Article

Culture

Sport

Trauma

17 July 2025

5 min read

Scottie Scheffler has a lesson for this summer's fading sports teams

The Open Champion's musings speak to the demise of Welsh Rugby and West Indian cricket

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A cricket batsman surrounded by opposition players leaves the crease.

A West Indies Batsman leaves the crease.

xcom/windiescricket.

This past week, while England were beating India at Lords in a nail-biting, high-quality Test match which was in the balance until the very last ball, on the other side of the world in Jamaica, something tragic was unfolding. The West Indies were bowled out for the paltry sum of 27 runs against the fearsome Australian bowling attack, the second lowest total of any team in around 150 years of Test cricket.

Why tragic? People of my age remember the 1970s and 80s West Indies as one of the best cricket teams in the world. Superb bowlers such as Malcolm Marshall, Curtly Ambrose, Michael Holding and Joel Garner terrorised batsmen from Adelaide to Antigua, from Cape Town to Christchurch. They hurled down cricket balls at a frightening speed, whizzing past the heads of batsman who didn't even have the security of a helmet. At the other end, a succession of brilliant batsman like Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Clive Lloyd and Alvin Kallicharan scored hundred after hundred, as together they made-up one of the greatest teams in the history of Test cricket.

Since then, a sorry mess of dried-up funding, poor governance, neglect of grassroots cricket, and the competition of other sports such as athletics or basketball, has seen the standard of West Indian cricket decline dramatically, especially at the most complex form of the game - international 5-day Tests. So, the 27 was not a huge surprise. Something catastrophic like that was bound to happen one day.

In those same 1970s, Wales boasted one of the best rugby teams in the world. Gareth Edwards, Barry John, JPR Williams and Phil Bennett were at the heart of a dazzling and brilliant team. Rugby is Wales's national sport, yet in recent years a similar story of incompetent governance, lack of funding, and an inefficient regional structure has led to its dramatic decline, and a harrowing 18-match losing streak, which finally came to an end with a narrow victory over Japan, hardly one of the world's greatest teams. Last year's Six Nations ended with an embarrassing 68-14 home defeat against the team they hate to lose to - England. The current Lions team contains no Welshmen at all - the first time since 1896.

Then there is the demise of Manchester United. “We’ve seen it all. We’ve won the lot. We’re Man United and we’re never going to stop” sing United fans at most games. All very grand, but these days they don't win anything. The great triumphs were back in the 1960s, and then the 90s and 2000s under the great Sir Alex Ferguson. After a takeover by the incompetent Glazer family, who have increased sponsorship revenue but leeched billions out of the club, and seem incapable of running a global football institution, United have declined dramatically, ending up 15th in the league last season, and with a failure to recruit new players this summer, look destined to do even worse next season.

The fall of such sporting giants often elicits a strong dose of Schadenfreude in opposition fans. I was moaning about the fortunes of Man United to a Chelsea-supporting friend recently. He had zero sympathy.

And yet there is something tragic about lost sporting glory. Watching the current West Indies, Wales and Man United teams getting beaten by mediocre opposition brings a heavy sense of sadness - even if you're not Welsh or West Indian. Like King Lear, reduced to wandering around a ‘blasted heath’ like a madman, Icarus falling to the sea after over-reaching, or Sisyphus, once a king, yet incurring the wrath of the gods and now condemned to eternally rolling a stone up a hill only for it to fall down the other side (sounds just like Man United’s recent seasons), these teams’ current manifestations can’t escape the glory that was once theirs but is no longer.

Fading sports teams are our contemporary memento mori.

“How the mighty are fallen.” The phrase comes from the Old Testament - when the young warrior David mourned for the slain King Saul. Reflecting on lost human glory was in the past thought to be a valuable thing. Churches up and down the country have effigies of dead local grandees, lying in stone with hands clasped in prayer, as a reminder that human glory fades, death comes to us all, that our wealth will be handed on to others, and the things we are most proud of most likely forgotten.

Scottie Scheffler, the world' No 1 golfer and who just won the British Open recently spoke about winning a gold tournament, having a brief sense of euphoria, which then vanishes within a few minutes as life returns to normal. He wondered aloud whether it was all worth it: “There are a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfil them in life, and you get there, you get to number one in the world, and they're like, 'what's the point?'”

Scheffler has made no secret of his Christian faith. It presumably lies behind his comments that golf can’t give what he called “fulfilment in the deepest places of your heart". And maybe that is the ultimate lesson of these teams that were once great and are no more - a reminder that sport can be a source of great joy and achievement, but ultimately is unable to satisfy our deepest longings, because its glory is fleeting.

Fading sports teams are our contemporary memento mori. As humans we somehow yearn for something permanent, unshakeable, eternal, what our forebears found in God, but we moderns struggle to find anywhere. Wordsworth’s classic questions: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” are echoed in the demise of sporting greatness, and the existential musings of Scottie Scheffler.

One day, every sportsman or woman, every team - in fact, every one of us - will experience what the West Indies, Wales and Man United experience right now. The flower fades and the grass withers. And perhaps in that moment of lost fame, we will find the wisdom to seek more lasting things than sporting glory.

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Article

Culture

Economics

Ethics

1 May 2025

6 min read

The rights and wrongs of making money with meme coins

When does investing become speculating, or even addictive gambling?

Laurence Fletcher

Laurence is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A montage shows Trump with a raised fist against other images of him and the phrase 'fight fight fight'.

$Trump coin marketing image.

gettrumpmemes.com,

Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs may have driven sharp swings in global financial markets, but his actions in markets a few months earlier were in some ways even more peculiar.

On the Friday before his inauguration as the 47th US President in January, the Republican surprised many with the launch of the $TRUMP memecoin, described by its website as “the only official Trump meme”. The cryptocurrency token, in which Trump’s family business owned a stake, initially soared in value to more than $14bn over that following weekend.

Then, on the Sunday, Trump’s wife Melania launched her own memecoin, $MELANIA, which reached a value of $8.5bn. Even the pastor who spoke at the president’s inauguration subsequently launched his own memecoin.

For those wondering what exactly a memecoin is, you are not alone. In short, they are a form of cryptocurrency - an asset class that itself has attracted plenty of questions about its substance and purpose - representing online viral moments. They have no fundamental value or business model and, according to the US securities regulator, “typically have limited or no use or functionality”.

Donald and Melania Trump’s coins subsequently plunged in price, but still have a value of around $2.5bn and $214mn respectively, according to website CoinMarketCap.

There are plenty of others in existence. PEPE, based on a comic frog, has a value of around $3.6bn; BONK, a cartoon dog, has a market cap of $1.5bn; and PNUT, a reference to a squirrel euthanised by authorities in New York and about which Trump was allegedly “fired up” (although doubt has since been cast on the president’s involvement in the matter), is still valued at around $174mn, despite having fallen sharply in price.

Dogecoin, seen as the world’s first memecoin and originally created as a joke, boasts a market value of around $25bn. (There are other memecoins which may not be suitable for these pages).

Some people’s willingness to buy an “asset” with no use or fundamental value may seem strange to more traditional investors. But it can be viewed as just one manifestation of the speculative investor behaviour evident since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and, indeed, at times throughout history.

The price of Bitcoin recently rose above $100,000, despite many investors still viewing it as having little or no value (in 2023 the UK’s Treasury select committee described cryptocurrencies as having “no intrinsic value, huge price volatility and no discernible social good”). In early 2021, shares in GameStop - a loss-making US video games retailer that some hedge funds were betting against - rocketed as much as 2,400 per cent, as retail investors piled in, many with the aim of inflicting pain on the hedge fund short sellers (in that respect at least, a highly successful strategy that became the subject of the film Dumb Money). The huge rise in AI and other tech stocks in recent years - until the recent tariff-driven volatility - has also been described as a bubble by some commentators.

Whether or not such episodes can be compared to infamous bouts of speculative mania in history depends on your point of view (and often can only be judged with the benefit of hindsight) - be it the 17th century Dutch tulip bulb mania, shares in the South Sea Company in the 18th century or the dotcom boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But it does give rise to the question of when investment should start to be described as speculation or even as gambling? And what are the rights and wrongs of any of those activities?

There can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources...

Gambling can be thought of as risking a stake on, for instance, the result of a game of chance or sport in the hope of a bigger payout. While often the result is purely down to chance, in some cases a strategy or an element of research (for instance of a horse or football team’s form) can be used. Investment, in contrast, tends to involve purported economic utility and assets believed to have some sort of underlying value, and holds the hope of future profit (although there are also plenty of bad investments or those that have gone to zero). While an investor must be prepared to lose their entire stake, in some cases such an event is relatively unlikely (for instance, if they buy a fund tracking the performance of a major stock exchange). Speculation is harder to define, but is generally seen as shorter term than investment, with more chance of a bigger gain or loss, and dependent on price fluctuations. Rightly or wrongly, the term has a more negative connotation than investment.

One writer who explored the ethics of these activities was Oswald von Nell-Breuning, a Jesuit theologian and economist who served as an adviser to the Pope and who was banned from publishing under the Nazis.

While he found that “one general definition cannot capture all the nuances” of speculation, he identified two different types of speculative activity - one that was purely trying to make a profit from financial market trading, and one based on trying to create a viable business. (See this article in the Catholic Social Science Review for a fuller explanation of Nell-Breuning’s views on speculation).

As the CSSR article shows, Nell-Breuning found that there can be positive effects from speculation - one might think of better liquidity and price discovery in a market, while, in commodity futures markets, speculators allow producers to hedge risk.

But he also argued that there can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources away from production.

And whereas gambling typically takes place within a circle of players who have chosen to take part, speculation, he wrote, can affect a greater portion of society - for instance, if it affects the price of shares or bonds they hold.

The Bible - on which Nell-Breuning’s faith and analysis was based - does not take a prescriptive approach to such activities. But it does provide some interesting guidance.

An entrepreneurial approach to business and investment is applauded, for instance when the writer of the book of Proverbs (traditionally believed to be King Solomon) praises the virtues of “an excellent wife”. These include investing in a field and using her earnings from business to plant a vineyard, and feeding her family from her gains.

Jesus tells a story of a master who, before going on a journey, gives his property to his servants, each according to their ability. To one he gives five “talents” (a large unit of money), to a second two and to a third servant he gives one.

The first servant trades with his talents and makes five more talents - a 100 per cent profit - and is applauded by the master on his return. The second servant also trades and similarly makes two more talents and is again applauded.

But the third servant, being afraid and believing the master to be “a hard man”, hides the money in a hole in the ground. He is condemned as “wicked and slothful”, and told that he should at least have put the money in the bank.

While Jesus’s story may primarily be about how we view God’s nature, how we use our God-given abilities and whether or not we can take risks in faith for Him, it is also hard not to see investment and indeed wise speculation as being virtuous activities here. Putting the money into a bank account is, in this story anyway, more of a fallback option.

But the Bible also warns us against putting money above all else in our lives. The love of money is, famously, a root of all sorts of evil, while we are also told to be content with what we have, and that “wealth gained hastily will dwindle”.

Nell-Breuning similarly warns that a “get-rich-quick” mindset, when this is placed above all else, can be harmful, and advises caution in situations where the lure of big profits can lead the speculator into market manipulation or fraud.

After all, both gambling and crypto trading have the potential to become dangerous and damaging addictions needing treatment.

Ultimately, Nell-Breuning struggled to come to a simple conclusion on the question of whether speculation, in and of itself, is morally wrong. It is, he wrote, a judgment call for those involved.

When making such decisions ourselves, his - and the Bible’s - warnings may be worth bearing in mind.