speedy wrote:
Burnwinter wrote:
They are professional footballers. Accepting criticism goes with the territory, actual abuse is a shame but also to be expected if your performances are abominable.
I find it extremely hard to feel sorry for these guys who earn in a week what the average person earns in a year.
Don't like the heat? Work a couple of years and retire.
The financial side of it isn't the point I was making although its interesting to think there's sum of money that if you earn past that particular point its OK to abuse you to menal health issues. But let's stick a pin in that point.
The point is that in real terms, once they arrive at a club like Arsenal, professional footballers have far more freedom and agency than ordinary people, or even privileged workers like myself. They've chosen a path that requires immense dedication, and carries considerable pressures, and comes with huge rewards.
I personally think that failing in front of 60,000 fans who are biting their lips to avoid hurting your feelings would carry its own weight. Football is a very public, very arbitrary activity where success is defined by the millisecond and millimetre. The "abuse" from fans is the dual of our rather arbitrary cathexis, which is what in turn defines our willingness to give up our time and money to the spectacle. For some fans, the abuse may be the product itself: a distasteful situation, but understandable given the constrained working lives to which ordinary people return when they're not briefly liberated by the myriad psychological transferences of football. If being a footballer is a Faustian bargain, it's not a particularly difficult one for most, even the Denilsons. It's the men truly damaged by the experience, like Gascoigne or Maradona for whom I reserve my sympathy, and even then it seems clear their outcomes are bound to complex preexisting tendencies.
speedy wrote:
But the point I was making was abusing your own team is just poor impulse control like a small child. As it makes the player worse the team performance worse and the results you dont like worse. Deep down they know its damaging for thr team but abusing the player lets them vent so they feel good for a few seconds.
I think it's preposterous, for the reasons given above, to expect or indeed desire the experience of being a football fan to be one characterised by the duty of work, its own kind of work. That's not how this arrangement should be and I wouldn't want it if it were, I have work that pays me. I know you've worked in sports support teams (or similar) and I think that mentality would make sense from the vantage point of a support worker. It doesn't from mine.