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What Is Ownership in Sports?
In sports, there are two kinds of ownership. There's the ownership of assets, such as the Glazers have acquired, and the sentimental, spiritual ownership of fans, the ownership I claim as a fan of Manchester United. All of us will probably agree that this second kind of ownership– let's call it The Ownership of the Fan– is more palatable and morally superior to the first kind, in part because it does not exist, and so cannot be trawled through the muck of the real. Simply put, The Ownership of the Fan is a figment of the imagination. The fan has an object of his love—in this case, Manchester United—and supports the success of “the club,” though he may not quite like every player, and may disagree with how the team plays (Many current Man Utd fans strongly disagree with the team’s current tactic of playing only one forward, for example). It would be almost impossible to exaggerate or even describe just how much the team dominates the thoughts of the fan and overwhelms his psyche, the thoughts that no one knows or can know, the ceaseless cinema of his mind; in short, his stream of consciousness. To be fan is chiefly solitary, and frequently lonely, so fans often gather with like-minded fans to share this solitary experience, this isolated cognitive state. In this way, it is similar to art museums and prayer, if louder. An actual game is being played on a field, somewhere, and fans may watch the field from a seat in the arena, or on television, as I do, but their distance from the game can be measured in more than just yards, or miles. Despite the mitigating elements, the fan’s immersion in this pseudoimaginary experience is total.
When a team is good, and in the last twelve years, Manchester United have been exceptional, the desires of the fan and the player—the degree to which the player exemplifies the fan’s imagination—are so close as to be almost identical. The player, and team, express the fan’s desires utterly. What Man Utd fan hasn’t thought of Roy Keane as a more perfect version of himself? What Arsenal fan, for that matter, wouldn’t trade places with Thierry Henry or be poetically subsumed into him? This vicarious miracle is part of what makes sports such incomparable entertainment. I often imagine myself to be an amalgam of Roy Keane, Paul Scholes, Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs in his pomp, and with David Beckham’s free kick.
When the team is not good, then the fan often feels that he cares more than the player. He probably does care more than the player; indeed, he may feel that he is more a part of the team than the player, that the players are little more than fickle mercenaries while he, the fan, is the soldier of truth, and if you think that’s too military, you should that a friend and Man Utd supporter quoted Churchill to me this week in an email: We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old; and if you still think that’s too military, then at least you can begin to understand the power that sports can have in the minds of those who love them. I certainly care more than Kleberson does. Kleberson looks as though he hates his job; he looks like I looked when I was a busboy. I worked harder as a dogwalker than he does in his attacking midfield position. My allegiance to the team, after all, is older than Kleberson’s, and better, but he is the player and I am not, and my happiness depends to some extent on him. I help to pay his salary, and he is a little bit my servant, but I am not so naïve as to assume that he cares about my happiness one way or the other, win or lose. It should also be noted that fans never get to chose who plays for or coaches their team; we never get to vote. Fans are perpetual spectators; helpless and almost without agency in the fortunes of their team, and, as every child will tell you, no amount of cheering, prayers or wishes can influence a game through a television set, or make a player better than he is, or try harder than he wants to.
Thus is the experience of the fan to some great extent imaginary, especially when you consider the vagaries of what countries the players come from, where the fans are from, etc. I am not knocking imaginary experiences; nations are imaginary, too, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance that God is imaginary. But The Ownership of the Fan—i.e., the relationship and sense of ownership the fan feels for his team—can be revealed as the phantasm it is when you compare it to The Ownership of the Owner.
The Ownership of the Owner is legal and financial. I write fiction, so I don’t understand law or money, but maybe you do. Laws are a set of imaginary rules we all agree on that protect us from each other, and guard our rights. Money is a system of measuring value. Most of us agree to pretend that ownership exists because the world would go to hell if we didn’t, though you could say that a few rich assholes have convinced the lumpen mass of us to accept that we can never own most of what we want, and you could go even further and say that these same oligarchs have tricked us into thinking that our lives after death will be a paradise. The Ownership of the Owner may also be illusive, but at least it has a paper trail, and the muscle of the government, the law, and financial institutions behind it to prove that it exists and give it power. We may resent these institutions, but all of civilization forces us to respect them. How can one man—Malcolm Glazer, say—acquire possession of a building or a man, like Old Trafford or Roy Keane? At times like this, it seems more than unjust, it seems spiritually illegal, but the forces in play are the cornerstones of our world, nothing less. Note how one defers to spirits when betrayed by reality, note how I’m reduced to invoking God in an emergency, I who don’t believe in God. It’s the moral opposite of asking what is is.
The fans may feel they own the team, but The Ownership of the Fan does not extend to the stadium, the players, or the right to sell replica shirts. What, then, if not the object of his love, or the objects of the team, can the fan say he owns? Nothing but his love, his illusion; the emotion itself. Glazer’s problem, reduced to its essence, is that he needs an overflow of love to make his risky venture work; he needs to translate the love of Man Utd’s fans into shirt sales, attendance, and sponsorships with potentially reluctant corporations who don’t wish to be attached to a loser.
There are, in sum, two Manchester Uniteds: one for the fans and one for the Glazers, not to mention the Manchester Uniteds of Arsenal fans, Chelsea fans, Liverpool fans, Leeds fans, and Munich fans, who, by the way, must all love Glazer. By forcefully establishing his own Man Utd, Glazer has altered forever the Man Utd of the fans, has tainted The Ownership of the Fan, destroyed its object; revealed it as the illusion it is. Fans feel violated because Glazer has reached into their heads and scroonched their brains, has committed a kind of mindcrime, altering the landscape and texture of their minds without their consent, proved to them in no uncertain terms that their minds are not fully their own. For Glazer to succeed in this endeavor, he needs to get the fans to accept this thoughtrape as a normative state, to violate them with their full consent, over and over.
The Ownership of the Fan may be imaginary, but the emotions it evokes are as real as any emotion, and can be no more disimagined than grief, depression, or sexual fixation. Try explaining to a fifteen year old boy that his sexual obsessions are only in his mind; try to tell a Catholic, or a Muslim, that his God is a myth; find within yourself your most cherished illusion. How would you feel if a wealthy, unassailable stranger had altered it forever?
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