Who tells your story?
This is the post I have been slowly writing in my head since this site started. Why does this site exist? Among the reasons are:
I believe a top tier club deserves as much coverage from professional and amateur media as the market will bear.
I did a little bit of research and didn't find anybody doing non-statistical, eye-test player ratings for Racing Louisville FC
My inflated ego made me think I could actually write about soccer. That same ego is healthy enough not to be insulted if only a few people read it.
Cynically…I wanted there to be a place where fans could get the unvarnished truth. If the club did something bad, I wanted there to be an outlet for fans to hammer them on it (Google European Super League debacle if you need some context).
Not in that list was to be a club historian.
History is such a funny thing. It's simultaneously embraced for its better parts and reviled for its inevitable recording of the unsavory ones…if it's a truthful history.
Selfishly I want this club to stay new forever and simultaneously be 100 years old. The newness brings a willingness and dare I say eagerness to engage with fans. New teams need fans to be successful. New teams have a honeymoon period on both sides. Using Racing as an example, the team immediately reached out to me and gave me as much access as I could have ever dreamed. I think it was on the site's second or third day of existence. I have frankly bombarded the communications team with questions and ideas, and they have been gracious in responding. Everyone on the team seems likable, and you could not design a better captain in a lab than Racing has in Michelle Betos. The stadium is new and sparkles. The merchandise is flying off the racks. The local media seems engaged and educated about the team. The 2 clubs owned by Soccer Holdings LLC are tremendously run organizations. They have shown several times to be responsive to fan complaints (logo changes, name changes, where away fans should sit). Hopefully most of these things come with being a well run organization, and not just being a new one that needs its fans as much as the fans need them.
A perusal of the ownership list of some of the oldest professional sports teams in the world frankly is full of selfish jerks and shady businessmen. I would say that most large sporting enterprises care just as much, if not more, about their TV revenues and licensing fees than their fans. However, their support is huge and their history is often rich. You don’t get “You'll Never Walk Alone” by buying a franchise and popping it in a random city. Nor do you inherit a memory like “It's up for grabs now!”. As many times as I watch it, it still gives me chills, but not as much as someone who experienced it real time or was actually there.
But traditions have to start somewhere. There is no better place than right here and now, but you can't force them. I was so close to trying to start an oh-Eb-o-ny Sal-mon chant (the ever present Seven Nation Army chant) after she scored, but the goal song played, a hydration break occurred and I lost my nerve. As much as I would like to be “King of the World”, I don't know if I could have even gotten my section to go along with me. Traditions can't be forced and have to occur naturally, no matter how much I might want to manufacture 3 or 4 of them right now.
What I CAN do is be a historian. I can tell the story of someone who was there, pretty much from the beginning. I am trying to do this through this site. As an auxiliary to my posts about the matches, I am creating a few historical markers. First, I am keeping a list of goals scored in competitive matches. Of course you could get these one by one through match reports, but my list is a chronological record if you want them all at once. There are links to the videos that I hope stay active. The second one is something a little more tangible and evolving. I have a wooden fleur-de-lis where I am logging the same information as the goal list,
but I plan to leave room for a chart of appearances and maybe, just maybe, a space for silverware.
I have no idea of what I will do with it once the season is over, but it’s more about the process of doing it, than the finished product. Also, I want to start a Player of the Month award. Several Premier League teams give a Player of the Month award that is voted on by fans. I am deciding whether to open it up for voting, but the “King of the World” in me says that I'll be a benevolent king by asking for input, but ultimately decide it myself. I'm willing to actually make a physical trophy as well, but we'll see if there is any interest in that.
You might ask yourself why, since so many stats and stories are available on the internet, would anyone go to the trouble to document a history that can be reconstructed at any time? At no point in history have more or better statistics been available more broadly. It is because football (soccer) is betrayed by its statistics more than any other sport. A box score in baseball is such a beautifully tragic item. It so greatly encapsulates the game that you need not have watched the game to understand what happened. Of course you would have missed something by not watching the game, but for the most part the story is there. You can reconstruct the game in your mind with some degree of accuracy. In football, the performances by defenders and midfielders are often boiled down to goals, tackles, passes, etc. on the stat sheet. The statistics can do them a great injustice. I looked at Freja Olofsson's stats and player rating on Fotmob after the match yesterday. She had 6.8 rating and 0 tackles. To me she was the player of the match. Who is right? Probably both perspectives, but one of those perspectives would be lost to history if I had not recorded it somewhere.
I guess my entire point is that it matters who records history. If you leave it to the robots and machines, you might rob yourself of a truer understanding of what happened. If you somewhat trust a unapologetically biased fan like me, you'll get my version of the truth even if it has a lavender tint.
