You wake up, force your eyes open, pick up your phone and open a social media feed, because apparently that is life now. Small pieces of Lionel Messi’s late career are drip-fed to you in a broken order, your brain trying to work out the score on subconscious autopilot even though you really don’t care. This is the good stuff: uncontextualized clips from vastly different time zones of an elite footballer doing bits against low-level opponents.
“Oh my God, he didn’t… did he?” a tinny voice inevitably barks as you rush to turn down the volume, because if you have to explain this to someone who you have just woken up then it’s going to sound bleak. Well yes, of course he did. Because he’s Lionel Messi and he’s up against defenders who are a billion pay grades below him.
Messi does at least seem to be having fun here. And why wouldn’t he be: closer to Argentina, in a wonderful city, playing training ground football and away from the maelstrom of last season with time to bask in winning his World Cup. Far better here than in Paris – I joined a state-owned super club and all I got was this lousy criticism from the ultras.
Later the same or another day, a similar experience as Saudi Pro League football gets underway. An ESPN tweet screams that Cristiano Ronaldo “CAN’T STOP SCORING!”, which appears to be a social media strategy designed exclusively to host replays of the most tedious debates in history in the replies. In some far-off place, Riyad Mahrez crosses for Roberto Firmino to score and their celebrations sit somewhere between pre-season friendly and third goal in a 4-0 EFL Cup win over a second-string Championship side.
There is certainly some aesthetic benefit to this. If we would pay too much money to watch Messi juggling a tennis ball (and we would), him scoring goals against anyone has entertainment value. But after watching Messi everywhere else, it is a little like sitting down with a rumbling stomach to watch delicious food being made on the TV. You can appreciate the artform, but it doesn’t satisfy the senses nor your actual pressing need.
There’s an inescapable fascination with the Saudi Pro League too, even if it is limited to spotting players you’d forgotten about, a kind of footballing “Where’s Wally?” (or Where’s Waleed?, if you know your Al Wehda FC captains), daydreaming about how many other clubs and leagues this vast mushroom cloud of spending is going to suck into its power and wondering if those rumours of players being unpaid last year are going to cause a stink.
In fact watching the Saudi Pro League, even for just a few minutes, is a unique experience. Normally, as an invested neutral, you take in a match in its full context: where’s the ball? Where’s the next attack brewing? Is anyone out of position? Who is playing well (and poorly)? Where is the momentum?
Here, it is distilled into the actions of a few players. It is scary how quickly and easily the non-big names fade into your background to become football units who facilitate the work of the stars. Which is sort of the point, I suppose.
What links Messi in Miami and everyone part of the Riyal family in the SPL? This is everything that we are repeatedly told that young people want from football. New stadiums, big names, vast social media followings, smartphone light shows at half-time and games presented to us as mini-clips that hone in only when the best players do the best things.
Okay, so one of the managers and plenty of the players don’t even have Wikipedia pages, but who cares about that because nobody wants to find out more about them anyway. This is sport in 2023 and your kid wants an Al-Nassr shirt for Christmas.
Except that it isn’t. This isn’t an attempt to diminish every aspect of these ventures. Those who are watching Messi’s appearances and SPL matches live seem to be thoroughly enjoying the experience, and good on them for it. Their joy is worth no less than mine. But I cannot appreciate them as pure football experiences because they have not been designed that way for me.
Inter Miami are younger than the eighth Fast & Furious movie, a football club literally formed out of a clause in David Beckham’s playing contract. The Saudi Pro League is 40 years older, but has been reconstructed after the PIF acquired the controlling stakes in four of the biggest clubs. You can’t pretend that the Al-Hilal and Al-Ittihad rivalry is the same now half of each team have only signed up for the nonsensically large payday.
In these clips, we are consuming football on a technicality. It is deliberately stripped of all context: history, jeopardy, rivalry, heritage, and so there’s no depth to it. Football excels because it is simultaneously a competitive endeavour and an aesthetic spectacle, but also because it brings along with it the back stories, the emotional and historical baggage.
Every fixture, every goal, every moment, is piling further fuel on the fire of history. Without that, football feels like a Netflix drama that stops when you turn off the television.
But then perhaps that’s the point. These clips are not produced to give us a glimpse into a football culture, be it Messi’s farewell tour, the Saudi Space Jam League or anything else. They are there to do the opposite: take this on its merit, feast upon the lack of context, don’t ask too many questions about how this bizarro framework all came together or who’s in charge.
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