The General Football Thread

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CIES Football Observatory

n°311 - 02/11/2020

Values

Most valued young players: Alphonso Davies at the top

https://football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2020/wp311/en/

Alphonso Davies (Bayern Munich) heads the exclusive CIES Football Observatory list of the highest estimated transfer values for big-5 league players born in the 2000s: €180 M. The Champions League winner outranks Jadon Sancho (Borussia Dortmund, €125 M) and Ansu Fati (Barcelona, €123 M). The top 100 is available in issue number 311 of the Weekly Post.

According to the CIES Football Observatory algorithm, among the 12 big-5 league footballers born in the 2000s with an estimated value greater than €50M are four Englishmen (Jadon Sancho, Mason Greenwood, Bukayo Saka, Phil Foden), two Spaniards (Ansu Fati, Ferran Torres), two Brazilians (Rodrygo Goes, Vinícius Júnior), a Canadian (Alphonso Davies), a Norwegian (Erling Haland), a Swede (Dejan Kulusevski) and a Frenchman (Eduardo Camavinga).

Two players born in 2003 figure in the top 100 list: Jude Bellingham (Borussia Dortmund, €44M) and Florian Wirtz (Bayer Leverkusen, €16M). Bellingham heads the rankings for footballers who did not yet play for a national A-team, ahead of Benoît Badiashile (Monaco, €40 M). The latter outranks Ozan Kabak (Schalke 04, €35 M) and Wesley Fofana (Leicester City, €33M) in the table for centre backs.

Top estimated transfer values (€ Million)

Big-5 league players born in the 2000's. Date: 02/11/2020.

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War Minus the Shooting

George Orwell’s famed essay of football shows how little he understood it

https://www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/war-minus-shooting

George Orwell did not like football. He was, throughout his life, largely dismissive of Britain’s great pastime. It was rarely mentioned in his work, but when the topic of football – and indeed any of the country’s other various popular sports – did crop up, he approached it with a general disdain. “Football,” he wrote, “is war minus the shooting. It has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.”

That is just a short extract from Orwell’s 1945 essay “The Sporting Spirit”, in which he decries the tribalistic, overly aggressive nature of a sport that had, for most of Britain’s working-class population, only recently made a welcome return. For Orwell, football could not be detached from the political climate of the time. 

Just a few months after the end of the Second World War, Dinamo Moscow had been invited on a tour of Britain. There was, for fans of the sport, a sense of intrigue, of curiosity. This was eastern Europe’s most dominant team, a team filled with some of Russia’s most gifted players, among them the prolific forward Vsevolod Bobrov, who had joined temporarily from CDKA Moscow.

In Britain, very little was known about the opposition. It was not clear when the tour would begin, nor which team would land in London. There was speculation, an air of anticipation.

For Dinamo, the intention was to prove a point. Their players had been told to visit Joseph Stalin shortly before departing for Britain. Alongside his sadistic chief of Soviet Security, Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin gave them a simple message: do not lose to the capitalists. There was, then, an underlying politicisation surrounding the tour: England, still considered football’s elite, would be knocked off their perch by the rising power in the east.

That is how Stalin saw it, and that is what concerned Orwell. He did not approve of entertaining a totalitarian state, even given the role the Soviet Union had played in the conclusion of the war. 

In November 1945, Dinamo arrived, their players all wearing the same blue coats. They carried briefcases, the contents of which were the subject of much speculation. Some suggested they had been used to smuggle an atomic bomb into the country. The reality, though, was that they had simply contained the players’ food.

There was a mysteriousness about Dinamo. No one knew what to expect. But the assumption was, of course, that the British teams would win. At this point, the English hubris, which would be shattered a decade later following the visit of the great Hungarian side, was as prevalent as ever.

Dinamo took everyone by surprise. At a packed Stamford Bridge – filled to capacity with 85,000 supporters – they adjusted to the noise and intensity to earn a 3-3 draw. Then came a 10-1 victory over Cardiff and a 4-3 win against Arsenal at White Hart Lane. A draw with Rangers in Glasgow meant Dinamo returned to their homeland unbeaten. They had earned the respect of football’s founding nation. The USSR’s reputation had been enhanced and Stalin was content.

Orwell, meanwhile, had watched on, unwilling to be drawn in by the furore of the crowd. “I am told that the match in Glasgow was a free-for-all,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “Those bloody Scotchmen again, eh? What are they like, mate?”

---

Orwell, of course, was writing in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Football was back, and it had been a long wait. Attendances spiked: in 1938-39, the final season before war put an end to the football calendar, average attendances in the Football League stood at 16,413. That figure rose to 21,642 during the first season back. There was, clearly, a huge demand to watch football after this enforced hiatus. 

According to Orwell, though, it simply offered an outlet for those with any left-over anger, a conduit through which they could channel their pent-up aggression. He did not approve of these “orgies of hatred”. There is an element of Orwell’s critique that appears almost tongue in cheek, deliberately exaggerated. It is written from the perspective of someone with no appreciation for the sport, although the argument could be made that this allowed him to cast a more objective eye over its shortcomings.

That, though, is not the belief of Dorian Lynskey, author of The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984. He has, in his own words, “read every word” of the writer’s work. And he describes Orwell’s pontification on football – which would, had it been written in the modern day, almost certainly have earned him the abuse of hundreds of anonymous Twitter dwellers – as “a kind of proto-trolling”. 

“Orwell often had strong opinions about things he didn't appreciate or understand,” said Lynskey. “One was Hollywood movies, another was sport. He saw football as inherently violent and an arena for destructive nationalist rivalry, which is quite an extreme view. In his Tribune columns he liked to exaggerate for effect and enjoyed goading his readers. Of course, international sport can foster xenophobic hostility but it's the safest vessel for it. ‘War minus the shooting’ is better than the other kind.”

Of that there is little doubt. Orwell’s denouncement of football – and, more specifically, of Dinamo’s tour of Britain – could justifiably be dismissed as little more than an overreaction, the curmudgeonly views of a man who simply placed too much significance on the role of sport in foreign relations. And, as Lynskey points out, Orwell’s intention might not have been for his essay to be taken entirely seriously.

“This is a great example of how Orwell valorised the common man but looked down on things that the common man enjoyed,” Lynskey said. “He was oblivious to the positive aspects of sports fandom, especially football. All he saw in football was a lot of shoving and shouting. He was repelled by anything that pitted nation against nation, even if almost everyone else thought it was harmless fun.”

In Orwell’s 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, an exploration of the living and working conditions of the working classes in Lancashire and Yorkshire, football barely warrants a passing mention. There is a brief mention of the Pools, a pastime he lumped in with fish-and-chips, the movies, the radio and strong tea as “cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life”. It is likely he had the same opinion of football itself.

Some of his observations in “The Sporting Spirit”, though, are worthy of further observation. Some remain pertinent even now. And some of his objections – the inherent tribalism, xenophobia and hostility – have grown only more severe in the decades since. The opening of Orwell’s essay is, perhaps, the neatest summation of his overarching point: “… sport is an unfailing cause of ill will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.

“… At the Arsenal match, I am told by someone who was there, a British and a Russian player came to blows and the crowd booed the referee. The Glasgow match, someone else informs me, was simply a free-for-all from the start. And then there was the controversy, typical of our nationalistic age, about the composition of the Arsenal team. Was it really an all-England team, as claimed by the Russians, or merely a league team, as claimed by the British? And did the Dinamos end their tour abruptly in order to avoid playing an all-England team? As usual, everyone answers these questions according to his political predilections… No doubt the controversy will continue to echo for years in the footnotes of history books. Meanwhile the result of the Dinamos' tour, in so far as it has had any result, will have been to create fresh animosity on both sides.

“And how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.

“Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win… At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe… that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.”

Orwell’s main qualm about football was obvious. The “ill will” it encouraged was, in his view, simply not worth it. Why could the game not be played more amicably? Why was it so tied up in nationalism? Why did it induce such anger and such derision towards the opponent?

Many would argue that these sentiments are simply part of the game – that to remove tribalistic behaviour and a distrust of the opposition would take the edge off football. That, it could be argued, is what makes the sport interesting. It is what draws people in. The culture of supporting a club, the rivalries, the ultras, the feeling of winning, the schadenfreude when another team doesn’t.

“The words of a man who never played competitive sport - a perplexed observer,” wrote Brendan Gallagher in a 2004 piece for the Telegraph. “A solitary, introvert man who had no concept of teamwork and no comprehension of the passion which motivates sportsmen and women.”

But base tribalism has become such a pervasive and insidious problem over the last decade that Orwell’s comments seem almost prescient. Things were relatively tame back in 1945. In the decades since, social media has brought partisanship to the forefront of football’s discourse; almost normalised it. Xenophobia has, in many instances, become blatant racism, too. 

It would have been fascinating to read Orwell’s take on the advent of the Premier League, to see what he would make of football’s unapologetic embrace of hyper-capitalism. He would probably not have been very surprised with the way things have gone.

Of course, his essay might still strike some as a sanctimonious and slightly hyperbolic attempt to belittle a sport he considered beneath him. But there is no question that he raised issues which, 75 years on, have only grown more concerning. Orwell might not have understood football, but he understood what it could do to people. Perhaps, in football, the focus should be on the simple pleasures it brings, and a little less on the “savage combative instincts”. 

 

[NikkiCFC 7,942]

This is lit!

 

[Milan 17,853]

A total chaos.

[MoroccanBlue 5,296]

Diego Maradona has passed away. 
 

Fuck 2020

[NikkiCFC 7,942]

Ahh sad news  What a legend he is...

He never looked good with all the drugs...

 

 

[Atomiswave 6,072]

Damn, was it of age or sickness? RIP

[Special Juan 27,421]

27 minutes ago, Atomiswave said:

Damn, was it of age or sickness? RIP

More sickness than age. His misuse of drugs and alcohol did not help.

[Atomiswave 6,072]

16 minutes ago, Special Juan said:

More sickness than age. His misuse of drugs and alcohol did not help.

Yeah his coke abuse was well known, 60 he was I see. In any case thanks for the info.

[robsblubot 3,502]

I was lucky enough to have seen him play on the telly. Yes, it was his final year as a top player and I barely remember it, but from what I do remember, the easiest way to describe Maradona play would be comparing him to Messi: Diego had MORE tight control of the football than Messi.

Being originally from the south of Brazil, near Argentina (everything is many miles away over there), we have a somewhat different view of Argentina esp regarding football. For example, I wouldn't go into Pele vs Maradona because it is akin to Ronaldo vs Messi (apples to oranges) as they could have easily played together and even complement each other. But I'd say Messi is a little closer to Pele in style when compared to Maradona: a bit more direct than Maradona and a bit less about protecting the football and controlling the game like Diego was.

Maradona controlled the game like no other player I've seen.

The mentality of Maradona on the pitch was amazing. He was not as calm as Messi is and his sanguine demeanor would also influence his teammates in a positive manner. Maldini said once that Diego got kicked all the time and never complained.

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RIP DIEGO!

 

[Jase 43,479]

JFC! The English media are despicable!  

 

[OneMoSalah 8,776]

1 hour ago, Jason said:

JFC! The English media are despicable!  

 

Usual from the usual.

Still not over the hand of god even thought it was 35 years ago. The poor guy dies, an absolute legend, a huge heroic figure to 3 or 4 generations of football fans and past/present day footballers and they pan in specifically on something that is to do with their NT.... Would say I am surprised but simply am not.

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Miguel Angel Ramirez, the best coach you’ve never heard of

https://theathletic.com/2232129/2020/12/01/miguel-angel-ramirez-coach/

Sometimes, when someone has a crystal-clear vision of how football should be played, and is willing to sketch it out without reverting to generalisations or cliches, the best thing you can do is sit back and soak it in.

You almost certainly haven’t heard of Miguel Angel Ramirez. He is 36 and has never played the game at any significant level. His most high-profile position in European football to date was as an academy coach at Las Palmas, his hometown club in the Canary Islands. He is only a couple of years into a managerial career that he stumbled into by accident.

He is also the most exciting young coach in South America. But we’ll get to that in a minute. First, a sermon.

“Football, for me, is a possession game,” Ramirez tells The Athletic over a shaky Skype connection. “But not in some a superficial way. Having control of the game means having the ball. That’s the foundation on which I can build everything else. I try to outnumber the opposition in places, so what looks ‘risky’ is just actually just the team attacking with as many elements as possible, in as many ways as possible.

“I obviously want to keep a balance, which allows me to defend, but I like to subdue the opponent, playing close to the opposing goal. In terms of the relationship with space, it’s like a chess game: the opponent might leave a gap, or not, and there are certain spaces I want to win. I play with the opponent to win control of certain areas where I think I can do damage.

“When I don’t have the ball, I want to win it back, and I want to do that as soon as possible so I can keep attacking. That’s more or less what we were looking for. In broad strokes, that’s how I want my team to play. That’s how I understand football.”

It sounds good in theory, but ideas alone do not make you the talk of a continent. No, that is a factor of the extent to which his vision has been transposed onto the pitch. Ramirez’s team play daring, intricate, futuristic football. It carried them to the 2019 Copa Sudamericana — South American’s Europa League equivalent — and it has made them one of the most watchable sides in the Copa Libertadores this year.

At which point, we must place the final piece into this overachievers’ jigsaw. Ramirez does not manage one of the Brazilian or Argentinian giants, but a tiny Ecuadorian side called Independiente del Valle. Their stadium, in Sangolqui, holds just 8,000 people. Before Ramirez took charge, in May 2019, they had never won a top-flight domestic title, let alone a continental competition.

That Sudamericana success was historic. Now they are competing against even bigger teams — and holding their own. They started their Libertadores campaign with back-to-back 3-0 wins against Barcelona de Guayaquil and Atletico Junior, then recorded a staggering 5-0 success over defending champions Flamengo. That result echoed around South America, and even though Flamengo later achieved some revenge back in Rio de Janeiro, COVID-stricken Independiente remained loyal to Ramirez’s vision.

“It’s normal that a team like Flamengo, or Junior, who are champions of Colombia, will be better than Independiente, because we don’t have the same budget,” says Ramirez. “My whole squad is paid one-quarter of what (Flamengo striker) Gabriel Barbosa is paid. So in normal circumstances, we have no chance of beating Flamengo.

“But I think we’ve had some matches that have ended up making noise, globally. It’s less about the result and more about the way this team plays. It’s attractive football for people who like a spectacle.”

---

Blur your eyes a touch when watching Independiente and it’s not so difficult to imagine you’re watching Manchester City — and not just because Ramirez himself could expect to be a finalist in any Pep Guardiola lookalike contest.

They have a goalkeeper who is happy to step out of his penalty area and start moves. They have full-backs who are comfortable slotting into midfield positions. The wingers stay high and wide, stretching the play. There are even, to borrow from Guardiola’s lexicon, a pair of “free eights” who roam between the lines, probing for openings. The ball is occasionally pinged to the far side of the field but otherwise, it stays on the floor.

Ramirez accepts the comparison but insists that his approach is influenced more by those with whom he has worked closely. “For those of us who like the possession game, obviously Guardiola is an important name, a point of orientation for our footballing compasses,” he says. “But I don’t know how Guardiola works. I only see how his team play. The inspiration has come from the people I’ve had around me — people who have helped to build me up, offered me an idea about how to go about being a coach.”

While Ramirez got his start at Las Palmas and then had a brief spell in Greek youth football, he cites his time at the Aspire Academy in Qatar as his most formative experience before he arrived in Ecuador. There, he met his mentor, Roberto Olabe, who is now director of football at Real Sociedad. Over the course of six years, during which he coached the under-12, under-13, under-16 and under-17 sides, his philosophy took shape.

“Roberto had this way of seeing the game as it relates to the player, to space, to the opponent,” Ramirez explains. “I arrived in Qatar unable to see that. By sitting with Roberto and chatting for many, many hours, I was able to start to see the game in a totally different manner.”

The chance to go to Ecuador came in 2018. Independiente have a link with Aspire, who recommended Ramirez for the job of academy coordinator. He didn’t think twice, but the decision to step up and manage the first team when coach Ismael Rescalvo left the club a year later was trickier. Ramirez liked working with young players. He did not harbour a burning ambition to move up to senior football.

Still, it felt like too good an opportunity to turn down. “I had time during that year in the academy to get to know the club, to get to know the people behind the project,” he says. “I knew their vision, and what they wanted. I understood that I could be calm and secure in the knowledge that I was going to have stability at this club.

“What I saw during the nine seasons I was at Las Palmas — a European club who spent a long time in the first division — was a third-world set-up. Independiente have a first-world set-up — a structure and a vision that is very different to other clubs in Ecuador and to most of the rest of South America, too.”

 

Ramirez holds the Copa Sudamericana aloft (Photo: Franklin Jacome/Agencia Press South/Getty Images)

 

On a practical level, Ramirez must work within certain constraints. “It’s a very responsible economic model,” he explains. “There aren’t funds for big signings, because there’s a salary cap that the club doesn’t want to go past. They want to prioritise the academy and the promotion of academy players to the first team, even knowing that doing so has certain sporting costs.

“Throughout the club, teams use the same method of training and style of play. There is also a very effective scouting network. Right now, Independiente are the No 1 club in Ecuador for scouting young players: the best talents in the country play in our youth teams. We try to get players into the first team and the idea is that later we can sell them to bigger clubs. So players leave, players come in from the academy, those players are sold… and that’s how the club remains sustainable.”

This suits Ramirez, who already knows all of the youngsters well, down to the ground. Four of the players who started the Sudamericana final against Argentine side Colon came through the academy system. The Ecuador national team have also started to benefit from the production line and Ramirez says there is growing respect for the club’s achievements on the continent. “For Ecuador, Independiente are an example of how to do things,” he says. “It’s a club that don’t have a lot of supporters, but there has been a big reaction across the country. There’s a lot of admiration: people can be fans of another club, but they’re also supporters of Independiente.”

Much of that owes to Ramirez’s style of football. He has won admirers far beyond Ecuador, too: Palmeiras were desperate to secure his services earlier this year and they aren’t the only Brazilian club to have been in contact. Ramirez, though, says he was not overly tempted.

“Let’s put all our cards on the table: I’m just starting out professionally,” he says. “I understand that I wouldn’t have had the guarantee that I have here at Independiente del Valle. I know that a bad result isn’t going to change anything about the project at Independiente, about the vision that the club have and the trust they have in me.

“In Brazil that wasn’t going to be possible. The immediacy, the focus on results, and above all the lack of time to train… it would have been impossible for me to build a foundation for a project. Everything is immediate there: every two or three days, you’ve got to get a result, and if you don’t get that result, you’re out on the street.

“Especially for my system of play, and how I understand the game. However big the club, the circumstances wouldn’t be there due to the immediacy that pervades Brazilian football.”

He has had a few phone calls from this side of the Atlantic, too, and admits the prospect of testing himself in Europe is more appealing. “I’m not obsessed with returning, but it is attractive because the competition there is so difficult. The level of coaches… I know it will push me to new limits. It’ll be a headache to work out how to compete in each match. That’s what motivates me.

“I have to be careful because I don’t think my way of playing would be well suited to just any kind of club. My way of understanding football needs a particular context, which not all clubs have. So I have to be very sure before I take the next step.”

You don’t need a crystal ball to know that his time will come. In the more immediate future, though, there is business to attend to. Tonight, Independiente are in Uruguay for the second leg of their Libertadores last-16 tie against Nacional. The first leg ended 0-0, but goodness knows how: the Ecuadorians had 78 per cent possession and a frankly ridiculous 32 shots. More of the same in Uruguay and they will surely progress to the quarter-finals, where a glamour meeting with River Plate could await.

Which isn’t bad at all for an unknown Spanish youth coach, right? “I never imagined this,” he says with a glint in his eye. “I think everything that has come my way is a gift from football. And a gift from life.”

 

[Vesper 28,767]

wicked goal

Shirley Cruz

 

[Vesper 28,767]

LGBT role models might be common in women’s game but they’re still so important

https://theathletic.com/2244089/2020/12/08/rainbow-laces-women-eriksson-harder/

Sweden’s Magda Eriksson and Denmark’s Pernille Harder

It’s match day and Sheffield Wednesday are playing at Hillsborough. Logging on to my laptop to start some work, a cursory scroll through Twitter tells me that it’ll soon be Rainbow Laces week and that, unsurprisingly, people still take issue with a campaign that promotes inclusion and diversity.

But, hey, it’s 2020 and I should know better.

I kiss my girlfriend as I leave the house, then listen to a Christmas playlist on the drive to the stadium. Things have been a little different this year, what with no fans around and Sheffield in tier-three lockdown, so the journey takes much less time than usual. We’ve also just bought a house, so that’s something a bit different, too, as my Sunday will likely be spent decorating or on a walk with just the two of us.

When I get to the ground, I send a message to my girlfriend to let her know I’ve arrived safely — something she insists on every time I drive to a game — and then head inside. It’s eerily quiet at Hillsborough, as it has been at matches for months, and as I take up my position in the press box, I notice I’m the only woman covering the game up there again this week. That’s not unusual and although a bit disappointing, it’s not a huge problem, unlike Wednesday’s inability to score goals from open play, which has me slumping my head onto my keyboard with frustration as the game ends in yet another draw.

As I said, it’s not uncommon for me to be the only woman in the press box at a Championship match but it is a thing I notice and some days more than others that makes doubt creep in. And as well as identifying as a woman, I am also gay which isn’t news to a lot of people but is something that I am mindful of when I am in a footballing environment. Most people probably don’t even care but some days it’s there in the back of my mind as another thing that separates me from those sitting around me and could be cause for abuse on the rare occasions I get to go to a game as a fan.

So why am I telling you this?

Well, as part of Rainbow Laces week I was asked what the campaign means to LGBT women, which is not a straightforward thing to answer. It’s impossible to answer for everyone but to me, the campaign is important, particularly because it brings together two of the most important things in my life: my identity as an LGBT woman and my love of football.

We rarely have grown-up conversations about football’s inclusivity issues and we normalise the lives of those who work in the sport even less frequently. And so when it comes to the time of year that rainbow-striped corner flags and captain’s armbands pop up, it’s nice to start that conversation again in the hope that someone, somewhere finds acceptance in a sporting community that might have shut them out or hurt them over the years.

When prominent players including Jordan Henderson post supportive messages on social media, it makes a difference. As do the tweets from clubs’ official accounts in support of the campaign but they are, disappointingly, met with dozens of damaging and offensive replies and always bring about the debate over when a professional male player will come out in English football. When will it happen? How will it be received? How will the media react?

None of it ever feels particularly helpful until a male player does become the role model that many young LGBT people need and even then, they should be allowed to come out without pressure or expectation.

But some of the answers and a much more constructive way of considering how LGBT players and fans can feel more included can be found in women’s football.

It’s in the high-profile out players and coaches of the Women’s Super League and the fact I wouldn’t hesitate to take my partner to watch a game in women’s football that I find the answers to what the Rainbow Laces campaign means to me.

In the part of my life that involves engagement with the men’s game, Rainbow Laces can feel like we’re all chipping away at an iceberg in the hope of reaching an enlightened state of the game where who you love, your gender or any part of your identity is irrelevant to your ability to play, watch or work in football. On the other side of things in the women’s game, I think of the campaign as a chance to celebrate the progress already made by acknowledging LGBT role models.

The photograph at the top of this piece of Sweden’s Magdalena Eriksson and Denmark’s Pernille Harder (clad in a Sweden shirt), who are in a relationship and both play for Chelsea, sharing a kiss after a World Cup game in 2019 is a good example of that. It sent Twitter, or one tiny corner of it anyway, into a tailspin and made the pair even more powerful role models in a moment of celebration.

On and off the field, that will have had an untold impact on so many LGBT people — it would certainly have changed my world to see something like that when I was a teenager — and that’s what Rainbow Laces is all about. Eriksson and Harder have spoken about how many letters they received in the wake of the photo making it onto the internet and it’s not hard to see why such a genuine moment of affection will have made a difference to so many.

Seeing successful, happy and thriving LGBT role models can mean so much to people who are not ready or not able to come out yet. Delivered through sport, that carries even more power as there is, after all, no more universal language than love or indeed love for football. A photo like the one of Eriksson and Harder and their subsequent steps to embrace their new status as football’s power couple reassures LGBT people that it’s possible to live without fear — whether they are out or not.

The image and messages like Henderson’s will bring home something that either currently feels, or at one time felt, so out of reach for LGBT people around the world and that influence is worth celebrating. It’s what makes Rainbow Laces, which can at times feel like lip service from Premier League clubs and still has some way to go to ensure football really is for everyone, worthwhile.

It’s a celebration, a message of acceptance and, most fervently, hope for a better future.

 

 

Harder and Eriksson: ‘After the photo people wrote and said how much we’d helped’

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/aug/07/magda-eriksson-pernille-harder-kiss-womens-world-cup-common-goal

We're powerful together': Harder and Eriksson on being a gay couple in football

Sweden’s Magda Eriksson and Denmark’s Pernille Harder talk about their kiss in Paris that went viral, what it was like coming out and joining Common Goal

It was the most normal thing in the world to Magda Eriksson when, after helping Sweden defeat Canada in the last 16 of the Women’s World Cup, she located her partner in the stands and wandered over towards Parc des Princes crowd. They shared a kiss and thought nothing of it until later on, when the amount of activity on their phones suggested something was blowing up.

“We weren’t even aware anyone was taking a photo,” Eriksson says. But somebody had and the noise on social media had nothing to do with the fact that the girlfriend in question, the Denmark international Pernille Harder, was wearing the shirt of her country’s arch-rivals. The image’s power came from its sheer rarity: a gay, high-profile sporting couple showing their love in public without the slightest abashment. Harder only realised what had happened when her Twitter following suddenly swelled by 3,000; a penny began to drop that something so everyday to both women could be an inspiration to millions.

“It was crazy, the picture was tweeted all over the world – Argentina, Brazil …” Harder is speaking at another familiar scene: the dining table of her apartment just outside Wolfsburg where she is preparing for a fourth season with the serial German champions. Beside her sits Eriksson, the Chelsea defender, who has spent the three weeks of her pre-season break here. Time like this is precious: once the football starts in earnest they may see each other only a couple of days a month. They cannot remember sitting down for an interview together before but their relationship, which they have never hidden since getting together as teammates with the Swedish club Linköping, has taken on a new dimension.

“We’ve always just been natural, not so much thinking of being inspirations together, putting pictures up of each other or anything like that,” Harder says. “But when we saw that photo and the comments around it, then it was really something; like: ‘We’re role models.’ We had messages from a lot of young people, people of our age, but older people also.”

Eriksson came to a similar realisation. “I think that’s when I felt the demand for role models in that way, because of how big it was and how many people wrote to me on Instagram saying they looked up to us and how much we’d helped them. That’s when I understood that we’re really powerful together. Before, we hadn’t really seen ourselves as that.”

That power has been wielded for further good now they have signed up for Common Goal, the movement through which footballers pledge 1% of their earnings to organisations that drive social change. They are the first couple to do so and their donations will be pledged to PlayProud, a global initiative that aims to make team sports a safer and more welcoming environment for youths who identify as LGBTQ+. “We’ve played without privilege and now we are privileged,” Eriksson says. “So now we want to give back to those people who don’t have the same situations we do.”

Among PlayProud’s findings is that more than 40% of LGBTQ+ youth do not believe their communities accept them. Eriksson and Harder grew up in liberal countries but they had different experiences of coming out. Ikast, the Jutland town of 15,000 where Harder was raised, felt “like there were so many traditions” and she did not feel comfortable revealing her sexuality until after she left to play in Sweden seven years ago.

“If I came out in my home town I don’t think anyone would have hated me or anything, but I would have felt a bit alone about it,” Harder says. “It was a bit like being a homosexual in this small place was weird and not normal, and no one was it. When I came into this new environment in Linköping it was totally normal and maybe that helped me to find myself and really realise that I could fall in love with a girl. I think it’s important that environments are open and people can talk about it more. Then everyone can just be themselves.”

Eriksson says it was “definitely easier” to come out in cosmopolitan Stockholm but she still agonised at length before telling those close to her. “I came out a lot earlier than Pernille, but when I think back to it I still had anxiety,” she says. “When I told my friends for the first time I was crying so much, and had so much pressure building up to it, even though I was probably in one of the most accepting environments in the world. So I can imagine how tough it is for people who don’t have the environment I had, because I struggled even though it was really acceptable.”

The time when this kind of conversation could, on record at least, be held with a high-profile male player still looks some way off. An anonymous Twitter user named @FootballerGay, claiming to be a Championship player, stated his intention to come out last month but then reversed the decision, saying he was not strong enough. A handful of individuals, such as the former Leeds winger Robbie Rogers, have done so in the past but the numbers have never been enough to indicate a sea change.

“If you look at the photo from the World Cup and the support we got, imagine what a men’s player would have, it would be massive,” Eriksson says. “But it feels like we have to break the norm before that happens, unfortunately. The men’s game has taken a different turn and it’s very difficult for players to come out. Hopefully when youngsters today grow up, the norm will change.”

Harder thinks male footballers are still “afraid of how fans and teammates will react” but the example of just one courageous individual could change perspectives. The women’s game is setting a standard on this front and in other areas, too. More than half of the 107 players to have signed up for Common Goal so far are women and it is hardly news that their salaries are generally far lower. “I feel we know what it’s like when you’ve come from a lower point,” Eriksson says. “You want to help the younger generation and grassroots build something because of what we’ve gone through.”

Yet there must come a point where the pressures of managing one’s own top-level playing career, acting as a social role model and bearing responsibility for pushing an entire sport forward appear overwhelming. “That’s been the life of a female footballer throughout history,” Eriksson says. “They’ve always had to do more than be footballers. They’ve always had to drive it and get questions that would never be asked of a male player. But hopefully those things will change in time.”

She sensed a shift in the way Sweden were received after finishing third at the World Cup. They lost agonisingly to the Netherlands in their semi-final but beat Germany and, in the third-place play-off, England along the way. Upon arriving home she felt something about the sport’s consumption had fundamentally transformed.

“People were like ‘It was so fun to watch you guys, so entertaining’,” she says. “I’d never heard anyone say they’d genuinely enjoyed watching us before. Previously it was a bit ‘We support you guys …’ but kind of condescending. This time they’d enjoyed it and I was like ‘Ah, this is the point I’d been wanting to reach for so long’. One where people just respect us and don’t think of us as women playing football but just watch the football game.”

Harder’s place among the crowd came after Denmark’s failure to make the tournament, a situation expedited when Eriksson and Sweden defeated the Euro 2017 runners-up in qualifying. She is firmly among the world’s best players; a lethal, exhilarating striker. It was galling to miss out but certainly not an issue that would ever cloud their relationship; she followed Sweden across France, estimating she stayed in nine different hotels during the month.

“I kind of got used to it,” she says of that initially unwanted, but ultimately fulfilling, perspective. “Every time I was at a stadium I was really thinking ‘Women’s football is so cool and fun to watch’. And I think a lot of people who hadn’t seen it before changed their view of it.”

Without ever expecting to, Harder and Eriksson may have altered a few other perspectives too.

 

 

[Blues Forever 1,232]

The North American League project already has the approval of FIFA AND CONCACAF. MLS and Liga MX are working on the regulations.

[Fernando 6,453]

37 minutes ago, Blues Forever said:

The North American League project already has the approval of FIFA AND CONCACAF. MLS and Liga MX are working on the regulations.

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