This is a Liverpool newsletter, and so I am duty-bound to tell you that Liverpool Football Club won 3-2 this Saturday at home against Nottingham Forest. Diogo Jota, whom you may remember from last week, when he broke a yearlong scoring drought with two goals against Leeds, scored two of the three for the home side at Anfield. One was quite beautiful.
Otherwise, it was a strange victory for Liverpool. All five of the goals came in the same pattern—Liverpool would score from a set piece, and then five or ten minutes later Nottingham Forest would score from a throw-in. This was sloppy football, nothing to look twice at, and yet there was some beauty in seeing Liverpool, who have struggled all year to win when playing badly, see out a rough 3-2 win at home. After Jota’s two goals, Mohamed Salah got the winner in the 70th minute, from a Trent Alexander-Arnold free kick. It might have been expected, as Forest are now winless in their last 11 games (8L-3D) and fivethirtyeight.com gives them an 84% chance of going down to the Championship next season. But titles (and top-five charges) are made by beating smaller teams, and Klopp’s squad got it done Saturday.
There are, however, much more exciting things happening this week in the Premier League than a review of Liverpool’s Saturday performance. In order to get a sense of the whole mental picture, we’ll organize these three major happenings under those most useful Freudian categories of Id, Ego, and Super-Ego.
Id: Tottenham Hotspur sack their interim manager Cristian Stellini
Freud, in the 1933 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, understood the id as the site of our most basic desires: the set of attractions, repulsions, and instincts “inherited…present at birth…laid down in the constitution.” Freud also understood that, because the id does not regulate itself, “contrary impulses exist side by side.”
This, to borrow a phrase for their former manager Antonio Conte, is the story of Tottenham. Spurs are all about contradiction: they want to be a big club, and so they build a £1.2 billion dollar stadium. They want to be a global brand, and so they make their football pitch fully retractable and build an NFL-size turf field underneath to host the NFL, who come once a year. They get in trouble for hosting too many concerts at their stadium, which is registered as a football arena. They want to play beautiful football, so they hire Mauricio Pochettino. They almost win the 2019 Champions League, fire Pochettino, and hire José Mourinho because he is a proven winner. Mourinho plays the kind of unwatchable, negative football that he has always played. They fire him. They hire Fabio Paratici from Juventus as Director of Football. He hires Antonio Conte, also from Juventus. Conte plays Mourinho’s football but has longer hair and is Italian. He doesn’t win enough either, and is unhappy with the ownership of the club. He gives an epic rant where he accuses everyone at Tottenham except himself of laziness or incompetence. He goes back to Italy, works out his severance package, and leaves by “mutual agreement.” Spurs hire his assistant, Cristian Stellini, to be interim manager. Days later, FIFA ban Paratici from holding any football position, after it is found out that he cooked the books at Juventus. Paratici loses an appeal, and resigns from Tottenham. Tottenham lose 3-2, in the last minute, against bottom-table Bournemouth. Exhale.
Then, this Sunday morning, Newcastle United slot five goals past Tottenham keeper Hugo Lloris within the first twenty-one minutes of the game. Stellini looks dumbfounded, and center-back Cristian Romero chews his finger in disbelief. Lloris comes off at half-time, apparently for a muscular injury. Harry Kane gets a goal back in the second half, but Spurs lose 6-1, just shy of their record 7-1 Premier League defeat, also to Newcastle.
This morning, Spurs Chairman Daniel Levy announced that Stellini—the interim (!) manager—had been sacked.
It’s almost a joke at this point to rag on Tottenham, as if they were the worst-run club in the Premier League (they’re not—that’s Everton), or as if they are the worst-performing (they’re not—they’re in fifth place, well above Liverpool). But there is something so contradictory about Tottenham that it is impossible not to speak about them in strongly emotional language. Perhaps it’s because we recognize in Tottenham something of a trapped feeling which we abhor in ourselves—in trying to be so many things and to play so many styles of football so quickly, they have become sort of identity-less. Players like Romero—who just won a World Cup with Argentina, a team whose burning identity was to get Lionel Messi a trophy—seem lost at Spurs.
Not that any of this is unfixable. Players like Romero, Harry Kane, Heung-min Son, Ivan Perišić, and Richarlison will bounce back to identity and form just as soon as Tottenham find some sort of plan and identity that lasts beyond six months. (Kane and Perišić, for what it’s worth, have never really been off form.) But what is scary for Tottenham is that, on their current course, they may not have the same kind of squad by the time they hire a full-time manager with a two-year plan. Harry Kane, a generational talent whose reputation has probably been hampered by Spurs, has wanted to leave for a while, and will probably do so this summer.
Kane must have his own conflicting desires about leaving a club for whom he is a living legend. He probably won’t get better wages somewhere else, but there is the small matter that he is much more likely to win trophies if he’s not at Tottenham (where he has won zero, unless you count the two-day, preseason Audi Cup). The bright side for Spurs is this: Kane’s departure will be so devastating that they may have no choice but to get an identity, and a plan, quickly. Until then, it is all instinct, and all contradiction.
Ego: The title race
Freud understood the ego as the part of the psyche that tried to realize the id’s desires in beneficial, rather than self-destructive, ways. The important part here is that the ego mediates between the real, external world and the imagined, interior world of desire—Freud says in the same 1933 book that the ego’s job is “to be taking notice of reality even when the id has remained rigid and unyielding.”
This spring, there is no better explanation for the ego than the title race between Arsenal and Manchester City. Arsenal, the current leaders, have the second-lowest average squad age in the league at 24.4, just above last-place Southampton. They play beautiful, human football, zinging passes around in small spaces and each trusting one another with the ball. But youth also carries with it inexperience and nerves, and Arsenal, who haven’t won the Premier League since 2003, have begun to slip a little—drawing Liverpool 2-2 away (understandable), drawing West Ham 2-2 away (not understandable), and then drawing Southampton 3-3 at home (unthinkable). The fact that Arsenal were down 3-1 in the 88th of 98 minutes against Southampton is either a sign that things are going off the rails or a sign that Arsenal have genuine fight and identity. (They nearly won the game when Leandro Trossard, ancient for the squad at age 28, hit the crossbar in minute 90+2.)
Man City, meanwhile, are the definition of “rigid and unyielding.” They have won four of the last five Premier League titles, largely with the same squad, and this year have added Erling Haaland (32 goals in 28 league appearances) to try to win the Champions League, where they are the clear favorite. City, annoyingly, can even claim some credit for Arsenal’s run: Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta was until December 2019 an assistant to Pep Guardiola at City, and Arsenal signed two major players this summer from Manchester: Oleksandr Zinchenko and Gabriel Jesus.
City are best compared to a machine—they have transformed the title race, as Liverpool know all too well, from a competition for consistently good results into a competition for consistently perfect results. Turn on any football show now, and you’ll hear serious talk about teams like Arsenal (this year) or Liverpool (last year) needing to win every one of their last eight or nine games—no draws!—to be serious title contenders. It’s just assumed, usually correctly, that City will do the same.
From the Premier League’s perspective, it’s perhaps not the greatest look to have City winning every year, especially since they weren’t competitive or particularly well-supported before the takeover. City seem to have passed beyond Freud, beyond psychology—their only goal or thought right now seems to be winning. Everyone except City fans, meanwhile, are hoping Arsenal can do what the ego does: tame City’s rigidity and their refusal to live in reality, or at least what used to be reality.
All this psychology all comes to a head this week, when Arsenal play City at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester. Kick-off is at 8 P.M. local time, or 3 P.M. E.T. I think the best we City-skeptics can hope for is 1-0 to the Arsenal.
Super-Ego: The relegation battle
Freud defined the super-ego, most simply, as the force which mediates between the desires of the Id and Ego, the force which makes morality, belief systems, and intellectual heritage possible. It is the part of the psyche which can contend, critically and not just in a pleasure-seeking way, with our own selves.
All of this comes out in a relegation battle, and if the fight for the top spot this year in the Premier League is less competitive than we should like, the battle to avoid relegation from the bottom of the table more than makes up for it. This season is slightly unusual in that there is only one team, Southampton, who are virtually guaranteed to be relegated, not only because of their current position (dead last) but also because of the way they have been playing (until Friday’s draw with Arsenal, dreadfully). The rest of the picture at the bottom is much less clear: Wolves and Bournemouth are likely, but not guaranteed, to survive, whereas Leicester, Leeds, and Everton all stand real chances of being relegated. Two of these are big clubs—Leicester won the title in the 2015/16 season, and have several big-name players; Everton, meanwhile, are one of only six clubs never to have been relegated out of the Premier League. Both Leeds and Everton narrowly escaped relegation last year in the kind of final-day performances that can leave teams and fans emotionally drained for months. All the Everton fans I see online are in various states of self-aware resignation—most are caught between being resigned to relegation and resigned to the pain of hoping with their whole hearts that they will somehow escape.
There will be more to say on the topic, surely, as we approach the end of the season. But suffice it to say, for now, that the work of generations—the values, morals, and standards of clubs—are all at risk in the face of relegation. Once you go out of the Premier League, it is very hard to get back in, never mind break the vicious cycle of bouncing back and forth every year. The finances are brutally difficult to get right, and one needs to be City-like about winning to get back from the Championship to the Premier League. But all this is the work of the super-ego—to decide not only what we want, or how to get it in a self-benefitting way, but to decide what kind of people we want to be and what things we want to do together. To all the clubs at the bottom, and to their fans, a sincere dose of sympathy.