I may have made the semi-random (in the usual American way) decision to support Liverpool, but I have a lot of Gooner friends, and even real affection for the club from North London. A lot of Yanks seem to like Arsenal, a tendency which I imagine involves all kinds of dark cultural DNA surrounding firearms and weaponry and National Rifle Association membership and subarticulate theories of rugged individualism. (”Fuck, dude, my Uncle Trev has a MASSIVE arsenal…I better support those guys.”) And, of course, when you’re a clueless Septic trying to “get into soccer,” the name Arsenal calls out to you amid the unfamiliar chaos of clubs. As you read through dauntingly long league tables crowded with the likes of Sheffield Someday, Witherwhence Athletic, Everton, West Sandwich Albion, Everywhere United, AFC No One Knows What the “A” Stands For and other ridiculously High-Church Anglican club names, “Arsenal” appeals with its simplicity. Then you read Fever Pitch and you’re pretty much done.

Which all goes to say that I found it utterly miserable to watch the black-mass priests of Manchester Bay lead the Arsenal Football Club about like a fatted calf purpose-bred to sate the Volcano God. The events at Emirates stand as an example of what gratuitous violence in the media can do to a society: perfectly nice little football teams, trained in the latest feats of Art by the finest French professors, get mauled on the way to the Underground station by well-honed organized crime units. This match may have been a deleted scene from that film Gomorrah, for all I know.

And that, I think, is the terrifying and impressive quality of Manchester United—the sense that they are not so much a collection of men as a unified and unbending Force, the true strength of which flows from unseen places. Sure, the guys at the stadium are human enough: Rooney, apt at any moment to kill a bystander for sport; Ronaldo, who must think it highly amusing to hear Franck Ribery bandied about as an adequate replacement; Ferguson, whose little celebratory jigs are very unbecoming, if you ask me. And sometimes those guys at the stadium even lose. But in the end, they’re just the muscle. They may falter and provide you a brief glimmer of hope. The Organization will always come for you—with a teenage Italian you never heard tell of, or a mysteriously sturdy Korean, or Paul Scholes.

The Organization will always come for you. The Organization always wins.

Two fine, revealing posts at two of my favorite football blogs:

Vanda Wilcox (AKA Spangly Princess) reports that her fellow AS Roma supporters are so out-of-joint about that club’s dismal season that the leading ultras groups boycotted a home match and played a five-a-side tournament outside the stadium instead. This, after a tense meeting between these same ultras and Roma’s leading players and long, entangled speculation about the debt-ridden club’s possible sale to George Soros, some socialite Germans with strong National Socialist connections, or parties unknown. (Vanda, who has clearly absorbed Italian football culture’s total strangeness, says she’d prefer the Germans to Soros because they come from a country with a “football culture.” Soros, born in Budapest, might say: Che?) 

I don’t know whether my reaction to this is more “That’s the spirit, boys!” or “Man, things are really fucking weird in Italy.” I think some combination of the two, yes?

Second, YOU MUST IMMEDIATELY READ Brian Phillips’ staggering post on the aesthetics, politics and mythopoetics of FC Barcelona. Written in the wake of Barca’s 0 : 0 home draw against the Brutalists of Chelsea, this piece resonates even more strongly after the Blaugrana’s mesmerizing 2 : 6 destruction of Madrid over the weekend. I would cheerfully admit that discovering Run of Play just about put Eleven Devils out of business, because I just can’t compete with the craft and firepower Brian deploys over there. This post is a good demonstration thereof…and makes more sense than RoP’s blanket coverage of Brian’s computer fantasy team, which I frankly just don’t understand.