Liverpool’s teens suffer, but football suffers more
Welcome to a future nobody wanted. Aston Villa are through to the League Cup semi-final after beating a teenage Liverpool side 5-0 at Villa Park. But as seemingly always with football today, it will be the memory of the night’s subliminals which last, not the game itself.
Anyone back early enough from work to have caught the end of Al Hilal against Flamengo will understand. The first semi-final of the Club World Cup was a decent enough game, the Brazilians prevailing 3-1 after falling behind, but it caught the competition at its most bizarre.
It was bloodless football played with several running tracks between the pitch and the fans. The vast expanses of the Khalifa Stadium make London Stadium seem like Upton Park, and the occasion possessed that unsettling Europa League final otherness, borrowed from that bizarre night in Baku. Something of significance was taking place, but remotely and in front of lots of empty seats.
At full-time and many thousands of miles away, Liverpool took the field in the Midlands. Forty-five minutes later, they were leaving the pitch four goals down, out of the League Cup, and having been put back in their place by a half-cocked Villa performance which grew more sheepish with every goal.
It was harsh. At the end of November, Liverpool’s U19s had beaten Napoli 7-0 in the Champions League. That was a hell of a performance, all brilliant mechanics and perfect understanding. Four of the players involved that night started this evening – Luis Longstaff, Harvey Elliott, Sepp van den Berg, Ki-Jana Hoever – and given the reputation of Liverpool’s academy in general, the players promoted tonight were well worth watching.
This harsh lesson doesn’t change that, it doesn’t make any of them any less talented and hopefully none of them will take this too badly to heart. But this wasn’t really a night to dwell on the micro. In fact, even the concerns being expressed over the League Cup’s integrity seem really to miss the point.
Liverpool – real, actual Liverpool – will play their semi-final tomorrow, against the Mexican club Monterrey. They’ll win, of course, because they’ll be much too strong. Then they’ll win the final at a canter, too, dispatching Flamengo in a way which should make European football cringe over its many, many advantages.
In two years’ time, the competition will be more convoluted. Gianni Infantino has won the battle to enlarge it to 24 teams and by then it will have a group stage, a quarter-final, and will have been moved to three weeks in the summer. And it will be in China. Of course it will, because we must continue to grow the game at every opportunity. Football must keep getting bigger. All the time. It must penetrate new territories, play its games in new climates and pile its merchandise into shopping cities which haven’t even been built yet.
Why are Liverpool in Qatar? Literally to win the Club World Cup, of course, but what even is that? What will it mean to win it? Now, or even in its expanded format. It comes with a financial prize, presumably, maybe even a natty little badge that could be sewn on to the kit, but what is its value in the context of other footballing achievements?
Isn’t one of the great ironies that European football has done so much ‘growing of the game’ through pre-season tours and tournaments and through the selling of overseas rights packages and opening of new offices in different continents, that fighting an actual battle on these pitches is invading a land already conquered. At least the League Cup offers a fight between semi-equals.
And that’s what it should have been. Aston Villa against Liverpool on a Tuesday night before Christmas. No extra-time, straight to penalties. Two of the most recognisable side in the country piling into each other at one of the oldest venues in Europe. Except not, because that occasion was traded away for who knows what. As will increasingly be the case.
UEFA’s big beasts won’t stop until they’ve disfigured continental football entirely and that new schedule will, inevitably, have to come at the cost of something else. And on and on, because the game never knows when to stop. It can never just survey its scene, conclude that things are kind of fine as they are and just carry on. No, the mobilisation has to keep going, irrespective of whether it’s serving a purpose or not. Bigger tournaments. More countries. Longer qualifying. More TV.
Play it all on the moon. Sell Gazprom telescopes and pump the approved lagers into the observatories. Replace the ball with a Faberge egg, build a dome over the pitch and find an official gravity sponsor. Appoint a warlord as referee. Grow the game, grow the game.
So what of those Liverpool players tonight? They’ll be better for the experience, we’ll be told, and this will be an important night in their education. But education for what? What is football actually going to look like in five or ten years, when its calendar finally splits at the seam and its natural order scatters.
Seb Stafford-Bloor is on Twitter.
