The Meaning of All Those Goal Fests

Crushing scores have become strangely ubiquitous in top-tier soccer lately. Manchester United, which last year embarrassed Roma in the Champions League with such a score, this year got a taste of the same horrible medicine at the hands of Liverpool, which also dispensed it to Real Madrid – then nearly succumbed to the same treatment against Chelsea. Bayern Munchen gave my favorite Portuguese team, Sporting, the drubbings of its life in both legs of their recent Champions League encounter – only to suffer much the same fate at the hands of Barcelona. Porto was humiliated against Arsenal, only to come back and outplay Arsenal’s proven better, Manchester United. To fans of the winning team, of course, such inflated scores are the stuff of fantasy. Yet these are indeed inflated scores, more fantastic than real. They make the losing team look like utter crap, forever vanquished, and the winners like invincible supermen who will rule forever. If soccer were truly war, would not such routs mean the absolute conquest of a nation, even annihilation of a race? In fact, though, Roma is neither crap nor vanquished, nor is Sporting Lisbon in danger of vanishing or even of just ceasing to be a top European team. And that Bayern and Manchester United and Liverpool are not the godly teams that their goal fests would make them out to be was recently demonstrated by the humbling results they obtained against Barcelona, Porto and Chelsea, respectively. Scoring routs, then, may be spectacles especially pleasing to fair-weather fans mainly interested in seeing their team win, by the more crushing a margin the better. But the game’s true aficionados know such scores between well-matched teams are fairly meaningless, no more than aberrations that do not truly reflect the history, character, quality or future performance of either team and arise only in weirdly dysfunctional matches in which one team acts as if it had somehow been crippled by a sucker punch. After all, even in war, easy routs are not to be trusted, usually meaning far less than they at first appear to: consider what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.