Article
Character
Culture
Football
Sport
3 min read

What happens if your club doesn’t win?

In football leagues and life not all of us can be winners.

Henry Corbett, a vicar in Liverpool and chaplain to Everton Football Club.  

  

A dejected football coach squats by the byline.

Most football clubs don’t win Premier League titles, FA Cup finals, Champions League trophies. 

Most football players don’t pick up winners' medals at the highest level. 

Many of us don’t achieve fame, status, “winners” headlines. No medals or trophies on our mantlepiece, no rousing applause or open-top bus parades. 

So, are we losers, are we the defeated, should we be envious of the winners? Or do we try and ignore all this talk about winning and remain indifferent to all this hype about football, medals, fame, applause? 

Here are some attempts at comfort, at a better perspective, at some hope for us all, whether out club wins titles or not, whether a player picks up medals or not, and whether all of us are recognised, famous or not. 

Winning is not just about titles and trophies. If your club has the resources and the team to win a title and a trophy, at whatever level, professional or amateur, that is great and definitely to be celebrated.  

But if you support a club with a limited budget and which has performed brilliantly well and beyond expectations has stayed in its division and brought pleasure to many then that is a win.  

If your club, thanks to great efforts by a few or many, has remained solvent and has an outstanding community section that makes a difference, that is a win.  

If your club has excellent supporter involvement and a pricing system that is fair, inclusive and creates good relationships across the club and the community that is a win.

If your team is clearly improving, if the attitude is spot on, if the behaviour on and off the pitch is sound, if every player and coach and staff member gives their very best as well as looking to improve that is a win.  

The word “winning” needs a fairer, more encouraging, truer definition. 

Are we the defeated, the losers, the envious? Of course not. 

They say that professional football players have two lives: the first is their playing career, and then the second is their life after their playing days. To win in life is to win in both lives.  

That will mean giving of their best as players with a passion to learn, to improve, to be a good teammate. It means being a good role model on and off the pitch. Then in life number two to give of your best there too to make our world a better, fairer, more loving, more beautiful place.  

And there will be lessons from the time as a player to take into life number two: the values of teamwork, discipline, training, courage, and of course coping with the disappointment of not maybe winning titles and realising there is more to life than simply titles. Player, manager and World Cup winner with Argentina in 1978 Ossie Ardlies reflected back on his football career and said:  

“Everyone is a winner who gives their best.” 

And for all of us applause, status, fame are unreliable goals. A few achieve that, some deservedly, some maybe less so. Most don’t hit the headlines. Are we the defeated, the losers, the envious? Of course not.  

So, are we indifferent to such issues as winning, success, applause, accolades?  Roy Castle wrote a forward to a slim volume of essays celebrating Christians who had worked and served in their communities away from the limelight, and he mentioned that as a performer he appreciates the applause he gets. “These people”, he wrote, “have worked away without applause, But there is always one person in the audience. His applause comes later.”  That’s the greatest win. 

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Snippet
Character
Comment
Digital
Film & TV
3 min read

Here’s why we play judge and jury on social media

Discovering the truth about celebrity feuds.

Rosie studies theology in Oxford and is currently training to be a vicar.

A montage shows two celebrity faces in opposition
Lively and Baldoni face off.

Depending on your Instagram algorithm, you might have seen that Hollywood actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni continue to make news with their ongoing feud, which is soon to reach litigation in the US civil courts. Then again, maybe you haven’t – in which case kudos to your scrolling habits and for avoiding celebrity clickbait (unlike me). 

What interests me about their dispute – and others that have gone before it – is how it spotlights our need, as the general public, to search out the truth. And to make ourselves judge and jury on the matter. 

Having starred together last summer in It Ends With Us, Lively soon after accused Baldoni of sexual harassment and of orchestrating a smear campaign against her during the film’s press tour. Baldoni responded by suing the New York Times for libel, and Lively for civil extortion and defamation. Cue some biased media reporting, and conflicting evidence being released by their legal teams, and both actors’ reputations have been significantly damaged by the dispute.  

With their accounts remaining at complete odds with each other, the question Instagram’s pundits keep coming back to is: which one of them is telling the truth? 

The reality is we’ll probably never fully know (and, obviously, it’s not actually any of our business, so I won’t speculate).  

But it makes me reflect on how, in lots of instances of conflict, the answer can be blurrier than we’d like. 

The judges and juries of Instagram rarely, if ever, offer us this kind of impartiality in their search for the truth.

So often, in disagreements and disputes, both parties’ accounts have a seed of truth in them. But as we ruminate on the event afterwards, the risk is that we re-interpret it according to our values, biases, and past experiences. That seed of truth is watered by the stories we tell ourselves, growing and morphing into something that can become hard to untangle. 

Over time, as we centre ourselves in the narrative, we become the ultimate arbiters of our truth.  

But when the stories we tell ourselves become the stories we also tell others, and we discover that our respective truths are in fundamental conflict with each other, it exposes how our perception of a situation might differ from is reality. 

Which is why, so often, we have to defer to impartial third parties to search out the ultimate truth. Judges and juries who seek to understand each person’s story but who also inhabit the fuller narrative, and who can untangle the layers of interpretation we unknowingly heap onto our experiences. 

The judges and juries of Instagram rarely, if ever, offer us this kind of impartiality in their search for the truth. 

But they remind us that truth is, ultimately, found outside of ourselves. And that, in discovering the truth, we can also find the justice we’re so often longing for. 

Maybe we’re all just suckers for a bit of clickbait. But perhaps the need to make ourselves judge and jury also points to a deeper part of our humanity. We’re all seeking after truth in this world – if only we can find it. 

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

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If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

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