What Joe and the Democrats can learn from Roy and Crystal Palace
A football saga offers guarded reason for optimism.
The hugely successful and widely beloved 1960s and 1970s Liverpool Football Club manager Bill Shankly is frequently quoted as having said,
"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death… I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”1
To an extent, he was right. Football – or your own preferred sport, but, y’know, it’s football – transcends everyday life. It is transformational. It takes on an importance beyond all logical reason, and turns us into irrational beings.
But ultimately, football – or any other team sport we devote ourselves to – is just a game. Politics is not. Politics is real life and death. It affects every one of us in every aspect of our lives, whether we want it to or not. And its importance doesn’t get much greater than choosing the President of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth.
Perhaps our current President of the United States can, however, learn something from football. By which, of course, I mean football. Read on…
This essay is the result of a conversation I had at a small July 4 barbeque gathering here in the States on Thursday. To a friend who confessed to being depressed by the American political situation, I said I had a story to share that gave cause for guarded optimism. (And it was not related to the British general election, though I certainly had more reasons for political optimism than I imagine anyone else here did.) When I finished telling it, my friend not only now confessed that he was feeling considerably more optimistic himself, but enquired as what newspaper I would be writing this for, insisting that it needed to be shared more widely. He then stepped up with a full year’s paid subscription to Substack to ensure that I/it did so.
I don’t take commissions for Wordsmith. But I’m generally happy to put thoughts that I’ve already shared in person into writing, especially if someone encourages me to do so for positive reasons. And while I would prefer writing about other forms of culture and will get back to doing so Midweek, and while the word politics does not appear in my “about” page or byline, if you were ever a reader of my Jamming! fanzine/magazine, my old iJamming.net website/blog, have followed me on Facebook, or indeed, have listened to the first or most recent single by The Dear Boys, you’ll hopefully be fully aware that I have never shied away from discussing it when necessary and that it comes with the territory of knowing me. Plus, y’know, it’s football…
Back in 2017, Crystal Palace FC, the South London team I have supported passionately since early childhood though they have often been patchy on the pitch and have no trophies to their name worth speaking of, found themselves entering what was then a record fifth consecutive season in the English top flight, and appointed a new manager/coach who was meant to bring a progressive playing style to the club. It didn’t work out, the team losing all its opening games and the Dutch coach losing the dressing room in the process, so the club quickly fired him before things got worse and appointed a certain Roy Hodgson.
Roy was a household name in the UK - a South Londoner whose professional career had started at Palace back in the 1960s, and who had enjoyed considerable success coaching clubs and national teams all across Europe, though less so when put in charge of the aforementioned Liverpool and the English national team. That job had ended in a humbling defeat to Iceland in the 2016 Euros, and Roy took a year out. He was pushing 70, just two years out from that of any manager in Premier League history. There is no official retirement age in football, but sport has demands on the body as well as the mind, and for all the wisdom that older heads can bring to a club, it’s generally considered a young man’s game.
Nonetheless, Hodgson obviously wanted to redeem his reputation, to end his career on a high, and Crystal Palace, just up the road from where he was born in Croydon, offered the ideal opportunity. He quickly righted the sinking ship he had inherited that first season, and guided Palace to respectable positions in the lower half of the EPL for the next three years. His age did not necessarily show in terms of visible stress or cognitive difficulties, and apparently he could still kick a ball around on the training pitch, but he favoured a highly defensive style of play. Under Roy, Palace did not score many goals, did not play especially attractive football. Though personally he was openly liberal, professionally, he was a tactical conservative.
Inevitably then, Royball, as our rather dour style of play came to be known, soured with the fans, even as the club stayed secure in the EPL, and there were calls for him to retire long before he did so in May 2021. But it all ended swell, with a beautiful on-the-field speech to the fans at the end of that season, a lap of honour, glowing tributes to his competency and earned respect in the national newspaper, and the ceremonial Freedom of Croydon bestowed upon him. And off into the sunset of a well-earned retirement he sailed.
Or so we thought. But football can be an addiction, and the salaries are off the charts. Just a season and a half later, in March 2023, Roy came back to the club, replacing once again a progressive young manager (the former Arsenal and France legend Patrick Vieira) whose fortunes had turned and who seemed unable to dig his team out of an ever-worsening hole. There were question marks and divisions around the firing of Vieira and the reappointment of a man who had outstayed his welcome first time around, but, just as in 2017, Roy righted the ship, saved the team from relegation, and saw out the season in uncommonly impressive style.
We were grateful. But this time there was no lap of honour, no ceremonial goodbyes – because it seemed like he wanted to stay on. And it appeared in turn that the club establishment wanted to keep him, that either they had been unable to secure or were unwilling to look for a new coach; they had perhaps given up, for now, on the notion of “progressive” football and preferred a safe pair of hands. But if in Roy Hodgson they thought they had this, they also now had the oldest manager in EPL history by far – by an age gap of almost five years.
The fans had little choice but to back Roy’s reappointment: we, after all, don’t select the coach nor the players, we just get to vote for them with our attendance, our season tickets, our devotion, and our singing. And Palace are some of the most loyal and most vociferous in all of football. We may not be a “big” club – our ground holds just 25,000 – but what we lack in stature we more than make up for in noise.
As Hodgson immediately regressed to Royball for the 2023-24 season, that infamous noise quietened, fans grew disgruntled, and justifiably so. We wanted the club to go forwards, not backwards, and Hodgson’s age came up in every discussion, every match commentary. He missed one of those matches early in the season for health reasons; though you and I might take occasional sick days, you’d be surprised how rarely that happens among coaches in the top leagues. Hodgson began to get highly tetchy – like, old man tetchy - in TV interviews. With results not going our way, he accused the supporters of being “spoiled,” which is an offense worse than signaling out individual players to blame for a defeat.
Roy never quite did that, but he did make a point of dissing the younger players who the fans wanted to see given a chance allowing that the first team clearly wasn’t exactly firing on its current choice of cylinders. Stubbornly, the team that Roy preferred remained largely unchanged week by week, as if nobody had informed him that the sport is now a squad game, though he did make a point of alternating our choice of two central front men, neither of whom seemed capable of scoring. As we went through almost the whole of January without a goal, nor in fact looking much like ever getting one again, even I began wondering why I was tuning into the matches from 3000 miles away just because I could: surely a fast run up a steep mountain would be a less painful use of that time.
The nadir came with a 4-1 drubbing in February at archrivals Brighton, which ended with a particularly ugly exchange between the younger “fanatics” and a couple of the players who had come over for the traditional applause of the away support. (I’ve set the clip above to start at that moment.) This caused other, more mature fans (of which I consider myself one) to turn on these younger and rough ones for their behavior, but all of us were united in this: Roy had to go at the end of the season, and this time for good. He had been a hero twice, a loyal servant always, but his era had come and gone.
Belatedly, the club owners began leaking news of a succession plan. Specifically, they were seeking to hire an Austrian, Oliver Glasner, who had achieved unprecedented successes for the two clubs he had coached in Germany. The announcement pf Glasner’s appointment was all on the verge of being made public – on the understanding that the new man would be arriving in the summer, after Roy saw out this one-year extension on his contract, and so that Glasner could get a full pre-season to prepare before launching his first campaign. Clearly, nobody wanted to fire Hodgson; it seemed such a cruel thing to do given all that he had done for the club. But time, evidently, was running out, for him to save it for himself.
And then, on February 15 2024, just three days after following up the Brighton defeat with a home loss against another rival team, Chelsea, Roy Hodgson collapsed in training. He was rushed to hospital, where he stayed for the next three days, apparently in “stable” condition. And with that, everyone involved sensed an opportunity for this whole sorry saga to end with some dignity.
Roy made his announcement on February 19: ”I understand, given recent circumstances, it may be prudent at this time for the club to plan ahead, and therefore I have taken the decision to step aside so that the club can bring forward their plans for a new manager, as intended for this summer.”
It wasn’t, as The Athletic pointed out in its lede, “supposed to end this way,” but at least it concluded with both sides saving face. Roy Hodgson got to resign, rather than be fired, leaving – for a second time now – with the fans’ respect, gratitude and admiration, albeit all somewhat diminished from his first departure less than three years earlier. And the club got a new coach.
But at what cost, we all wondered? No one likes changing horses midstream. The club was in a woeful position, with the fans on edge, as desperate for inspiration and motivation as the players. And for all that Oliver Glasner had proven himself in Austria and Germany, there were doubts that he could bring his winning ways to the demands of the English Premier League - especially allowing that he had no opportunity to change the squad, no time to prepare, and that he was now being brought in not only to change the club’s style of football, but to get the club out of a hole in the process.
The result? Come May 2024, Crystal Palace finished the season in 10th place on a tear, winning six and drawing one of their last seven games, beating two of the top four clubs along the way and delivering a 4-0 drubbing to the richest team in Britain, Manchester United, for good measure. The season ended not only with that first ever top half finish, but the club’s highest EPL goals tally, and a joint highest points tally. The 5-0 victory over a 4th place Aston Villa on the final day of the season was their joint biggest win in the EPL. Of the two alternating front men who had seemed incapable of scoring under Hodgson, Glasner put his faith in just one of them, which Jean-Philippe Mateta repaid in spades as he scored for seven home games in a row, ending the season with a hat-trick, the rare occasion when a forward scores three goals in the same match. He was voted Player of the Season.
Mateta is French and may yet go to the Olympics with France this summer. In the meantime, as vindication and validation of the club’s rapid turnaround in fortunes, a record four Palace players were picked for the English national squad that has been in Germany for “the Euros,” (no other club has higher representation), and others went off to compete in that tournament, the Copa América, and World Cup qualifiers for Denmark, USA, Colombia and Ghana, all of them solid first-team choices and several of them scoring for their nation. The players’ confidence, evidently, is running sky high.
And by the way, the football being played under Glasner is indeed progressive. But then to switch to the political use of that word, so is the club in general. Back in the 1970s, Palace was one of the first clubs ever to even field a Black player, this at a time when the terraces were filled with racists and accompanying racist chants. Palace has long prided itself on a multicultural ethos, the support of minority rights, and it has extensive outreach within the community, which with the Borough of Croydon is one of the poorest and most problematic “catchment areas,” as we call the areas around a football club, in the south of England. The club only goes after new players these days that are comfortable with the club’s principles, team players rather than prima donnas.
Progressive football, progressive politics, steadily progressive successes, and finally, at least for now, harmony.
Crisis, it turned out, presented a golden opportunity.
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You all understand the parallels don’t you?
Like Roy Hodgson, Joe Biden has clearly stayed on the job for too long. Just as 76 was too old to be a top-flight football manager, 81 is beyond the pale for anyone to run the most powerful country in the world. Biden was already the oldest President in history when he took the job. And he can deny it all he wants (and as I edit this on the morning of Saturday July 6th, he is working overtime attempting to do so), but age will catch up with you and it will become visible, and if you and the people who employ you or supposedly support you don’t recognize as much and find a way to tell you as much, a great and noble career is liable to end in ignominy and failure.
I want to be clear. I think of Joe Biden as I do of Roy Hodgson. He is a good and honorable man. At what already seemed like the waning days of his service, four years after he had stepped away from a Vice Presidency that appeared to have been the pinnacle of a long and illustrious political career (albeit that it stopped one election short of the job he had always craved), he returned into the ring driven not just by political ego, but to do something far more important than to save a football club from relegation: to save a country from disintegration.
Joe Biden declared himself the only person who could beat the horror show that was Donald Trump, and though I had other candidates I much preferred during the nomination circus, it was Biden who won the delegates during the Primaries, Biden who was duly awarded the Democratic nomination and Biden who lived up to his promise, winning the Presidential Election in 2020, bringing over the moderates and independents that were necessary to do so. Once in office, he righted the country’s sinking ship, he delivered on his promise of stability and to what passes in politics as a degree of “normality.” Compared to the political and economic chaos in so many other western countries, the USA has been relatively peaceful and quiet under Biden. He surrounded himself with good people and those good people have been allowed to get on and do their jobs. Frankly, I should be surprised that his job approval rating is so incredibly low.
But perception quickly becomes reality, and Biden has offered little by way of enthusiasm or inspiration. He represents the old guard, and he was always aware of that, which is why he promised upon becoming POTUS to be a “bridge to the next generation.” But then power is addictive, the same way football was for Roy, and Biden proved reluctant to let go of that power. And the Democratic establishment, and the people around him in the White House, decided not to challenge him on it.
Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten has a number of excellent paragraphs buried within a long article on “Prediction Markets” in which he admits to how he, like myself and maybe you as well, lived in denial of Biden’s increased senility. (Biden’s problems were all too apparent in the recent debate and were highlighted by Jon Stewart in the clip above; I have set it to the appropriate moment and hope non-US residents can also watch it.) We all preferred to highlight Trump’s own gaffes and mangles; his unstructured, essentially illiterate sentences; his rambling anecdotes with mistruths dotted like verbs. After all, Trump too would leave office as the oldest President in history should he win and serve a full second term, he too suffers from moments of forgetfulness and instability, but I hate to admit it, he has an energy that suggests far more than the three-year age gap between the two old white men.
How did we get to this nightmare scenario whereby we are apparently being dictated what the Economist this week, in a leader headed “Why Joe Biden Must Go,” called “a choice between the incapable and the unspeakable”? Alexander points to The Principle of Charity, by which little white lies are delivered in the belief that they are for the common good, pointing out that in fact, “every horrible giant deception was perpetrated by people saying “I’m telling little white lies that don’t matter, for the greater good.” He is talking here not of Trump’s megalomania and narcissism, but of Biden’s inner circle and the leaders at the Democratic Party.
I assumed that if [Biden] was becoming senile, some Democratic elites would have secret knowledge about it, and they couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to deny it while also scheduling him for a debate where it would inevitably come out. So I figured the Democratic elites who were closest to him thought he was doing well, and I trusted them more than the people who had been wrong every time for the past five years.”
He goes on to excuse Biden himself from this failure of honesty:
Every early-stage dementia patient (and their family and friends) always tells themselves (and everyone else) that they’re fine. It’s an easy thing to think, there’s never a clear bright-line where things obviously stop being fine, and the charade saves them from having to confront horrifying questions about their own mortality.
I know of what he is saying. My mother has dementia and it played out just like that first half of that second paragraph, except that I, as a member of the her immediate family, absolutely could see the decline and was under no illusions as to what was happening. Trying to convince her of same was a more difficult natter, however, and the NHS was limited in its help. And so I lived a story familiar to many of us: Denial in the face of the obvious, until the obvious caught up with her. She had a fall – collapsing in training, if you like, fortunately while answering the door to her social worker just as Hodgson was likely fortunate he collapsed while in the presence of a medical team – and briefly hospitalized. She never went back to her beloved house again, but rather, was moved into one care home for respite and another for permanent residence.
This was over six years ago, and there is very little of her left now. Dementia is an awful way to wither away, but it could happen to any one of us. As I keep telling my younger son, we should be careful of being first to cast the stone, but we should also be helpful at letting our loved ones know that they need to readjust accordingly. Which is why Alexander rightly states that
Joe Biden and his family have the future of the country in the balance. They need to step up and do the hard thing.
However, he then goes on to suggest that Biden
“decline the [Democratic] nomination and endorse some likeable purple-state governor. If Kamala Harris gets angry, he should just say “sorry, I’m a demented old man, you can’t blame me for my actions”. If she gets angry at the other Democrats, they should just say “sorry, it’s an old man’s dying wish, it would be cruel not to honor it”.
And on this, I disagree, vehemently. First, just think of the optics and do not for a moment think that they don’t matter. This is a Democratic party that made a big deal of appointing a woman of color as Vice President – that is, the best candidate to take on to the most powerful job in the world should the President become incapacitated during his four-year term. To pass over that woman of color for either a white woman or a white man would fly in the face of the party’s platform of diversity and multiculturalism and the progressive promotion of equal opportunities, and reveal Harris’s job offer as a sham.
And those optics would lead to immediate political fallout. Most of us reading Wordsmith would, I hope, vote for a plant pot against Trump. But that doesn’t go for all the young people out there, those who don’t see in Biden what the previous generation saw in Obama, who don’t believe he has been strong enough on the environment (rightly or wrongly), are offended by Biden’s unfettered support of Israel (rightly or wrongly), and it especially doesn’t go for young people of color, LGBTQ+ young people, all those young people who not only see in Biden a reflection of a senile grandparent, but someone disconnected from their own moral and cultural values.
Getting those people to the polling stations this November to cast a vote for Biden is going to be hard work indeed. Hell, I’m an old(ish) white man and I am done with old white men. Give these people the choice of someone who is, at least, a generation younger, a woman, a person of color with a multicultural background, and they have the power to suddenly energize this vital campaign to preserve democracy (however faulty it may seem at times), to get out and knock on doors and make phone calls and share positive social media memes, not negative ones, about the Democratic candidate for POTUS. In doing so, they can win over those few moderates and independents who have yet to declare their choice, not Biden. They and their candidate can make all the difference.
Espousing the above on July 4th, hopefully more briefly, to my friend whose eventual reaction spurred this written article, he responded with the same phrase I heard from a much closer friend at a road race earlier that morning, “But surely Kamala Harris can’t win?” To which I say, Says who?
Listen, polls can lie. They got it wrong in 2016. But in the same post-Presidential debate CNN poll that put Biden six full percentage points behind Trump in the popular vote, Kamala Harris was just two points behind, within the margin of error. No other prospective Dem Presidential candidate – not Whitmer, Newson, Buttigieg, Booker or Klobuchar – polled better. As of this week, Kamala Harris is not only the best alternative, she is the only option.
So, to another oft-quoted notion my friend expressed which, upon request, he just summarized as follows – that “she hasn't been much of an active presence during the bulk of the current admin, she seems to have receded into the background,” - I respond, And whose fault is that?
Harris works for the President. The White House sets her agenda; and her agenda, quite clearly now, seems to have been to stay the hell out of the way and to allow Joe Biden a clear run for a second term. To challenge those orders, would have meant going “rogue.” The fact that she hasn’t done so says something about the stability she could herself offer the country. And even now, as her name is suddenly being spoken again at July 4th parties and the NYTimes runs July 5 articles about “The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris” and Harris ramps up her schedule, she is still, officially, on paper at least, towing the party line, backing Biden. Give her the chance to speak as a nominee, however, and she will.
As for all the racism and misogyny that the Trump camp would heap upon Harris, I say, Bring it on. It will only serve to motivate - not just myself, but the younger, more diverse generations who are currently out of the arena entirely. Listen, the racists and misogynists already know who they are voting for. And I’ll be first to admit there are far too many of them in this country. But they are still a minority. We elected a person of color to the highest office in the land twice before; we can do so again.
How, then, does this end? Maybe Joe Biden needs to “collapse in training.” Or have the “perfect fall,” just like my mother – one that leaves no permanent injuries but allows for the necessary adjustments in lifestyle and residence. In short, Biden needs to leave the White House before he is pushed out of it by the rank and file. He has the opportunity to be like Roy and resign from the race with honor, leaving the path free for his VP to take the reins, perhaps even for the next few months if necessary. There will be brief turmoil, but that will be quickly forgotten if it is all for the greater good.
Crisis, remember, presents an opportunity. Yes my analogy here is a sporting one and I know you can shoot holes in it, but I bring you back to the Bill Shankly quote with which it kicked off, and what our sporting loyalties mean to us as a spiritual quest in a short material life. My football club Crystal Palace was in crisis only back in March, and it was able to go from the deepest doldrums to its greatest heights in a matter of weeks; the sudden resignation of a man clearly too old for the task paved the way for the sudden appearance of someone who was clearly right for it. The depressing days of January, February and early March are now forgotten, just like this depressing last week could be forgotten soon enough, certainly by mid-November. It turns out that you can resign with your dignity just about intact when it becomes obvious what the alternative might be. You can get out of the game with your name going down in history for mostly all the right reasons and not because it ended for the wrong ones. You, we, all of us can change horses in midstream. And with the exact same team otherwise, we can all go on a winning streak.
Nice try, friend. Roy has led several teams (including Fulham). Biden has only led one team for part of his life. They both failed at the top of the table.
I'm riding with Kamala and hope she pulls in those younger voters and those so disaffected by the previous choices that they would have sat out this election. Perhaps with Harris the Democrats can wrestle back the momentum!