It’s a time of year I find myself wondering how we all got here from somewhere else. Pick a starting point, let some time go by, and try to figure what the heck just happened.
In soccer, the most basic starting point has got to be – the ball. It’s lying on a grass field. Someone kicks it. Someone else runs after it. Off we go!
So … how does such a simple act of joy and freedom turn into salary caps, transfer rumours, GM firings and governance flaps?
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Equally, how does it become the heart-pounding emotional roller coaster endured and celebrated annually by passionate fans of every large or small soccer team on the planet?
I’ve spent a fair bit of time, in recent years, watching groups of soccer supporters emerge from the tunnel under the railway tracks at Toronto’s Exhibition grounds, headed for BMO Field to back their boys (or girls). It’s the moment the stadium is in sight. It’s the giddy time the crowd – and opposing support – can see, hear – and assess – the new arrivals.
Montreal Impact fans, Canada fans, Colorado Rapids and FC Dallas fans, Peru fans, Costa Rica fans – and the massed singing, chanting and outright cussing of U-Sector, Red Patch and the rest when Toronto FC fans surge southward together for a particularly important match.
Eternally, I’m intrigued. How does the flight of a ball get us here?
It’s all deep in the heart, of course. Guys and gals everywhere kick soccer balls. We want to believe, as we struggle through whatever else we’re struggling through, that our guys and gals kick the ball better than their guys and gals. That our colour shirt is worthier and grander than theirs. That someday – maybe – we will prevail.
“Just yesterday I was in a shopping mall in Texas and it was a hundred degrees outside,” I heard a Dallas fan say on the way to November’s MLS Cup final at BMO. “And now it’s a day later, and I’m freezing cold on the Great Lakes.”
Fella uproots himself from his life, puts himself on an airplane at considerable expense, and goes marching through a strange, cold city at night. Oh, and his team eventually lost.
On the other side of the Cup Final coin that night, Toronto and Colorado fans took turns beerily serenading each other at a watering hole in the warehouse district, with great joy and enthusiasm – all because somebody, somewhere, long ago, kicked a ball.
Well, and good, but we still haven’t figured out “the business side.” Budgets and rules and transfer windows, oh my!
Somewhere along the way, this kick-the-ball thing got popular with the working man, who was willing to shell out some shillings on a Saturday to watch his team. At multi-billions of dollars annually, soccer remains a fairly modest industry, by international standards, but the global emotional investment far exceeds all combined fortunes the kicking of soccer balls has ever – future, present or past – produced.
Which means, if you want to be lucky enough to write about all this stuff, you’re likely going to be writing about constitutions and balance sheets as much as sweeper systems or two-man couterbreaks.
There was a moment, at the end of the MLS Cup match, where no soccer balls were left to be kicked. A team won a trophy, their fans were ecstatic, the television cameras were rolling, sponsor banners lined the field, and everyone in the pressbox was busily banging out whatever take they had on what it meant – not just to the teams or the fans, but to the business.
Which is deeply odd, if you step back and consider it, because so many of us put our business on hold for a couple of hours each week to watch our teams – our allies, our hopes, our ambitions, our dreams – kick around a soccer ball.
It is the human condition at its most simple and creative – and most snarled and corporate. Before a professional soccer ball can fly, business have to be incorporated, stadiums have to be built, governments need cajoling, agents and lawyers have to do their thing, salaries have to escalate, and hearts must be broken.
Then the whistle blows, and the real emotional roller coaster begins.
And why would a man who, as a young teen, discovered this odd ball-kicking business and decided to tag along, have to write seven stories in a row on soccer administration in Canada in general and Alberta in particular?
Because someday – along with many, many others writing countless other things – it might actually help lead to a talented lad in a Canada shirt kicking a live ball in a real match at the FIFA World Cup.
And how much would all our yearning hearts love that?
Happy holidays to all!
Onward!