This past week saw the coming and going of a purported scandal involving a £1 million payout from Liverpool to Manchester City involving allegations that two former employees logged into City’s Scout7 profile several hundred times in 2013.
The scandal seems to be that Man City, suspicious they were being spied on by their Premier League rivals, felt they needed to speed up some transfers to prevent Liverpool from pipping them. Which, as this tweet brings to light, is more than a little funny considering who the Reds picked up the following summer:
Further taking some of the wind out this story, Liverpool recruited three Man City scouts, people who presumably had very good knowledge of City’s transfer strategy already! Even if they'd signed NDAs before they left, it’s hard not to think Liverpool had already absorbed a significant portion of the City transfer brain trust regardless of which players City were sniffing out on Scout7.
The interesting question to me is, criminality aside, is this gamesmanship all just part of football? Is espionage merely an unsavoury distraction from the more critical matters we see every week on the pitch?
The Two Views
It seems to me there are two basic views of football, opinions that are irrevocably and confusingly intertwined in most of us that we often try to hold at once even as they contract each other.
View #1 maintains that footballing competition is limited to what happens within the 90 minutes of play. The game is twenty-two players and four referees (ideally, thank you very much, VAR), battling out to see who will win on any given Saturday (or Friday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday).
All the rest—ticket sales, the transfer market, player agents, commercial deals, sports analytics—is ‘the business side of things,’ which is separate from the ‘actual football.’ When the business side bleeds too much into what happens on the pitch, you get intrusive innovations like VAR, which robs the game of uncertainty at the cost of entertainment, or data-driven tactics that reduce human players into nodes in a simulation. You get players refusing to dress as they push for a transfer to another club willing to pay them higher wages. You get owners who sell good players to boost revenues, even though it costs the team on the pitch. It’s neoliberalism run amok!
View #2 holds that competition in football comprises both the games themselves, but all these above elements as well. In this view, football does not end at the final whistle. Commercial deals, transfers, analytics, ownership, scouting—this stuff is not merely the mechanics of the football business, it is part of the sport itself, as much as throw-ins and free kicks.
This view tends to be more receptive of things like VAR, because poor referee calls have a knock-on effect on the table, which has a knock-on effect on earnings, which has a knock-on effect on player spending and the competition itself. Improving the game through more accurate officiating isn’t proof that business is ruining traditional football; it’s proof that the competition of the sport has expanded and matured beyond the old method of enforcing the rules of the game.
Ditto for sports analytics. What holders of View #1 might see as the drab splitting of hairs by nerd accountants eager to wrest as much value from every dollar spent as possible, holders of View #2 would see as an intriguing new chapter of the sport.
Where do you fall?
I will come out and say I, too, switch between views 1 and 2 depending on the circumstances, but I would argue this ‘switching’ is inherent to football itself. On the one hand, your place in the football league table is decided entirely by your ability to win and draw more games than you lose, ie goals and the prevention of goals. On the other, where you fall on the table is explicitly tied to things like merit pay, and relegation from your league carries with it a substantial financial penalty that, as we know all too well by now, can be an existential threat that has precious little to do with football.
I also believe the confusion between these two views is at the heart of support for and opposition to football analytics. For View #1 types, analytics represents a crude and foolhardy attempt to inject mathematical science into what is, at heart, an art. For those who support View #2, it is simply another, more solidly evidence-based form of coaching.
I wouldn’t argue one view is inherently better than the other (though I suspect I would fall solidly on the View #2 part of the spectrum). The businessification of football is certainly not something I enjoy, but I also think analytics has a lot of value to preventing otherwise well-supported clubs from making stupid and sometimes suicidal decisions in the boardroom, which is surely part of football as much as scoring bags of goals.
Moving forward, I’m going to use Views #1 and #2 as an argumentative shorthand, so expect me to link to this post a lot. I think they provide a decent if gimmicky shorthand for a lot of the repetitive bullshit we see out there (especially regarding VAR).