During Portugal’s Nations League opener against Wales, Cristiano Ronaldo thought he had scored another international goal. The retirement home could wait as the celebration theatrics followed. Alas, it was chalked off, and the BBC commentary team described the Lisbon hush that followed as like a “bereavement”. The words used were out of kilter, but they were typical of how the man, and the game, are deified.
People expend the most extreme emotions on football. It is their everything, from anticipation to matchday to academic arguments afterwards. Eat, sleep, and drink it in – maybe more of the later during international breaks. Football really is the most important of the least important things.
After he experienced the very real loss of his newborn son in 2022 , Ronaldo spoke negatively of the executive reaction at Manchester United and the wider football community:
“The football world, not just in Manchester, can be very individualistic; often they don’t care what you’re going through or your family problems, they just want you to be available to play.”
This much is true. There is little patience for the professional as a human being until sport’s insularity is accosted by external events. The wake-up calls shout reality. It’s an uncomfortable truth that football isn’t the point of life.
It is coming up to the tenth anniversary of the Chapecoense flight crash, which killed the majority of the team and instigated three days of national mourning in Brazil. When Princess Diana died in Paris on that fateful night in 1997, all the pre-match excitement for another classic Newcastle and Liverpool blockbuster was extinguished. The game was cancelled.
A day before COVID stopped football for months, Jurgen Klopp angrily turned down excited handshakes from the crowd before the match against Atletico Madrid. He knew something more sinister than an exit from the Champions League was bubbling.
For some, even the green grass isn’t enough of a refuge. Andy Robertson was about to play in his first Champions League final in 2019, when news of the death of former Arsenal player Jose Antonio Reyes was announced before kick-off. A minute’s silence was observed. A football Invincible had passed. Reyes’ football called his son the “greatest in the world – as a person, not an athlete”.
Six years later, football’s summer break was catapulted into front-page news after Diogo Jota also died in a car crash. Robertson had just attended his wedding. Liverpool had won a Premier League that summer but had just lost something far more precious.
This much is evident from Robertson’s interview on the Overlap. Robertson has thrown his weight behind the recruits that Liverpool 2.0 brought in, saying that it was very difficult for them to operate in a team that was grieving.
“I felt so sorry for these guys because they’d signed and they were signing for big money and all that, if I’m talking about football. It took them months to settle in because we didn’t care, we didn’t care about football. “
Coming from a man who was a Liverpool thoroughbred, a player who famously chased down Manchester City when the Reds were 4-1 up at the beginning of those elite days of thunder, that resonates. If anyone cares too much, it’s Robertson. And he just said that the team at the top of their game for almost a decade didn’t have enough determination. The edge had gone because their friend had gone.
Klopp took on the role of unofficial moral guardian during COVID when Liverpool were walking to the Premier League title, but suddenly that holy grail was in jeopardy. The German did not change his view of the order of things.
“First and foremost, all of us have to do whatever we can to protect one another. In society, I mean. This should be the case all the time in life, but in this moment I think it matters more than ever. Today, football and football matches really aren’t important at all.”
The longing for the return of league action beyond the international break has only been interrupted by the news of Manchester City's guilt on 114 Premier League financial breaches. Fans need to believe in what they are seeing on the pitch, but that is all about fair play, money and trophies lost. The business of football through the courts is not what fans live for.
After Jota’s death, Arne Slot said that nothing seemed to be important if we think of what has happened. Robertson asked what the point of it all was.
Slot also acknowledged that football clubs need to play again, “if we want it or not.” Liverpool went back to their day jobs. They just couldn't get up for them.
Football is not life or death. We know that Bill Shankly’s words were misrepresented in any case. Shankly was talking about putting the sport before his family, something he regretted dearly. Robertson put it in its rightful place last week.