen this year, so enough dabbling in nostalgia and let’s get back to the matters at hand – the Canaries haven’t played worth a damn in 2013 and now survival is no sure thing. And with Norwich sinking towards the bottom of the table, skirting the edges of the drop zone, come rumours of what could happen were the club to fall out of the EPL. Indeed, the agent for the Dutch striker I mentioned before, a player with the wonderfully Dutch name of Ricky van Wolfswinkel, has said the deal is off if Norwich sinks to Div. 2. Norwich disputes this, of course, but I don’t really want to find out. Just WIN SOME DAMN GAMES and settle the issue already! I mean, here at IN PLAY LOSE World HQ, losing is a fairly common (and quite interesting) phenomenon which I try to take in stride, but I understand well that a loss in this game, and the potential loss of a place in the EPL as a consequence, could be disastrous to my favourite football club. The game with Reading on Saturday (a club already virtually doomed to relegation themselves, sitting last in the standings) was therefore of tremendous importance. The three points were vital …
Whew!
The win and the three points moves the Canaries up to 13th place, seven points clear of the drop zone with four games left to play. They aren’t out of the woods yet, but they have three manageable games ahead of them where taking points are realistic, beginning this week against Stoke City (Suck it Frentz! The Potters are going down!) They also have a game at Manchester City which appears to be a beast, but Man City had their designs on defending the EPL title and have come up wofully short. They’re fairly comfortably slotted into a European qualifying place, and they have an FA Cup final to prep for, so its unclear what sort of focus they’re going to have for what is, to them, a pretty meaningless game with Norwich City. And as I said before, the season gets wacky this time of year, with the bottom clubs suddenly channeling their inner Man Uniteds and picking up points which have eluded them all year, often at the expense of middle-of-the-run clubs who aren’t in danger of being relegated but also aren’t in the running for any sort of spoils. (In other words, they no longer care.) So we loyal members of the Yellow Army cannot breathe a sigh of relief quite yet. We must remain en garde and on the ball …
In the days to call, which we have left behind,
Our boyhood’s glorious game,
And our youthful vigour has declined
With its mirth and its lonesome end;
You will think of the time, the happy time,
Its memories fond recall
When in the bloom of your youthful prime
We’ve kept upon the ball
Kick off, throw in, have a little scrimmage,
Keep it low, a splendid rush, bravo, win or die;
On the ball, City, never mind the danger,
Steady on, now’s your chance,
Hurrah! We’ve scored a goal.
Let all tonight then drink with me
To the football game we love,
And wish it may successful be
And in one grand united toast
Join player, game and song
And fondly pledge your pride and toast
Success to the City club.
Kick off, throw in, have a little scrimmage,
Keep it low, a splendid rush, bravo, win or die;
On the ball, City, never mind the danger,
Steady on, now’s your chance,
Hurrah! We’ve scored a goal.
