Every rose has it’s thorn: A divorce of English soccer allegiance
You know when you meet someone new? And you first get their number? And you can’t sleep at all that night because you can’t possibly waittttt to text them the next day
And then after you text them.
— At 6:07 a.m. –
…
And then you completely overreact and throw your phone against the wall and pieces go everywhere.
– Who texts someone they just met yesterday at 6:07 a.m.!?!? —
And your mom is going to kill you because this is probably the second phone you’ve broken this month.
And you already went way over your text limit.
Like the first time you broke a phone this month.
–“Just woke up! Do you want to hangout at the mall later? .”—
Your phone’s not broken. Well not completely.
I was 15 when I first became acquainted with Leeds United. A new town, new people, new urges, no friends, no clue.
What I did have was soccer though.
What I did have was a PC.
What I did have was a copy of FIFA 2002.
15 is an absolutely miserable age to move to a new town. Not only are you aware how many friends you don’t have. You’re also acutely aware you can’t go anywhere without someone agreeing to take you there.
This means long hours at home.
This means developing your foot skills with the ball in the backyard for extended periods of time.
This means playing a video game to the point that it becomes an extension of your existence.
For every friend I didn’t have, I could hit a free kick from an impossible angle. I could erase four goal deficits against Real Madrid in stoppage time on the World Class setting. I could derive joy from something I could control.
I was a part of Leeds United.
It was completely coincidental that I became linked to this club. A club that, when my version of the game was released, had just finished 4th in the English Premier League and was only a year removed from finishing as a semi-finalist in Europe’s premier club competition. They were a solid team, but not the best team.
I never chose the best teams.
Soccer would play the catalyst in my assimilation to my new surroundings. I tried out for the local club team and was deemed roster-worthy. I made friends. A few of them wanted to know who my club was?
Huh?
In my old town I had never discussed the game with anyone. Nobody did that, at least not with me. None of my friends. Soccer was just a game I played. You couldn’t even really watch it on tv. I knew that Brazil was good. I liked Ireland because I was Irish. Who was my club?
My club was … Leeds United.
It wasn’t as trendy or accomplished as the other choices of Arsenal, A.C. Milan, or Barcelona, but it was kind of cool in a way.
Oh? Really? Leeds United? Whoa.
Yeah. My club was Leeds United.
I had one friend who played on the club team with me that had happened to move from my hometown to this new town at the same time. He told me they got a new channel called Fox Soccer Channel.
And so seven or eight months after I first met her through my computer we were formally introduced, Leeds and I.
There’s this thing that happens when you grow up with too much free time and too many chat rooms to choose from. This thing, this language you speak suddenly starts to evolve the more repetitions you have seeing it hammered out in front of you.
— LUFCrOse92: a/s/l? 😛 —
—StevoBruin2: 15/m/Oklahoma —
—LUFCrOse92: LMAO, where is that? u live n a teepee? lololol —
Seeing the way people react to it.
Seeing the way it can move and mingle and dance and do things.
You see it like Neo seeing Sentinels in The Matrix.
There’s a certain power in the imagination of interpretation.
What she told me was this:
She had been the best at soccer in her whole country in 1992. The very damn best.
—She’s older than me!—
She hadn’t been quite the best since then but she was always in the top four or five.
—In her whole country!—
Then just two years ago she went to this tournament in Europe. All the big fish were there. She made it all the way to the semi-finals! She beat some of the very best.
—Real Madrid!? Barcelona, AC Milan!?!? Very cool.—-
She was a big deal. They called her the Yorkshire Rose.
—She sounds so hottt!—
There’s a certain power in the imagination of interpretation.
Every rose has its thorn.
What she didn’t tell me was that beyond her pretty face, beyond all of her achievements, and her wonderful personality, and her sense of a humor was — a problem.
Like the kind you’d list as a serious fucking character flaw; the kind that when you see someone in person is fairly self-evident. Something’s just not quite right.
There’s a certain power in the imagination of interpretation.
It is true that in 1992 Leeds United were crowned champions of the English First Division.
It is true that from 1998 to 2001 Leeds United never finished below fifth in the English Premier League.
It is true that in 2002 Leeds United made a spectacular run all of the way through the UEFA Champions League group stages and to the Final Four (This was George Mason upsetting UCONN, North Carolina, & Michigan State in 2006!).
But this was August 2003.
Every rose has its thorn.
She had told me one of her favorite, favorite pastimes was going to the mall.
–I fucking love shopping. It’s just… I love it—
What she conveniently did not tell me was that she loved it so much it had become a problem.
That after she made it to the Champions League she went a little crazy.
She splurged. HARD.
It was affecting her soccer. She wasn’t adequately paying her bills.
She never told me any of this.
There were signs.
Rio Ferdinand was sold for a club record £30 million to Manchester United. Innocuous enough as that is just a ridiculous amount of money and soccer is business and—that’s just a ridiculous amount of money.
But then star striker Robbie Keane.
–Wait you sold Keano!?—
Then things really started getting dicey.
Winger Robbie Fowler and homegrown defensive star Johnathan Woodgate, two more lynchpin, heart-and-soul players, also walked out the door. Olivier Dacourt and Lee Bowyer walked too.
— How is this happening!?!?—
2003 saw her drop to 15th place. I was concerned. How bad was it?
–How much could you possibly owe?–
Shortly thereafter Leeds United announced the largest loss ever recorded by a British club.
–Oh.–
The next year was not an easy one, but I refused to break it off. I was raised better than that. You stand and you fight.
Leeds United, just two years removed from making it to Europe’s version of The Final Four was then relegated, demoted from the top division in England; a fall from finishing as one of the four best teams on the continent to outside the top 20 in your own country.
I refused to break it off. This was just a test.
I wasn’t that shallow. I wasn’t. This was my club.
Two things happened my junior year of high school: Leeds’ didn’t make it back and I stopped caring about my relationship with her.
2004 wasn’t easy. Leeds was demoted. Bye, bye Glory. But it was worse than that. That wasn’t my issue. The Champions League splurging? It was so bad we had to call in an insolvency specialist. It was still an issue.
–Those boots aren’t so fucking cute now are they.—
He had two weeks to find a new buyer for Leeds or they would go into what is called “administration” and risk losing “points” and getting kicked out of the league. It eventually didn’t matter as Leeds was sent down anyway, but it was a clear litmus test that things were…
¡FuCkEd!
She avoided administration that March, but here we were in 2005. Whatever I had initially found attractive was now gone. I was still in shock at the events of the previous year. Her personality had begun to change too. I stuck around anyway.
You get used to having certain players around. In the summer and fall of 2004 the bulk
of what was left
of the guys I had met when I first became acquainted with Leeds moved on.
They were frankly above this shit.
I stayed anyway. This wasn’t the club I originally committed to. I wasn’t going anywhere though.
One of the highlights from that year I like to remind my therapist of from time-to-time is The Casino Theory.
The club immediately dismissed this rumor. It popped up a couple of times though. First, it was an American casino that would ride into town to offer a separate revenue stream, saving the club and returning it to its former glories. Then it was Stanley Leisure, the biggest operator in Britain, who actually purchased a £5 million option to build on 7 acres of land next to Leeds stadium. There would be no profit sharing.
The biggest news though?
With the acquisition of that £5 million the Leeds debt had been reduced from £103 million in March 2004 to just above £30 million.
–Hooray, Debt!—
By November the constant toil of trying to get her shit together was wearing Leeds and wearing myself down.
November 12 saw Leeds improve its table position to 15th out of 24 teams in the Coca-Cola Championship (the 2nd division in England). This was punctuated by a war of words between one of Leeds’ directors and some asshole trying to buy the club. Basically, he was told to put his money where his mouth was.
Nope. Shit drug on.
December brought drama. It also brought closure.
There were a number of bids entertained for Leeds, but it was Ken Bates – who had run Chelsea into the ground financially – who swooped in with a last minute bid. In a matter of 48 hours Bates backdoored just about everyone and purchased Leeds United.
–Holy Shit.—
Bates copped to the amount of work ahead to restore Leeds to any sense of normalcy, but announced the debt had been further consolidated to £21 million. £8 million was still owed to former players and manager.
–I… I’m still here.—
Things were stable though. Leeds was able to hold strong in the mid-table spots. They weren’t pushing to make it back to the big league yet, but they also weren’t teetering on the edge of the unthinkable—being demoted even lower in England’s tiers of national football. The new Chairman wasn’t fucking around either.
There’s a certain power in the imagination of interpretation.
Leeds United had a debt of £103 million in March of 2004. There were never going to be easy days ahead. Aged 73, Ken Bates had no fucks left to give.
There will be a 25% increase in season ticket prices, Bates told the Yorkshire Evening Post.
“It’s pay-up time,” Bates claimed.
Nice.
While I was almost sort of cackling in disbelief and thanking my lucky stars I didn’t actually live in Yorkshire, I figuratively moved out.
Everyone goes through shit, but at a certain point you have to stand up for yourself and let some people deal with their own shit themselves. I was starting to feel my allegiance should lie elsewhere. Liverpool had caught my eye.
Because of the playoff structure in American sports, we are, in general, conditioned to devalue the regular season, unless of course that’s that our only point of pride for that year.
Therefore, I’ve always been more attracted to the here-and-now results that occur in tournament play over the the banal, tantric, 38-week league copulation that is the English Premier League. I enjoy the Premier League just like I enjoy Fantasy Football, but I love the all-or-nothing stakes of a tournament, of the Super Bowl.
I also loved the flashy-brilliance and hard-working grit of one, Steven Gerrard.
I followed 2005’s Champions League as best I could on ESPN. Catching glimpses here and there before my high school soccer practice. I got to witness the fantastically brutal Chelsea-Liverpool semi-final. I got to witness the hard-working, blue-collar guys from Liverpool outlasting the Russian oil-tycoon, new-money backed Blues of Chelsea and making it to the top of Europe to face off with A.C. Milan. I was smitten.
This team had tradition, they had grit, they were cinderella. It was the perfect escape.
The day of the final came. I watched in shock as they were utterly prison-raped up and down the field in the first half. 3-0 to Milan. Hernan Crespo is GOD.
Then, the ultimate American thing happened.
Steven Gerrard channeled his best Sylvester Stallone and punched back. Within a span of 6 minutes Liverpool had evened the score. The third goal in the 60th minute broke Milan’s ribs. It went all 15 rounds, but Liverpool pulled themselves off the ropes and, after two periods of extra time and penalties, were Champions of Europe, while A.C. Milan exhausted, and in shock lay in a crumpled heap on the mat.
There’s a certain power in the imagination of interpretation.
I wanted this. After all the shit I had dealt with supporting Leeds, I deserved this.
Meanwhile, Leeds scrappily finished 14th in the league below. Their season summed up by Ken Bates’ purchase of the club and the following statistic:
37 different players saw action. Thirty. Fucking. Seven.
That’s more than enough to field 3 full teams. That’s … embarrassing.
I was tired. I just didn’t care.
My senior year of high school, I flat out turned my back on Leeds. I still wore the wedding ring, but I didn’t care what she did. I didn’t care that Leeds had its lowest opening day attendance in 44 years. I didn’t care that Leeds had gone as high as 2nd early in the season, appearing to be on track to returning to the top flight. I was watching Arsenal and Liverpool now. Leeds was going to have to prove to me she deserved my affections.
I was 17. I will say nothing more about my conduct.
Shortly after my 18th birthday on New Years 2006, Leeds had won 9 out of its last 11 and had shot up to 2nd place in the Championship. I wasn’t paying attention.
When May came around I was too busy graduating from high school and fawning over Steven Gerrard’s heroics against West Ham in the FA Cup Final. I had no idea what Leeds had even done that season. And I still didn’t care.
Leeds had, in typical Leeds-I’m-a-fucking-constant-mess fashion, somehow toppled to fifth by only winning one in its last ten matches. This was however good enough to at least get them into a playoff with four other teams for the third and final spot back to the Premier League.
Guess what? They made the playoff final. Guess what? They FUCKING LOST AGAIN.
–Steven Gerrard doesn’t pull this shit. He always comes back. Steven Gerrard also doesn’t BLOW EVERY GOD DAMN CENT ON GOD KNOWS WHAT AND END UP IN FUCKING SOCCER HELL.—
You would think, having just moved 3 years prior in high school, I would know how to acclimate to new surroundings when I went off to college.
Nope. Same fucking disaster.
Guess who I turned to? My favorite shitshow.
I was still following Liverpool and Arsenal, I was starting to dabble in the Spanish game, but in times of great stress you turn to what you know. And I knew Leeds.
Leeds and I were both a constant mess at that point. I could identify with that now. I was experiencing the real world.
College wasn’t what I thought it was. I had no idea how to make friends. I had no idea how life worked. I was miserable.
I gained 85 pounds that year. Leeds got demoted again. Down to its lowest depths as a club, while I felt down to my lowest depths as a person. Never, in its entire existence, had Leeds United been below the second tier of English soccer. Now it was in tier 3. I didn’t care. But, it was because I understood.
We’d make it through this together.
It would be poetic to say that we both bounced back on the same timeline, but that’s not how life works. I bounced back much quicker than Leeds. The only real similarity in our storylines is that it would take 3 years for me to graduate from college. It would also take Leeds 3 to make it back to the Championship—the second tier.
Leeds continued to be marked with upheaval. In 2008 their first year in what is called League One, but is actually the third Division, Leeds was suffering the effects of having finally gone into administration. So many players came and went I became somewhat immune to the whole process. I only bothered learning one or two names. Leeds were docked 15 points to start that season, that’s essentially 5 wins.
Didn’t matter.
Leeds came storming out of the gate winning 9 of their first 11 matches. I lost 30 pounds and made friends.
Near Christmas Leeds actually topped the table briefly. They looked like they were on their way back. They weren’t. Their manager quit on them midway through the year to take a more lucrative position.
They lost in a playoff for the third and final spot after faltering near the end.
This was the daily reality of Leeds.
The next year would bring more of the same. A poor run of results to begin the season saw another manager come and go. A stout Yorkshire run would ensue, leading Leeds back to the playoffs. Again, Leeds came up short, this time in the semi-finals.
It was that third year. The year I would graduate from college, that would be a special year for the both of us. I had begun to take a break from soccer at this point, but it was Leeds shocking their bitter rival Manchester United at home in the FA Cup that returned my attention to the game. A return I celebrated quite hard with with my preferred mixture of 151 and Root Beer.
It was a sign of things to come. That spring, Leeds United had earned their way back into the Championship—England’s second tier.
There was a gulf though. As happy and excited as I was for Leeds to be back in the Championship and to be moving in a positive direction, I just didn’t feel a connection. We had both seen ups and we had both seen downs over the last six years. More downs than ups if I’m going to be brutally honest about it.
When the new season dawned, I tried to be a loyal fan. I tried to keep up, but at this point I really was just going through the motions.
What I had felt when Steven Gerrard headed in that goal in Istanbul that magical night in 2005 had felt more like love than this.
What I had felt when I briefly pulled for David Beckham and Real Madrid as they snatched a La Liga title on the final day from the likes of Barcelona & Sevilla in the spring of 2008 felt so much more like love than this.
What was I holding on to?
Had I ever forgiven Leeds for the financial mismanagement that literally almost killed them? No. It had led to some severe trust issues. She couldn’t hold down a manager. She was constantly in the news in talks with some new suitor promising to restore her to where she once was: At the top of England. At the top of Europe.
When I moved to Waco, Texas in November of 2010 I tried my best to rekindle things, but to no avail.
The same issues are still there. The team can’t hold down a manager. The team can’t finish a season; always destined to push for that final hurdle only to throw in the towel at the last moment. The constant stress of seeing promising players sold away, of constantly watching an inept board making stupider, and stupider decisions. In December 2012 it was announced a Middle East-based private equity group had purchased the club. While money changed hands, the same characters were initially still in play in the board room.
There has been some transition this summer, but …
I’m done.
I’m divorcing Leeds United.
It’s almost a relief. It really is. Looking back, I’ve felt guilt for not staying true to my club. This relationship has been a sham. Leeds has done nothing but fuck me and, more specifically, itself, over for the last decade. I haven’t exactly been loyal either. In fact, I’ve been kind of a dick. Now, I don’t have to hate myself this season for wanting to spend more time with Arsenal or Swansea or Wigan than I do with my Leeds. I’ll always root for her, but I believe it is time to move on.
While relieved to be taking this step in a positive direction with my future, I find the task also quite daunting, quite terrifying.
I didn’t really even try when picking out Leeds, now I’ve got all sorts of things to think about.
Is it the on-field product I care about?
Is it boardroom stability?
Is it as simple as cool uniforms or an awesome manager?
Over the next 10 months we’ll find out as I play the role of an EPL bachelor, constantly evaluating the merits of each potential suitor, hoping to finally find happiness among the beauty of the Premier League with deliberate and careful measure.
We get our first look at the cast tomorrow.
You’ll receive my thoughts on Tuesday.