What can sport teach us about the nature of the tribe? Can the human inclination for sports give us insight into the dynamics of human power?
In this episode of APEX Level To Power w chat with Jim Luisi and football/soccer coach Morell Maison we discuss what English Football teaches us about human power.
Transcript
| Mark Gleason: | Welcome to APEX Level to Power, the podcast completely dedicated to your self-empowerment. The title of this episode is Sports and the Nature of Tribalism. We have two guests on today; a friend of the program Jim Luisi, and Morell Maison, European football coach and philosopher of life. Together we have an interesting conversation about what is the nature of sport, why is British football in particular so emblematic of this tribalism that surrounds different kinds of sports teams, and what can we learn from that? You can change your level, change your life, change the world. Welcome to APEX Level to Power.
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| Escape the herd, rise above the pack. This is the Apex Level to Power podcast, the only place on the web that teaches you to identify and control the invisible strings that dominate all human interaction. We teach sheep to become wolves, a challenge to be sure, but one that we answer and answer with vigor. I am your faithful host Mark Gleason. I welcome you to the program, and I invite you to visit our little corner of the web at leveltopower.com for more information and to support the broadcast.
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| Speaker 2: | And now, for an episode from the APEX Level to Power Man on Fire series, the episodes where guests find personal power, and we prove that like a masochistic narcissist, you only hurt the ones you love.
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| Mark Gleason: | Welcome to APEX Level to Power. We are thrilled to have in the studio today Jim Luisi and Morell Maison, back to talk about the power dynamics that exist behind football. By that we mean European football and specifically English football. Certainly a sport is a very great lens to look at any society. How people deal with their sports is how they also deal with many other aspects of their family, of their business and their work and their politics and their life. Welcome, gentlemen. Jim, just to introduce you quickly first, you’re a friend of the program, author Jim Luisi. Thank you for coming back. Maybe you could just give us a quick into to yourself and what your approach is to this topic of sports.
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| Jim Luisi: | I represent the exact opposite of Morell. While both of us have been a soccer coach, I coach my daughter’s team and because of my style, I didn’t bother reading the rule book. I just look to see, this kid has a really good left foot, this kid has a really good right foot. Okay, you play on the left side, you play on the right side, and we won almost every game. The other coaches who knew how to play hated me.
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay, as do all of our European football fans-
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes.
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| Mark Gleason: | … who are now turning off the podcast. But before you do so, we brought some legitimate experts on this topic to the podcast for you.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes you have.
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| Mark Gleason: | We have Morell Maison. Thank you for joining us. Please introduce yourself to the podcast and let us know a little of your background in the football industry.
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| Morell Maison: | I’m a football supporter and my name’s Morell. I’ve been involved in football for many, many years, and I’ve studied the game. I’ve coached at pro-level. I coached at the national league with Kettering Town. I coached in the national league with Chester City, and in the lower local leagues with Buckingham Town, so … I spent a lot of years in the game coaching. I have my UA for qualified coach. I have a diploma in sports psychology, so I like to think I’m a student of the game.
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| I spent a lot of time in the game, not just in England but places stretched as far as Belize and Germany and Italy and I’ve really … Holland. I followed the game and coached in different countries and tackled courses in different countries, and tried to understand this fascinating game, which changes all the time. It changes like society changes. The disciplines of the game change, the speed of the game changes, the school levels of the game change, the participants change. It’s such a deeply simple game, but it really tests you when you’re either a coach or a player.
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| Mark Gleason: | Well, very good. We have a big listenership in Europe, and also in Bermuda, and also in Australia. There’s many people I think who already follow football pretty closely, through the lens of their particular team, but perhaps you could just give an intro to our American listeners who know soccer as a sport, and are probably used to supporting their home team, be it baseball or hockey or basketball or American football, but who may not be aware of how different it is to be part of a team where you have a local team, your grandfather supported the team, your father supported the team, you support the team, and it becomes almost like a local industry, and I think Americans experience some of that. We have hometown teams that become kind of larger than life with multi-generational things, but I don’t think, just to an extent I should say, that exists in England. What makes English football different from a societal perspective? Why is this sport so all consuming in England?
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| Morell Maison: | I think it’s the history of the game. This game started over a hundred years ago. Many of the clubs, three of the clubs that I’ve represented were formed in the 1890s, so these clubs have been going for a long time and one of those clubs has only ever played at the same stadium. It’s been playing at the same stadium since 1893. Everybody that was born in that town that grew up in that town supports the club. The club is part of their lives. It’s the fabric of their life. It’s part of the fabric of their lives, so they become very entwined with their club, and that’s what leads to things like Celtic never signing a Rangers player or a catholic not playing for Rangers, or a [inaudible 00:06:41] not playing for Celtic, which is a catholic club.
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| These things have only changed recently after about the last 15, 20 years. Prior to that, you never had people that played outside those clubs. In Spain, it was Catalan. You couldn’t play for certain clubs in the Catalan regions if you weren’t a Catalonian. You couldn’t play for them. They wouldn’t have you, and they didn’t care if they didn’t win the league or if they were mid table, but they have their rules and that’s what they applied. You had all these … Even to today, I can’t remember the last time Arsenal bought a player from Tottenham. I know a lot of people are gonna be screaming at their things going, “Sol Campbell,” but Sol Campbell was out of contract and came to Arsenal. We didn’t buy him from Tottenham. I’m trying to think the last time Tottenham bought a player from Arsenal or Arsenal bought a player from Tottenham. It doesn’t happen. You know, I’ve done business with [inaudible 00:07:35], and Liverpool have done business with everyone, but very rarely … They very rarely sell their top players, their good players, to each other.
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| This rivalry is endemic. It was a working man’s game, so you supported your local club. That’s not so much now in the globalization of the world. People support Manchester though they’ve never been to England. People support Manchester United that live in London, that have never been to Manchester. You do get this … The closeness of the game, I think with America being new and introducing the game relatively recently in the last 25, 30 years, you have distance and I think that distance dilutes the effect of the rivalry. When you talk about Liverpool [inaudible 00:08:20] you could throw a cricket ball into these grounds from each other. You talk about Manchester and Manchester City, they’re right on each other’s doorsteps. You can hear the roar of the crowd in Manchester United’s ground from Manchester City’s ground.
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| You have all these clubs, Tottenham and Arsenal, West Ham … You have all these, West Ham and all. You have all these clubs that are so close to each other, and their fan bases live next to each other. I have friends who have brothers where one supports Liverpool and one support Everton, and if it’s football, the arguments are so [inaudible 00:08:58] doesn’t spin it into violence, but when they walk of the house one turns right and the other ones turns left, and they’re brothers living in the same family. The grounds are so close, so you have Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday, Nottingham Forest and Notts County, so there’s stadiums that are almost opposite of each other, with two sets of fans, and often the families of those fans support opposing clubs and they never switch. When you have your club, that’s your club through thick and thin, good or bad, that is your football club.
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| I think that’s the difference between the British football club and the British football in commodity to maybe America, is just the size. South America, it’s different. They have a similar rivalry in South America, and I’ve coached in South America, so … It’s a different rivalry but it’s no less intense. It’s a very intense rivalry, and it has that Latino Caribbean mix in there that makes it extremely volatile. You’ll see many a referee running off the pitch at the ends of the games to avoid a discussion with the fans.
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| Mark Gleason: | Well, certainly geography had to play a role here. If you are sharing a neighborhood with a rival team, then in-group loyalty is extraordinarily important, and certainly social signaling about which group you adhere to is extraordinarily important. Less important, for instance, if you’re New York versus Atlanta, or New York versus Austin. You don’t have to enforce. You don’t have to check with every single person around you as still onboard with group team, because there’s only one big local team, let’s say.
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| The way it works in most American sports is there are two teams in a city, but they’re in different leagues, and therefore they very rarely ever play each other. It is interesting how the close proximity does drive a certain amount of the fervor required to make sure you’re constantly keeping your people engaged and loyal, and not losing any new fans to the other more energized team.
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| Morell Maison: | Now, the discussion’s become interesting. It’s difficult … Unlike politics, we could have a conversation about President Trump, and at some point we will agree on something. We’ll go, “Well, we can agree on that because we think it’s logical.” It makes sense. Football becomes illogical. If I’m talking to a Spur supporter, there’s nothing that I say that makes sense, and there’s nothing that he says that really makes sense to me. I’m slightly different because I have more panoramic views, so I could understand the views and I understand the player.
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| The players in this are a completely separate dimension, remember. They’re a completely separate entity, because they’re commodities. They can be for themselves. You can be playing for Arsenal today, and you could be playing for Liverpool next week, because they sold you. That loyalty for the player is to the check, unless the player is someone like Steven Gerrard, who’s been at Liverpool all his life. He’s played for Liverpool all his life until he was sold to an American club.
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| For the last two years of his career, he’s back coaching at Liverpool. He’s a Liverpool supporter through and through. He’s Liverpool fan. He started watching the team on the terraces before he ended up playing for the team, all his life, which is unusual in today’s game. There are not many of them. They’re commodities, so they could be an Arsenal supporter whilst they’re playing for the club, then maybe they get sold, they’re an Everton supporter because they play for Everton now. The ones that play a lot of games for a club always retain that little loyalty. This is their business, this is their job, and they’ve had to move. There’s a completely different dynamic when you talk about the movement of football as inside football.
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| Mark Gleason: | But through the APEX Level to Power lens, what I would say is somebody who is level one, who sees one perspective and they’ve embodied usually their local environment as the true perspective. To a level one, argument level one, about football, about differing religions, about differing nations, are always going to have that misunderstanding, because they only see their own perspective, and everything else comes out as nonsense that disagrees with that perspective. If you are more of a student of the game … So, you’re a coach, right? You’re more of a student of the game, and you’re talking to a Tottenham coach who is also a student of the game. You guys will certainly be able to make much more progress because you’re able to see a perspective beyond just blind loyalty and [crosstalk 00:13:31]
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| Morell Maison: | Yes, I agree. I’ve actually signed players from Tottenham as an Arsenal supporter.
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| Mark Gleason: | For another team?
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| Morell Maison: | For another team that I was coaching, yeah. I’ve had a contingency of Tottenham players, but no, I’m an Arsenal supporter. I’m working for a different football club, so it’s a different challenge, but either you-
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| Mark Gleason: | All hate mail for Morell goes to info@leveltopower.com. Well, very good. Thank you guys then for the intro. Let’s get more into the nuts and bolts of what tribal power is, and what European football can teach us about the mechanics of tribal power.
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| This podcast actually came about as an output of a conversation Morell and I had several years ago, when we were talking about the power dynamics behind European football, henceforth referred to as football, where we talked about the clubs, the local clubs that exist in the UK, and the great rivalries that still exist between different locations, which are only miles apart, and how this kind of feeds into the tribalism and taps into the tribalism of, there’s inherent in all people, and how this is an excellent showcase of that. We spoke about how what started off as a bunch of football games became a commodity where you could just record all of them, and you could have channels which had just wall-to-wall football 24 hours a day, and people would actually pay for that. Even though you are highly tribal and you hate the people two miles from you who play football, you’ll watch Croatia versus Lithuania at three o’clock in the morning, because it’s still football, even though it’s a world away from your own tribal experience.
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| This really is a microcosm for the human experience. Across the world at every country and every culture, you have the same phenomena that happens. The English football example is unique in some ways. As compared to let’s say American football, where I think the mobility of American society, the fact people move around quite a bit, leave their old neighborhoods, you don’t have the same kind of diehard entrenched fandom that sometimes you see in the UK. I think that is a very interesting lens to look at these ideas of tribalism. What is sport to the tribe, to the herd? What is it a placeholder for? What do fans get out of it when they commit themselves wholly to this larger cause, this larger community cause, and what happens when you start having these different tribes that are united under one banner? Meaning, when you have the religious tribe you belong to, and the geographic community tribe, and the sports tribe, and all these things get combined into this one thing, which could be your local football club, what is the power of that versus merely a sporting team?
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| Morell and I had a great conversation a couple years ago that touched on all these topics, and now that we have the APEX Level to Power program, it seemed very appropriate. We have quite a large following, actually, in the UK and Bermuda and Australia, so for all those listeners there, this is a special football podcast just for you. Looking at football through the lens of the APEX Level to Power. That’s kind of how I see, as an outsider looking in, if I look at it merely as a function of human experience, of belonging to a tribe, and the benefits and cost associated with that, I’m fascinated by this idea of looking at English football in this way.
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| Now, you obviously grew up in it, and maybe you could introduce for the listeners your perspective on it since you participated as a fan, and you’ve also participated as part of the machine, the football machine, in some ways. Perhaps you could just introduce us a bit to your background and help inform us about your perspective.
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| Morell Maison: | Thank you, Mark. I think this is going to be a very interesting conversation, and interesting on a lot of different levels. I will reproach you for your use of the word “merely”, this is not merely a football game or a soccer match. This taps into several areas. It taps into religion, it taps into race, it taps into homophobia, it taps into sexism. It actually touches so many different areas of life and … It taps into politics. It taps into so many different areas. It’s not just merely a game. It’s something that affects people in a lot of different ways, and unlike anywhere else in the world. I think I’ve seen the stunning success of the sport of football in other areas, and I’ve seen rivalries between teams because they may be locally in the vicinity, but rarely have I ever seen some of the historical division, rivalry, passion, and in some cases hatred that some of the rivalries in European football, particularly British football.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yeah, that’s a key point. It’s able to tap into historical rivalries that go back many hundreds of years, and that’s something you just can’t see at Giants game.
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| Mark Gleason: | Well, it’s important to understand, I think, just to note, before we really get into this, what the function of sports is, in a human society. Right? Sports has a particular placeholder, and that used to be that during peace time, you needed some way to train your warriors. Right? You would have these different athletic competitions, which were usually directly applicable to their ability to go wage war. The problem is, when you’re doing training with people, you don’t want to weaken the tribe who you’re training. You don’t want to have actual combat where your warriors are getting killed or maimed. Therefore, you need to have something less than combat. You need to have some trainings which you can reuse. Reusability becomes a very important part of whatever training regiment you’re engaged in. Therefore, you have these rules to blunt the severity of the possibility of maiming your potential troops.
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| You have this idea of sports where we’re going to change the rules now, we’re gonna go out there, we’re going to fight, we’re gonna settle all our differences in a way, where we hate you and you hate us, but we’ll send our teams out there to fight, and we’ll have bragging rights for the next year until the following year, and hopefully we’ll go out there and win, and maybe we can avoid a war in this way. That’s a very fascinating human diversion.
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| Just one note here, I think we’ve noted it on a previous podcast; what’s fascinating is when two teams go into a game, any sporting event, and they measure the adrenaline and endorphin levels. They’re both very high going in. The winners have endorphin levels that are very high for days afterwards, whereas the losers, they immediately crash after a loss. What’s fascinating is the fans follow exactly the same curve, where the fans of the winners, their endorphins are at an all time high for days as well, even though they had no part of the actual victory. They didn’t participate, they were in no part of the sporting event, but they somehow reaped the benefits of being a victor vicariously through feeling like they participated in a team. That’s obviously very, very a, key to human functioning, and a very important part of human functioning, and b, integral to this whole idea that I can somehow be part of a tribe, have no risk of maiming, but have many of the benefits associated with victory.
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| Jim Luisi: | I’m gonna challenge that last piece about no risk of maiming.
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| Mark Gleason: | This bring us to English football.
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| Jim Luisi: | Exactly. I think one of the stories that Morell can share is, what kind of security precautions are taken at some of these games where you have these strong rivalries near local factions?
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| Morell Maison: | Well, I can actually speak from direct experience there being an Arsenal fan myself and a lifelong Arsenals fan. I should say, actually, Arsenal supporter, because I should really make a difference between fans of what you would call soccer, and supporters of football. There is a direct difference. One of the biggest rivalries in English football is the game between Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal [inaudible 00:22:21]. This is historical. Both North London clubs, both powerhouses in the game, and as an Arsenal supporter I would say it’s an intense rivalry. I’m sure that many people don’t understand why it’s developed into such an intense rivalry, but it’s extremely intense.
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| I’ve actually seen, and Americans will realize that our enforcement officers in England are not armed. Well, a section of the enforcement officers are armed, but your every day on-the-beat guy is not an armed officer. When we have attended a Tottenham verus Arsenal game, I have been in the stadium, in the bowels of the stadium, watching the game from a particular vantage point, and we’re stunned to see anywhere up to a hundred heavily-armed police officers waiting for a signal, and that signal was to inform them of where a pre-arranged battle was going to take place, either during or immediately after the game.
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| Tottenham’s stadium holds about 38 thousand. I’m sure there must be another 10 thousand in the streets surrounding the stadium who can’t get into the ground, that want to be directly affected by the passion that this game produces. In a second, this particular area of the stadium emptied as these guys get the tip to where this fight’s gonna be. This is a pre-organized battle between two sets of supporters. That is not pretty. It will end up with people being hospitalized, and on occasions, killed. When you say you’re not sure that the system’s devised to stop people from killing each other, it doesn’t happen that way.
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| Mark Gleason: | No, that’s true, but in general, that is the function that sports play, and even then, even in this case. Imagine if you had no sports. We outlawed football. Right? Now you have these two sections of North London who hate each other, and there’s no outlet for it. You’ve outlawed football, and now they just are hating each other and you don’t know where this is gonna crop up. You don’t know when there’s gonna be a riot, or you don’t know when there’s gonna be a battle, or you don’t know when … It becomes gang warfare at that point, versus open sporting events.
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| The fact that you can have 10s of thousands of people on either side, and a few of the roughnecks go in the street and slug it out, and a few people end up in the hospital, is a miracle. That almost strengthens the case for the importance of sports as an outlet for particularly young men who have an excess of testosterone and are looking to channel it somewhere. Right? And to channel it in a way that makes them feel good and victorious like they are part of the battle without actually joining a street gang and going out there and doing battle. I think I stand by my point.
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| Just to shape this for our American listeners, so the English listeners and the ones in Australia and Bermuda, and Europe in general as a matter of fact, understand all this already, but in America, we have … I think it’s a lot cleaner division between teams that you’re focused on your local team, your local tribe that everybody locally supports, and there are certain functions there. There’s not a lot of historic rivalry for other socio-economic reasons. The Superbowl with Atlanta, Georgia and the New England Patriots, there are certainly a rivalry there, and a certain amount of hatred there between the diehard fans, but not because of ancient religious reasons, or tales of economic oppression, or anything like that. Right? These two teams are simply located in different cities and there’s the classic sports rivalry.
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| Now, this is one of the advantages of being a young country, where we don’t have a lot of deep-rooted history, and you have a chance to kind of move beyond some of the old hatreds in some ways. The Atlantic Falcons are a relatively new team, right? When you talk about other parts of the world, and in particular England, which has a very rich, very deep history, I think what we’ll have Morell explain more of for us is, you have these deep-seeded resentments from past thousand years of Irish and the Scotch and the Welsh and the British, and all of these different factions and how they all treated each other and wronged each other, and how this is often dredged up and used as fuel to fuel rivalries when these different factions go and do quote unquote battle on the pitch. Is it called the pitch, or is that only in cricket? Okay.
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| Morell Maison: | It’s still a pitch.
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay, very good. When they do battle on the pitch. Morell, perhaps for our American listeners in particular, if you could a, just explain a little bit about your background in the sport, because you actually have some interesting perspectives because you actually worked in the sport, and then maybe give us a brief history lesson of this, of why some of these football clubs have such an intense, more tribalism than you would expect from a normal sporting event because of these other socio-economic religious factors that kind of play into it. Certainly, I think you mentioned one of the Arsenal rivalries, that’s probably pretty representative of many of the other rivalries around European football, in terms of the other factors that have come to play when people or when groups of fans are opposing each other. Maybe you could kind of give us a window into that world.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yeah, I’m particularly looking forward to the thousand years in a thousand seconds.
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| Morell Maison: | I think the Arsenal Tottenham rivalry is more based around the location, and as such, losing some of the global interest that you would see in other rivalries. If you look at the Scottish and Irish rivalries, when you look at Celtic and Rangers, you now have all the components for a really interesting, sometimes disturbing, discussion because you have two strong factors that are involved in this discussion. You have the political factor, you have the religious factor, and you have the emotional factor that drives all these. When you consider that the theme of today’s discussion is the song that the Irish … It’s been owned by the Irish national team supporters, The Field of Athenry, and you look at the origin of that which goes back to the great Irish famine.
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| It’s surprising to realize that the Great Irish Famine today, at a football match somewhere in the world, that is played out with an Irish contingency, evokes such emotion that it’s played out within or around the context of a football match. When you hear the passion for the song and if you’ve read the poem, it’s amazing that people converse it from start to finish in song, in an arena, in a stadium, with such passion. I have very rarely heard such passion outside of Anfield Football Club, so it ranges. These are stadiums that really … They give you goosebumps when these guys and girls start to sing and start to recollect some of these historical moments, which many people don’t really have on their calendar. It’s connection to football and to football clubs.
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| You take into consideration that during this famine, over a hundred thousand people left Ireland and went to Scotland. You also have a huge contingency of Irish people that during this problem, left Ireland and arrived in Liverpool. You now hear that song, which there is now another song that’s come out of that, The Fields of Anfield. For those of you that don’t know, Anfield is the home stadium for Liverpool Football Club. When you hear the Liverpool football fans singing that song in support of the Irish football fans or something that’s happening in Ireland, it then bring it home to you the amount of Irish people who now live in Liverpool that are still connected to their Irish brothers and sisters, and will sing that song at a football stadium in an English football game in support of their Irish brothers and sisters.
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| Now, the evolvement of football means that many of the players on the football field are not English, are not British, to the extent that you could look at a Liverpool football team and see maybe three Englishmen or British players. Probably no Irish players. Liverpool used to have a large contingency of Irish players. You’ll see a team that is represented by maybe no Irish players, and to a lesser degree, no English players, no British players [inaudible 00:32:10]. When you listen to the words of that song that are sung with such passion, you’re now looking at a situation where the Irish support are singing a song at an English football game where no Irishmen represent either team, to support their colleagues in Ireland around their different event.
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| What part does football play in there? Where is the sporting element in there, other than the venue? It’s not necessarily support for the team, because often, some of those team members don’t even speak English. They probably don’t even know what’s going on in terms of the words, the event, the history, and where they are channeling their energy and what cause they’re supporting. That is a very, very … And there are other examples, and I’m sure some of our listeners who are from Scotland or Ireland and Wales will have the completely different view or a similar view or other stories that support exactly what I’m saying.
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| It’s not as simple as merely a football game, and I’ve attended soccer stroke football matches in America, where you are fighting to stay awake because the game isn’t that good, and three or four thousand fans in a stadium that’s built for a hundred thousand fans have a rah-rah, let’s go, rah-rah call, but there’s no response because there are no opposition fans because it’s New York Red Bulls playing Miami. People don’t travel from Miami to New York to watch their team, or very few. When you’re at Manchester City or Manchester United taking into account the joke you told me the other day, you are less than a mile away in terms of these two huge stadiums, and then there’s a whole story that builds up around that.
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| When you’re in that ground … Traditionally it used to be a 50, 50 split on the gate, so you would play at home or away and it wouldn’t make a difference. You got half the attendance. Now it’s changed so that the home team keeps its funds, so if you’re the home team, you keep the game. Then you split the seating arrangements. You’d allow a certain amount of fans in. Now you allow very few in if you’re the home team. You still have sufficient rivalry to be able to hear and feel the passion between the two sets of supporters, and historically what these things mean. It’s more than just football. It spills over into a whole area of life that is extremely interesting. It’s always interesting to know that politicians say, in England particularly, football mirrors society. What you hear and feel and see in that stadium is a mirror on the way people think in the society they live in. It’s played out at that game.
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| Mark Gleason: | Well, certainly. Certainly it has to be a powerful indicator in the UK, no question. In the United States when it comes … We have so many sports, is our issue. Right? We have hockey and baseball and football and basketball … There’s just many, many sports to divide everybody’s attention. I think in the United States, the closest you get to that with European football would be the Mexico-USA rivalry, where there’s lots of historic grievances, really on both sides of that Mexico-USA divide, and the Mexicans will come to the US and attend a USA-Mexico game and outnumber the home crowd. You’ll have 10 thousand USA fans, you’ll have 20 thousand Mexican fans who travel to the USA to watch their team. Obviously there’s a lot of historical grievance being played out and aired during those games. There’s a lot of resentments that they’re at play, beyond the sport. I think that is probably as close as the US gets to that kind of rivalry, in when it comes to soccer slash football.
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| Morell Maison: | Well, I think it’s interesting to note you picked two countries. You picked Mexico and America, obviously looking at the historical problems between those. We’re talking about clubs within a city. We’re not even talking about … We could be looking at England versus Germany, England versus France, England versus Scotland, England versus Ireland, England versus Wales, or England versus anybody. You’re looking at countries. I’m not even looking at countries. Sometimes in Liverpool, you have more than two clubs in Liverpool. Liverpool and Everton are the two biggest clubs, but you’re talking about two football clubs a stone’s throw away that have massive rivalry in England, in Liverpool, and Everton. You could then look around and say, “Well, what about Tranmere?” Tranmere Rovers, they’re a smaller club, but you have lots of different clubs within that catchment area. Under Liverpool, Manchester United have the same … Manchester United and Manchester City are the two biggest clubs, but there are lots of other clubs around those two clubs, even drifting into non-league football. You could be talking about 20, 30 clubs.
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| We’re not even looking at the England-Scotland game, which is a hugely passionate game, to the degree … They don’t play that often anymore in their 70s and 80s. They used to play … They used to have the home championships, England, Scotland, Ireland and what else, Northern Ireland. The home championships. Maybe one of the readers will correct me on the Northern Ireland Republic of Ireland section of that. Those games evoke huge emotions. Those are nationals, internationals. When you talk about local rivalries, when you talk about grassroots football and the teams that you grow up supporting and the historical battles that you inherit to the degree that something that happens in another country will elicit support from a set of supporters in a different country, who obviously have a historical tie to that country, and the perceived atrocity that was visited on those people at that time, it brings a whole different dynamic into the game.
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| This is not just about football. This is something much deeper, and is, bearing in mind, that the Great Irish Famine was 1855, 1850 … Something over a five year period. This is not a few years ago. Most people living were not effected by that. Why the emotion on this subject now?
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| Mark Gleason: | Well, so … And this I think is a function of the tribe, Jim, is that it is important to know who you hate if you’re going to remain a tribe, right? Nothing galvanizes a tribe like an enemy, and nothing fractures a tribe like the lack of an enemy, a lack of a known enemy that can be quantified in front of you. All you gotta do is look at any country in peace time, and they become a squabbling mess. Then all of a sudden you have an enemy appear on the horizon, and boom, they get slapped into order because anybody who now tries to cause distention is immediately branded as somebody who’s weakening the cause.
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| Jim Luisi: | I’m curious, gonna ask you a question, Morell, about the security measures because I would imagine that at the end of the game probably has the highest chance of a full-blown riot breaking out, since one side has been defeated and one side is victorious. What’s your experience, and what security measures are taken at the end of the game?
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| Morell Maison: | It largely depends on which two teams are playing. It’s common for away supporters to be locked in the ground until the home supporters have been dispersed, until they’ve made their way home. Sometimes you can have 10s of thousands of supporters locked into a ground for an hour or two.
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| Jim Luisi: | You just don’t see that at a Mets game.
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| Mark Gleason: | No, you do see that at a Phillies game though. No, the violence obviously in American sports is much, much less than it would be in, than I’ve heard reported certainly, in English sports where you have these near riots that occur, or actual riots that occur.
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| Morell Maison: | I wouldn’t even say English sports, I would say football. Some of the levels of violence I’ve experienced at a football match-
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| Mark Gleason: | Some of those golf matches get pretty rowdy.
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| Morell Maison: | They do. In the USA versus Europe, team competitions. When I see some of that, you … I’ve never seen it at a rugby match. I’ve never seen it at a football match. I’ve never it in an athletic stadium or a number of other sporting events. I’ve never seen it.
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| Jim Luisi: | In cricket? Cricket? Cricket? No?
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| Morell Maison: | Cricket? I’ve never seen it in cricket, and in cricket you … I’m going back a few years, but you used to be able to drink at football matches in football stadiums. Now you can still drink in the periphery around the football stadium itself, and they sell … They have licensed areas in the football ground, but you cannot take that drink into the stadium. You can’t sit in your seat watching the game and have a drink, even if you’re in a private box. When the game starts, you’re no longer allowed to drink alcohol and take your seats and view the stand. It has to stay behind you when they shut the door.
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| The level of security invades even what you imbibe as a beverage. You cannot drink alcohol. That was devised to try and reduce the level of other factors that can incite violence, but these games can be extreme … The game itself can dictate a lot, because sometimes, particularly in local derbies, you don’t see a football match. You see a contest of gladiators. The ball is almost irrelevant, and that sets the tone for what, or can set the tone, for what can over spill into violence outside of the stadium.
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| Mark Gleason: | But there has to be a predisposition to violence already there, meaning the reason you may not see this at polo matches where all of a sudden people break out into fighting skirmishes over the result is because of the predisposition of violence. It says something about the economic clash you’re in. It says something about the risk of being arrested and how this might threaten your career prospects. It says something about whether you are actively looking for a socially acceptable outlet for violence. Right? If you are a Phillies fan, and I use those in America because they are known to be among the most violent, you go to that game, you are already frustrated.
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| You are already from a neighborhood that’s not doing well economically. You’re not making the money that you want to be making. Let’s say you feel like somehow you’ve been dealt out of some of the benefits of some of the richer rival whatever, and you come to this game predisposed and frustrated and angry, and therefore when something happens where a riot starts over the home team, you are predisposed towards that behavior. You’re predisposed toward exhibiting violence, and it for once can be socially acceptable way, which has the added benefit of virtue signally to your tribe what a committed fan you are because you are willing to commit all this violence on behalf of the tribe.
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| I’m just saying, I think it goes back to what you said before, which is that politicians will say that what happens at the football match is a true reflection of what’s occurring in society. If everybody there was worried about being caught in the news, throwing a punch and losing their job, there wouldn’t be those kinds of fights. If-
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| Morell Maison: | I disagree. I think that there are … The picture that you paint is not quite accurate. You have the game traditionally, and most football fans are traditionalists. They’ve come out with their … Usually the person that takes them to their first game is their father. Usually they live within a certain area of the town, which is why they support a particular team. They will use the same route to the ground. You very rarely drive unless you’re from outside the area, so you don’t take your car to the football match. You leave your car at home and you walk, and you’ll stop at the same pie shop. You’ll stop at the same chip shop. You’ll stop at the same pub for a beer. You’ll meet your friends who you meet, and you all walk the same route to that football ground.
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| Jim Luisi: | So, it becomes a ritual that’s repeated over and over again.
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| Morell Maison: | Yes. That’s correct. You then have … Because some of those people will go to away games, and some won’t. They’ll only go to home games. Some of those people will sit in the stand, and they’ve had … If they’ve got a season ticket, their grandfather may have left that season ticket to their father who’s left it to them, or a couple of season tickets, or a family season ticket. It’s not just about being frustrated at the ills of society and going down to the football match for a fight, that’s too simplistic. People are frustrated in their life, but they might be frustrated in their working life, they might be frustrated in their home life, they might be frustrated in life in general. They may not be frustrated at all. They may just want to see a good game. They may-
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| Jim Luisi: | Well no, I’m talking about the violence. I’m not saying people [crosstalk 00:46:02]
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| Morell Maison: | No, but I was saying what leads up to the violence. You don’t necessarily go there with that thought, and it’s very rarely around the result. You don’t go, “We lost, I’m gonna beat someone up or hit someone.” I don’t think it happens like that. Well, I know it doesn’t happen like that. I’ve been to enough games. You have a role that you get on this. You have the whole ritual, and as you partake in that ritual, then you have another dynamic, which is the discussion of the team, the discussion of the players, the players you like, the individual players, what didn’t happen last week that you’re looking forward to happening this week, who played well, who didn’t play well, who should be on the team, who shouldn’t be on the team, who should be bought, who should be sold.
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| You have all these elements that now sit on top of the ritual of going to the ground, getting into the ground, how much you paid for your ticket, the stadium, its standing, where you are in the league … It is a very complex structure around the 90 minute game that’s played out that nobody has an idea of what’s going to happen. It’s totally unpredictable, so it’s-
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| Mark Gleason: | But what you had said before was that at rugby matches, cricket matches matches don’t have the same outcome of violence that football matches do.
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| Morell Maison: | See, now we’re gonna get into another area of this dynamic that we’re discussing because traditionally, and don’t everybody in the audience reach for a heart pill, but traditionally-
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| Mark Gleason: | Info@leveltopower.com for all complaints about Morell’s football analysis. He is an Arsenal fan, by the way, just so everybody knows.
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| Morell Maison: | The traditionally rugby-
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| Mark Gleason: | Arsenal supporter, sorry.
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| Morell Maison: | That’s correct. Traditionally, football was a workingman’s game, and I don’t think many people would disagree with that. Rugby was not a workingman’s game. It was a middle class game. As you went up the social structure, the game changed, so you’d have football, you’d have rugby, you’d have cricket-
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| Mark Gleason: | Polo?
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| Morell Maison: | You’d have polo, fishing, but-
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| Mark Gleason: | Which is Jim’s sport, right Jim? You’re a big polo fan?
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| Morell Maison: | … you didn’t get … Haven’t had-
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| Jim Luisi: | Polo shirts are my favorite.
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| Morell Maison: | … violence that’s associated with football off the field with rugby and cricket, though rugby’s violence seems to take place on the field. This is a real brutal game.
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| Mark Gleason: | Well, that’s the fascinating thing, where you have more violence occurring on the field in rugby, and you have less violence off the field as an output of watching the game and the fans surrounding the game.
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| Morell Maison: | Almost none.
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| Mark Gleason: | Exactly. That’s what I’m pointing to and saying … I’m not saying there’s not other reasons to enjoy the ritual of going and seeing a good football match. What I’m saying is when there is violence, it seems to me that the group … Like you had said in the beginning, the politicians would say that what happens in football is a reflection of what’s happening in society. Therefore, it is the people who are more predisposed to violence who are going to be more violent at a sporting event. Right? The people who are looking for the excuse to be violent are gonna be the first one to become violent when given a socially acceptable way to do it.
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| Morell Maison: | There is an element of that, but remember, you go and watch Arsenal play, there were 60 thousand people in the stadium. There’s only four or five hundred of those people that will be involved in some kind of violent interaction with another group of supporters. In the main, the large majority are there to see a football game, enjoy a football game, buy their shirts, take their sons and their kids to the game and their daughters to the game, and enjoy the event, the spectacle, because these stadiums are built for spectacle now.
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| There’s still an element of the support that is extremely volatile, and I don’t think you can get that out of any of the clubs that are represented in the English Football League. This behavior was exported because you did find, when we had the Heysel disaster when Liverpool played Juventus in what is now called the Champion’s League, which was the European Cup at the time, and a lot of supporters died. You’re talking about 80, 90, a hundred supporters I think were killed in that.
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| Mark Gleason: | But explain what happened, because most people are not gonna know that.
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| Morell Maison: | I was actually watching the game, so it was … The cameras panned away from a lot of what was happening, but there was surge against one section of this … Allegedly, the Liverpool supporters were putting a lot of pressure on a section of the Juventus fans’ stadium. A wall collapsed, and a lot of people were killed as a result of that. There’s lots of different stories. There is an official line. In watching the game, this happened whilst the game was being played. The players were taken off the field, the players came back on the field. They actually finished the game, which Liverpool lost one-nil. Juventus won. A lot of players … I’m not sure of the numbers, it’s 30, 40, 50 odd people lost their lives at that game. The majority are not involved in that.
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| There is an exporting of that because now some of the most aggressive and dangerous fans are Russian football fans that have taken over the mantle from previously the English fans. Before that, the Dutch fans and the German fans, the Turkish fans … Extremely dangerous if you’re in the right wing faction of these football clubs, these are very dangerous places to be. I’m not sure … And the Italians have the Ultras. They have all these different factions in different football clubs. I’m not quite sure that they ever go away. They’re always present, and they’re always dangerous, and they’re always extremely volatile. It doesn’t take a lot to tip this into violence, but it still remains a small percentage of the people that are in this stadium supporting the team, and globally, because it’s now become a global game, so it’s completely different.
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| Jim Luisi: | When you see the police moving against the prearranged fight, how were those fights arranged? Who arranges those things, and what’s the mechanics behind that?
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| Morell Maison: | There always seems to be an element of leadership within certain sections of certain fan groups. It’s difficult to call them gang members, but they’re almost like a gang. They morph from being supporters into something else. Because of the ability of the police to infiltrate supporters’ groups, and some policemen are football supporters, these situations can’t be organized openly. Now you have the internet, the dark web, and all these other venues where supporters can contact the leaders of other supporters’ groups, and they organize and prearrange their fight. They’ll arrange the numbers, the arrange the venue, they’ll arrange everything for them to be able to have this battle royal to see who is supreme.
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| These are dangerous places. People are killed at these arrangements, so the police work very hard to infiltrate them, figure out where this is going to happen, because when you start to tell people, invite people, advise people of where to be, there is a footprint. Someone emails, texts, phones, because you’re talking about hundreds of people, maybe up to a thousand people, so someone is going to tell someone somewhere. They find out eventually where it’s going to be, and then they stop it. Sometimes it just doesn’t happen like that. If you’re a well-kept gang where there’s a lot of people, there can be lots of fans from numerous countries all congregated as we saw in the last European Championships, and suddenly the violence just explodes. It just depends on where it is and how the police then decide to manage it. Sometimes it’s not arrange. It depends on how these things come together in terms of [inaudible 00:54:08] and movement of people.
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| Jim Luisi: | If you look at the herd dynamic … One of the cornerstones of APEX is to look at the herd dynamic. Could you take apart for us who you see as the leaders of the different herd constituents? You had mentioned, started off with this one where you have almost like these quasi-gangster types that emerge out of these groups, but who are the other constituents who are pulling the strings of power say, over these powerful dynamic herds of people?
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| Mark Gleason: | Yeah, let me just recast that question. That’s exactly my question, Jim, which is; a level one by definition is somebody who imbues the culture that they grew up in. Right? My father was an Arsenal fan, therefore I’m an Arsenal fan, and we follow the same ritual. A level one never thinks beyond that. They never look at a different perspective. My way is right. We are the right team, we are the right cause, my tribe is the right tribe.
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| Level two is somebody who can understand that everybody sees that the same way, that every other fan of every other club, if they were born in a different town, they would be that fan, not an Arsenal fan. The level two can see multiple perspectives, and that starts to allow them to benefit, to position themselves so in this stampede of the herd to support their local team, that … There’s also money changing hands. There’s money for tickets, there’s money for beers and pies, and there’s money for outfits and shoes and shoelaces and jackets and hats, and the people who can see the perspectives, the multiple perspectives, are the people who can position themselves in this ebb and flow, this herd stampede that goes back and forth and back and forth.
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| For instance, let’s say sales are down. Well, maybe we can rally the herd around the fact that there was an Irish Potato Famine, and the people we’re playing, their ancestors were responsible for it. Maybe we can rally the tribe around that cause. I think exactly to your point, Jim, who are the people who benefit from this herd stampede, and can we walk back from there and identify are they doing it because they are an accident of history that they happen to be in a great position to monetize this, or are they pulling the strings of power to make sure that this is constantly being monetized and they’re constantly keeping this herd moving in the right direction to have the output they’re looking for? Now maybe part of that is monetary. Maybe part of that is-
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| Jim Luisi: | Yeah, monetary. It could politics.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s right.
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| Jim Luisi: | There’s so many dimensions, I’m curious to see how you take this question apart.
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| Morell Maison: | If we look at the perspective of the Irish, let’s look at the song. You’re now in a stadium with a hundred thousand people. One person starts to sing that song, that’s all it takes. One person, and everybody around them joins in. Within seconds, you have 50, 60, 70 thousand people singing the same song. If you look back and go, the person that started singing that song, is he the leader, or is he the follower? Is the most important person in that picture the second person, because that second person endorses the first person and everybody starts to follow? One person sings, the second person follows, and everybody follows because he’s endorsed it so it’s all right to sing this song now. It’s not like the second person doesn’t sing, and everybody looks at this guy and thinks, “Why is he singing that song?” The other thing to look at is the fact that those 60 thousand people know the words, they know the meaning, they know the intent-
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| Jim Luisi: | By heart. They’re not reading it.
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| Morell Maison: | By heart. They’re not reading this, they don’t all of a sudden look at their phones and start reading off a script.
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| Mark Gleason: | But who benefits from that? Who encourages that, who benefits from that, who keeps that going? Clearly this at some point started, but somebody is either being helped by it and encouraging it, or somebody is being hurt by it and discouraging it. Right? So-
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| Morell Maison: | In the context of where that particular song that you have today as taking place, that was in the European Championship game between Spain and Ireland. Ireland hadn’t collected enough points they needed to win the game. They were losing the game, something like three or four-nil. Six minutes to go, 84th minute, I think, of the game, when that song started to be sung, and they sung that song from the 84th minute until the game finished. Was the song directed at the players, in support of the players, being the underdog, was it an indirect reference to the Great Famine, to being the underdog, to being neglected and abused and to losing? Was it that kind of a support song, or did it have a deeper, more far-reaching motive? Was that the Irish in … I forget where the game was played now. Sending a message elsewhere, was that aimed at home? Was that aimed at Irish people around the world? Was that aimed at garnering support? Somebody benefited from that action, otherwise they wouldn’t have taken it. They wouldn’t have taken the action. They wouldn’t have financially benefit … They wouldn’t have benefited from a financial perspective-
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| Mark Gleason: | Well this is downstream, so let’s just raise this up and point to some particular people. You have the owner of the football club. Right? We ask the obvious question, does this person benefit from increased tribalism and loyalty to the tribe, or decreased? The obvious answer is increased, that the more ardent the Arsenal fans are, or the Manchester United fans are, or the Chelsea fans are, the more money they’re going to spend an invest. The more social signaling is an important thing.
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| Morell Maison: | That’s not necessarily true. You’re talking about a very unique phenomenon here, and I’ll tell you another game that I’ve visited some years ago-
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| Jim Luisi: | Well, maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Is it more that this emotion exists in this herd, and that it’s intrinsic in this herd, and that it’s more of a question of not who’s leading it, but who’s able to channel that energy and make use of that power of that herd.
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| Morell Maison: | Again, difficult. Let me … I’ll throw another little circumstance, another little description in there. I was at a game at Chelsea, and Chelsea were playing Liverpool, and I’ve seen some very good games between Chelsea and others, and I’ve seen some dreadful games. This was probably the worst. It was nil-nil draw at Chelsea and it was just an awful game. It was a midweek game. I was sat in a box that was owned by a friend of mine underneath the owner’s box, and the owner is a Russian Jew called Abramovich, and as I looked across to my left and I looked up into the upper tiers, a swastika was unfurled, and the most disgusting, vitriolic, racist chant came out of that top-left half the stadium. Abramovich was above me, and I remember looking up, and as I looked up, he was looking at his team and you didn’t see a flicker of emotion. He didn’t look left, he didn’t look right; there was no expression on his face at all other than watching his team.
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| What you heard was … You can be arrested for that in England, and usually somebody gets their collar felt, even throw out the grounds, something happens. But nothing was happening, and that’s his club. He owns that club. He didn’t build the club but he owns the club, and he’s taken it on an amazing journey of success, but he doesn’t benefit from that. There’s no gain for him from that at all. He doesn’t gain from the energy, he doesn’t gain … There’s no financial gain for him from that. My initial response was, “How did these people get in the place? Why doesn’t he lock them off? Why doesn’t he shut them out?” There’s lots of things that were going through my mind as this situation was unfolding, and to be fair to Chelsea fans, they were booing them down, so they were trying to raise the level of what they were doing above the level of what these guys were doing in the top half of the stand.
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| Jim Luisi: | Was there a thug, though, who was in charge of that errant group?
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| Morell Maison: | It’s really difficult to see because when you look, you see maybe a thousand people that are participating in this. Who do you single out as a ringleader, or is it a common theme? Is it something that they all agree with or they all feel? It takes one-
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| Jim Luisi: | A crowd dynamic?
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| Morell Maison: | Yes, a crowd dynamic. It takes one person to start the song, the chant, the abuse, and everybody feels safe in joining in.
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| Mark Gleason: | Yeah, but you have people who piggy back on the large tribe movement. For instance, in America you have gangs who wear the colors of their local team. That’s their gang colors. They wear the Falcons, or they wear the Cowboys, and so the local gang membership is this Cowboys football wear.
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| Morell Maison: | But we all belong to a gang, don’t we? You wear a suit and tie when you go to work. Some other people wear [crosstalk 01:03:58] when they go to work. Some people wear swimming trunks when they’re going to work.
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| Mark Gleason: | What I’m saying is that just because there’s some sub group decides to leverage the overall tribe movement, doesn’t necessarily say a lot about the overall tribe, right? Doesn’t mean the Cowboys are gangsters if some local gangsters are wearing Cowboy colors. In this case had you some Nazis or whatever who were trying to leverage this-
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| Morell Maison: | They weren’t Nazis. They unfurled the Nazi banner that had a Nazi insignia on it, that doesn’t make them Nazis though, does it?
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| Mark Gleason: | Well, it certainly doesn’t make them not Nazis.
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| Morell Maison: | Define Nazi.
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay. I think my real question though was … Let me take it to an ever higher level. Manchester United is … And I may be wrong in this. I admittedly got this fact from a Manchester United fan, but has one of the largest worldwide revenues from their brand. From Jerseys, from hats, from that kind of thing-
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| Morell Maison: | They overtook Real Madrid this year.
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| Mark Gleason: | Yeah, certainly one of the top. Right? That’s a huge amount of revenue then that gets poured into the coffers of Manchester United, and it provides them a big advantage when it comes to trying to manage their football team properly. They over, let’s say, Nottingham, which does not have … You’d think the Sheriff of Nottingham, they probably should be doing a better job of marketing than they are, really. For all those Nottingham fans out there, you know who you are.
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| My question is … If you ask the very simple question, do the people who benefit financially from Manchester United winning, do they benefit from an increase or a decrease in tribe loyalty, then the obvious answer is they want the tribe as loyal as possible. They want the tribe to not only back their football club, they want the tribe to feel confident in doing social signaling, meaning I’m buying the brand and I’m proudly wearing it around the world to show basically free advertising. Right?
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| Jim Luisi: | Follow the money, follow the power.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s right. Nowt the way you do that is by having a winning club, so people wear the brand to show they’re associated with winners. That’s one of the ways you can get people who are not familiar with the club to expand the reach of the club. Now, the people then who’ll be pulling the strings of power, who are trying to increase in-group loyalty, one group at least will be the people who stand to benefit from this increase in in-group loyalty. One way you can raise in-group loyalty is by identifying a villain and/or a threat, and pointing at that and say, “We need to rally behind each other and fight them.” This is the classic way you do it, even in let’s say politics.
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| Saul Alinsky was a famous American in the 60s who wrote Rules for Radicals, and one of his things in politics was, this is what both Hilary Clinton and Obama subscribed to, is you find the enemy, you fix them in place, meaning you fixed them in place in a position they can’t retreat from. Maybe you got them on record saying certain things, and then you rally people around that threat, that person, because people need a name. They a need an individual. They need a corporation. They need something they’re opposing. If you do that, then you can rally people because that’s how people work. They’re not really good at rallying around a generic threat, they’re quite good … In other words, the threat against the spread of Nazism, people can’t really rally around that. Let’s defeat Hitler. Boom, everybody can rally around that idea.
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| When you look back then and say, okay, now we have these team rivalries. You have these sports club owners who benefit from intense rivalries because the in-group loyalty on both sides goes up, and money gets spent, and free advertising happens, and even the violence … Even when you start to have violence, it’s not necessarily bad for the owner of that football club team. If he or she judges that this makes the club brand even more valuable and increases in-club loyalty even more, because the way the violence happened … Of course, we had to do this because the referee gave us a bad call and we trashed a bunch of people outside the stadium. That’s what happens to our club when you give us bad calls and unfair referees.
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| What I’m saying is, in-group loyalty is such where it follows its own logic. You have the people who financially benefit from the football, you have politicians, I imagine would get into the mix, where I’m the local politician who’s hoping to motivate all of these sports fans to come and vote for me. It’s very classic, at least in American politics, where somebody shows up and all of a sudden they have a Yankees cap on because they have to be in New York going, “All right, home team.” Hopefully they don’t forget which city they’re in because of course they’re gonna say the same thing when they go to the next city.
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| Any time you’re trying to motivate a herd of people … I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some movements born against Brexit that were somehow trying to harness the power of the football clubs to push people to the polls in one direction or another. I think that’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about who is pulling the strings of power. It’s not the guy sitting in the stadium who starts the chant, it’s the people who are making the money who are putting the chant on the back of t-shirts, and who are coming out with the commercials and advertisements in advance of the games, in advance of the season, to say, “We were wronged last year at the championship, and we’re at redemption, so this is gonna be 2017 redemption,” and feeding into this whole idea of how wronged we were, how we’re gonna make things right, and tap into those peoples’ emotion so that the in-group loyalty shoots up and people are spending more money, bringing their families there more … This is just kind of the classic herd mentality.
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| Morell Maison: | Violence counteracts all of that. We’ve experienced it in the UK, they’ve experienced it in Holland, they’ve experienced it in Germany. The moment you start to get this level of violence again, the attendances drop-
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| Mark Gleason: | Good. That’s good because that incentivizes people.
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| Morell Maison: | … so people stop going because they don’t want to risk their children there, they don’t want to risk themselves there in that environment. That’s counterproductive. That doesn’t work for the football club because they lose revenue. Not only do they lose revenue, if they’ve got that problem they start to lose sponsorship. The very entities that put money into the football club, because of their success, pull away. Manchester United is actually a bad example. It’s a bad example because I remember when Manchester United were relegated from the Premiere League, and they were in the second division. They still got 40, 50 thousand every week at every home game. It did nothing for their gates. Their gates probably even went up slightly. That was before they built the 70 odd thousand seat stadium they got now. They had a 40 thousand seat then, but that-
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| Mark Gleason: | That means that their in-group loyalty was not tied directly to winning at that moment in time. It was tied to other things.
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| Morell Maison: | Most definitely, and still isn’t. They’ve gone to number one in terms of global revenue, revenue into the football club. I think it was 945 million, I think they’ve just about collected a billion in revenue. They’ve done that at a point when the team is not champions, not in the Champions League, not winning trophies. They won their first cup last year, but they still maintain that dominant position they’ve been vying with Real Madrid. It’s been Manchester United, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Arsenal, the same clubs that are occupying the top six, seven spaces, continually year on year do that, and with Manchester United it’s not dependent on winning the league. It’s not dependent on them being successful in the team’s performances.
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| Jim Luisi: | What would you say contributes to the marketing genius of that franchise?
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| Morell Maison: | I think it’s historical. I think it goes back to the Busby Babes, Busby being the manager of the football club when their plane crashed coming back from Munich. Several players were killed and several wounded in that accident, and I think that brought to the world the attention of a club that they wanted to adopt. It was a tragic moment. There were some iconic players that died in that, and there were some other players that became icons out of that that were involved, like Sir Bobby Charlton. I think that happened, I think their brand of football, which was very cavalier in attacking and breathtaking in some of its execution. In the swinging 60s they had players like George Best. They had some wonderful, wonderful players. I think it’s a combination of that.
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| Chelsea had the same in the 60s as well. They had the Hudsons and Peter Osgood and some great players that really embodied the whole swinging 60s moment, but they didn’t do what Manchester United did. They didn’t go on to become a global entity like Man United. I think it was a set of circumstances. It wasn’t one any individual thing, and they were able to capitalize on that, and the advent of the internet just gave them a bigger reach and a bigger audience, and now their audience is just global. They’ve got probably more fans in China than they have in England, in the UK. It’s a stunning transformation with a global support, and many of those people who have never been to Manchester and they love Manchester United Football Club, but they buy the shirts and they buy into all the paraphernalia and they buy into the hype of the club. That’s their football club. Globalization’s had a positive effect on football clubs, and that’s why the English Premiere League remains the number one most watched league in the world.
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| Jim Luisi: | Is there a relationship between the nations that support a team and the nationality of the players? Are there any Chinese players on Man U?
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| Morell Maison: | I think there used to be one. I think they sold him to a German club, not being a Man United fan. Tottenham had one, I think.
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| Jim Luisi: | But the reasons that people will by the jersey in China will be completely different from why someone would buy it in the UK. It could be simply because … For instance, in China, car brands … I read somewhere that the level of car you drive … If you’re a government worker who’s doing very well, you drive, I don’t know, a Mercedes, but if you are a private sector worker who does really well, you drive a BMW. There’s these classes of cars based upon where you are in society. That’s completely irrespective of what we have in the United States. You have people who might be buying these jerseys in China who are saying something else.
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| Morell Maison: | It’s a fashion statement-
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| Jim Luisi: | It’s a fashion statement, a method of belonging or saying, “I’m standing for something outside of China, that’s why this is cool, or I’m standing for something inside, it’s red like China, the red color of communism,” who knows why? I’m just saying … It’s interesting-
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| Morell Maison: | Often they don’t know why. I know people from Africa that love Millwall, and if you’re an Englishman you look at them and you think, “Why would you love one of the most racist clubs in Europe?” It’s amazing. They don’t know. They don’t know the history of the football club. They don’t know what the football club stands for. They don’t know … I should separate that. Not the football club, but the club’s supporters, because often the football club’s ideology is very different to the supporters’ ideology. When they look at the fan base of that football club, it’s extremely racist. You don’t really have a problem going to a football match in Millwall. It’s getting out of the football match in Millwall that you have a problem with.
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| Jim Luisi: | Oh, dear.
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| Morell Maison: | Getting out of the stadium and making it to the train station in one piece is a challenge.
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| Mark Gleason: | You know, I found it funny as an American traveling. For instance, when I’m in a foreign country, I’m often talking to the cab driver, and it’s always a very good pulse of what’s going on. The cab driver has a certain view of society in every city that is kind of unique. I’m always surprised when they realize I’m from America, and they instantly start saying, “Oh, I’m a Raiders fan.” You know, American football. “Oh, I’m a Cardinals fan. Who’s your team? Who’s your team? I’m a Cowboys fan,” and it’s not just a throwaway statement, because when I ask them about it, and I am not hugely knowledgeable when it comes to American football but I certainly know enough being American, they are quite knowledgeable about it. I asked them, “Well, how did you … You’re from this other country. How did you decide that you were gonna become a whatever, a Falcons fan?”
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| Morell Maison: | I’m a Chicago Bears fan.
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| Mark Gleason: | They usually have a very arbitrary story that just says, “You know …” They usually start off saying, “I don’t know,” then they think about it, and they say, “Well, my so-and-so I knew was a Giants fan, and I don’t really like him, and I remember when there was this big game, and so I chose that team because they were opposing the Giants-”
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| Morell Maison: | They did have a thing in England throughout the early 80s, maybe into the early 90s for about 10 years, but they were trying to launch Gridiron into the UK. Channel four, we had a station … We still have a channel that’s called channel four … Used to show all the games, and if you’re a sports fan you’d go, “I think I’ll watch that,” and that’s how we learned the rules to Gridiron and how it worked. I think at that point everybody picked a team. You kind of went, “Who am I gonna support?” I like the Chicago Bears, I like the whole black thing, uniform. Uniform, I should say. Mike Ditka was amazing. This guy had built this crushing machine in the Chicago Bears. They crushed everything. I liked them. I liked the guy’s delivery. He looked like the no mess sergeant major type guy at school that you’d go … He had even the biggest bullies shaking with just a stare. I just liked the guy. I thought, “Yeah, this is my team.”
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| The San Francisco 49ers had a good team, and then the Miami Dolphins had a good … At that period in the 80s, I think they were … Those three teams, I think the San Francisco 49ers, the Miami Dolphins, Dan Marino, the Chicago Bears, they just had three, I think, exceptional teams at that time that everybody, even around the world, could identify. Miami Dolphins had two wide receivers that were amazing at that time. You click into the sport and you go, “Ah, that’s my team,” and then every Sunday when Gridiron was on every Sunday, you’d watch it. There will be a lot of people in England tonight sat up watching the Superbowl.
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| Mark Gleason: | But here you are picking a tribe for no geographic reason, no historical reason, you just have decided to pick a tribe. You decided to pick a side in this contest. Maybe because it’s fun, maybe because somebody you know who you like also likes that team, maybe because you want to pick an opposing team because you don’t like who they picked-
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| Jim Luisi: | Somehow you identify with them, you know?
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| Mark Gleason: | Isn’t it funny that it’s so innate in humanity that you want to know who’s part of your tribe. The first thing you ask somebody else is, “What tribe are you?”
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| Morell Maison: | I don’t think it’s even that it’s innate in humanity. I think you’re more predisposed if you are already … If you have tribalistic tendencies, if you identify with the football analogy … I grew up living a stone’s throw from … Literally on a good day, I think I could’ve thrown a cricket ball into the stadium. That’s how close I lived to the stadium. When you grow up with it, I think you have this innate trigger for observing other tribes, if you like. Because I was involved from a very, very early age, it’s easier later on for me to go, “Chicago Bears, I like them,” because I’d seen them. Or the Lakers … Is it LA Lakers? Yeah, LA Lakers. I used to watch basketball, and I thought, “Yeah, I like this. I like it.”
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| Mark Gleason: | Yeah, because sports happens to be the tribe, your go-to thing, but there’s other tribes, right? There’s nationalities, there’s ethnicities, there’s religion, and if you ask anybody to describe themselves in two sentences, in there is going to be three or four tribes they identify with. To provide context of who they are, they explain-
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| Morell Maison: | But sports fans very, very, very rarely, very rarely pick a tribe based on ethnicity, very rarely. You pick that tribe … If you’re going to look at a team, you look at the components of that team, it doesn’t necessarily matter to you, unless you’re wired differently, if one element of that is Black, Mexican, Hispanic, American …
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| Mark Gleason: | Well no, I agree with that.
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| Morell Maison: | It’s not that, it’s about the team, its function, its start, its ideology, its history, it’s about a lot of other things before it comes down to … I couldn’t tell you how many Black players Arsenal’s got. I couldn’t tell you how many White players they’ve got. I couldn’t tell you how many German players they’ve got. I probably could if I thought about it, but I certainly couldn’t do it for most of the other teams that play in the league.
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| Mark Gleason: | I’m just giving you possible tribes that people can ascribe to, and you could say that’s not how you choose a football team, but if you’re at a football match and you get in the middle of a riot, you get thrown in prison, and you’re walking into the jailhouse and there’s the people of one ethnicity on one side and the other ethnicity on the other side, people will tend to sit with their own ethnicity in that moment, because that’s all you have to go by. Right? I’m saying it’s-
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| Morell Maison: | [crosstalk 01:21:57] I’ll tell you the very interesting story. I remember I used to … I could’ve been a West Ham fan. I wasn’t a West Ham fan because West Ham’s very close to Arsenal …
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| Mark Gleason: | Good. Let’s trash some of those fans.
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| Morell Maison: | Growing up, West Ham had a player who’s a great player, he’s dead now, called Clyde Best. He was Bermudan.
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| Mark Gleason: | Was he related … No. Not related to George Best.
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| Morell Maison: | He was Bermudan. No. He’s from Bermuda, George Best was from Ireland, so if those two were related there’s an issue. He suffered the most horrible abuse as a player, and they would boo him, they’d throw bananas at him, they’d do all this kind of stuff, but when other fans did it, they’d attack the other fans. He thought [inaudible 01:22:42] we have complicity there. That’s complex. You do it, but when other fans do it you attack the other fans. There was a strange logic, “Well, he’s ours to abuse, he’s not-”
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| Mark Gleason: | Well, that’s how families are, right?
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| Morell Maison: | He’s ours to abuse. You can’t abuse him. We can abuse him. We can abuse him, but you can’t. The abuse was shocking, and it came at a time in the late 60s, early 70s when football wasn’t on top of these situations, so you got this almost every week in almost every single football ground. You had to be extremely confident as an individual if you’re an individual of color walking into a football club, into a football ground, to watch a game, because what was directed at the player was soon directed at you very quickly. You got very used to exiting the ground 15 minutes before the end of the game. There was always these strategic points where you left the game so that you avoided this … The [inaudible 01:23:42] itself, but in today’s world, you very, very rarely come across that.
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| People watch games and they watch the team and you’re watching a team particularly in England that is multinational. There are people representing countries and ethnicities from all over the world, so literally you could pick a team and if they have one or two Englishmen in it you’re doing well, because some teams have none. From there you’ve got Jews, you got Muslims, you’ve got everybody represented in a single team. You’re supporting a team, which is made up of people from all around the world.
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| Mark Gleason: | No, I agree with that. I didn’t mean race is a tribe in a nefarious way. What I meant was if you take the individual and you say, “Give me a list of the 10 tribes to which you belong, to which you ascribe in terms of a larger groupings,” then you might say, “Well, I am White, so I am part of the White tribe. I am male, so I am part of the male tribe. I am catholic, so I am part of the catholic tribe. I am an Arsenal fan, so I am part of the Arsenal tribe. I am …” and you have these traits about you, which you will … It could be I am a chess player, right? I’m a Labour or Tory.
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| Morell Maison: | You can’t separate being White and male.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s what I’m told by liberal intelligentsia, but let me assure you-
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| Morell Maison: | They count as one.
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| Mark Gleason: | … let me assure you, you can.
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| Morell Maison: | Yeah.
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| Mark Gleason: | Jim’s a living, breathing example.
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| Jim Luisi: | I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.
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| Morell Maison: | I’m not gonna ask you how you know that.
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| Mark Gleason: | There’s an app for that.
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| Jim Luisi: | It’s all perspective. I listened to the video … I looked at the video that you shared with us, and it is astounding. I was wondering if you’d go through the lyrics with us to help us understand what the poem means.
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| Mark Gleason: | In the introduction to the podcast, I did mention that in the show notes, there is a link to both the lyrics of the song, as well as the YouTube video of the song being sung, so people are free to, as a reminder, to go to there and bring that up as we’re discussing it. For those of you driving, that’s not possible. I wondered if Morell could walk us through the lyrics of the song and give us a bit of this historical context around it. Obviously what we’re wondering is, how is this song playing at the tribalism, tweaking the strings of power, the emotional strings of fans, to raise the in-group loyalty beyond the mere football spectacle that is occurring? Now by the way, the strings are being pulled, maybe it’s accidental. Maybe nobody’s actually doing it. Maybe somebody … It’s a random thing that’s that occurring. Either way though, the song is sung and it is certainly plucking at emotions that are beyond the mere football game that’s occurring right before-
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| Jim Luisi: | It’s clearly a herd.
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| Mark Gleason: | Oh, exactly. It’s clearly a function of the herd. Then we can talk about, if you’re a level two, level three, how could you put yourself in the pathway of the herd so you do not get crushed-
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| Jim Luisi: | So you get stampeded.
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| Mark Gleason: | You do not get crushed, but you do get to cash in on the windfall that comes with surviving a herd stampede. Okay, so the song is called Fields of Athenry. Is that how you pronounce it?
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| Morell Maison: | That’s correct, and that’s in the county of Galway and it’s about 15 miles outside of Galway. It’s a little town.
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| Mark Gleason: | Where is Galway located?
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| Morell Maison: | In Ireland.
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay, so a town in Ireland called Galway, and that is where Athenry is?
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| Morell Maison: | Yes.
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| Mark Gleason: | The fields of Athenry?
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| Morell Maison: | Yes.
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay. Just to give everybody a background, Wikipedia says, the source of all knowledge, that the Fields of Athenry is an Irish folk ballad set during the Great Irish Famine between 1845 and 1850 about a fictional man named Michael from near Athenry in the County Galway who’s been sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay, Australia for stealing food for his starving family. It is a widely known and popular anthem for Irish sports supporters. Obviously you can see there that you’re plucking the national-
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| Jim Luisi: | Heartstrings, right?
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| Mark Gleason: | … ethnic heartstrings by talking about a man who stole food to feed his starving family during the Potato Famine and was sent away to Australia, where he gets to live in paradise, to our Australian supporters, as they will verify. All right, so the actual words … That gives us a little bit of historical background. I know a lot of Irish patriotic music by the way, being of Irish descent myself. The words of the song go like this, “By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl calling. Michael, they have taken you away, for you stole Trevelyan’s corn so the young might see the morn, now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay.”
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| Okay, that makes a lot of sense then, because he stole some food to feed his children so they wouldn’t die, and now he is destined to be shipped to Australia where the prison colony … As a penal colony. The chorus is, “Low lie the fields of Athenry, where once we watched the small free birds fly, our love was on the wing. We had dreams and songs to sing. It is so lonely ’round the fields of Athenry.” Okay, I guess it’s lonely because people either starved or they were shipped off to Australia. Then the next line is, “By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young man calling. Nothing matters, Mary, when you’re free. Against the famine and the crown, I rebelled. They cut me down. Now you must raise our child with dignity.” He’s telling his wife to be strong and to raise their child. Clearly, probably raise their child with dignity and never forget what’s happened here, where when the Irish were starving, they were being penalized for trying to feed their family.
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| Okay, that’s the background. Morell, anything else you’d like to share with us before we play it? This is … We’re about to play the Irish fans singing this song when they’re against Spain-
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| Morell Maison: | In the European Championships.
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| Mark Gleason: | … in the European Championship. This song has become a rallying cry for Irish fans, and others? Is that what you were telling us?
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| Morell Maison: | And others, yeah.
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay. Song is a very powerful motivator when it comes to motivating the herd, right? There is something very, very … Dance and music, the primal beats that kind of hit some subconscious level of tribal communication, that’s one of the reasons that song is used by religions and by nations to rally people around because it bypasses the logical brain and goes straight to some of the subconscious triggers that we have. Here you have a national game against Ireland and Spain, and let’s go ahead and play a section of this, and then we can talk about it.
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| Okay, so Morell … This is the crowd singing to their team, singing to the players on the field. Now, you’ve actually been a coach, so in your coaching experience … You have the support of the crowd waving onto to the field in the chants you do, the songs you do … What does that feel like for the players and for the coaches?
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| Morell Maison: | It’s very, very difficult to put it into words, really. When you’re on the field and you’re part of winning, losing, drawing, entertaining, performing, you could be at the end of your physical capacity. You might have nothing left. You may be desperate to win a game and you might be losing, and you’re trying to find a way back into the game. There are so many different scenarios that you could play out here. When you are involved at the elite … This is the elite level when you’re talking about football at this level. When you’re involved at the elite level or when you’re involved at any level, crowd participation really can turn a situation to your advantage. I don’t know if it turns it to your disadvantage, because some players when the odds are stacked against them become bigger players. They can rise to that occasion.
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| These guys were losing this particular game and had lost it. They were falling down. There were six minutes to go. They’re out of the European Championships; they’re going home. Yet for six minutes, undisturbed, the support used this song to carry them across the line. I’m not Irish, so emotionally it doesn’t tug at me, I don’t think, in the way that it would do some of these guys, but being British, I’m aware of the story. We all are aware of the story of the Great Irish Famine around the world. We can identify with famine. We can identify with struggle. We can identify with oppression from certain perspectives. Most of us haven’t had to live through that, so we haven’t been oppressed or starved out of our homes, but we know of areas in the world where that still happens today. It may be a bit strong to call it a rebel song, it may be correct to call it a rebel song, that might be the herd vocally rebelling against not just losing the game or going out of the European Championships, but it may go further or deeper.
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| It may just be a song, and that’s what they sing. I doubt it. I’ve heard this song at Anfield. I’ve heard them sing this at Anfield, and it’s just that Anfield being Liverpool’s home stadium, and Anfield has a big Irish contingency, and I’ve heard this ring out on a Tuesday night, and it really does make your hairs on the back of your neck stand up. There is something in there. I’m not sure sometimes what it is or why it starts or where it comes from, but the affect you can see on the field. You see the response of the players. Every tackle snap, crackles and pops. They all cover an extra yard. They all put that extra piece in. They become part of that movement that’s surrounding them. They can’t get away from it, and if you’re on the field when this is going on you can’t hear anything. You can’t hear the guy next to you. The guy next to you in the game, he’s got to shout at you for you to actually understand what’s going on because this takes over, it pervades everything.
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| Mark Gleason: | If I could put this in the APEX Level to Power vocabulary, this phenomenon that I see looking at this through the lens of the APEX Level to Power, what I would say is that there is a danger sometimes when you’re in the game, or when you’re in any situation, where you’ve collapsed to level one, your perspective, which is, “My leg hurts, my back hurts, I want to win this game because I’m gonna get a 50 thousand pound bonus if we win the championship,” there’s all these various things, “But I don’t want to get too hurt because I have next year to think about, so I can’t really give a hundred and 10 percent because if I blow out my knee, how am I gonna feed my family next year?” You have all the normal considerations that anybody is going to have when they’re just playing on the field. They’ve collapsed to only their perspective.
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| Something like this, a national chance, a patriotic chance, something which reminds you that there’s more than just one perspective on this … There is something larger you’re fighting for than yourself, which is the team, which is your country, which is your ancestors who died and starved so that you could actually be here today. It changes the perspective in a way which might help elevate a player. It’s something we all understand. I think we’ve all experienced it where you’re in pain and you’re hurt and you hear the rallying cry from your team that says, “Go out there and win for us,” and you remember that you’re fighting for something bigger, that you can sacrifice for the tribe. I think that’s what a rallying cry is. It’s a reminder that, in Shakespeare’s words, the fewer who live, the greater the share of honor. This is the time, this is now. This rallying cry I think appeals to that.
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| I’ll turn it over to Jim with one more comment, which is Jim and I have an ongoing debate as to who is the better or more profound author. Frank Herbert who wrote Dune or Issac Asimov who wrote the Foundation series. Once again I’m gonna put another brick in this wall, which is that Frank Herbert has an excellent quote which is, “There is no escape. We pay for the violence of our ancestors,” which is that when your ancestors do violence, they gain something for it, but there’s no escape from it. There’s always a price to pay later on. You can see that again and again and again with all of the social problems that we have. Just because you won the battle, doesn’t mean that you’ve really solved all your problems.
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| Here you have a situation where hundreds of years later these people remember, and they have the songs, particularly Irish songs. They couldn’t do anything militarily against the British who would just come in and do whatever they wanted, basically. All they could do was have the songs to remember and never forget all the things that were done. At times like this when they’re fighting, they’re able to remember back and say, “You are part of something bigger. This is part of a larger struggle. Yes, you’re hurting on the field, but you’re not starving in the fields of Athenry, right?”
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| Morell Maison: | I think also you’re seeing a variable glimpse into the past, and you could imagine there being an army of troops facing another army of troops, and one side breaks out into their song, and the other into theirs, and all of that spirit, the soul that they put into it is what drives their side forward. Watching this in this soccer match, in this football match is … Even though we’re not in the stadium, it makes your hair stand up. It’s quite an affect that it has on you because you imagine being immersed in this crowd as this is going on where it’s vibrating your body with all those voices singing in unison.
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| Mark Gleason: | Just to point out, a relatively small minority of people would have to break the chant or sing something different to mess up how powerful it is. Let’s say 10 percent of the group decided to chant something different or not be part of that. It’s going to be a different effect. In other words, it’s almost a physical confirmation of the solidarity that you hope is there. When you’re on that battle line and you have a thousand people with you, it’s one thing to say, “Well, we’re all here. I think we’re all as dedicated to this cause as I am. I hope when we all run forward, I’m not the only one running and everybody else is kind of hanging back.”
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| Having everybody visually confirm by the dress they’re wearing and then in an audio way, all chant and sing the same song in time, in rhyme, in rhythm, altogether, is this audio confirmation that yes we’re all on the same page, we all remember why we’re here, we’re setting our paradigm in the right place, which is that we’re fighting for something larger here, which is the tribe. That’s critical in those moments where the key to winning is individuals willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the tribe.
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| Morell Maison: | I think it’s also interesting in that description that you just put together there, you don’t hear any descent from the Spanish supporters.
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| Mark Gleason: | Yeah.
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| Morell Maison: | The Irish weren’t alone in that stadium. They were playing Spain. Spain had a lot of contingency in that game, so for six minutes you don’t hear one single attempt by the Spanish to disrupt what was going on there. Just an observation.
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| Mark Gleason: | Yeah. It’s interesting. It’s interesting because either A, they all didn’t have a ready song, or B, they couldn’t rally everybody behind that single song or didn’t see the need to, so-
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| Jim Luisi: | They had a dance that was really …
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| Mark Gleason: | They left the castanets at home, apparently.
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| Morell Maison: | Oh, dear.
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| Mark Gleason: | All hate mail goes to luisi@leveltopower.com.
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| Morell Maison: | Oh, god.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s why I think the football is, like Morell said, a very, very good window into what’s happening in a society. Certainly in the UK, obviously, because it goes top to bottom. It penetrates the family unit, it penetrates the religious unit, it penetrates the working life, it penetrates everything. How goes football, so goes the country, in a certain sense.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yeah. One of the things that I’ve tried a number of times in different sports … I’ve gone to some good hockey games and baseball and football, but I don’t follow any particular team. It’s more to see what this crowd experience is like, and also at concerts. When I went to concerts with my daughter, often horrified with the pitch of screaming of young girls be right behind me. If one were to look forward to have the ultimate experience, I think we’re gonna have to go to one of these stadiums, Tottenham or Arsenal, and experience this massive song supporting the team where you have probably one of the largest choirs on the planet.
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| Mark Gleason: | Could we just talk a bit about the commercialization, Morell? Now you have this top to bottom fascination with the sport of football. It’s embedded itself in English society, but you don’t yet have this 24 hour Sky Sports or whatever cycle of it’s on TV all the time yet. What you have is a bunch of football clubs that play, you have a few of the very high profile ones who play who perhaps get televised, but somebody somewhere around this time decides there might be path forward here to monetized this in a whole ‘nother way. How can we make football and the consummation of football more of a commodity that can be bought and sold in terms of TV air time?
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| You and I touched on that in a previous conversation. I think it applies to any sport, or almost anything. The model that was followed there, the path that was followed, I think tell us a lot about the commoditization of anything when it’s gonna be put out for entertainment. Could you walk us through that?
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| Morell Maison: | I think you’ve seen huge changes in the game of football. I’ve seen huge changes over the last 10 or 15 years, and I would say that the way the game’s structured now actually does lend itself to exactly what you’re talking about. You see now most clubs play twice a week, so they’ll play Saturday and Tuesdays, Saturday and Wednesdays, so it just about gives the players enough time to recover from a game on Saturday to play on Tuesday or Wednesday. They still have to recover, train, prepare, play … When you’re doing that every three or four days for nine months, that’s quite a schedule.
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| If you think about it, whatever sport you’ve played, when you have to put on a performance in front of millions … Because now the audience isn’t just about the stadium, it’s about the global audience and millions are watching games now every two or three days. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday you’re playing a game. That already has lent itself to the globalization of this sport. In England, this is not fair to say in other parts in Europe where foreign leadership is restricted, but in England it’s not. Most of the Premier League clubs are foreign owned. You have American owners, Russian owners, Spanish, Italian owners … You have owners from around the world, and American owners own the biggest clubs. Manchester United is owned by the Glazers. Manchester City is owned by the Sheik in Saudi. Arsenal’s part owned by … I forgot his name now. I’ll remember his name in a minute. I should know my own club’s owner, but he’s an American.
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| [inaudible 01:45:02] been American-owned. Sunderland are American-owned. He’s trying to sell the club. Probably half the teams in the Premiere League are American-owned clubs. You now see this globalization, the merchandising now, the sponsorships for shirts, the sponsorship for clubs, the sponsorship of the stadium … Arsenal’s ground is called the Emirates Stadium, and it’s not Highbury anymore. Every element of the football club is being sold. It’s being commercialized. It’s driving revenues higher and higher and higher all the time.
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| Mark Gleason: | When you were young, were you watching games on the television like you are now?
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| Morell Maison: | No. Only on a Saturday. You only saw highlights, so you only saw match of the day on a Saturday night. That was it.
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| Mark Gleason: | What was the pathway to getting all these different clubs to buy into the idea that we can televise your games, we can package them up, we can broadcast them, and you get a cut of the revenue back? I assume is how it works.
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| Morell Maison: | Sky.
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| Mark Gleason: | So, Sky on its own-
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| Morell Maison: | In 1990. Before then, you had to go to the ground. If you wanted to see a football match you went to the ground. Grounds were busy. They were full. There was a period of time before when the grounds were busy, then we had this extreme violence through ’73, ’74, up until ’78, ’79, up until the Heysel Stadium disaster when Liverpool got kicked out of Europe. A lot of people died. Then they started tightening things up. They started the redevelopment, the redesign of the stadium. They removed terracing. Terracing being where you can stand and watch the game. Remember, you were standing at the pitch side and then the terracing goes all the way up to the back. You could have a bank of 20 thousand supporters all standing, watching the game with just some crash barriers to stop them falling into the people in front. They did away with that. They had all seating stadiums designed. The whole thing took a different turn when they became all seating stadiums and the terraces went.
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| The game started changing, and when Sky came into football and started to pay the clubs big contracts, big money … Each club was getting to begin with, I think it was 20 million for one season. They sold their rights to Sky. Sky televised the games, and initially the attendances dropped because now, if Manchester were playing in Southampton, that’s a big journey, and you didn’t want to drive, you could watch the game live on TV. Sky in 1990 I think was the big change. I have friends who at that time would earn six, seven, eight hundred pounds and be a Premier League player. The following year, they were earning five, six thousand pounds because of the Sky contract.
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| Mark Gleason: | Per game, per month? What was-
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| Morell Maison: | That was a week.
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| Mark Gleason: | A week.
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| Morell Maison: | A week, yeah.
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay. So you have Sky that comes in, now how does that change the nature of the game and the nature of how the fans interact with the game? Before, I’m supposing, you never really would see another team play unless they were playing your team. If you’re a Liverpool fan, you’re only seeing Liverpool games.
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| Morell Maison: | No, you would go away. You’d see all the teams in your division, but a lot of fans travel so they’d go to all the away. Some fans are dedicated. They’ll go to all the away games.
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| Mark Gleason: | Of Liverpool?
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| Morell Maison: | Yeah.
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| Mark Gleason: | Right.
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| Morell Maison: | If you’re a Liverpool supporter-
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| Mark Gleason: | But you’re never gonna watch a Chelsea game if they’re not playing Liverpool, is my point. Right?
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| Morell Maison: | No.
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| Mark Gleason: | But before all this happens … Now you have-
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| Morell Maison: | Someone like me would. Someone who’s a coach and who’s interested in the game and who has a … I’d watch any game. I’d watch a game on the side of the street. Most supporters don’t do that. They follow their team. If you’re watching Chelsea and they’re playing at Tottenham, why aren’t you watching Liverpool who would be playing on the same day?
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| Mark Gleason: | Right.
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| Morell Maison: | You’d be watching your own team.
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| Mark Gleason: | Right. That makes a lot of sense when it’s not televised, right?
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| Morell Maison: | Mm-hmm (affirmative).
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| Mark Gleason: | Now you have Sky and you have television and you have replays, and now you could have 24 hour football where these, I’m assuming it’s 24 hours, where these things are stacked. Now when your team’s not playing but you really want to watch some football, there is some football somewhere being broadcast, and you can go find it and watch it.
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| Morell Maison: | Not for us in Europe. We’re not like that. You can on Sky if you search around. You can plug into the various different stations, but mainstream television, no, not really. They show the game live, and you could watch that game. They’ll show more than one game, so they’ll show all the games, and then you pick which game you want to watch. It’s up to you to pick your game. You’re going to watch your own team, but all the other teams are playing at the same time or staggered times, depending on … Some might be playing on Tuesdays, some might be playing on Wednesday. The games are available to watch, but we don’t have the American system of 987 channels and every single game being screened from every single angle, day and night. I’ve walked into American bars with Jim and we’ve seen baseball on every single screen, or ice hockey or basketball. You don’t get that saturation coverage in the UK.
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| Mark Gleason: | Now, do you think that this whole televised thing has caused people to approach the game more like you, where you’re more student of the game? You have your team that you follow, you’re a supporter of, but you’re also a student of the game meaning you’re prepared to watch any good football match regardless of who’s playing just because you love the game. Now that it’s much easier to do so, the bar has been lowered, do you find that amongst football fans there’s more of that kind of viewer?
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| Morell Maison: | I think there’s always been … I think with every single club you have ardent supporters. There’re different gradients, there’re different grades of supporter. You have the ardent supporter who can name their first team for the last 20 years or the last 25 years. They’ve been going since they were kids. The football club is part of their life. It’s ingrained in them. They know every single living heartbeat of that football club. I know people like that. I know people that can describe for you a goal that was scored four years ago, and were there watching it and we’ll say, “Well, he did this and he crossed it and he …” There’s that. Then you go right down to the other side to people who have never even been in a football ground and just watch it on TV.
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| Mark Gleason: | If you’re a coach, how does it being televised in this new system of being a televised, how does that change your approach of who you pick, the right players for your team? Now that you’re more of a global … It’s more of a global game now. Now maybe you’re trying to pick … Are you picking more aggressive players? Are you picking more showy players? How is this effecting your view on how you’re constructing your team?
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| Morell Maison: | I don’t think it does. I think most coaches that go through the coaching education … Usually great coaches are [inaudible 01:52:03] players. You have coaches like [inaudible 01:52:03] who’s never played the game before. He’s never played at a professional level. Fantastic coach. Arsène Wenger of Arsenal, he played at amateur level but he’s never played as a professional. He played as a professional at a third division or fourth division. He wasn’t an elite player. Very few of the managers at the top of the game now were elite players. The next tranche of players coming through are threatening to change that dynamic because they are elite players. They’ve been at the elite end of the game and they’re now turning into coaches.
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| Watching a game doesn’t make you a coach. You have to get out there. You have to understand the dynamics of the game and you plot your way as to how you want the make of your team to be. You don’t particularly pick a player because he’s aggressive, because he may not fit your team dynamic. He may not play in the way that you want your team to play. He may be a very effective player for somebody else. He may not be an effective player for you. Television doesn’t change that. You have to get your guys on the field and work with them and coach them. You have to see how fit they are, how strong they are, what the team dynamic is, how fast they are, can they defend, are they an attacking team, and it depends on the players that you have available also. Those players are available to you dependent on your team’s budget. Even if you’re a Sunday League side, you could have one of the best Sunday League players in your team if you pay him 20 quid a game. If you don’t, you haven’t got him. That’s a different game.
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| What you put on the field in terms of personnel is largely dictated by your financial resourced. Can you afford to put that player on the pitch? If you can’t, somebody else will. You’ll get players, but they may not be the best players, but then you develop a team ethic. There are other ways of building a team. That’s why Leicester City won the league last year, and as most people predicted, they’ll struggle this year. They could be the first champions to be relegated in the following season. There’s a lot more than watching something on the TV and determining whether that will work for you if you picked a similar type of player to play on your team. It’s not simplistic as that.
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| Mark Gleason: | Well no, I understand. Yeah, that’s a good point. What I meant was, your ability to raise revenue is now gonna be different. It used to be, let’s say that your revenue potential was only people from the town who would show up to the game, and they’re gonna show up regardless, let’s say. You have certain things you’re gonna try to achieve to make sure the local people come and show up every single week. Now you have the global audience, and you have global brand sales … You want to be the next Man U who sells jerseys in China, so that can effect your revenue, the money you have to put the best players on the pitch. Is that changing, then, what the owner wants to do, what the coaches want to do, their strategy for putting together the best team, because now you’re trying to appeal, you’re trying to play it … Let me give you an example from another sport. In chess.
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| Chess used to be where people would play chess and they’d have rich people basically sitting around them, and if you did a very showy win, if you figured out how to sacrifice three pieces and actually still end up with a mate, people would shower the board with gold coins. That’s how you got paid. People took lots of risks in chess. They were very, very aggressive, not much about defense. Now later on when people became more professional players, it became about wins and losses, they became very, very defensive. It became very, very much about drawing or winning and never losing. The whole game shifted because the reward system shifted for how you got rewarded for being a professional player.
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| I’m just wondering if there’s a corollary there where now a club has to think about, “Well, we could go with a more defensive team, or we could go with a more aggressive team, and we’re not quite sure which way to go, but we know a defensive team may not give us exciting games that people in China will want to watch or buy our jerseys for. A more aggressive team might give us that because we’ll have some more showy highlight reel stuff that we can rally the fans around. Maybe we should go that way.” I’m just asking you from a perspective of a coach, did this globalization of the game now change the way at least the owners or the coaches wanted to approach the building of the team?
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| Morell Maison: | I think the short answer is yes, but there are checks and balances whatever you do and they’ve brought them into football too. Four or five years ago, most of the big clubs are now owned by a benefactor. I mentioned Mr. Abramovich at Chelsea. He spent a billion dollars on his team in the last 10 years. Stoke have spent a hundred million. He spent a billion. There’s obviously disparity there. In looking at how you even it up, the world power decided that you could only spend a certain portion of your income. Now you have to be in profit and you can only spend 60 percent of your profit. It might be 60 percent of your turnover. There’s a percentage of your turnover that you could spend on the acquisition of players, including their salaries.
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| Mark Gleason: | But that includes your merchandising abroad, right? That billion dollars that Man U brings in-
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| Morell Maison: | It includes all your revenue, yes.
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| Mark Gleason: | All your revenue. Yeah. So it becomes much more important now to have those highlight reel good fan story that everybody can kind of … A underdog everybody wants to get behind that can attract that global base. For people who hate the leaders, they’re tired of Chelsea, they’re tired of Man U. Now you’re Leeds or your somebody who’s gonna come up from the bottom with an underdog story. How you’re building your team, it’s an important component of that, of your ability to attract those new fans.
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| Morell Maison: | Well, Leicester City blew that whole scenario out of the water last year because they were a small team, they cost 50 or 60 million, they were playing teams that cost 400 million, 500 million, and they won the championship over 38 games. Now, there are a lot of factors that were involved in that in terms of game time, but they still went out there and won those games and won that championship. This year they’re fighting relegation, so next season they could be in the championship.
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| Mark Gleason: | Which means they’re fighting to stay in the top league, right?
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| Morell Maison: | Exactly, so-
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| Mark Gleason: | Relegation’s where you get demoted.
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| Morell Maison: | You get demoted, so you’re down into the championship instead of being in the Premier League. They did not have the money or the spend that the big clubs had. They spent very little. I think they spent 30, 40 million. You had Manchester United spent 200 million. They spent 90 million on one player. They spent four times the amount of money that Leicester spent on one player and never made the Champions League and finished fifth or sixth in the league.
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| The money, though … I would say eight times out of 10, they money ensures that you’re going to be successful, but that’s two times in 10 when you could hit the jackpot not having the money. Leicester City did that last year, and that shook everybody up. That made everybody look, but the reality is they still cared on spending money, they still cared on building their team, buying the best players, and Leicester are fighting relegation whist these teams march on. There is something to be said for the money, but that doesn’t guarantee that you get the player that you want and that that player will perform consistently over a period of time in the way that you want him to perform.
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| Mark Gleason: | All right, to wrap up here … You have this football as a means of understanding better how people relate to their travel grouping, how they identify and how they relate to it. Jim, what do you … As a sum up, what do you think this teaches us? What do you think football as an experience, as it functions today in the UK, English football, what insight does this give us into human power dynamics?
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| Jim Luisi: | I think there are a number of interesting aspects that I find in this in that for one, I’m really impressed with the power of the herd when you look at this particular game. I can pretty much tell by the din of the sounds from a television station whether somebody is watching soccer versus any other sport. There’s a certain always a noise level and a certain number of voices that are being heard in those matches, and to me it’s so distinctive in that for myself, when I look at what herds are capable of and how much emotion, how people are so tied up into it, the depth at which they can identify with one particular herd, it’s really quite amazing.
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| I myself don’t have that. I do not have that feeling that I have an affinity to any particular herd, and to me it’s a very alien thing because of that. Yet when you see it and you experience it, it’s a whole different thing. I think when you look at crowd dynamics, you have a certain change in the way people behave. I think this is a great example where you are have a large crowd, and these things can go sideways really fast. If you don’t have those security measures in place to separate fans from one another … At a European soccer game, a football game, there are sections for one side and sections for the other side. You do not sit in the middle of team A’s crowd wearing team B’s jersey if you plan on getting out of there. It’s just not gonna happen.
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| Mark Gleason: | Which is alarming from a civil society standpoint. I should be able to wear whatever jersey I want and not suffer violence, right?
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| Jim Luisi: | Yes, that’s why I’m giving you this gift of this jersey, and I’m gonna … I have a seat picked out for you.
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| Mark Gleason: | Well no, what’s alarming is that I would imagine that if ended up in front of a judge, that the judge would say-
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| Jim Luisi: | He would say, “What’s the matter with you?”
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| Mark Gleason: | … “Why are you wearing that jersey in the middle of there?”
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| Jim Luisi: | Exactly.
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| Mark Gleason: | But it is interesting. I myself also, I am more of a witness to the herd mentality around sports teams. Once you start becoming a student of human power, the herd begins to lose some of the magic it had before. For instance, I am not a christian. I was raised christian, but I do not consider myself christian, but I don’t need to be christian to be sitting in a church on Christmas Eve when they’re singing songs holding candles and they’re singing hymnals to feel the surge of emotion and power, to experience that moment of belonging to the tribe and how powerful that is. You don’t need to be a sports fan of a particular team to be sitting in the stands and to feel that wave of belonging, that sense, that overwhelming power that comes with being lost and just being a member of the tribe in that moment. It’s very, very fundamentally human thing.
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| Jim Luisi: | The other aspect of it … I think it drives something home to me over and over again in that there really is no such thing, say, as person that creates a herd or a following. I think what happens is it’s the opposite way. I think there’s a collection of people that have something about them that allows them to identify as some sort of a group, and that what somebody does to become a leader of that or a beneficiary of that is they recognize it and find a way to tap into it, but they themselves cannot create that, and so it goes back to …
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| I think at the end of War and Peace, Tolstoy writes when the French followed Napoleon, it wasn’t because he was charismatic. It wasn’t because they were scared of him. It wasn’t because he had a compelling argument, it was because that was their sentiment and he just tapped into it. The herd has their emotions and when somebody can tap into it, and hence like a lot of the things that we see in politics, we’re seeing somebody being able to tune in to what’s happening in this collection of people, and the better you tune in, the better you can rise up as a figurehead or a representative showing the herd that you stand for their ideals. You are the person that they can funnel their dreams and desires into. That’s how people rise up in power.
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| Mark Gleason: | I think I want to draw an important distinction there, though. You can start a brand new movement. People do. People start a movement that others identify with, and they say, “You know what? I’d never thought of it in that way before, but you’re absolutely correct. You’re imagining a new future that I never imagined before,” so you can start movements and you can start a movement that attracts members of the herd. However, to your point, the reason you are able to do that was because man is a socially gregarious species. We tend to be herd-like. We tend to have already been a member of a tribe, and now you’ve pointed us in a new direction, and say, “Ooh, I think I’ll follow that tribe instead.” These notions of independence you have, I’ve always considered myself English, but here I am in the Americas and you’re standing up and saying all the reasons why we should be an independent country. You know what? You’ve won me over here. I’ve switched loyalty from my old tribe to my new tribe, and you’ve tapped into something there. Now-
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| Jim Luisi: | But they had to have those sentiments in themselves to be followers of that, even if they didn’t know of it before. There’s something in their character or in their personality profile that … Or in their circumstance, that lends itself to easily identify with that particular group.
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| Mark Gleason: | Well, I would say at the simplest form the answer to that is probably yes, but now you have a situation where you have a bunch of people who are not predisposed to your ideology, and now you are someone like George Soros who sees a bunch of people who are perfectly content to continue the way they are. What do you need to do now so that it does become obvious that they should join your way of thinking? Well perhaps, we could start funding some movements in groups, causing some instabilities, having riots here or there, starting to change peoples’ perspective. Pull the strings over power to move them a step at a time closer to what I would like them to follow.
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| This happens amongst every leadership of every movement, and that is where those strings of power get applied. It’s easy when it’s just a single jump, we’re gonna go from A to B. When you have to move somebody slowly and carefully over time so that they can end up in a position they never would’ve ended up ordinarily. If you explain to them where you’re going to end up initially, they would’ve rejected it wholesale, but because, like the frog in the pan, you’ve turned up the heat a little bit at a time, they end up in a place they never thought they would. Once they end up there they say, “Of course we’re here,” because you’ve been able to move their paradigm and shift it a piece at a time. Anyway, that’s a topic for another conversation, but I think this starts to … If you looked at something simple, quote unquote simple, like how do I turn Arsenal fans into fans of another football club?
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| Jim Luisi: | Or fans of another sport.
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| Mark Gleason: | Or fans of another sport.
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| Jim Luisi: | That’d be a tall order.
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| Mark Gleason: | How difficult would that be? If you could crack that problem, then going from Labour to Tory is easy.
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| Jim Luisi: | Yeah. I think what they’re trying to crack as a problem is how do you get European football to be as popular here in the United States? How do you get that interest level up here in that following, that belonging, and so far it hasn’t happened.
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| Mark Gleason: | The socio dynamics … Again I go back to the mobility of the society. Being in the same neighborhood that your grandfather was, that you’re in, that your children are in, is just not as prevalent in the US, which has a very mobile society. People move up and down in social status, economic status, profession … Just because your father’s a bricklayer that’s not highly predictive of whether or not you’re gonna be a bricklayer. America tends to have a highly mobile society. That means you’re gonna have less entrenched interests, right? Therefore, you need a slightly different angle if you’re going to try to have football break in because it’s gonna mean something different. It’s not gonna mean going down to the local and having a pint with the lads, just like your father did and grandfather did to watch the exact same team play in the exact same stadium. There is a whole ‘nother way of reaching out to people, which needs to occur.
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| Now, maybe you can do that. Maybe the internet’s allowing you to reach out specifically to the people to say, “Your grandfather is from this part of Liverpool and we still want you as a fan. We found a picture through face recognition of your family tracing all the way back to the ’50s, and here’s four pictures of them in the stands. Were you aware of that? We have a group on ancestry.com of all the people who came up this way. We want you as a fan.” Who cares if you’re a programmer living in San Francisco who has never been to the UK. Your family was, and maybe this is a way of restoring your roots. It may be there, I’m just saying it has to happen in a different because of how differently the people live in America.
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| Jim Luisi: | I think one of the stories that I remember Morell telling me about how he had taken his girlfriend to one of the matches. I think having exposed an individual to a match brings them to a point where they experience this whole emotional experience that is so intense that the only way to get to that again is by going to another European football match.
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| Mark Gleason: | Morell, you dog. Bringing these girls to these matches where they experience these wild adrenaline and endorphin rides, making them addicted to the experience. You mad genius.
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| Morell Maison: | Jim’s right. It’s an incredible thing to watch because after you’ve been to a few thousand games and thousands of games … Inertia doesn’t set in because every game is different, every set of circumstances is different. The emotions are different, but I took Emma to an Arsenal-Tottenham game at The Emirates. We needed to win. We did win one-nil and it was a cagey affair. We got one-nil up and then it was hang onto your everything because Tottenham were looking for this equalizer. There was a moment when Tottenham almost scored. I think the ball just bounced past the post or just clipped the post, and the stand we sat in, everybody lept to their feet. I’ve seen this a hundred times, a thousand times, so I just sat there. I was reading the program.
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| When I looked around, I looked up, and my girl is standing in her seat leaning forward with the entire crowd and there’s a whole, “Ooh,” as they almost scored and she was absolutely just wrapped up in it. Wrapped up in it, started listening to the songs and then singing the next rendition of the song; I was stunned. This is a film producer. She doesn’t do this. I’m like, “Wow.” To watch the whole thing unfold when someone hasn’t been to a game … The same with my son, M.J. He was exactly the same when I took him to his first game, and his brother. They get infected by it. They get infected by the game and everything that happens in the game. They then become part of that unit. They sing the songs. Some of these songs are not savory, so you look at your seven, eight-year-old son and you go, “No, you don’t sing that. You don’t sing that.” They don’t listen because they hear the words and then the whole emotion, this whole situation, takes over. It is incredible.
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| Mark Gleason: | Now, as a member of the team, as a coach or as a player, then there has to be a certain amount of celebrity that comes with the tribe acknowledgement, right?
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| Morell Maison: | Yeah. Definitely.
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| Mark Gleason: | The people on the field.
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| Morell Maison: | And you get different situations, so you get songs that are only ever sung in the pub, so you get pub songs. I think I played one to Jim earlier on. If you’re a supporter that goes to a lot of away games, there are songs that only get sung on the coach. They become the coach song. Then you get the terrace songs, the songs that are sung in the stadiums. There are different songs, and if you ever go onto Manchester United’s TV, they have their own TV channel, you’ll see a guy they call John Boyle.
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| John Boyle has been making up Man United songs since he was seven, traveling on the coach. He sat there as a seven-year-old on the coach with the players. Say, “Come on, sing. Sing a song.” So he’d make up songs. Those songs then would get played in the bars, sometimes on the coach. They could become coach songs. In the bars, they’d become pub songs. On the terraces they’d become terrace songs. He doesn’t know. He never knew … If you listen to John speak, he never knew what would be a successful song and what wouldn’t. He’d sing a song and that was it. Then he’d sing another song, and it’d go viral within the stadium. Everybody was singing it, and then he got adopted and it became an anthem. It was no longer a song, it was an anthem. Manchester United had a … Did you know the song Kumbaya?
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| Mark Gleason: | Yeah.
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| Morell Maison: | Manchester United had an Irish player called Paul McGrath. He was a fantastic player. They got him from Aston Villa. He liked to drink. He was one of the old school Irish and he liked to drink. There’d be games where he’d be playing, and to this tune of Kumbaya, they’d be singing, “On the piss, my son. On the piss. On the piss, my son. On the piss.” They’d been drinking the night before. The songs would become personalized, so they would sing songs to players about those players’ activities. If a player gets caught in bed with another man’s wife, they’ve made up a song about that. Suddenly you’ve got 40 thousand people telling your previous week’s escapades on the football pitch in full voice. You just pray your wife’s not listening. There’s loads of things that go on in the creation of these songs that become anthems that become imbibed in the history of the football club. It’s stunning, and to be there …
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| You should have a repeat of this episode, of the blog, having been to a game. In that game, when you feel what we’re discussing and what you heard, when you’re actually the person in there … Some of these things are indescribable. I’m sure there’s supporters of clubs that are listening to this blog that are probably shouting at the radio because they’ve got hundreds of stories they’d like to tell themselves, or they disagree with what we’re saying, or they more than agree and they’ve got things they’d love to add. When you’re in that stadium, if it’s a tight game, if it’s 1-1 and there’s a minute to go and you need a goal and it’s end to end stuff, the emotion, everything that rages through you is unbelievable, and if your teams score in the last minute of that game, you see 40, 50, 60 thousand people, it goes mad. You want to bottle that up and sell it and they do because everyone turns up the following week because they want to see the same again.
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| Jim Luisi: | The challenge I’m grappling with now is how I can explain to my boss why I need to hire a musician on staff to write a song for our company.
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| Mark Gleason: | See, I already have somebody full time writing ballads about my exploits.
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| Jim Luisi: | [crosstalk 02:16:26] Very interesting. You’re ahead of us.
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| Mark Gleason: | Well, very good. Gentlemen, thank you so much then for sharing with us your experience. I think we will do that. I think there’s so many things to talk about on this topic. Info@leveltopower.com, level T-O power dot com, for any feedback or questions. Now Morell, you have been a coach and you’re quite embedded in the internal mechanics of the whole football industry, so anybody who has any questions can email us and we’ll make sure Morell either answers or even better yet, bring him back on the podcast and he can address all your questions, concerns, and cheerful anecdotes directly. Very good. Well, thank you gentlemen for coming. We’ll welcome you back again soon. You can change your level, change your life, and change your world. Welcome to APEX Level to Power.
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| Speaker 2: | This has been the APEX Level to Power podcast with your host Mark Gleason, the podcast where your opinion changes but you still get to feel right. The one ability we cannot give ourselves is credibility. You have to give that to us, so please like, subscribe or write a review. Change your level, change your life, and you can change the world. Welcome to APEX Level to Power.
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