📢 Is it worth working in the football industry?
nutmeg fc #60
For Jordi Alba to become who he is today, he had to sprint hundreds of times into empty spaces waiting for a deep ball that never came. And despite the frustration that being ignored after such a great effort generates, he kept sprinting into empty spaces, again and again, and preparing himself so that, the day the ball arrived, he would be able to control it and resolve well.
Entering the football industry is a bit like wanting to be Jordi Alba. Either you are friends with the number 10 and he brings you into the game, or you have to sprint into empty spaces over and over again hoping that, at some point, a deep ball will come your way.
However, this is the easy part. Football is a volatile and changeable sport, often decided more by emotion than by reason, and in which chance has an influence that is as wonderful as it is damned.
And I'm not just talking about the game. Footballers are the main asset of the industry, but they can also be unpredictable or difficult to manage.
For instance, did you watch All or Nothing: Juventus? At one point, the story focuses on a member of the club's audiovisual team who is on the verge of a panic attack. Nothing bad happened, but he's waiting for Cristiano Ronaldo to film the Christmas greeting and all he can think about is everything that can go wrong. What if he doesn't show up? What if he's in a bad mood? What if he doesn't want to do it? What if he only agrees to do one take and it doesn't look good? In the end CR7 arrives in a good mood, does it perfectly and everything goes well. The audiovisual guy can breathe a sigh of relief but he has lost years of life.
The mood of footballers is just one example among many. Working in this industry is emotionally charged in a way that many other jobs are not. It demands being aware of thousands of possibilities that in no way depend on us. It means working weekends and nights. It requires accepting that everything thought and planned is tied to an enormous quota of chance. It’s like trying to build a house of cards on the beach. On a windy day. With a couple of gin and tonics on you.
So the question arises, why would anyone want to work in the football industry? Or, more to the point, why would I want to? I make more money, work less hours and struggle less working in other industries.
So it doesn't give me more money, more peace of mind or more time, but can it give me more happiness?
What makes us happy?
In her book, The Power of Meaning, researcher Emily Esfahani Smith concludes that seeking happiness does not make us happy. What makes us happy is finding meaning. And meaning is nothing more than belonging and serving something beyond oneself and developing the best version of oneself.
According to Esfahani Smith, there are four pillars of a meaningful life: belonging, purpose, transcendence and storytelling. What I find most interesting is that, while achieving just one of these pillars is enough to live a happy life, all four can be achieved by living a footie life.
Belonging.
This is the pillar through which most people achieve happiness. It refers to having bonds with people you value for who they are (without wanting to change them) and who in turn value you. It's the relationship one has with family or friends. It's tied to who you are, rather than what you feel or think. Football works very well to generate belonging because real fans do not like a football team, but rather feel it is part of their identity and, therefore, it links them with the rest of the people who share that identity. According to Soccernomics (by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski) football has a strong anti-suicide effect on people with low interpersonal skills because it helps them feel that they belong.Purpose.
Which is not the same as a goal. It's not what one wants, but what one gives to serve another. It's always linked to altruistic issues. It’s not a stretch to say that football fan actually feel that they are helping their team when they sing in the stadium, defend it on social media or hang the flag from the balcony? That’s why they’re called supporters.Transcendence.
It’s that which goes beyond the mundane, that which connects us to a higher reality. This often happens through art and also through religion. I am sure that everyone reading this newsletter is convinced that football is art. And I also believe that very few would deny its religious characteristics. The bulletproof fanaticism, the rites, the gods, messiahs and demons, the miracles, the stigmata... You don't have to be a member of the Maradonian church to believe in the hand of God.Storytelling.
Stories have united us for billions of years. In fact, the first human beings survived when they began to reach out to each other to share stories, anecdotes, learnings. This, of course, is something I just made up, but it must not be far from the truth. The storytelling that allows us to generate meaning is not just any story, however important it may be. It is the stories we can tell about ourselves and how we tell them. Stories allow us to show that we exist, and football generates thousands of stories every week. Because even if we are telling the story of a game we don't play, watching it makes us part of it. The most frequent types of stories are redemption, growth and love. It doesn't get any more footie than that.
Conclusion.
It is hard not to want to work in an industry that has so much capacity to generate happiness. Real and lasting happiness, not just adrenaline or the temporary endorphin of having made a purchase.
Now, whether I'm going to make a living from football is another matter. The hard data says probably not. But who cares about data when you can be happy.
2025 kicks off.
I sprint into an empty space.