Lending Support to the Red Devils

It was eerie to see Manchester United sport their usual AIG-sponsored jerseys at this week's Champions League match against Villareal. Manchester United (nickname: Red Devils) played a great draw, bore the seal of failure on their illustrious chests, and lost no irony with the fact that their club owner since 2005 is, like AIG, a debt-jockeying American.

On September 12 the New York Times printed a business column on the question, Why are American moguls investing in the English Premier League? The sad, sad answer:

Mainly because, to a surprising degree, they can act far more like old-fashioned two-fisted capitalists in England than they can in the United States. Go figure.

The financial meltdown only adds to a much-deserved reputation in the soccer world of Americans as debt-fixated. If you aren't averse to debt, what would stop you from buying up more and owning more? What can you do if you're holding a bottomless bag of gold that must be repaid? Let's look at what Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl did.

My favorite story from the German romantics, Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, 1813, is a socially critical “fairy tale” and the genesis for a really awesome descriptive noun, schlemiel, which persists today in Yiddish as the word for sucker, dupe, or gull. In Chamisso's tale, Schlemihl sells his shadow to a gray man in exchange for a purse of gold that never empties. It seems like a great deal to Schlemihl until he's reviled and outcast as a shadowless freak. The gray man turns out to be the devil, who tempts Schlemihl with the return of his shadow in exchange for his soul. The only way Schlemihl can get rid of the devil is to wise up and remain a freak. He becomes a lonely researcher and tosses the purse into a ditch, thereby ridding himself of the persistent gray man. It's a great story. And I've left out so much.

With all the money being poured into top-flight soccer, one wonders if fans will someday reject bottomless gold purses and pull for the small, local club instead. For that, the lower leagues and their bric-a-brac grounds are an alternative worth considering. But that's not without temptation, because teams with devilish talent like Manchester United are just so fun to watch.

A Second or Third Chance

In 1929 Alfred Döblin wrote Berlin Alexanderplatz, the first great, modernist novel in German not by a guy named Kafka or Hesse. The plot is pretty straightforward; the protagonist is a construction worker released from prison after a four-year sentence for an involuntary murder. (Involuntary murder - Did someone say modernist?) Fate deals him blow after blow despite his firm intention of becoming an honest citizen in bumpin' Berlin. He becomes an alcoholic, joins a gang of criminals, ends up a pimp, loses an arm through treachery, a jealous thug murders his new girlfriend, and he’s re-arrested and thrown into a psych ward.

Another recent release from prison is Joey Barton, who returns to his role as midfielder at Newcastle United in the English Premiership after serving part of a sentence for assault. He was caught in a drunken late-night fistfight in Liverpool, then while on parole he was re-arrested for beating up a former teammate at the training grounds. Before he disappeared behind bars last year, Barton was a fantasy owner’s dream. Now few clubs are interested in him and the media criticize Newcastle for the huge risk in taking him back.

Redemption is not a popular theme nowadays. Novels from the intervening war years of the Weimar Republic are likewise cynical, but they often end with the typically expressionist motif of rebirth and renewal. Döblin’s protagonist has had it rough, but with every setback he gains new insight, and he can make a final comeback of sorts. At the end of the novel we find him working as an assistant caretaker at a factory, unbothered by any crooks. Newcastle’s manager Kevin Keegan apparently also believes in redemption. He said about signing Joey Barton to his team this year, “People have opinions, and you must respect those, but mine is to give him another chance and back him” (AFP July 29, 2008).