Article

Character

Comment

Football

Sport

16 July 2024

6 min read

Why England lost the Final

Emerson Csorba explores why love is a game-changer when it comes to winning.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson Csorba works in deep tech, following experience in geopolitics and energy.

Gareth Southgate congratulating the team

So, England reached another final which ended in crushing disappointment. Despite their ability to grind out wins deep into Euros and World Cup tournaments due to the savvy approach of now ex-coach Gareth Southgate, the team risks a similar fate as it looks toward the World Cup.

Gareth Southgate resigned as England manager having lost two successive Euro finals. And maybe there’s a reason. His style is habitually defensive, cautious and careful. There is a sense in watching England that they fear failure under the weight of expectation, the fear leading to a strange restraint. There was a caution in their play, the potential of their extraordinary players limited rather than unlocked. When they equalized in the final, they inexplicably failed to capitalize, sitting back and letting Spain come at them again, leading to Oyarzabal’s winning goal.

It is not surprising that England were overtaken in the final minutes of the Euros by an opponent that went for it. Spain played with more intent, winning the tournament with fewer stars than England, but with heart embodied in captain and player of the tournament Rodri.

Compare, however a lesser-known football nation in a less well-reported competition over these past weeks.

Little was expected of Canada’s Men’s National Team upon entering their first “Copa America” football tournament in late June. However, led by former Leeds United coach Jesse Marsch, Canada made the semifinals – a remarkable run that had much of the ice hockey-loving nation turning their television sets to football.

It took the eventual champions and world number-one Argentina and its star Lionel Messi to knock out the Canadians in a closely fought game. Argentina coach Lionel Scaloni called the Canadians “a very good team that’s made it hard for everyone.”

When all was said and done, Canada advanced further into the tournament than Mexico, the United States, Chile and even titans Brazil.

What was behind Canada’s recent Copa success? And what can be learnt from coach Jesse Marsch – and other similar coaches – in unlocking the potential of their teams?

The answer, modelled by Marsch but seen in other select coaches’ approaches, is found in a quality not often mentioned in the world of sport: it is nothing less than Love, and the courage it produces.

A quality which is not often mentioned in the world of sport: Love, and the courage it produces.

Certain coaches’ evident love for their team allows players to tap into new reserves of energy, taking risks despite fear of failure. These teams play with courage, striving to win, rather than sitting back. They leave everything on the field. This love keeps teams on the offensive, their opponents on the defensive. Such courage is important in modern football, which values a high-energy, attacking style.

Modern sport rewards teams who display speed, directness and versatility. Just as the smartphone has sped up the pace of modern communication and life, rewarding those capable of communicating with large audiences instantaneously, football and other sports reward those with quickness and directness in their style of play.

For instance, in American football, the “quarterback” position of previous decades needed only throw the football effectively. These days, the best quarterbacks must throw and run. Speed, directness and versatility are demanded of the modern quarterback, mirroring the overall speeding-up of society and their ability to reach people instantaneously in an increasingly interconnected world.

Canada, adapting to these changes, brought speed to every match. Marsch’s enthusiasm on the sideline was clear throughout the tournament. Canada provided opponents with little room to breathe, keeping on the front foot from the opening kick to the final whistle. The team was rewarded accordingly, despite their inexperience and lack of stature. The same was true of the dynamic Georgia team in the Euros, who humbled the mighty Portugal 2-0 in the group stages.

Marsh recognised Canada’s potential when others didn’t. Following a quarterfinal win over Venezuela, arguably the most dominant team in the tournament up to that point, with the stadium packing 48,000 Venezuelans compared to Canada’s 1,000 fans, Marsch highlighted his players’ untapped ability. He did this throughout the tournament, and his players fed on this awareness of their potential.

Marsch’s own story is one of challenge. He was fired in 2023 by Leeds United and then rejected by the United States Men’s National Team. Despite his track record and promise, he was overlooked in favour of lesser candidates. These rejections provided Marsch with a deepened belief in his own ability and unique style. This inner strength in turn provided his players with courage in hostile matches throughout Copa America.

Reflecting on the Copa America success, Marsch said: “I want to get back to loving the game that I love, and this team has helped me find that, and I’m very thankful for that.” This love helped the Canadians play with courage, tapping into energy levels to underpin this courage.

Few coaches achieve this – but the results are evident for those who do.

In the English Premier League, Jurgen Klopp, Mikel Arteta and Pep Guardiola are often criticised for their exuberance on the field, but each coach clearly loves their team. This translates to teams that do not easily give up, responding quickly to setbacks.

St Paul famously wrote: “Love always hopes, always perseveres.” When they are bound together by a sense of love, it enables a person, or a team to push forward, never giving up hope, always pressing for the win.

Jurgen Klopp loved the city of Liverpool and demonstrated this through his unforgettable hugs of his players and on-field energy. His players fed off this love and routinely went for it. Liverpool launched long ball after long ball, with fullback Trent Alexander-Arnold one of the best long passers in the Premier League, game in and game out, winning the Premier League for the first time in decades and even reaching the pinnacle of the Champions League.

Mikel Arteta inherited and rebuilt an Arsenal that had fallen from previous heights. One moment stands out in this rebuilding process. Following a shock loss to Everton at the midway point in the 2022-2023 season, Arteta told the press that he loved his team “even more” than he did previously. Arsenal were unable to unseat Manchester City that year, losing energy in the final weeks of the season. But they took their game to a new level in the following campaign, pushing City to the final day.

Pep Guardiola is the exuberant and intense coach of Manchester City. But look at his captain Rodri, who recently led Spain to Euros glory. Following Spain’s victory, Rodri commented “In sport, as in life, when you leave it all there, you are rewarded.”

Rodri made a similar comment following Man City’s fourth consecutive EPL title, stating that he knew Man City would win the EPL title following Arsenal’s 0-0 draw with City at City’s home stadium the Emirates.

The reason? Arsenal came to achieve a draw – not a victory. They did not demonstrate the heart needed to win the game decisively. They were lacking in love in that match, playing instead not to lose. The difference between these approaches, one focused on winning and the other on not losing, was fear – even if subtle.

The Jewish sage Hillel is well known for saying “If I’m not for me, who will be for me? And if not now, when?” The coaches described above, each demonstrating love, instill in their teams the ability to take risks, playing boldly. This is Hillel’s “if not now, when?”

Love is the vital quality providing players with the courage, to play on the front foot with a view to winning decisively. It is conducive to success in modern football valuing speed. Led by the coach, and spreading through players, it is the difference-maker as the margins between failure and success continue to narrow.

Review

Comment

Morality

23 November 2023

7 min read

Sam Bankman-Fried: doing the math on morality

The calculated character and philanthropy of crypto-criminal Sam Bankman-Fried is analysed by Krish Kandiah, who finds it doesn’t to add up.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Sam Bankman-Fried at a crypto-conference, 2021.

Cointelegraph, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’ biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire is quite the compelling read.

For a start Lewis has an incredible ability to explain complex economic and business scenarios in a way that is not only accessible, but also gripping. It is no wonder his previous books have been turned into Hollywood blockbusters.

Lewis also has a knack for finding the humanity in almost any given situation. Whether he is writing about the system for picking a world-beating baseball team, the global economic crisis or, in this case, the rise and fall of a cryptocurrency exchange, he delves deep into the characters at the heart of the stories, exposing their strengths and weaknesses, their struggles and values.

The publication of Going Infinite last month also coincided with Bankman-Fried’s real time court case, ending in a guilty verdict for, in the words of US attorney Damian Williams, “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history – a multibillion-dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto.”

This fraud centred on Sam Bankman-Fried’s company FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. It emerged as one of the largest in the world with billions in deposits. All helping Bankman-Fried, aged just 29, to become recognised by Forbes magazine as the 41st richest American.

For all Bankman-Fried’s (and his friends’) talk of altruism, they weren’t very good at being nice to each other.

My personal interest in the man behind the fraud was shaped by three things. Firstly, as an adoptive and foster parent of two children who are on the autistic spectrum, I was interested in what Lewis would say about the common speculation that Bankman-Fried is also on the autistic spectrum.

I was also intrigued by Bankman-Fried’s philosophical approach to philanthropy and how Lewis would present the problems with the movement known as Effective Altruism.

Finally, I was interested in just to what extent Bankman-Fried’s commitment to mathematical algorithms overshadowed his moral awareness, given that it may well ultimately result in a sentence of 100 years behind bars.

Autism

Lewis invites us into as much of the inner world of Bankman-Fried as he can. He writes about his loneliness in childhood and his struggles with social conventions, for example. One particularly powerful moment is when we are allowed to eavesdrop on a video call with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Bankman-Fried cannot do the call without simultaneously playing a video game. He doesn’t want to see Ms Wintour’s face while she is speaking and only looks at her when he is speaking.

While Lewis readily points to traits that are commonly associated with people on the autistic spectrum – Bankman-Fried’s struggle to comply with social norms and difficulties understanding facial expressions, for example – he avoids using the term “autism”.

It seems that Bankman-Fried himself is aware of his neurodivergent traits and is not afraid to talk about the way they impact his emotional and existential intelligence.

At one point he writes to his girlfriend:

“I don't feel happiness. What's the point in dating someone who you physically can't make happy?"

He went on to say:

“In a lot of ways I don’t really have a soul”

I found statements like these hard to read, but insightful. As a culture we are growing in our understanding and appreciation of a range of areas of diversity, however this has yet to be robustly applied to enable both widespread social acceptance and self-acceptance. The fact that Lewis chooses not to use the term autism may be a symptom of this.

Altruism

Sam Bankman-Fried was a very visible member of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. EA is a fascinating philosophical approach to philanthropy which challenges individuals to consider their lives in terms of maximising their resources for the benefit of the world. Bankman-Fried’s answer to the question “How can I do most good with my life?” was to plan to earn a very large sum of money, ideally an infinite sum of money, that could then be used to help solve huge global issues such as the threat of nuclear war or another global pandemic.

There are many criticisms of the EA movement, and, Lewis explores several of them during the course of the book. Perhaps most obviously, for all Bankman-Fried’s (and his friends’) talk of altruism, they weren’t very good at being nice to each other. In fact, there was a major falling out between the effective altruists at his first company Alameda Research where half of the employees left because of his leadership style. Charity, it seems, did not begin at home.
It is also unclear how much money Bankman-Fried actually gave away to philanthropic causes. And it is alleged that just a month after FTX collapsed, the company even began trying to claw back the charitable donations it made. According to direct messages on X with journalist Kelsey Piper, Bankman-Fried agreed his ethically-driven approach was "mostly a front".

"Some of this decade's greatest heroes will never be known," he wrote to Piper, "and some of its most beloved people are basically shams."

The quest to do good in the world seemed to have become more like a gambling obsession with Bankman-Fried, a game in which the ends justified the means.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is uncertain whether Bankman-Fried had good intentions at all or whether the lure of billions of dollars became so irresistible that whatever virtue once existed was sacrificed to vice.

There was another dark side to Bankman-Fried’s EA philosophy. He seemed to be fascinated by the question of just how far he could go in his calculations of trade-offs and risks in the supposed cause of saving the future of humanity? What was the highest risk he would take? What boundaries would he cross for financial gain? What would need to be sacrificed on the way? The quest to do good in the world seemed to have become more like a gambling obsession with Bankman-Fried, a game in which the ends justified the means.

Automatism

Sam Bankman-Fried was not afraid to be honest about his struggles to process and express empathy in socially acceptable ways. He once said:

"There's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake.”

However, what he seemed to struggle with in empathy, he apparently tried to make up for in logic. The following example is helpful.

Lewis records that Bankman-Fried saw Donald Trump as an “existential risk” to democracy and good governance and decided the best way to remove the threat was to offer to pay him not to run for president—an idea Trump was reportedly open to.

“His team had somehow created a back channel into the Trump operation and returned with the not terribly Earth-shattering news that Donald Trump might indeed have his price: $5bn. Or so Sam was told by his team,” Lewis writes.

I have some admiration for Bankman-Fried’s out-of-the-box thinking. He was speaking Trump’s language. He was trying to save the world. He was trying to solve a problem. Logically it was sound. But his $5,000,000,000 calculation was fundamentally flawed. It took no account of democratic values, of the consequences of feeding an ‘existential threat’ billions of dollars, or the illegality of bribery and corruption on that scale.

The same miscalculation haunts the EA movement. While earning infinite amounts of money to save the world or prevent the climate emergency sounds logical, it fails to factor in the dark side of humanity: greed, lust, pride or gluttony, or whichever vice stopped Bankman-Fried from giving away his promised sizeable sum of money and led him rather to committing one of the largest frauds in history. The tech-bro altruistic movement also doesn’t factor in the bright side of humanity: compassion, humility, generosity, sacrifice. It doesn’t account for the human things that keep us going as we pursue justice - proximity to the people we are serving, faith or beauty.

The verdict against Bankman-Fried shows us that hard logic, like lofty ideals, is not enough to protect us from the bad we might do or propel us unswervingly towards the good we should do. The equations are flawed. We are more than machines. We are not social or biological robots. Our emotions and reactions can never be completely predictable or automatic because we are human beings, each of us with our unique strengths and weaknesses.

Ultimately, this is what I liked about Lewis’ book – his portrayal of Sam Bankman-Fried not in terms of how much money he made, or how many years he will spend behind bars, not as Crypto-King or Lord of Frauds, but as a uniquely talented and flawed individual who wrestles with some of the biggest existential paradoxes, and who is still, by the way, only 31 years old.