Luck.
Megan Rapinoe deserved a different ending to her career. The most iconic player of her generation had earned more than six minutes of play in the NWSL Championship before her Achilles popped off. But she didn’t get to have more of it, because she was unlucky. It was a heart-breaking moment, and at least watching it on television from a different continent at 2 A.M. it felt like it sucked the excitement out of the stadium. In life, luck trumps merit. There’s no way around it. Everyone who has ever been at the top has had, whether they’ll admit it or not, one extremely lucky break they wouldn’t be able to do what they do for a living without. That you can work your ass off for years, eliminate every kind of social interaction from your daily life to concentrate on refining your skills and still be at the mercy of other people’s and other things’ decisions should be like the little fish that whichever Mary is narrating in A Room Of One’s Own caught with her mind in the first pages of the essay, a thought you can’t easily get rid off and that questions many of your assumptions.
I am twenty-four years old. But when I was a kid, I got almost hit by a car twice while on a bike. In both situations, I escaped death for a matter of centimeters and there was no way for me to control just how close the car got to me. I was lucky and I am lucky to be here now writing these words. Yet, if one wanted to examinate longevity like a matter of merit, I earned the right to be here. And if that person wanted to take this thing further, they could also argue that all of my fellow 1999-born kids who are not here anymore, whether because they got hit by a car or for any other possible cause of death, well, it was because in the end they didn’t really deserve to be here. It’s a dehumanizing, cruel, not-even-borderline evil logic, isn’t it?
Meritocracy is an ideology. It’s not a fact, something that is natural to all humans. And it was born within a very specific cultural context, one that got to shape its values and define its borders. It exists to support and justify capitalism to the masses. If you can have even one rags to riches story, that upholds the entire system by making it look like it’s open and advantageous to everyone. But even meritocracy, as it is just a social construct, it’s not immune to the thing we call luck and that other would simply call life, to the one of billion possible combinations that ends up happening every millisecond on every inch of this planet, influenced by the behavior of every particle, and of which only the word we use to define it is a social construct.
Giovanni Alberto Agnelli, nicknamed Giovannino to distinguish him from the many Giovannis in the famous Italian family at the helm of FIAT, was expected to inherit the reins of the family business from his uncle Gianni. He was not supposed to be there, as Gianni had a son, Edoardo, but since the assumed Dauphin to the throne renounced his rights by getting into mysticism, Islam and then, eventually anti-capitalism before committing suicide in 2000, Giovannino quickly ascended as the brightest business mind in a new generation of Agnelli. He got a degree from Brown University in IR, and during his stint as head of Piaggio he resurrected the brand. He was the poster child of meritocracy, one who had paid his dues and proved his worth before getting the top job. Yes, his surname carried weight, but it’s not like it was the only factor, or the son of Gianni would’ve gotten it anyway before his more qualified cousin. Unfortunately, Giovanni Alberto Agnelli died of a rare form of intestine cancer in 1997, at just thirty-three years old. So meritocracy is not only unjust and a tool for the privileged, but also deeply fragile, exposed to failure even when it works exactly as expected and, most importantly, really fucking boring.
At some point during the last ten minutes of the Game 3 between the Houston Dynamo and Real Salt Lake, fear started to break out among a certain subset of soccer fans, not all of them and not necessarily supporting the home team. The game had become a transition-fest with no kind of midfield filter from both sides, and chances of creating big chances were flying in from both sides. But as nobody got really close to it, the realization that the game might go on to penalties and that Real Salt Lake could win it settled. Pablo Mastroeni’s team — who, on their side, did a masterful job at making sure it was going to penalties, especially when in the last five minutes of the game the ball never left the top right corner of Houston’s half of the pitch — had a chance of going through without ever winning one game in regulation and the recent US Open Cup winners could be eliminated while having won one and by scoring more than their opponents.
Even just going to the shootout, even giving the Dynamo one more chance to lose felt to many like a direct attack to the foundation of meritocracy, to the core principle that should guide sports. The higher seed ending up winning it only avoided what could’ve been a total ridicule of the idea of fairness. But the thing is, the game was fun. The penalty shootouts was a galore of cool and interesting storylines, from Diego Luna missing a shot after such a great end of the season and his long journey to MLS stardom, to Griffin Dorsey putting another cherry on top of a season in which his decision to ask Houston to turn him, a winger by trade, into a fullback, proved to be the right one. And even outside the penalty shootout, the last twenty minutes of the game offered some spectacular entertainment, something that I couldn’t take my eyes off even if all my eyes were asking was to go to sleep. Both teams played expansive soccer, trying to pull the trigger on the series. One stroke of luck could’ve gotten them through, and they were not willing to just wait for it passively like Gladstone Gander, but they were going to try and create the conditions for it.
Mine isn’t a total endorsement of the playoff format in MLS. I would be in favor of tweaking it slightly, and I would not be opposed to introducing the first-to-five principle which would’ve gotten the Dynamo through without penalties, even if just to see it at work and then make a decision. As many other ideas, it could be first tested in MLS Next Pro. But my point is that merit is never in the list of priorities influencing my opinions. Which is not to say that I don’t think that achievements should not be rewarded some way, I liked when MLS switched from home-and-away to single elimination in the playoffs because it rewarded more league position over a 34-games regular season. But that I don’t think results on the field hold a higher intrinsic value, almost spiritual. If there’s a God on this planet, they aren’t judging us by our results in sports.
Meritocracy is nothing more than the most severe form of Christian moralism repackaged for a changing world, and it proved to be way more effective, and sports are an integral part of this rebranding. When Club Africain fans turned into a tifo the well-known aphorism by which soccer was “created by the poor, stolen by the rich”, they took a noble stance against the hyper-commercialization of soccer — they were playing a friendly against post-Qatar PSG — but what they said is factually wrong. The origins not just of soccer, but of almost all sports known today are well documented and all very similar between them, and involve some kind of rich guy’s son in a posh university that required a hefty fee just to get in at a time where scholarships for disadvantaged students weren’t offered and where access to education itself was a sign of privilege.
It’s not by accident that sports as we’ve come to know them started to become popular as capitalism was becoming the force we’ve come to know and were promoted by the classes who also were the staunchest promoters of capitalism. Sports served as an ideological Trojan horse, as a normalization of the processes happening all through society. But the working class is not dumb and they too coopted sports to serve their own side of the fight. What they did come up with, though, was still an extremely moralistic view of sports. They did not unlearn the De Coubertin-ian lesson, they didn’t try to blow it up à-la-Fixer Upper, they just painted the walls a new color, changed the wooden floor and ran with it.
Sports are as such caught at a crossroad. You are either the poster child of a billionaire’s investment portfolio, or you are the tiny fan-owned club punching above their weight. Meritocracy annihilates every kind of nuance because it sets a standard to be followed, a moral compass you shall not deviate from. To quote this essay by Adam Kotsko, thanks to the concept of merit and the way it has been constructed by different sides, we are all evangelicals now. And, as Kotsko says, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with these ideas, but the point is that they’re just not interesting.
To quote one of today’s most interesting philosophers, Charles Barkley, athletes “are not role models”, and “just because [they] dunk a basketball [or kick a ball, or throw touchdowns etc etc] doesn’t mean [they] should raise your kids”. It is offensive to the intelligence of those watching to think that if they get excited about sports they are automatically espousing the political or moral convictions of those playing, and is dangerous for athletes to force them to meet a standard by which all their plays are considered to be bearers of an ideological message, after already filling their lives with the pressure to perform from a young age.
So to see sports as entertainment, simply as a matter of aesthetics, is the only way — at least the only one I could find — to get it away from the crossfire of two chastising views of sports as the search for perfection and purity. Only with these glasses on we can not only see the impact luck has on human life, in general and in a sporting environment, but also accept it for what it is, something inseparable from our own existence. Formats that recognize the outsized impact luck has on our lives and see it as a feature and not a bug make sports more fun, more exciting, more open and accessible to those groups of people that have been excluded over the decades from the sports world because they did not fit within the moral compass guiding said world.
I have always been intrigued by the representations of luck within our cultures. The Greek poet Archilocus wrote, in what is now known as his fragment n°16, about how it’s the Tyche and the Moirai, luck and destiny, that give everything to a human. What is under our control is eventually nothing but the smallest part of what decides how we’ll turn out to be. Archilocus died around the 645 BC. Over two hundred years later, the decline of Athens during the Hellenistic period initiated the development of the concept of luck as we know it today. Luck is a whimsical force, something to be feared for its unpredictability. Luck is a clumsy person with a bandage in front of their eyes and, since our specie has never said no to a little cup of sexism, it’s a woman, because, you know, if women are one thing is unpredictable /s.
Contrary to what the Greek would have you believe, luck is not a stain that can’t be washed. If luck can, like Pindar claimed, give victory to a lesser athlete, anticipating by a couple millennia the sports discourse of our time, then that athlete was not lesser in the first place. We’ve come to see luck as an insult and as such we reacted trying to eliminate every possible influx of luck or, contrarily, of bad luck. But it’s a battle lost before it’s even started. You don’t need less luck to win a European soccer league just because it’s a balanced schedule with 30/34/38 home and away games compared to a single elimination tournament. You might actually need more, just because of the size of the tournament and just how much one single event, in soccer, yes, but even in higher scoring sports, can impact the development of the entire game. This is why being able to win close games in which you play badly is seen as a sign of strength and a good omen for title contention: because that’s being lucky, even though pundits and media will try to spin it as being “resilient, tough, mentally strong”.
When I first got into American sports, my guides in this universe, let’s call them my Beatrice educating me through Paradise, were two Italian NBA commentators from early ’00s, whose broadcasts I found on YouTube while I was in high school. One mantra they used to repeat was that the two best words in the world of sports are “Game 7”. Two teams who have gone one against the other for some extenuating hours realize that they’re too close to actually be separated, no matter the adjustments, the new wrinkles a coach might add to his team. When Game 7 hits, the teams accept that a coin flip might decide the destiny of their season, that a weird bounce might be the difference between them.
Soon after I found out about a thing called March Madness, and quickly discovered it wasn’t a splatter horror movie from the ’70s. One month in which everything can happen and in which each night everything will most definitely happen. Try to keep your eyes off of those games. You can’t, and even if I’m not of the idea that more money=better, well, it’s hard to explain why the NCAA racks up so much income from that one month of games. Hell, I don’t even know why I’m talking about other sports when I could just mention that the most watched sporting event on the planet and the most important trophy in the most popular sport in the world gets designated by a single-elimination tournament, and no one would ever dare to change it to make it more “meritocratic”, I’m so stupid to have left this thing out until now. What I’m trying to say is, to conclude, that when you harness the power of luck, when you don’t try to hide it, beautiful things happen. And people will be watching, because we too, even if we might not want to admit it, recognize that one single thing that is totally outside of our control usually ends up having a bigger impact on things than a billion of good actions we could do.
