But some would also argue that those franchises’ owners simply go through the motions and cash the cheques, since in the end, there is little genuine incentive to be good. The aforementioned Mariners recently sold for over $1 billion in spite of having never achieved much of anything on the field, while the single-worst franchise in the NBA, the Sacramento Kings, recently fetched a $600 million price tag at sale. Salary caps and revenue sharing have created something of a cost certainty in the endeavor, meaning that, from a financial standpoint, the incentive to actually be good doesn’t necessarily exist, and there are little to no consequences for being bad.
The single-entity American professional leagues are a far cry from European soccer, of course, where leagues are essentially loose amalgamations of vast numbers of clubs grouped into strata and tiers. Whereas being terrible on the field in North America can make you quirky and charming and cute, in Europe, if you suck, they just tell you to go away. Relegation is ruthless and merciless: if you fall below the line, down you go to the lower league, regardless of status or pedigree. This past season in the English Premier League, two of the three clubs which were relegated – Newcastle United and Aston Villa – rank, in terms of revenues, among the 10 largest soccer clubs in Britain and the 20 largest clubs the world. Aston Villa had never been relegated since the EPL was founded in the early 1990s. Newcastle, meanwhile, found £70 million in the bank accounts to spend on new players back in January in a desperate attempt to avoid the axe, and their net-spend this season was the second-largest in Europe. Didn’t matter. Newcastle finished 18th while Aston Villa finished dead-last, the two clubs running through multiple managers while trotting out ill-conceived lineups of players with cartoonishly large wage bills and remarkably small attention spans. Both clubs will have to hit the reset button this coming August, coping with tighter budgets while enduring one of the more grueling leagues on earth, the English Championship, formerly known as Division Two, where the season is 46 games long and most every club has a chip on its shoulder. Welcome to the mess.
And the third club going down to Div. 2, the one that finished 19th in the EPL? That would be my beloved Canaries of Norwich City. Sigh. One of the wordsmiths at Football Weekly said it best when calling this result a throwback to Great Britain’s coal mining past, with two clubs from the industrial north descending into the underworld and taking some Canaries with them. Whereas the British press has heaped scorn and hurled vitriol towards Newcastle and Villa for their largesse, bombast and general, across-the-board incompetence, it’s been a little different when it comes to Norwich City.
Quite simply, the Canaries weren’t any good.
This particularly awful play, in which Martin inexplicably gifted a goal to Liverpool’s James Milner, was part of an epic collapse by the Canaries on Jan. 23 which saw the Canaries race to a 3-1 lead after 54 minutes, only to then yield three goals in the next 21 minutes to find themselves down 4-3. The Canaries then tied it at 4-4 in stoppage time, only to lose on an Adam Lallana goal on literally the last kick of the game in one of the wildest, wackiest games anyone has ever seen in the league. The 5:4 defeat has earned plaudits in the press for being the best game of the entire EPL season on account of its sheer entertainment value, even if it was something of an error-strewn mess. But when you wind up 19th and you are sent down to Div. 2, that’s little consolation.
And Norwich were perpetually praised for their effort this season. Unlike the trio of other clubs mired in the relegation battle – Villa, Newcastle, and Sunderland – who were often vilified for being gutless, spineless, and acting like cowardly quitters, the Canaries always put up a fight. This fighting spirit was best embodied in a game against Chelsea, where a nasty coming together in mid-air left one Norwich player with four missing teeth and another with a bandage wrapped around his head, having stepped off the pitch momentarily to have a gash in his forehead stapled shut. The walking wounded played on regardless and played their asses off that day, but the Canaries lost nonetheless, a 2:1 defeat to the Blues in which the winning goal was scored by Chelsea striker/shithouse extraordinaire Diego Costa, who was about two yards offside at the time that he scored – an infraction that was blatant and obvious and yet the referees missed it. An unsurprising turn of events, really, because if Norwich didn’t have bad luck this season, they would’ve had none at all.
And this team had no luck whatsoever. They were constantly on the wrong side of the official’s decisions. They were only awarded one penalty all season, and few of those awarded against them were truly deserved. They lost 2:1 to Leicester when Jaime Vardy flopped in the box and got awarded a penalty for it. They had their equalizing goal in their season opener against Crystal Palace – a gorgeous overhead kick by Cameron Jerome (more on him in a minute) – overturned for a high foot even though the Palace defender was nowhere near the ball. The officials have been remarkably unkind to Norwich this season.
A large factor of luck is timing, of course, and Norwich had none of that, either, losing more points in the closing moments of matches than I can ever remember seeing before. The Liverpool loss came on the last kick of the game, and a goal by West Ham on the game’s final play turned a Norwich win into a 2:2 draw. Norwich lost two other games – at Leicester and at Manchester City – on goals allowed in the 89th minute. Simply seeing those four games out would’ve resulted in 5 more points in the table – the exact final margin this season between themselves and 17th place Sunderland. This team seemingly invented ways to lose, and then when it came to the end of the campaign, a rash of serious and season-ending injuries struck the most important members of their defensive core. The Canaries felt cursed at times. They just could not catch a break.
But here at In Play Lose, our favorite quote may be the Sartre quote which serves as the epigram for this blog – “in football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposing team” – but probably the second most favorite quote would be one from Louis Pasteur: “luck favors the prepared mind.” And just as luck favors the prepared mind, it also favors the prepared players. If you have to ride your luck to get by, you’re probably not good enough to belong there in the first place.
West Ham’s 94th minute goal, which I mentioned previously, was particularly ill-timed, but it also came on a free kick after a dimwitted foul gave the Hammers one last opportunity for a set piece, and the Canaries made a mess of it:
Down a goal to Manchester City at the Emirates despite playing a terrific game, the Canaries finally caught a break in the 86th minute, when current England goalkeeper Joe Hart suddenly developed lettuce hands and dropped a routine cross at the feet of Jerome – a chance not even he could miss, and he tapped it in to level the score. But three minutes later, former England keeper John Ruddy gave it right back with this wandering, wayward effort resulting in a spot kick for the Citizens:
Man City converted the ensuing penalty. Game over, Man City 2:1 Norwich, another point dropped. Sigh.
Luck isn’t enough. You have to make your own luck and, more importantly, not put yourself in a position where bad luck might bite you in the ass.
After winning the richest game in soccer last May, and earning their promotion to England’s top level, it was always going to be something of a struggle for the Canaries to stay up in the EPL, given the size and the stature of the club compared to the others. This is the nature of the beast. The competition at the highest level of the sport is fierce and intense and vicious, and unlike here in the U.S. where you can just go on being terrible in perpetuity, once you reach the EPL, you have to get it right. You don’t get a second chance.
And to give you an idea what “getting it wrong” actually looks like, consider the squad composition of a club like Norwich City. During the international breaks, when players were released to play internationally, as many as a dozen of the Canaries were wearing their national team colors. Five Canaries are on the rosters for teams playing in the Euros this summer, while two more were in the starting XI for the Dem. Rep. Congo team with finished third in the African Cup of Nations. So in the grand scheme of things, we’re hardly talking about a bunch of stiffs here. These are literally world class players.
But it’s a matter of scope and scale. When you venture into the English Premier League, you’re talking about trying to compete in the biggest, richest, most balanced and most competitive league on the earth. EPL clubs spent over £1 billion on acquiring talent this past season. The wage bills at top clubs runs as much as £200 million. The talent level is so high that even high-calibre players like those Norwich employ can come to look like bushers in a Sunday pub league.
And soccer is a sport where the margins between success and failure are damningly small. In basketball, where there are sometimes more than 100 possessions aside and the points flow freely, the difference between good and bad is obvious. But failure in soccer drives you insane after a while, because you’re always so close to being successful. It’s easy to look through the catalogue of failure that was Norwich’s season – 22 losses, 7 draws, and only 9 wins – and find so many instances where one play here or there going a different way would have radically altered the outcome. Good teams make their own luck and find ways to get results, while bad teams squander chances and are ultimately punished for their shortcomings.
And Norwich had plenty of shortcomings this past season, starting with the fact that the defense was dreadful and error-prone:
I have no idea what the hell the goalkeeper was doing on that play.
But the biggest culprit of them all was the offense, which dried up when the club needed it most – failing to score in five of their last six games – and ranked among the worst in the league. The club’s top scorer, Dynamo Kiev loanee Diumerci Mbokani, managed only 7 goals all season, with is putrid. The offense sucked, and this is where the Philosophy of the Fringe comes into play.
Every year, the fringe clubs in the EPL have to figure out how they’re going to play in order to gain enough points to stay up. Staying up is all that matters, and whatever works, you go with. Some clubs will go for the all-defensive approach. West Brom is the worst of the lot. West Brom are absolute garbage. They park the bus every game, play for 0:0 and score the lion’s share of their goals on set pieces. They’re absolute crap to watch, their fans don’t really like watching it, their players don’t seem to like playing it, yet here we are at the end of the season and West Brom have eked out enough 0:0 and 1:1 and 1:0 results to stay up. Two other clubs who are staying up, Sunderland and Watford, have less talent throughout their squads, on balance, than Norwich does, but both clubs had top-calibre strikers up front who could find the net in times of need.
From the get-go, Norwich wanted to be aggressive, to attack and play a possession-based passing game, and while it could be quite attractive to watch at times, it doesn’t do any good to play that way if you have strikers who couldn’t score in a whorehouse:
Every year, the fringe clubs in the EPL have to figure out how they’re going to play in order to gain enough points to stay up. Staying up is all that matters, and whatever works, you go with. Some clubs will go for the all-defensive approach. West Brom is the worst of the lot. West Brom are absolute garbage. They park the bus every game, play for 0:0 and score the lion’s share of their goals on set pieces. They’re absolute crap to watch, their fans don’t really like watching it, their players don’t seem to like playing it, yet here we are at the end of the season and West Brom have eked out enough 0:0 and 1:1 and 1:0 results to stay up. Two other clubs who are staying up, Sunderland and Watford, have less talent throughout their squads, on balance, than Norwich does, but both clubs had top-calibre strikers up front who could find the net in times of need.
From the get-go, Norwich wanted to be aggressive, to attack and play a possession-based passing game, and while it could be quite attractive to watch at times, it doesn’t do any good to play that way if you have strikers who couldn’t score in a whorehouse:
That was Cameron Jerome contriving to somehow miss an open goal against Leicester, which is something he did about six times this season.
Jerome scored 20 goals for Norwich last season, when the Canaries earned promotion, but hit the net only three times this year. He is what American baseball fans know as a classic AAAA player, a guy who is terrific at lower levels but, when advanced to the highest level and thrust onto the big stage, always seems to come up short. He’s had a journeyman career, bouncing about an assortment of yo-yo clubs that move between divisions.
And what’s alarming about the club’s roster is that virtually every player on the squad has been relegated twice if not thrice in their careers. It’s an entire team of AAAA players – guys who are really pretty good and on the cusp of being great, but who then strike out at the highest level. After the club was relegated in 2014, they kept the core of the club together, believing that 2014 was simply a blip on the radar, an act of underachievement after two successful EPL seasons before it. That they promptly bounced back up to the EPL after a season in Div 2 showed such that such thinking possessed some merit, but now that they’ve been tossed out on their asses once again, perhaps 2014 wasn’t an underachievement after all. The talent level just isn’t good enough, just as it wasn’t good enough before, and all of those players are simply older now and still not good enough.
Norwich tried everything this season. They tried to be open and attacking and they lost. They tried to be stout defensively and they lost. Manager Alex Neil tried every sort of shape and tactic and lineup he could think of, and none of them worked. Neil was the youngest manager in the league, and his inexperience showed at times – the EPL being a difficult place for a manager to receive on-the-job training. The game everyone points to as the the gaffer’s biggest gaffe was a ridiculous, 6:2 loss at Newcastle in which he made attacking substitutions in order to chase the game and his defense got cut to ribbons on the counter, after which the team pretty much abandoned the attacking identity they had sought to create. It was something of an overraction to a fluky sort of game: Newcastle had six shots on target and all six went in; Norwich, meanwhile, hit the woodwork twice, had a shot cleared off the line, and the referee missed a blatantly obvious penalty, which means that the score very easily could have been 6:6! Weird stuff happens sometimes in football, and there is no need for rash decisions after only one result.
Neil was always trying to find the balance, and never could quite get it right. Having said that, it’s hard to be successful with so little talent to work with, and the club did him no favors by acting overly cautious and being unwilling to spend much in the transfer market. Norwich is a tough sell to begin with since, while it’s a charming and pleasant little city, it’s decidedly rural and decidedly not cosmopolitan. The passionate and forgiving fan base can certainly win a player over, but you have to get the player there first in order for them to realize it. Neil has hinted in the post-mortem that the recruitment endeavor, and some other behind-the-scenes machinations at the club, contributed greatly to this season’s failure. Norwich’s club chairman David McNally responded to a tweet from an outraged fan calling for his resignation by tweeting back that he’d just submitted it. Neil has been retained and will be given a chance to manage his way out of this mess, but McNally departing was inevitable, because no matter how good of a job he’d done in balancing the books during his seven-year tenure, the mandate from the club’s board was clear: stay in the EPL.
If anything, Norwich have been too nice when it comes to competing at the highest level, not wanting to be quite so ruthless. In contrast, Watford came up at the same time as Norwich, completely turned over the roster, signed a dozen new players, cobbled together a successful season in which they avoided relegation, and then fired the manager anyway. Norwich are generally happy with being a small club, but they really can’t make the “we’re a small club” excuse for being so bad this year, since Leicester City – a club of similar size, who was even more of a longshot with the bookies than Norwich at the season’s start – just went out and won the goddamn league, for heaven’s sake.
And in the Wild West capitalism of international soccer, when you finish second to last in the EPL, you aren’t rewarded with the 2nd pick in the draft. You get sent to Division 2, you get your budget slashed by about £125m, you have a host of transfer requests turned in by players who don’t want to play in Div 2, you take a hit on the sale of any of those players since everyone knows that you need to sell and have guys who want to be sold, everyone takes a pay cut and usually there are job losses. It’s a mess you do well to avoid, and while an infusion of £130m for a season in the EPL provides something of a cushion as you fall, it’s a tricky situation which can be disastrous financially if you get it wrong.
But we Norwich City faithful are a patient lot, and the fans just roll with it whenever the club gets relegated – which, unfortunately, happens quite often. The Yellow Army isn’t about to go and burn down the stadium or do something similarly stupid. They’ve been bounced out of the EPL four times now, and yet they find a way to eventually turn it around and get back to the first division. It’s a case study in managing one’s expectations.
I’ve made it a point this past season to renew my interest and follow them more closely, and if nothing else, having them out of the EPL will be better for my sleep schedule, since I won’t be getting up for 4:45 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. kickoffs. I’ve sat back and watched this train wreck of a season with a fair amount of intrigue and amusement, frustrated with the constant run of defeats but only truly outraged on occasion.
Jerome scored 20 goals for Norwich last season, when the Canaries earned promotion, but hit the net only three times this year. He is what American baseball fans know as a classic AAAA player, a guy who is terrific at lower levels but, when advanced to the highest level and thrust onto the big stage, always seems to come up short. He’s had a journeyman career, bouncing about an assortment of yo-yo clubs that move between divisions.
And what’s alarming about the club’s roster is that virtually every player on the squad has been relegated twice if not thrice in their careers. It’s an entire team of AAAA players – guys who are really pretty good and on the cusp of being great, but who then strike out at the highest level. After the club was relegated in 2014, they kept the core of the club together, believing that 2014 was simply a blip on the radar, an act of underachievement after two successful EPL seasons before it. That they promptly bounced back up to the EPL after a season in Div 2 showed such that such thinking possessed some merit, but now that they’ve been tossed out on their asses once again, perhaps 2014 wasn’t an underachievement after all. The talent level just isn’t good enough, just as it wasn’t good enough before, and all of those players are simply older now and still not good enough.
Norwich tried everything this season. They tried to be open and attacking and they lost. They tried to be stout defensively and they lost. Manager Alex Neil tried every sort of shape and tactic and lineup he could think of, and none of them worked. Neil was the youngest manager in the league, and his inexperience showed at times – the EPL being a difficult place for a manager to receive on-the-job training. The game everyone points to as the the gaffer’s biggest gaffe was a ridiculous, 6:2 loss at Newcastle in which he made attacking substitutions in order to chase the game and his defense got cut to ribbons on the counter, after which the team pretty much abandoned the attacking identity they had sought to create. It was something of an overraction to a fluky sort of game: Newcastle had six shots on target and all six went in; Norwich, meanwhile, hit the woodwork twice, had a shot cleared off the line, and the referee missed a blatantly obvious penalty, which means that the score very easily could have been 6:6! Weird stuff happens sometimes in football, and there is no need for rash decisions after only one result.
Neil was always trying to find the balance, and never could quite get it right. Having said that, it’s hard to be successful with so little talent to work with, and the club did him no favors by acting overly cautious and being unwilling to spend much in the transfer market. Norwich is a tough sell to begin with since, while it’s a charming and pleasant little city, it’s decidedly rural and decidedly not cosmopolitan. The passionate and forgiving fan base can certainly win a player over, but you have to get the player there first in order for them to realize it. Neil has hinted in the post-mortem that the recruitment endeavor, and some other behind-the-scenes machinations at the club, contributed greatly to this season’s failure. Norwich’s club chairman David McNally responded to a tweet from an outraged fan calling for his resignation by tweeting back that he’d just submitted it. Neil has been retained and will be given a chance to manage his way out of this mess, but McNally departing was inevitable, because no matter how good of a job he’d done in balancing the books during his seven-year tenure, the mandate from the club’s board was clear: stay in the EPL.
If anything, Norwich have been too nice when it comes to competing at the highest level, not wanting to be quite so ruthless. In contrast, Watford came up at the same time as Norwich, completely turned over the roster, signed a dozen new players, cobbled together a successful season in which they avoided relegation, and then fired the manager anyway. Norwich are generally happy with being a small club, but they really can’t make the “we’re a small club” excuse for being so bad this year, since Leicester City – a club of similar size, who was even more of a longshot with the bookies than Norwich at the season’s start – just went out and won the goddamn league, for heaven’s sake.
And in the Wild West capitalism of international soccer, when you finish second to last in the EPL, you aren’t rewarded with the 2nd pick in the draft. You get sent to Division 2, you get your budget slashed by about £125m, you have a host of transfer requests turned in by players who don’t want to play in Div 2, you take a hit on the sale of any of those players since everyone knows that you need to sell and have guys who want to be sold, everyone takes a pay cut and usually there are job losses. It’s a mess you do well to avoid, and while an infusion of £130m for a season in the EPL provides something of a cushion as you fall, it’s a tricky situation which can be disastrous financially if you get it wrong.
But we Norwich City faithful are a patient lot, and the fans just roll with it whenever the club gets relegated – which, unfortunately, happens quite often. The Yellow Army isn’t about to go and burn down the stadium or do something similarly stupid. They’ve been bounced out of the EPL four times now, and yet they find a way to eventually turn it around and get back to the first division. It’s a case study in managing one’s expectations.
I’ve made it a point this past season to renew my interest and follow them more closely, and if nothing else, having them out of the EPL will be better for my sleep schedule, since I won’t be getting up for 4:45 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. kickoffs. I’ve sat back and watched this train wreck of a season with a fair amount of intrigue and amusement, frustrated with the constant run of defeats but only truly outraged on occasion.
Like that. What the hell was that? That was the single-dumbest goddamn play in the entire dumb goddamn season, a two-footed challenge from behind against a defenseless Stoke City player standing idly at the sideline. What the hell is wrong with you? I can live with not being very talented and having to work hard to get results, but the mistakes are what drove me nuts. So many mistakes, so many individual errors here and there which, collectively, amounted to a colossal sort of collapse. I spent quite a while going through game tape and culling all of these gifs, and this dimwitted, red-card earning tackle in a 3:1 loss at Stoke is the only play that actually made me angry.
But the rest of it? Ultimately, it’s all good for a laugh. Yeah, this team was terrible and there is no two ways about it. I’ll certainly drink to that. Laughter and strong drink continue to be the two best medicines.
But the rest of it? Ultimately, it’s all good for a laugh. Yeah, this team was terrible and there is no two ways about it. I’ll certainly drink to that. Laughter and strong drink continue to be the two best medicines.
