Column

Comment

Football

Sport

16 August 2024

6 min read

Is the Premier League too much of a good thing?

A weary look ahead to the new season.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Four footballers stand arms crossed looking expectant and confident.

Premier League.

Well, it’s the time of year again when my emotional well-being is governed by the weekly performance of Liverpool Football Club. Yes: the Premier League is back!

The start of a new season is usually abuzz with the excitement of possibilities. So many questions, so many possible outcomes. What will life look like after Jürgen Klopp? Will we win the league? Will we ever sign a defensive midfielder? This should be an exciting time for any football fan; a time of hope, of daring to believe this really is your year.

So, why does the start of the season fill me with such dread this year?

Normally as the season starts, I know when all the games are; who Liverpool are playing, where, and when. I’ve watched Liverpool’s pre-season friendlies to see if we’ve changed formation or made tactical tweaks. I’m up to date with all the players bought and sold by clubs across the league.

Not this year. This year the season has caught me completely off guard and I’m finding the prospect of yet another year of football hard to process. I was invited to join a work fantasy football league this week and, honestly, the thought of it made me want to cry.

When did the sport I love so much begin to feel like such an obligation? Why does being a football fan feel like such hard work?

I think I’m just tired of football. No, not tired. Fatigued. Exhausted.

Or, more accurately, football itself – the sport – is fatigued. As though it’s been drained of all enjoyment.

As television, rather than sport, football inevitably lives in the aftermath of the ‘HBO effect.’

There are all sorts of reasons for this. To start with one of the more obvious ones, Video Assistant Referees (VAR) have turned football into a glorified science project. It’s now a common occurrence for matches to be stopped for extended periods while three men in a portacabin miles away from the game pull out their CGI rulers. All to determine if an attacker has a toenail offside, so they can gleefully disallow a goal and congratulate themselves on a job well done. The line between ‘being right’ and ‘doing right’ is blurred more than ever as commentators bemoan the increasing gulf between ‘the laws of the game’ and ‘the spirit of the game.’

The standard and nature of refereeing in English football certainly isn’t helping my enjoyment of it. But it’s only part of a wider problem.

But there’s a truth about football that many football broadcasters and organizations don’t want to face.

Football is now primarily a televised commodity - content. Most football fans across the globe engage with the sport primarily through a screen, rather than at a stadium. As television, rather than sport, football inevitably lives in the aftermath of the ‘HBO effect.’

Prestige HBO shows like The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire, Game of Thrones (and countless others besides) have shaped the landscape of TV and, by extension, the culture around us. No longer confined solely to HBO, there seems to be, at any given moment, at least one TV programme you simply have to be watching if you’re going to keep up with the cultural conversation. If you’re not watching, you’re left behind.

This is the context in which football finds itself in 2024. No longer sport, but drama. And drama that begs to be discussed. A series of prompts for those sought-after ‘water-cooler moments’ that dominate conversation throughout the week. “That was never a red card!” “We were robbed!” Competitive sport boiled down and reduced to a series of controversies and talking points.

Because football is more television content than sport now, these controversies are not just discussed in the immediate context of the match in question. No, all week between games, key moments and decisions are slowed down, dissected, viewed from multiple angles, pulled apart.

I watch matches, and then watch people talk about the matches I’ve watched, until there’s another match to watch. There is simply too much football, and too much talking about football. All in service of football as television.

On top of this, the matches themselves are only becoming more frequent. This year, the Champions League will have an extra two games in the group stage.

And then there’s international football. This summer alone, there has been the Euros and the Olympics and, during breaks in the Premier League, players represent their nations in friendlies, World Cup qualifiers, and Nations’ League games (the competition literally no-one asked for).

This is to say nothing of proposals for a 39th Premier League game played abroad and an expanded Club World Cup from 2025 (again, neither of which fans seem to be clamouring for).

And all these matches are taking place within this context of football as television content. There’s not just more football, but there’s more football to talk about, more contentious refereeing decisions, more player mistakes and tactical battles to unpick.

But there’s a truth about football that many football broadcasters and organizations don’t want to face. Loads of it is really boring.

There’s no guarantee anything of actual interest will happen in any given football match. Goals in football are relatively scarce compared to other sports. Liverpool beat Manchester United 7-0 a few years ago and it was heralded as borderline divine intervention. If a rugby match finished 7-0, fans would be asking for a refund.

Authentic mundanity will always be more compelling than manufactured drama.

That’s one of the beautiful things about the beautiful game; it’s authentic. There are no pre-written storylines, and no perfect endings or twists set in stone. It’s real life. Like real life, it can often be mundane.

That should be no surprise, really. At the end of the day, football is a game we humans created to pass time and have fun. Like all sport, football is human flourishing in practice. By this I mean that, through playing sports, we get a glimpse into what it is we’ve been put here to do: to enjoy our existence. It is an expression of communal joy found in delighting in the physicality of our nature as created beings. When we take it too seriously or make too much of it, we obscure that fundamental truth to which it points, even at its most mundane. That we are creatures created to flourish and find joy in our creatureliness.

Authentic mundanity will always be more compelling than manufactured drama. In its endless pursuit to inject drama into the sport so it can compete as television, football has lost the mundanity and authenticity that makes it so compelling.

All of this has been somewhat lost in contemporary football and goes some way to explaining why the thought of yet another season of endless debates, drama, and analysis of the sport I love makes me feel rather exhausted. I just want to watch some people kick a ball.

So, what are my hopes for this Premier League season? It might sound counterintuitive, but if there was less football and less football drama in my life, that would do for me. Failing that, I’ll take a Liverpool treble.

Article

Climate

Comment

Sustainability

6 May 2025

5 min read

What “drill baby drill” really means for the world’s poor

Climate jargon pales in comparison to hard, hot and harsh realities.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

Forest in Cameroon.

Edouard Tamba on Unsplash.

“Drill, baby, drill,” declared Donald Trump during his inauguration speech in January to roars of Republican approval, going on to sign executive orders to “unleash” the American oil and gas industry to do just that: drill. This, even though the United States is already the largest crude oil producer of any other nation, according to its own Energy Information Administration, and has been for the past six years in a row.

Fossil fuel combustion is undeniably the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide says the IPCC, with oil accounting for about 34 per cent of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. And World Economic Forum statistics show that the lowest income countries produce only one-tenth of emissions but are the most heavily impacted by climate change.

Something doesn’t seem very fair here.

Many of us are aware of the statistics and policies and rhetoric around climate change. It is all buzzing around in the background of our lives, in the news, on social media and in opinion pieces like this one. But if we’re honest, it is all still theory for most of us living in the Global North.

On a recent work assignment, involving research in remote communities in Southern Cameroon, I found the true extent of climate crisis is hard hitting and very real. According to the IMF, Cameroon is ranked 16th in the world in terms of countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, partly due to its geographical location.

High levels of rural poverty and the country’s economic dependence on agriculture, which employs over 70 per cent of the population adds to this climate vulnerability. But the government statistics and climate jargon, worrying as it is, paled as I discovered the reality of rural Cameroonians’ lives. Lives that depend almost solely on the productivity of the land, and therefore on the weather. Lives that have no Plan B when the climate is unpredictable.

The communities we studied live in rural villages many kilometres from any urban centre, and rely entirely on natural resources for their livelihoods. They depend on traditional rain-fed agriculture, hunting for bush meat, and collecting non-timber forest products such as tropical fruits, insects, medicinal plants, herbs and honey from the dense forests near their dwellings to survive.

The effects of the changing climate have been felt by them for some time. During periods of water scarcity, which is becoming more unpredictable and prolonged, local streams dry up, meaning crop yields fail, such as corn, groundnuts and cassava, and families go hungry. Fishing yields dwindle. The work burden for women rises, as they have to travel further to collect water for drinking, washing and cooking. Poor roads with inaccessible tracks during heavy rain events, or non-existent roads, prevent communities from accessing markets, health care and external support, making them isolated and more vulnerable to climate impacts.

With the science predicting rising future temperatures and higher seasonal variability in their region, these communities will only become more vulnerable, mirroring the story of millions of other people around the world. They must adapt to survive. The alternative is not surviving. Devastatingly, this is a very possible future outcome.

I’d say the UK is standing on the side lines in the playground, looking on.

Why should wealthy, powerful nations mostly responsible for global carbon emissions, not only refuse to compensate those at the receiving end of resulting climate change, but actively seek to cause more damage? It echoes of a bully in a school playground, inflicting suffering on a smaller child, gaining in popularity, power and self-confidence as a few egg them on, others stand by, whilst the receiver of the abuse summons all their remaining strength simply to survive and make it through another day.

So where does the United Kingdom stand in the playground?

In terms of domestic climate policy, the UK must meet net zero by 2050, in line with the target set out in UK legislation, i.e. in twenty-five years from now, total greenhouse gas (GHG) territorial emissions must be equal to the emissions removed from the atmosphere. On paper, it seems the UK is on track to achieve this. GHG emissions have halved since 1990, driven by investing in renewable power and phasing out coal in the electricity sector. However, as WWF and others have pointed out, this figure has a glaring omission. Products including clothing, processed foods and electronics imported into the UK are counted as the “manufacturing country’s emissions,” not the UK’s. This is known as “offshoring.” And according to WWF, between 1990 and 2016, emissions within the UK’s borders reduced by 41 per cent, but the consumption-based carbon footprint only declined by 15 per cent, mainly due to goods and services coming from abroad.

In terms of climate finance for the world’s poorest nations, the UK pledged to spend £11.6 billion between 2021 and 2026, and the government recently said it remains committed to meet this pledge. However, the pot from which this climate finance must come, the UK’s overseas aid budget, was slashed in recent months from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of national income to prioritise defence spending. Meanwhile, climate experts and charities are warning that what the world needs now is stronger global solidarity in the face of the climate crisis, rather than national self-interest. I’d say the UK is standing on the side lines in the playground, looking on.

Trump professes to be a practicing Christian… I wonder what would Jesus have to say about the way America and other wealthy nations have dealt with the climate crisis? One of Jesus’ most well-known and powerful teachings was to love your neighbour. The parable of the Good Samaritan in the Bible demonstrates the way we should treat our neighbours; acting with love, compassion and mercy, not only towards those we know or who live in our friendship network, community or country, but towards every human being, regardless of nationality, background or social group. In the context of climate change, Christians are called to love our global neighbours. This includes supporting the world’s poorest communities to thrive, speaking up on their behalf, demonstrating love through political and social action. Jesus certainly doesn’t teach us to put ourselves “first.”

Imagine a world where every nation signed up to Jesus’ teaching on how to treat our neighbours. Would climate change abruptly halt, human suffering stop and global peace prevail? In truth, probably not, because humanity is imperfect and we get things wrong even when we mean well. But if the intention was there, and if world leaders looked to Jesus’ lead on this, there is little doubt we would be many steps closer.

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