What Liverpool, Manchester United and City fans can learn from Goethe
By Paul Hyland
When Sheikh Mansour took majority control of Manchester City in 2008, it’s fair to say the club signed a deal with the devil. They were offered the chance to become the most lavish project in football history in exchange for laundering the reputation of the Abu Dhabi royal family. Ten years later, a club that few outside of England had heard of is arguably the most fearsome team ever assembled on these shores.
The bargain struck by the Manchester club tapped into a rich tradition, stretching back at least to the 16th Century, when it was popularized in England by Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Its most popular iteration, Goethe’s 19th-Century Faust, is a poetic romp through the society and landscape of Enlightenment Germany as Doctor Faust, a nationally-renowned polymath who wishes for divine knowledge of the universe, literally signs a deal with the devil. The public intellectual is granted absolute knowledge of the universe in exchange for his immortal soul. His every endeavor soon becomes a poisoned chalice. He falls in love with the tragic heroine Gretchen, who dies giving birth to their child and who renounces her love for Faust in the hope of Christian salvation.
City selling advertising space for the Emirati royalty in exchange for wealth and success the likes of which had never been seen before is a classic Faustian narrative. But the parallel to the Goethe story is not just that City are like Faust. It goes much further. Having signed their own deal, they’ve become the devil tempting other clubs.
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The last-gasp Sergio Aguero goal that won Manchester City the Premier League in 2012, denying their city rivals a record 20th title, ushered in a new era of Schadenfreude in English football. Liverpool fans, desperate not to see their sworn enemies distance themselves even further in terms of league wins, erupted in cheers almost as loud as those inside the Etihad Stadium. In that moment, all that mattered was that Manchester United had missed out on more silverware.
This season, the boot was firmly on the other foot. An unprecedented league campaign, in which the top two teams amassed a combined total of 195 points, losing just five matches between them, ended with the oil-rich Citizens winning every game post-January as they brought home their second consecutive league title and tightened their iron grip on English football’s biggest prize.
City’s victory was celebrated almost as raucously in Salford as it was at Eastlands, while Everton’s traveling support could be seen returning to Liverpool Lime Street station chanting in celebration of City picking up another title. Before the goalless draw at Goodison that effectively cost Liverpool the title, the Goodison PA could be heard playing songs by City-supporting Britpop band Oasis.
There is a self-defeating irony in teams pinning their hopes on Manchester City to prevent rivals from winning trophies. City are the most lavishly funded football team in the history of the sport. Their wealth has distorted English football beyond all recognition. No team, not even Liverpool, looks likely to deny them a league title in the short- to medium-term. A marvelously well-managed club like Watford, whose smart recruitment has brought them excellent players such as Abdoulaye Doucoure and Gerard Deulofeu, were swept aside in the biggest FA Cup final defeat in 116 years.
Fans celebrating the downfall of their rivals at the hands of the oil-rich reputation-laundering project do so at their own peril. Aguero’s goal against QPR in 2012 consolidated Manchester City’s position as the best team in England, providing them with the perfect platform to deny Liverpool two years later. Manchester United, who go into the Europa League next season, look further away from a league win than they have at any point in the last 40 years. That’s not just because they’re a club struggling to determine their identity post-Sir Alex Ferguson, but because of their rivals’ vast wealth. The narrowness of City’s league win belied the comfort with which they won their last 14 games, and the fact that hardly any of their opponents during those matches looked likely to take points from them.
Goethe’s Faust is fundamentally a cautionary tale. Faust chooses the short-term gain of worldly knowledge in exchange for his ever-living soul. Among many of its blatant critiques of Enlightenment thinking and religious doctrine, Goethe’s Faust forewarns of the dangers of selling away the parts of ourselves that really matter in exchange for temporary pleasures. For when clubs celebrate their rivals’ disappointments at a long-term cost to themselves, they find themselves making the Faustian bargain.
Perhaps football fans can learn something from Goethe. Had Aguero missed that famous chance against QPR, which gave Liverpool fans a year’s respite from seeing United lift another title, they themselves might have ended their drought since. Now United fans find themselves with as little reason to celebrate their lesser rivals winning the biggest prizes, as it does nothing but contribute to their own fade into (by their standards) obscurity.
Fans are all too happy to see their own chances of success signed away. To celebrate that is practically an act of selling their soul. For ultimately in the Faust narrative, it is Mephistopheles, the satanic figure who wagers with God that he can tempt Dr. Faust into sin, who stands to gain the most. Manchester City have an almost supernatural stranglehold on English football. Those who pact with them to spite their rivals risk dooming themselves in the process.
The Faustian tale is one of hubris and downfall. Faust sells his soul to Mephistopheles in order to spite the creator of the universe:
“He dwells in splendor single and eternal,
But us he thrusts in darkness, out of sight,
And you he dowers with Day and Night.”
Faust considers himself untouchable, immune and impervious to the consequences of spiting God in favor of the devil. He fails to realize that Mephistopheles holds all the cards, that the devil himself cannot be outsmarted or manipulated. He threatens to break the contract with Mephistopheles at various points throughout their journey together. There’s an unwillingness to learn from how the terms of his agreement have doomed him. The same hubris fills radio phone-ins and character-limited social media posts at the end of every season. Fans sign a spiritual pact with another club to spite another, just as Faust signed one to spite his creator. How few seem to realize that their deal with the devil has damned them too.
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The Faust narrative might also hide a word of caution for Manchester City. Faust’s bargain with the devil to be granted ultimately knowledge of the universe backfires, because there are facts that are beyond human comprehension. Worse still, when the great scholar is given knowledge of all there is to know, it defeats his need to strive for the expansion of his mind. There is no joy left in the pursuit of learning. Faust in a later soliloquy realizes that his wish has been a poisoned chalice:
“That nothing can be perfect unto Man
I now am conscious. With this ecstasy,
Which brings me near and nearer to the Gods,
Thou gav’st the comrade, who I now no more
Can do without, though, cold and scornful, he
Demeans me to myself, and with a breath,
A word, transforms thy gifts to nothingness.
‘Within my breast he fans a lawless fire,
Unwearied, for that fair and lovely form:
Thus in desire I hasten to enjoyment,
And in enjoyment pine to feel desire.”
His desire for total knowledge has defeated itself in the same way as his amorous pursuit of Gretchen. Faust asks Mephistopheles to make Gretchen fall in love with him, and though he duly obliges, she ultimately rejects him as a heretic in the hope that God will save her after death. Faust’s story is of a sort of catch-22 written long before Joseph Heller popularized the term. And the City project is in its way a Faustian one, similarly condemned by the sheer extent and audacity of its ambition.
Faust’s goal was to know all that there was to know; City’s is to win all that there is to win. Faust ultimately realizes that total human knowledge is futile, as there are ideas out of reach even to his mind. In the same way, City cannot win every trophy every year. But the Faustian comparison helps us to ask a different question. What is the point? What was the point in Faust being granted infinite knowledge when the thrill was not the knowing, but the learning? What is the point in winning trophies by default if victory is joyful only when the chase has been thrilling? When a team so well-resourced can win 14 games in a row with such comfort as to be able to deny a team with 97 points winning the title, and can win the FA Cup by the largest margin the vast majority of us have ever witnessed we have to ask: What is the point?
Do we not need failure to give meaning to success? If success is the default position, what else is there to hope for? Faust’s knowledge is his prized possession. All of the knowledge in the universe brings him no joy because it has not been acquired through endeavor. Ancient historians narrate that Alexander the Great wept that his domain had become so large that there was nothing left for him to conquer. If City finally win the European Cup and see the Emirati football project to its completion, what then? Where do City go from there?
The club’s deal with the Abu Dhabi royal family has brought them so much success they will soon forget the feeling of failure, the feeling necessary to give their victories any meaning. It runs the risk of backfiring in the classic Faustian way, of having much too much of a good thing, almost condemning themselves to an existence where victory is the default, not something to be striven for. Just as fans of so many other clubs who have cheered on Manchester City might see themselves condemned to an existence where victory is always striven for, but scarcely achieved.
The Unexamined Game is a series exploring the intersection of philosophy and football. You can find the previous articles in the series here:
Toward a philosophy of football
Pep Guardiola, tiki-taka and the end of football
Ball don’t lie: Football’s problem of other minds
How Isaac Newton ruined football
Stefano Pioli, and the power of mindfulness
Raheem Sterling, Michel Foucault and football’s racist discourse
The longest penalty in the world