From the album ‘Green Onions’ (1962)
In my Premier League preview column I predicted that Liverpool would finish seventh, and argued that this was largely due to the ownership group of Liverpool, Fenway Sports Group, attempting to run a successful Ponzi scheme. I did so fully aware that these wouldn’t be popular opinions and or predictions. Nobody likes to be called naïve, and the prediction of another dire season swam against a riptide of optimism, the kind of defence mechanism that often besets supporters of any club coming fresh off a failed season.
Only six games into new the season and any enthusiasm Liverpool fans had that they’ll witness a prosperous season has been eviscerated, with the disenchantment and anger at last season’s debacle resuming with some fervour. Unexpectedly, within that backlash, some have finally recognised what is primarily responsible for this decline.
However, it’s still a minority. It’s easier to apportion blame by compartmentalising events on the pitch as a separate concern. From the owner’s perspective, that tradition is a gift. Plus, after the scarring experience of the Gillett and Hicks era, there’s probably an element of denial at play here. Many Liverpool fans simply don’t want to go through that experience again, so at this point believing they aren’t being duped is easier.
It should be noted that Rodgers is of course culpable to a degree. Had he not signed and preferred so many anti-footballers, generally betrayed common sense and his dossier, as he is now, Liverpool’s future under his and FSG’s stewardship wouldn’t seem so catastrophic. However, better quality of signings, selection policy and tactics would’ve only mitigated the damage that was being done by the Ponzi scheme. The Ponzi scheme can only function by placing specific financial and philosophical limitations, so that any manager or coach would find it hard to transcend them enough to meet expectations, realistic or otherwise.
Rafael Benitez, the last man to bring consistent success to the club, is often cited as an example by those who refuse to acknowledge the nefariousness of the ownership’s plan. He’s touted as someone who’d perform better in Rodgers’ place, as he did so before.
That the context of English football, namely the scale of its wealth and the widening of the financial disparity between even the so-called bigger clubs, has shifted significantly, even in just five years, is conveniently ignored, but that’s another debate not worth having.
Is Benitez a better manager than Rodgers? Yes, but even so many who take the position that Benitez would surely succeed with the resources Rodgers has enjoyed seem to have developed a form of selective amnesia. The symmetry of Liverpool’s last two declines after they narrowly failed to win league title, and what precipitated them, is startling.
Rafael Benitez had more success spending less, and ultimately operated under more trying circumstances. That explains the pining tone of these hypothesises in lieu of Rodgers’ tenure.
Back in the summer of 2009 Benitez, with a zero net spend, had to replace one of his best players in Xabi Alonso. Not only that, after narrowly failing to win the league the season before, he had to somehow make the team better to meet raised expectations. With no margin for error it’s no surprise that things deteriorated, and when they did, like Rodgers is now, Benitez didn’t help himself with defeatist rhetoric and queer tactical decisions.
Regardless of his own failings, retrospect has taught us that Benitez stood little chance. Now Rodgers isn’t being afforded the same luxury, or benefit of the doubt. I think it’s somewhat fair and understandable that he isn’t. He certainly doesn’t have the cachet of past successes that Benitez achieved, and achieved with Liverpool, to fall back on.
But the similarity, namely the loss of high calibre talent married with inflated expectations set against varying degrees of austerity, should provide sufficient evidence to those who fixate on a change of manager being the solution that they are wrong.
The basis of their argument is agonisingly simplistic. Too often it is glibly stated that Rodgers has had £300 million to spend and that another manager would’ve done better.
This argument might have significant merit if the next manager also wouldn’t be subject to the priority of monetising – basically a fancy word for selling – the club’s best players as soon as the owner’s valuation is met. Not only that, but there wasn’t an obsessive compulsive mandate to supress the wage bill at any short term cost, basically through a refusal to pay the wages required to attract top players or to keep those you already have.
Despite modern football being perverted into a disgusting form of extortion, which no doubt attracted FSG and their like to it, you have to admire how well FSG’s plan has been implemented to date.
‘We can compete with anyone’ said Tom Werner at the start, just what the fans wanted to hear. Then they cloaked their true intentions with the sanctimonious promise of their ‘do more with less’ model, knowing that they could revert to its universal appeal at any point. Spending relatively less is somehow seen as the antithesis of the oligarch/sugar daddy ownership model that encompasses the vulgarities and fickleness of modern football. Even better the myopic aversion to this marries beautifully with most notions of what the ‘Liverpool Way’ means – a revisionism of how the club’s historical successes were achieved fomenting a sense of pious idealism that any future successes must be earned, not bought.
In short FSG have pissed about experimenting with various structures and approaches, all of which failed to work quickly enough for them, before scaling back and focusing entirely on ways to make a significant profit.
To do this they brought in a young, relatively unproven manager, which lowered expectations. His inexperience meant they could give him minimum control over signings. They hired scouts, even branded it as a committee: “a synergy of informed opinions and philosophy” or whatever PR bollocks was used. Having given your manager little control over transfers, you can sell anyone, and he simply doesn’t have the authority or security to bluff you by threatening to leave. After all, having given him neither, he’s disposable.
If the young and inexperienced manager subsequently fails you cynically manipulate the situation with your actions implying that he’s to blame. This meant either sacking him, which incurs a financial loss, or giving him more control over player acquisitions, which costs nothing. Keeping him in situ means if he fails again, he’s the common dominator.
An even better virtue of making Rodgers a sacrificial lamb is he becomes a contingency, should such an event, mass fan dissention at poor performances and results, as we see now, arise. This insulates your money making scheme from scrutiny for another period of time. Bottom line, as profits go up, keep net spend the same every year. This means that the significant profits from the increase in domestic TV money, a slew of new ‘commercial partnerships’ that have been agreed, the increasing value of these sponsorship deals, and the expansion of corporate seating at Anfield, can remain untouched.
Selling star players for large sums helps. Here FSG exploit the fierce loyalty of the fans expertly, with press leaks that these players ‘want(ed) to leave’. The benefits of this demonisation are twofold; it imbues the illusion and or impression that a lot of money is being spent, and selling stars also saves you from having to pay them top level wages. Failing that, just refuse to pay them. Most players will agitate for a move – which fits the make them look ‘bad/disloyal/greedy’ template. Sending failed signings away on loan saves money too. Money saved is money made.
On that last point, did you know that Liverpool sent four players out on loan this summer, totalling almost £50m in transfer fees? One of those players, Lazar Markovic, cost £20m, and he was bought only a year ago. He’s also a winger, which left Liverpool with only one genuine winger in the squad, Jordon Ibe, who, at the time of writing, is nineteen and has less than twenty-five appearances for the club. A week ago at Old Trafford Brendan Rodgers resorted to using Danny Ings and Divock Origi, both strikers, and Roberto Firmino, a second striker, in wide positions. Not only does the Ponzi scheme relieve the club of its best talent, it also impinges on the plans of the manager and is likely to leave an unbalanced squad.
Looking back I wonder what the Liverpool fans who panted with glee at John Henry’s bravado “what are they smoking over there at the Emirates” in refusing to acquiesce to Luis Suarez’s alleged release fee clause, when Arsenal came calling two years ago, make of it now?
At the time that reaction was understandable. After many exasperating years under the timid and feckless guidance of David Moores, followed by the ghastly extortion of Hicks and Gillett, it was empowering to see the club finally act up to its size and reputation once again. Well, believing in that narrative was good while it lasted. John Henry only acted with such disdain because he was threatened with the loss of an asset for well below its market value. Luis Suarez was sold to Barcelona for significantly more money, via a release fee clause in his new contract, only a year later.
Why? Annually selling your best players is a natural life cycle for keeping costs down. It depletes the strength of the team and its chances of success, giving better players little reason to stay once they transcend the mediocrity that surrounds them. For example, Phil Coutinho, surely the next ‘victim’, or more likely, beneficiary, of the Ponzi scheme, has zero incentive to stay at Liverpool. Why stay to earn less, likely finish seventh or thereabouts and for Liverpool to show little immediate ambition to surround him with players of his calibre, when he’s clearly capable of playing for Bayern Munich or Barcelona and earning more money whilst doing it?
As we’ve observed consistently selling your best players is a universal formula for failure, as the money you do spend often becomes a futile attempt to make the team better, when you’ve started by making it worse. I’d imagine FSG’s intent was to ensure that, even with a high turnover of players, it retained enough talent on the club’s books to keep it on the fringes of contention to placate the fans and sponsors. In particular any talent that’s acquired must have the scope to significantly appreciate in value and be happy to develop at Liverpool, seeing and using it as a springboard to a bigger club.
To keep the Ponzi scheme alive and thriving is a difficult undertaking – talent must be purchased and developed coherently. But, by and large, Liverpool’s recent signings have been poor, and with the team struggling, there’s little individual development to be found.
After the departures of Luis Suarez and Raheem Sterling for £125m, Steven Gerrard leaving for a semi-retirement beach holiday and Coutinho’s impending departure, there appears to be little of value left to sell. Throw in other sales and departures during Rodgers’ tenure, and now that £300m spent seems a wholly inadequate amount to keep the team competitive, never mind in title contention.
The least gifted players from the side that nearly won the league two years ago, and it could be argued, prevented it from succeeding, still remain, and it’s easy to see why. They’re cheaper to keep, and they have the least resale value on the market. In addition to the transfer policy of signing the young, unproven and cheap, the Ponzi scheme leaves you with Jordan Henderson as captain, and Simon Mignolet, with his clown-like coordination, in goal. Then there’s the contract extension given to the utterly woeful Martin Skrtel, whose perpetual dim wittedness and slow footedness have come to embody the current side. None of these moves made any sense, under normal circumstances. But having sold your best players, any subsequent errors, and they happen at every club, are compounded.
There’s a sarcastic misnomer that Americans consistently fail to grasp the concept of irony. Two years ago FSG stumbled upon something more valuable than money. Something that’s virtually impossible to replicate. But they didn’t value it enough.
And that reveals the truth, for a club like Liverpool to succeed they need to be run with a specific form of altruism. The kind which understands that in a subculture obsessed with money there are certain things that are more valuable than it.
Under FSG Liverpool Football Club is, both intentionally and unintentionally, now in a ‘managed decline’, and given its reference to the city of Liverpool during Thatcherism, I don’t use that term lightly. More specifically the club’s decline reminds me of a quote from season one of True Detective. Standing in a shithole town in rural Louisiana, its infrastructure decimated by the environmental and sociological scarring caused by capitalism’s predilection for opportunism, disposability and competition, Rust Cohle denounces it ‘as someone’s memory of a town, and that memory is fading’. Liverpool used to be a big club, but through successive ownership regimes that were either incompetent, motivated by greed, or both, it’s meekly surrendered that status. Even Istanbul was ten years ago, and now the lustre is fading fast. If FSG aren’t careful, and at the rate they’re going, soon there won’t be anything left worth selling. Not even the club’s name will mean anything anymore, and that really will cost them.
From the album ‘Elements 1989-1990 (Deluxe Digital Version)’ (2013)
From the album ‘Renegades’ (2000)
When I had my computer built last October by PC Specialist (who I’d thoroughly recommend) I hedged my bets. I invested in a 500GB Samsung solid state drive, a dedicated sound card, and a very good Intel i7 CPU. However, both my graphics card and fully modular 350W power supply were average, and certainly not capable of supporting any form of high resolution gaming, or to be more specific gaming at 4K resolution.
The graphics card I have is fine for internet browsing, but definitely not ‘overclocking’ – a queasily teccy bourgeois euphemism, or a loose metonym if you prefer, for maxing out your computer’s components for speed of programming, which in most cases is required during gaming. My monitor is no longer up to par either. A trusty companion of nearly ten years, it’s held up well, and I’ve had my money’s worth, but now it’s fast approaching the dreaded status of ‘obsolete’, as it can only max out a resolution of 1080p.
I’ll apologise here. I know some of this jargon is as boring as it is esoteric. You see I’ve been studying up, because shit’s about to get real. I’m thinking about upgrading my computer, or rather, “pimping my computer”, to use terminology that’s down with the uncool kids.
Strangely this process of buying new technology, or the thought of buying it, reminds me of indulgencies from my youth. Specifically that taste of draught coke, and more importantly what the circumstances surrounding its consumption signified. You know the stuff that was almost flat after being drawn into the glass, foaming at the top, the excess sugar leaping into the air and lightly tickling your face as you took the first sip or gulp, watered down with copious amounts of circular shaped hollowed out ice that you only found in pubs, or so it seemed. Its sweetness permeated your blood and convinced your brain that life could be a world of ubiquitous Saturdays. Often it was accompanied with generic junk food, battered fish or a hamburger with chips, there was the condiments basket and its vibrant palette of colours and the appealing stench of hydrogenated fat and salt. This meagre decadence was further enriched by the conglomerated smell of cigarette smoke, alcohol and sweat that was prevalent in many pubs, arcades, bowling alleys and restaurants, haunts that parents frequented to safely abandon their under tens in during the late eighties and early nineties.
That may seem like a peculiar analogy. But think about it this way – when you’re a kid it’s all about the sensations and actions associated with self-gratification and hedonism. In retrospect you realise that when you were younger you weren’t thinking about much else. You aren’t considering the plight of Syrian refuges, those who use foodbanks, whether the NHS or Welfare State will still be around in ten years. You aren’t worried about paying the mortgage, the car insurance or whether the boiler’s about to go, you’re getting shit bought for you, your tea made for you, playing football with your mates, and if you grew up in the eighties and nineties, you watched Jean Claude Van Damme movies and spent hour after hour playing video games on the SEGA Genesis, and when you weren’t doing it, you were thinking of when you could do it next.
Due to its omnipresence throughout most of the lives of people in my age group or younger, gaming has the ability, or potential, during use, to transpose its positive associative nostalgia over any of the malaises of adult reality. While the technology has advanced, and the graphics, AI and narratives employed within have become far more sophisticated, at root it’s still the same form of entertainment that you utilised twenty-five years ago. The stability of the medium’s influence means you can also revitalise, guilt-free, a sense of entitlement and release from responsibility that you once enjoyed when you first started gaming.
Speaking more broadly buying stuff with disposable income as an adult is an additional effort to recreate an excitable sense of freedom, and it’s even more powerful. Once you accept that the act’s grotesquely self-gratifying, you’re warmed by a self-congratulatory glow, and its sense of worth and achievement, as you earned the right to treat yourself, it wasn’t given to you. In the realm of gaming, this imbues what is already a highly personalised pursuit, and therefore it can feel like an authentic, justified indulgence, not a frivolous one.
Yet, despite the allure of returning to this hive of existentialist ‘fun’, the reality is that buying anything computer related is a massive fucking con. The graphics card I’ve decided upon, the EVGA NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti Hybrid Graphics Card 6GB (pictured above), to give it its full, hilariously excessive and pompous, title, costs, including fucking VAT, a whopping £630. Can I justify this? Not really. It will be future proof for five years, possibly more. It’s by EVGA, widely considered the best custom graphics card manufacturer and the card itself comes with its own closed loop water-cooling system, meaning it’s less likely to overheat and fail. However, NVIDIA, the company who owns the chipset architecture in these cards already has its next generation GPU chipset ‘Pascal’ due for release next year. So I could wait, always a chore, and buy the latest generation of card, and probably pay more, or buy now, and possibly regret it within a year.
In truth this dilemma is present when considering most purchases. Vary rarely do you get value for money and significant longevity of relevance, whether it be from cars, clothes and in particular anything that falls under the crude term ‘modern household gadgetry’. Western culture is built upon instant gratification and the feeble attempt to channel that conceit and subdue its vulgarity within consumerism. There’s even an adage related to this, well of course there is, which works as a sanctimonious justification; ‘quality is remembered, long after price is forgotten’. It’s bollocks of course. For a start I’ll never fucking forget how much I paid for the EVGA 980 GTX Ti Hybrid, no matter how good it is or how much enjoyment it provides.
Sadly there is a kernel of truth to that musing, most of the purchases we consider to be successful are bought to be used and enjoyed, and therefore we tend not to contemplate, before, during or after, how quickly they’ll become disposable or outdated. Very few things appreciate in value, most properties do, ‘good’ antiques do too, or these days gold and bitcoins, but by gosh, buying that kind of stuff to hoard it is fucking boring, isn’t it?
So yeah, all things considered, my inclination to pimp my computer shouldn’t be held against me. It’s conditioning, and we’re all subject to it. Plus, one thing I’ve realised is that life’s lived better with a positive attitude. While any concerted dalliance with unadulterated materialism is concerning, any act that prevents bitterness and disillusionment from creeping in should be encouraged. Plus, by pimping my computer to partake in a few hours of gaming every week I’m verifying a crucial sociological, cultural, economic and political truth, as it’s instructive of why democratic communism failed and remains dormant.
A good question is, why now? Coming from a relative hiatus in gaming it’s hard not to be wowed by the technological advancements, particularly as the jump from 1080p to 4K is significant. My recent gaming, little that there was, had been limited to Football Manager before the motherboard on my archaic XP system finally packed it in.
So yes, I must confess, this makes the recent releases on the PC look even more enticing. In ‘Until Dawn’ you essentially control the narrative of a horror movie, with every decision you make on behalf of the multiple characters altering the ending. How about the impending Tomb Raider game? Lara Croft’s bust, lips and arse in 4K! How about that new Metal Gear Solid game, does it look terrific or what? Or how about some absurdly gratuitous ultra-violence, that would be Mortal Kombat X? Then there’s GTA V, which for men, and most of us have low impulse control, is a must. Better to go on a killing spree, taser cops, commit suicide, randomly run over pedestrians, rob banks, get a mullet haircut, be a drug kingpin, go on ‘rampages’, shoot teenagers, yuppies, and mimes, drive like a lunatic and kick cats, than to do it in real life. Just a hunch here, but I reckon that in GTA V the consequences are significantly diminished.
I have only one certainty in all this – that doing the research for this upgrade will probably be the most rewarding thing that I take away from it. I set up a motorised satellite system five years ago. The research for that was extensive; what parts I would need, and what kind of sat motor, wall mount, dish and Linux integrated box to buy. Most important of all was learning how its various elements worked. In retrospect setting up the software required was the easy part; installing CCCam (for cardsharing), flashing your box with an image (which is essentially a skin for the channel and setup menus), and giving the Dreambox its own IP address on your router (also a necessity for cardsharing). Setting up the hardware, now that was a real struggle. Working on a roof incline when attempting to do something this fiddly is no joke – getting a motorised satellite on the arc requires every flat surface, both vertical and horizontal to be flush, or straight. Then there’s the dish declination, which has to be judged according to the longitude and latitude of your location. Then, and only then, can you start to scan 0.8w, the satellite closest to due south. Get that scanned, and provided everything else is right, you should be able to scan the lot. Of course me being me, I attempted to do the scanning part, only the most difficult bit, with a £5 satellite scanner, this after spending £500 on my satellite set-up. The lesson? Don’t ever be stupidly cheap.
Despite that lapse in judgement the whole process was very enjoyable, mostly because I was learning about something that I was invested in for my own benefit. It truly is the best motivation for and means of learning, and even today I’m still learning things about my satellite system. That’s the main gift of technological advances – as they advance you have to learn how the innovations work and how they can benefit you.
Sadly, there has been a downside to this research. I’ve spent an inordinate number of hours watching tutorial and product review videos on Youtube made by computer enthusiasts, which is a kind way of saying a slew of portly greying men, mostly shot from within their ‘caves’. Nearly all of these abodes are lovingly decked out with pimped systems, multi-monitor set-ups, $3000 gaming chairs and other fatuous gadgets, which they make sure to be in shot whenever possible. It’s harmless, but let’s also point out a double-standard. Women who anoint themselves as beauty and lifestyle gurus and produce videos on Youtube of said subjects are widely and routinely ridiculed and criticised, often it’s by viciously insufferable feminists, for it being a form of preening. While that accusation is probably fair, this geek preening strikes me as being just as bad, or perhaps worse. Not only is this ego massaging a blatant attempt to validate their existences as worthwhile, with the ultimate intention of creating a famed brand, always an irksome spectacle and par the course with most career YouTubers, it’s also a desire to recreate a domain that is a surrogate for the lost wankpits, sorry bedrooms, of their youth. Even worse this aesthetic explicitly implies to the viewers that once they turn off the camera they’re liable to fart and wank with impunity.
Indeed watching videos of a computer being constructed it’s hard not to ignore the sexual innuendo. Attaching components to a motherboard requires slotting stuff gently into its odd shaped orifices. Sending cables through cable-tidying holes and screwing fans and cards into position is done with an extremely satisfying smirk. There’s cooing as they stroke the sleek surface of a £500 graphics card. Slow-mo close-ups of their excessive watercooled systems, complete with huge pipes and ‘dyed’ fluid that may or may-not have been modelled on a nuclear reactor in conjunction with the colour of their own cum, is often accompanied by deep lusty breathing.
The wretch is they’ve imparted knowledge, and so they have value. And just as some find it important to learn which foundation is best for your skin tone, what handbag is ‘in’ right now and how to successfully coordinate your style, so I’ve deemed it important to learn how to install a graphics card and what airflow configuration I should use. Each to their own, I guess.
Upgrading the computer myself still seems quite daunting, but less so than I when I first considered actually doing it. You would think that my previous experience as a novice setting up a satellite system, and extensive trials, tribulations and errors in ultimately succeeding is what’s making me more confident that I can pimp my computer. That ordeal was more physically demanding than what I face in replacing a few components on a computer that’s already been expertly set up for me. But I’m not sure the comparison is as relevant as I’d like it to be. Any first forage into the breach brings a mixture of elation and trepidation, and the experience, sorry, sense of achievement, would be lesser without it.
Now, I just have purchase the parts and do the upgrade. Even if you think my reasons for doing it make me a vacuous relatively affluent twat, root for me, and if you’re my age and male, you probably will.
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