#i write down their game against barça as one of the most entertaining ones this season

[stuckinakillingjar]

i kinda love watching rayo games, they play nasty af but it's very entertaining. they DID take out marc bernal though so i can't sympathize too much

[victimhood]

God money breeds god complexes

I didn’t want to overexplain the chapter in the notes, but it turns out that yes, I do want to explore the concepts behind it after all. This is an expansion on the meaning of chapter 108 of The Beautiful Game, which is also known as “Booker’s ending” for the fic, but I have no idea how coherent these musings will be.

What is the point of the chapter? Class conflict!!!! LOLOL Why is this the point of the chapter? Err...because The Beautiful Game is really a musing on life itself? This statement really shows its colors in the final chapters.

Now, what is the class conflict in this chapter?

Merrick: owner of capital accumulated thanks to vaccine patents, owner of the football club that Booker plays for

Booker: an employee at the football club. Don’t be fooled by his massive wages--he’s still an employee on a wage contract.

For all the debate about overpaid footballers, one thing is true, and this is a line Booker said in chapter 64: After all, lord knows they will always find a way to make more money off them than they will ever pay them.

Case in point: the finances of Barcelona FC are a complete mess, and Lionel Messi is on an eye watering wage that reportedly breaks down to over 2 million pounds a week. However, with a deeper analysis, some economists dug up that Messi is responsible for practically 50% of Barça’s revenue: 

The player made 383,655,000 euros over the 3 years but he has generated 619,265,000 euros in the same time period. This means that the player has made the club a profit of 235,610,000 euros.

Football almost uniquely illustrates the surplus value equation, which is put forth by Marx as "an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital, or of the laborer by the capitalist", because labor and product are the same within football--both rest within the form of the football player, whose labor generates the entertainment product that is the football game but who are in themselves marketable products--pieces of the notion of the player is turned into merchandise which can be sold. Further, the revenue-generating potential of a player is quantified into the transfer value, which is a payment made from one club to another to obtain the rights of the labor-product (i.e. the player).

Anyway, what I really mean to say is that the chapter is important for me to include, even though its purpose is very opaque at first glance. I cannot write about modern football without illustrating the capitalist machinations behind modern football.

There’s also symbolism! The mistral is a strong, cold, northwesterly wind that blows from southern France into the Gulf of Lion in the northern Mediterranean, and means “masterly”. Coming from Provence, le mistral is a reference to Booker as a masterly playmaker in the game but...it also portends storms. The chapter also calls into question who is the true master, for which the answer is Merrick, as the owner of capital and Booker’s labor rights.

Booker could not fight against Merrick--but he also isn’t given an obvious reason to in this chapter, although we’ve been told before that Merrick has a very cold approach to his players. Merrick has offered Booker a pay rise, but he’s also totally exploited the fact that Booker turned down a competitor, to offer Booker less money than his fair market value.

And then there’s another very interesting conflict between Merrick and Booker, which is exceedingly European and convoluted to explain, but European class divisions are not formed on the basis of money, but on the basis of symbolic markers (which can be cultivated by money). In polite old-money societies, money itself is crass, and talking about money is the crassest of all.

Merrick LACKS the old-money class indicators, while Booker actually possesses them: this is demonstrated in Booker’s knowledge of wine, which takes Merrick by surprise and causes resentment within Merrick. Booker was aware of this because when Merrick asks him how he knows about wine, he provides a misdirecting answer. Being French does NOT confer any special knowledge of wine. In actual fact, the supremacy of French wine is upheld by the most British of wine institutions: the Court of Master Sommeliers, and the other various British wine and spirit institutions. 

The OM academy knew exactly what they were doing when they placed Booker away from home. It’s classism, because they didn’t think a social housing environment would encourage a kid to follow the norms they want to impose. They bumped Booker into a middle class household for him to take on bourgeois values by osmosis. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t. By sheer dumb luck he had a kooky wine-obsessed host dad (As a side note: this is also a pointed callout on the bobo to antivax pipeline)

Anyway, Merrick is a total BoJo type, who is extremely insecure about their class standing (because their pedigree by birth doesn’t cut it, even if their education does), and by virtue of this insecurity continue to inflict immense damage on the world.

Merrick’s resentment of Booker’s accidental display of superior class knowledge leads him to shove Booker over when he senses an opportunity--which is pure schoolground bullying. What Merrick doesn’t know is that Booker has trauma from experiencing domestic violence in his childhood, and this random act of violence was triggering for Booker. It doesn’t matter that Merrick doesn’t know--the effect is the same. It’s an act of banal cruelty, meant to reinforce power relations.

And the end of all this, we roll into Booker’s final line, which is “his tears will not fall on her,” a line that just breaks me in so many ways. From the chapter before I’ve already gone into a whole existential musing on the duties of parenthood, and Booker and Nile are the characters who carry this duty in this fic. I think often to Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse”, a poem that resonated so much to me as a teen with a lot of familial difficulties.

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.      They may not mean to, but they do.   They fill you with the faults they had    And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   Who half the time were soppy-stern    And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man.    It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Now that I’m an adult who accepts my parents have flaws, I think the final verse of this poem bears a pessimism that I’ve learned to work through. I even belive I’ll do a better job of parenting, but if I have to be real, it’s because I am in a place of financial security. If we write for ourselves first and foremost, part of the overarching message of the fic has been to say that there is a better way, there is a way beyond what we know and we may not see the final work but we can build the foundations for the future.

And so I just love Booker and Nile’s final lines so, so much:

make it better, make it better, make it better.

she will always be safe with him, but his tears will not fall on her.