Sport gets so tangled up in its own language sometimes. Some big-shot coach says the wrong thing at the right time and it gets rack-stretched and passed into legend, whether they like it or not. This was the year when I learned that one of the most famous lines in all of sport – Vince Lombardi’s “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” – was one he ended up wanting to take back.
“I wish to hell I’d never said the damn thing,” Lombardi told the great New York journalist Jerry Izenberg shortly before he died in 1970. “I meant the effort...I meant having a goal...I sure as hell didn’t mean for people to crush human values and morality.”
Somehow, that bit never made it up on to the wall of a gym.
Instead, over the years, Lombardi’s line became infused with all the worst macho, psychotic posturing sport has to offer. It went all around the world, to every corner of the sporting planet, picking up passengers at every stop. “Remember what Vince Lombardi said,” roars Homer Simpson at Bart as he lines up a putt in a crazy golf tournament. “If you lose, you’re out of the family.”
The best and truest lines about sport keep it much simpler. The sportswriter-turned-ESPN presenter Tony Kornheiser will be breaking down why a team lost a playoff game and after all the ins and outs and ifs and buts are beaten to death, he’ll finish off by saying, “And look, the other guys get paid to come to work every day too.”
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That’s far more on the money. Forget all the quasi-mythical Lombardi lingo, the kind of thing that gets co-opted by grasping self-improvers short on imagination. Sport pretty much always comes down to a matter of resources, talent and technical application. And the other crowd are chasing it just as much as you are.
It’s this reality that makes it all so laughable to find the camera seeking out cycling guru Dave Brailsford in the crowd at Manchester United games now that his boss Jim Ratcliffe is buying up a quarter of the club. There he was at Old Trafford on St Stephen’s Day, bald and bespectacled, the sporting director of Ratcliffe’s company Ineos. He will apparently spend the next month embedded at United, assessing the club from top to bottom, turning his laser focus on finding all the fat that is there to be trimmed.
To which anyone who is actually involved in football on a day-to-day basis will presumably give a dry chortle and an exaggerated eye roll. Sure, Dave. Come on in. Let’s see those sweet, sweet marginal gains in action.
The initial soundings aren’t exactly encouraging, it has to be said. The ink was barely drying on the deal when someone – either United themselves or Ineos – felt it was important to get the news out into the world that 300 jobs could go at the club. Ratcliffe will be employing a big-shot external auditor to go through the club with a set of those thinning scissors you use on shaggy dogs and is set on streamlining the place good and proper.
At which point it seems appropriate to ask: what exactly does this guy think he’s buying? United may well be a live comedy show on the pitch three times a week but it’s not like this is some failing business that’s circling the plughole and needs to be saved. Despite how useless they’ve been at the actual football, the club posted record revenues of £648 million (around €745 million) this year.
Think about that – United have been a global commercial behemoth for close on three decades at this stage and 2023 was still the year in which they brought in the greatest amount of money in their history. They sold out their season ticket allocation at the fastest ever rate with the lowest ever churn. Their new deal with Adidas signed in July was the biggest in Premier League history, worth £90 million a season for the next decade. Winning isn’t everything – it’s definitely not the only thing.
And yet the first news they wanted leaked on buying into the club was that 300 jobs would be going up in smoke? Ask yourself why they would do that. Even if that turns out to be the best way of fixing all the things that have gone wrong over the past decade, in whose interests is it to make that the first impression for the watching world?
The presumption can only be that this is the image Ratcliffe, Brailsford and all the Ineos people want to present as they set about teaching football a thing or two about how to run a business. That they’re the boys who are going to bring a whole new world of efficiency and sinewy competence to the slobbering, overfed orgy of excess that is the Premier League generally and United specifically.
Hmmm. Imagine the shock they’re going to get when they are shown that all of this is already happening. Yes, even at a roiling, hapless shitshow like modern day Man United. All that streamlining and edge-hunting and fractional, hyper-targeted rationalisation, that’s the base level of all elite sport these days. Everything is measured. Everything has been xGified.
Maybe slicing 300 jobs out of Old Trafford is the way to go. But it feels a bit more likely that buying Harry Kane and Declan Rice when they were there to be bought during the summer is possibly a more direct line back to the top. In the end, that’s most likely going to be where United’s edge lies. They can spend more money than pretty much everybody else. That’s what will work, eventually.
Brailsford and pals are obviously smart enough to know that marginal gains aren’t going to cut it in 2023, not when everybody else has been marginal-gaining every aspect of football since it was first heard of.
The truly wild thing is that so much of the commentary around their arrival has been swooning over the expertise they’ll bring from outside football, as if the world’s biggest sport has been bumbling away all these years with nobody thinking of stuff like efficiencies and edges and everything else. When, in reality, no sport on the planet has invested more money and man hours into each tiny, minute aspect of what it takes to create and run a winning team.
The other guys get paid to come to work every day too. It’s going to take something more than a little light streamlining for United to compete with the best of them.
