Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I’m very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.

- Bill Shankly English soccer manager.

Soccer is unique in its ability to captivate a global audience. No other sport (sorry, David Stern) or international competition (sorry, Olympics) has the ability to create such joy and sorrow. And no other sport has the ability to define its participants and its fans. For the more than 100 million worldwide who have tuned into each game since they began last week, soccer is more than life or death — soccer gives people an identity.

From the tongue-in-cheek to the very real, soccer fans  define themselves on their love of the game, their club-level allegiances, their favorite players and their national teams. For many, these distinctions are more important than where they live, what car they drive, where they attended school or what job they hold. Claiming ManU, Inter or Bayern as a favorite team, or fully appreciating Joga Bonito, the brutal efficiency of the DLB-Elf or “Total  Football” is to make a claim about one’s personal beliefs and passions.

There’s been an interesting shift, however, in team identity. As the blog Culture of Soccer wrote recently:

Clubs’ identities came to be closely tied to those of the local community, and separating the club from its community was largely seen as a non-starter (that said, Arsenal’s move from South to North London in 1913 is a huge exception). Indeed, clubs more often served to incorporate arriving immigrants into their new communities. Many Irish men in Glasgow found a home at Celtic, for instance, just as many migrants from southern Spain found a home at Barcelona FC. One recent migrant, Eseteban, told the website The Travel Rag: “When I came here from Andalusia one of the ways I was able to feel part of the city and part of Catalonia was to support Barça. It was hard being a migrant but the club gives you an identity. Now I feel Catalan and I’m proud to live in Barcelona.”

Culture of Soccer goes on to argue:

If club teams are closely tied to their homes, one might imagine national teams would be even more so. It can be argued that especially in these times of increased globalization, sports are one of the few arenas in which people can continue to feel a strong connection to their countries. But in the 21^st century, the connection between nations and their national teams is changing dramatically. The bond between national teams and the nations from which they come is, in many cases, no longer as strong as it once was.

For years, soccer stars returned home, giving up time on their professional clubs, to represent their native country. But recently the soccer world has seen more and more of these stars play elsewhere. A perfect example is the German national team. As Rob Hughes wrote for The New York Times on Sunday:

There seems to be a new, vibrant, powerful Germany: a side whose players are too young to fear defeat and whose diverse ethnic backgrounds are a testimony to the society now forming in that country. . . The side that thrashed Australia on Sunday in Durban reflects the face of the new Germany. It is drawn predominantly from players born within the now-united Germany, although some are the sons of migrant workers who arrived after World War II. One, Claudemir Jerónimo Barreto, known as Cacau, is a native Brazilian who worked his way up from fifth-division soccer in Germany to qualify, after 10 years, for citizenship. The strike-force members Lukas Podolski and Miroslav Klose were born in Poland and had already been integrated into Germany’s national team. Both scored against Australia, and Klose now has 11 World Cup goals, closing fast on Gerd Müller’s German record, 14.

These players are joined by Mesut Özil, the young star of Turkish origin who is possibly the most intuitive young mind in German soccer; Sami Khedira, a midfielder from Stuttgart whose father is Tunisian; and his club colleague Serdar Tasci, also of Turkish origin; Jérôme Boateng, who has German-Ghanaian citizenship; and Dennis Aogo, whose father is Nigerian.

Even Germany’s style of play has changed to accommodate these new stars. The efficiency is still there, but it’s been made better by the creativity and artistry of these new faces. As Hughes put it: Germany, the sum of its many parts, is not your grandfather’s Mannschaft.

There’s a lesson here, but perhaps it requires a bit more thought. Feel free to share your own.

Oh, and you should check out my friend Katherine’s decidely non-soccer related blog: http://finchfinds.blogspot.com/ Definitely worth the read, even if you hate cats and home decor.

Great work by Dave on a topic that he and I have discussed at length. Read here or below.

Bill Simmons: Caught Between The Everyman And The Establishment

by Dave Levy | 7:58 am, March 25th, 2010

One of my most memorable moments of my college paper career occurred during the spring of my senior year. I was sitting across a meeting room table from Boston Globe writer and ESPN contributorBob Ryan, who had come talk with upperclassmen at his old alma mater about the industry. During his brief time with us, I got to lob a question at Ryan, and although it was a few years back, I recall asking him something along the lines of, “How do you feel about the new journalism coming from guys like Bill Simmons? Is he stealing some of your space while writing from the perspective of a fan?”

The memory will never leave me, because Ryan looked like he was not amused. I’m paraphrasing here from a foggy memory, but his answer was: “I’m a journalist. He doesn’t speak for all of us who have made a career out of reporting sports for decades.”

I respect Ryan – especially as someone who grew up reading him in the Globe. But that was a moment I realized that becoming the traditional, in-the-trenches sports reporter was long gone. For years, I pictured the massive divide between the press box and the bleachers, but Simmons was the first to successfully demonstrate that there didn’t have to be. He was on to something a lot sooner than the rest of us, he was writing in a blog style long before there were blogs, and ESPN recognized his talent and style quick enough to make a smart move and bring him aboard.

As someone who is one of the many influenced by Simmons, an everyman fan who has been a writer at ESPN.com for more than a decade, I will be among the first to admit he isn’t the pure commoner he once embodied. However, he still is putting himself out there from a very non-traditional place in the sports media world. He has such a distinct spot in the last decade of the Worldwide Leader, and not just on dot-com, but also because of his New York Times bestsellers, the 30 for 30 sports documentary series he produces and his star-studded podcast, The BS Report. He has a self-carved empire somewhere in the middle of “Booyah” and the screaming heads of Pardon The Interruption and Around The Horn.

The normal preaching about Simmons’s career appears in a column in April’s Atlantic Monthly by Isaac Chotiner. While a heavy emphasis on Simmons recent bestselling The Book of Basketball, Chotiner still gives plenty of ink to the following that the sportswriter has earned through his personality and style:

In public, Simmons fans love to yell out “Hey, Sports Guy!”—which (again) recalls voters who, when interviewed on camera about their candidate of choice, say that he is “one of us.” To Simmons’s credit, however, the unassuming nickname actually fits him comfortably. In certain respects, the public figure that Simmons most clearly resembles is the early David Letterman, although Letterman has never tried to seem like an average guy. Still, they have one thing in common: the way they personalize their work.

Chotiner sets up an even more interesting dichotomy in the column when he begins by referencing Bill James, whose stat-crunching encyclopedia of baseball is also very present as an influence to the works of Michael Lewis. Whether the obvious ties in Moneyball or the more shrouded stat-mind in the sports part of The Blind Side (i.e., the book, not the movie), Lewis is clearly a bookish disciple of James. The thing is that Simmons is kind of the opposite side of the same coin of Lewis; Chotiner places his tome of Basketball at the opposite end of the bookcase from James’s equally voluminous archive of statistics, yet certainly deserving of the same shelf.

This imagery is important for this era of journalism: Simmons is comprehensive in his coverage of sports, but not even close to the same way as James and Lewis. He grew up among fans in the decade of citizen journalism and online publishing, and he hasn’t let that change how he writes – he is proud to know Matt Saracen’s stats in the same way he does Matt Cassel’s. That has to irritate the crap out of the guys who’ve filed hurried game summaries from press boxes of low market teams to work their way up.

Yet, as Simmons has grown in popularity, the same problem has alienated him slightly from the fan base that once adores him. There’s a running joke about the time ESPN opened up comments for Simmons’ regular written columns – and how quickly the vitriol (actual comments in this 2007 Deadspin post) forced them to shut down that section for his posts still to this day.

In an exclusive interview with Mediaite last fall, Bill mentioned to Colby Hall:

You can’t work for ESPN and NOT be part of the establishment. For most people, we are the Starbucks of sports. When I started writing for them, it was like a switch went off — suddenly I was getting these “you sold out” emails and I’m like, “I sold out? Where’s the money?

The question I have, though, involves whether or not the establishment accepts him. It’s one thing to be a part of it, it’s quite another to be invited to the reporters’ buffet. As much as that ESPN tag makes him one of “The Man,” Simmons still has to fight the battle of being alongside the Rick Reillys, Gene Wojciechowskis and Bob Ryans of the world, with whom he still doesn’t line up perfectly. He’s as much outside the circle as inside of it in that regard.

Chotiner partly discussed Simmons in the same breath as David Letterman’s comedy stylings in the Atlantic feature. Letterman didn’t care who thought throwing watermelons off roofs wasn’t funny, he did it anyway; Simmons likewise doesn’t mind if you aren’t a fan of the television critics, fiction authors and former college roommates he parades through his podcasts. Changing the style to appease fans or join the reporter’s gallery isn’t in him – and even if he stands alone in this middle ground, he still will forever change the notion that there is no cheering in the press box. Because of him, the cheap seats are just as likely of a home for the next game changer in the future of sports journalism.

Gilbert takes this one step further and says that each individual has a word that describes their core essence. When someone’s word does not match up with the city he or she lives in, that city may not be the city to stay in.

I was reminded of this theme a few weekends ago while watching “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” (Strange, I know, but I hope to make sense of this shortly.) While watching John Hughes’ beloved movie about a cocky, self-assured high school kid and his adventures in and around Chicago, it occurred to me that Hughes wasn’t just making movies about growing-up as an adolescent in the 1980s. He was saying something about his persona through his movies — he was making a public declaration about who he was and how he viewed himself.

We’ll come back to this.

I’m a big fan of Woody Allen’s movies. While his humor is what draws many, including myself, there’s something else that makes “Manhattan” or “Annie Hall” or “Radio Days” worth watching: New York City. As Lauren Wilcox wrote in The Washington Post Magazine last March (emphases are mine):

The more I watched [Woody] Allen’s early New York films, the more they seemed to be different versions of the same movie. Actors and eras sometimes change, but the heart of the narrative never does: characters’ minor dramas against the mundane pageantry of the city, the idiosyncratic and irrepressible rhythm of its daily life. And ultimately, of course, the city is Allen’s star. Faithful to his muse, he gives it a dozen headlining roles, stubbornly ignoring its bad days, its fits of pique, its long dark moods. No matter what decade it is, no matter what boom-time fever or economic gutter the city actually is in, the performance he coaxes from it is always the same: chaotic and delightful, romantic and seedy, a brilliant, good-hearted mess. A knockout, no matter what anybody says.

The city is Allen’s star because for him it’s the obvious choice. My wife, like Allen, is a proud and demonstrative New Yorker. To have been born and raised in any of the boroughs is to stake a claim against those without the same good fortune. As if I needed reminding, my wife likes to quote John Updike when espousing the greatness that is her city:

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

Hughes, like Allen, casts his city as the true star. On a basic level, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Sixteen Candles,” and “The Breakfast Club” serve as reminders that adolescence is rarely easy and increasingly hard. But on a deeper level, these movies serve as a love letter to Chicago. A brief look at some of the most famous scenes from his movies reveal an intimate connection with the city, a place he spent his entire career. As Hughes once said about Chicago, it’s a “working city, where people go to their jobs and raise their kids and live their lives.”

Allen and Hughes identify with their cities on such a visceral level that it was (and for Allen remains) impossible to separate their work from their persona. If art imitates life, and if where you live is so inextricably linked with who you are as a person, then casting one’s home as the star is perhaps the truest expression of this.

Getting back to Gilbert’s theme of cities, words and ourselves, perhaps it’s not as complicated as she makes it out to be. I doubt Allen or Hughes would limit either city to one word, just as I doubt they would limit themselves to one word. How could they, after all, when they devoted countless scenes to their stars?

Disclaimer: I’ve not read Gilbert’s book and have no intention of ever doing so. I don’t want to see the movie, either.

By 2009, the steroids issue in Major League Baseball (MLB) had lost some of its appeal. It was becoming apparent that no one in the league during the 1990s was above suspicion, but perhaps more compelling was that fans didn’t seem to care. Perhaps fans had long-ago accepted what MLB hadn’t? Regardless, A-Rod admitted to using steroids and apologized for his transgressions. While fans weren’t exactly eager to welcome the 3-time league MVP back, he was able to reclaim some of the glory he’d enjoyed and, by the end of the post-season, had at least redeemed himself among Yankee-faithful.

How was such a divisive athlete able to reclaim some of that trust despite an admission of cheating?

To answer this, let’s look at another example from baseball. Recently, Mark McGwire, former first-baseman and now the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals, admitted to using steroids when he set the then-record for most home runs in a single season. McGwire was viewed with much skepticism and many saw his apology, particularly his timing, as simply opportunistic (McGwire was returning to baseball for the first time since retiring).

Bob Klapisch asked over at FoxSports.com: why was A-Rod let off the hook but McGwire was not?

As Klapisch sees it, and I agree:

“[A-Rod] appeared to be more honest than McGwire in revealing the detail of his cheating. While A-Rod may have fudged some details, he at least provided the name of a complicit family member, as well as the exact time frame of his cheating.”

Klapisch goes into more, including arguing (correctly) that on-field success can make public acceptance much easier (which A-Rod did experience), but the point remains: A-Rod appeared more honest and contrite.

If only Tiger Woods had paid attention.

Tiger’s response to his recent troubles stands in stark contrast to A-Rod’s admission and provides a great example of how not to handle public admissions/apologies.

Before we get too far, let me say this: A-Rod owed all involved an apology because he cheated the game; Tiger owed no one but his family, particularly his wife, an apology. He didn’t cheat the game, he cheated on his wife. His public apology was a wasted effort.

But since he made the apology, it’s worth dissecting.

In Tiger we have the perfect example of an athlete groomed to succeed in a highly publicized world. His father intended just as much when he set out to make him “bigger than Jesus.” If there’s one thing Tiger is known for (and there are many), it’s his ability to focus and take absolute control of his situation. We’ve seen other athletes show similar abilities, yet none have seemed as “in control” as Tiger.

But in becoming an athlete with such control over every situation, Tiger created his ultimate undoing. We operate in a 24-hour news cycle spurned-on by avid bloggers and instant media. We demand — expect — to know everything about everyone, for better or for worse. And it seems we push hardest against those for whom protecting that information is their number one priority.

For Tiger, his need to control information worked against him. He failed to allow us to learn about him, to become familiar with him, to accept him as something more than an athlete. As a result, we pushed harder once the cracks were revealed. It’s fair to say we acted like sharks tasting blood for the first time.

So when Tiger’s troubles surfaced and he later felt the need to apologize, the worst apology he could make was exactly the one he made. He appeared stilted, robotic and unfeeling. His speech was rehearsed — he even read the words, “Good Morning.”  His body language was distant, his words lacked fluidity, and his presentation, as Stephen A. Smith wrote:

“[R]eeked of someone desperately trying to salvage whatever was left of his stained image.”

It’s easy to say A-Rod and  McGwire were attempting to do the same — that is, salvage whatever was left of their image — but both appeared to have more feelings. They regained trust by appearing honest and contrite. Tiger’s prepared remarks before a staged audience, however, afforded him no trust with viewers.

To regain that trust, Tiger should have appeared before any reporters who could make the time (I think it’s safe to assume there wouldn’t have been room to stand). He should have prepared an opening sentence or two thanking everyone for being there, but then opened it up for questions and answered them honestly and openly. Only then could he have changed his public persona.

But that’s not what Tiger wanted. As Bill Simmons’ wrote in his take on the Tiger speech, “When you become famous too early, you don’t have to win over anyone. You just have to exist.”

So maybe the only way for Tiger to alter (again) his public persona is to play golf again — to exist as he’s always done. As noted earlier, on-field excellence can have a powerful effect on memories and perceptions. But that won’t be all that’s needed. No, Tiger cannot exist as he’s always had. He needs to take a page from A-Rod and McGwire and accept that questions will be asked, further accusations hurled, and his role is to simply field them as they come, openly and honestly.

Just made it under 1,000 words. Thanks for hanging in there.

Using my friend and colleague Dave Levy’s blog, State of the Fourth Estate, as inspiration I’ve decided to dive head-first into the digital world, which, until I accepted Twitter, existed for me in Facebook-only form.

My friends wish I hadn’t known about the pool.

Nevertheless, here I am and here’s what I plan on addressing: issues of perception, both large and small. What fascinates me is how countries, businesses, groups, communities and people position themselves. This reflection can be viewed as a person’s attempt to craft an outward persona based on how they view others’ perceptions of them (i.e., Charles Horton Cooley’s “Looking Glass Self”), or a company’s belief that it can adjust the public’s perception of them through targeted marketing and public relations.

I’d be neglectful if I didn’t mention that I work in public relations. I work for Edelman PR in Washington, D.C., but everything in this blog is my own work and my own opinion.

With that said, I’ve reached the end of this initial post, but certainly not the end of my thoughts.

‘Til next time.