Tim Hall’s view From 101

We are the complaining generation. Yes, ‘entitled millennials who got participation trophies for getting out of bed in the morning’ is the cliche, but, there is some truth in almost every stereotype.

We are the ones who take the slightest inconvenience and turn it in to a personal affront to our sensibilities and our character. The teenager behind the counter at the local overpriced coffee shop franchise misspells our name after hearing it only once in a loud room and it is fodder for a dozen social media posts. A car parks slightly askew and messages are left on the windscreen in paper and on the pavement in chalk. When service is slow, or the internet is slow, or traffic is slow, someone will be there to tell you all about it.

We complain so much about the minor inconveniences that major actual problems get lost in the din. Over-militarized police forces shooting minorities at an alarming rate, prescription drugs that are supposed to make us healthy instead leading to deadly narcotic addictions, taxes are too high and aren’t being spent on what matters. An assault rifle in every pot and a pipe bomb in every driveway. It’s this level of complaining that, instead of making us realize that we need to work together to get where we’re going, instead has turned the interior of a car into an argument over the air conditioning as we all go driving over a cliff.

In this bizarre little microclimate we’ve built for ourselves here as the American Soccer Community, we are not immune to wanting to become snarling, gnashing dogs pulling on the ends of our chains to get at the latest perceived insult. But sometimes we could do well to remember that not everything is as big a deal as we all want to make it out to be, and we need to rein ourselves in. This may be difficult, given how much we like to whinge, and if one of these is your personal cause celebre, but only by doing difficult things can we improve.

For starters, letss look at one of the areas where we have undoubtedly improved: ‘soccer’ vs. ‘football’. Sure, this is a go-to move for many a hack writer who look to point out how different we do things here in the States, but does anyone who cares actually care? No. Provided we can figure out from context clues which football you mean, it’s all fine. With that in mind, we should probably loosen the belt on a few other perfectly interchangeable terms. ‘Head coach’, ‘manager’, ‘boss’, heck, we could even sprinkle in a ‘gaffer’ here and there. Derby or darby, it’s not worth getting up in arms about. The thing you wear can be a kit, uniform, jersey, top, or strip, just so long as you’re not a fan in the stands wearing the shirt, shorts and high socks – we have to draw the line somewhere, folks. These are just words, folks, part of our collective poetry, ultimately nothing more than grunts out of our face holes, little to get worked up about.

Many people like to complain about attendance in America, namely the fact that the number that is reported often has little to do with the number of people in their seats at any given point during a match. But unless your job and your paycheck depends on getting that number right and factual, it doesn’t actually matter, does it? As a fan, it’s not your job to go out and sell tickets. If I show up, I’ve done my part. If I bring a friend along for their first game, great, but I don’t see a bonus at the end of the season, so if a team reports a game as 23,000 when there couldn’t be more than 15,000, who cares? Chances are every team are working under the same fuzzy math equation, so ultimately even though the numbers themselves may not be correct, their relation to one another may just be, and that is, to some extent one assumes, useful information to some people, somewhere. Just not you or I.

Similarly, the shocking increase in expansion fees is not our hill to die on, either. It was recently announced that the fee for a new team to enter Major League Soccer could balloon to $200 million dollars, and that got a lot of people’s dander up. There are only two outcomes: either some rube pays that much to get a team in San Antonio or whatever and MLS will have successfully worked a mark, or nobody would pay that much and the price will come down. The free market will decide. Let it be.

An open pyramid through promotion and relegation? Let it go, man. There’s too much money on the line. A single table in MLS? Not in an age when even auto racing has playoffs. TV ratings in the toilet? Well, it’s not like that’s a brand new story.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t myriad things to get our tails up about, it’s just that we should be a little more choosy. For instance, the team that is objectively our best – the US Women’s National Team – gets paid a pittance, and the powers-that-be didn’t care to the point of forcing legal action. There is a system in place that rewards and pushes rivalry between MLS teams but acts shocked when the narrative they push reaches the inevitable conclusion of violence. There are MLS teams that play in places unsuitable for the sport or the fans’ enjoyment thereof, and there are teams with no sense of place in the community. The people that run the game at the very highest levels are tone-deaf at best and criminal at worst with no oversight other than to their own bank accounts.

These are the things we should be focused on, not because they will be easy to change, but because they deserve to be changed. We should not be afraid of hard work, and we are fools if we continue to be divided and distracted by petty superficial things. Ultimately it’s a bit like The Boy Who Cried Wolf; if we’re screaming mad about everything, it sounds like we’re really mad about nothing. And if we are to shake a stigma – fairly or unfairly placed to begin – that we are merely a generation of entitled whiny little brats, it begins with knowing where to really change.



UPCOMING EVENTS

Saturday August 13 New York Red Bulls vs Montreal Impact: Every year, the Empire Supporters Club puts on a charity pro wrestling show called Forza Lucha to benefit the AIDS Resource Foundation for Children, and it is easily the most fun date on the calendar annually. It all goes down August 13th at RIO Lounge (618 Market St. Newark) from 1pm. Come out, give to a great cause, have a drink, watch an insane spectacle, and head off to the Red Bulls game knowing you’ve done some good with your day.