It’s a dog eat dog world
Unless and until we decide otherwise.
Watching someone get their first look at infinity is pretty cool.
I was having lunch the other day with a four-year-old when they told me the biggest number was 100. I went to the old Arsene Wenger playbook and asked them what would happen if they added one magic bean to 100 magic beans?
Pause, furrowed brow, wide eyes. ONE-HUNDRED-AND-ONE.
So, what’s the biggest number?
Rolled eyes, we just talked about this: 101.
What happens, though, if you add one to 101?
So went by one of the simpler and more profound half-hours of conversation either of us had enjoyed for a while.
I regret to inform you that the bidding for the exclusive naming rights to the Blog formerly known as the Blog with No Name didn’t go all the way to infinity. There are still lives left to be saved, if you’re minded to do so.
Nevertheless, I am pleased to report that the bidding did draw directly from Arsene Wenger’s Econ 101. Our brave and kind auction-winner, what with being a Master of Glaciers and a Doctor of Dunes, was able to go a step further than our four-year-old friend and first imagine adding a zero, starting up at £1000 and adding one from there. At £150 a pop, that’s the best part of seven years of an infant’s life to you and me. Truly, the stuff of legend, and well worth a month (or four posts, whichever takes longer (or even longer if it catches on)) of seeing his name up in lights.
I hope every time you look at the number 1001, you’ll see Arabian Nights:1 folklore compiled from many sources; storytelling as survival strategy; stories hidden within stories and unfurling over time; 1001 nights being how long it can take to change somebody’s mind. At least, that’s how long it took Scheherazade to change the mind of a mad king who had heretofore taken to killing a new wife each night. And are we really any more amenable to having our minds changed than him?
Every time I look at the number 1001, I’ll see Luis Suarez rubbing 31 boatloads of salt into Arsene Wenger’s wounded pride, and think life is oh so absurd.
Summer 2013, Arsene and Arsenal blinking their way out of the Banter Era. Arsene had spent £390 million of someone else’s money building the Emirates Stadium, which Arsenal moved into in 2006. Then he paid for it: the Banter Era (c. 2006-2013) was spent servicing debt, selling iconic players in their prime to clubs actually owned, not merely sponsored, by sovereign wealth funds, hunting for replacements in the bargain bin, and treating qualifying for the Champions League as a trophy.2
That fateful summer, with licence to spend more than chump change for the first time in years, Arsene comes to believe that Suarez’s contract with Liverpool has a buyout clause for bids “over £40,000,000”. Ever the economist, Le Professeur goes to work at the margin, submitting a cunning and club record bid of £40,000,001.
And so was served up another lesson, if one were needed, that being right is not enough.
You don’t have to be immoral to drive a Brink’s truck through the gap between what words say and what words mean in pursuit of your own interests: amoral people can do it too. The law living in spirit as much as statute means that vibes can defy reason in the court of public opinion. Shamelessness and indecency have a tendency these days to prevail when we rely on shame or decency to keep amygdala instincts in check.
Liverpool’s American owners, led by John W. Henry, interpreted Suarez’s buyout clause as requiring them only to inform him of bids over £40,000,000 and to negotiate in good faith, not necessarily to accept them. So informed, he asked them to accept this one. Nobody ever went broke betting on football culture being a bit allergic to things a touch too cute, especially if they smell intellectual. Henry and co bet the patent silliness of Le Prof going so strictly by the book would protect them from being on the receiving end of a backlash they couldn’t easily brush off. They told Suarez no, making one wonder what the clause could possibly have been good for other than the money power’s control over a streetkid from Montevideo.
Suarez was no saint. He’s been flagrantly crosswise with the law himself, for unapologetic cheating, unapologetic racism, and unapologetic biting. Once, a mistake. Twice, a mistake? Three times?!
Despite his flaws, and helpfully for remembering how the halo effect is a noxious bias and how everything is a tradeoff, prime Suarez was elite at making ball go goal. In 2013/14, surfacing few misgivings about continuing to serve the interests of the masters who defied him, he put together one of the finest seasons the Premier League has seen, scoring 31 times and earning himself a £75 million move to Barcelona the following summer.
It’s a dog eat dog world, unless and until we decide otherwise.
Thank you to all you bidders, most especially our Master of Glaciers and Doctor of Dunes, for kindly and bravely deciding otherwise.
Welcome to The 1001.
Training data
📖Among the Thugs (1991). American Bill Buford went and became an English football hooligan, up to and including being beaten by Italian police while rioting in their streets, so he and we could try to understand wtf that dishonourable culture is all about. Puts Hillbilly Elegy in the shade.
🎵My Number (2013). “You don’t have my number / We don’t need each other now / The creed or the culture / We can move beyond it now.”3
📖Behave (2017). Bearded Bob Sapolsky, primatologist and neuroscientist, goes long on our base instincts and how we keep them in check, biologically and culturally. The answer to whether we’re Good or Bad, like the answer to just about everything else, is it depends. (You can also inject his unrivaled nerd-charisma into your veins in lecture series format using video or audio.)
No, not Boogie Nights. I don't want to be Bill Simmons that much.
Now, thanks to having the 4th highest matchday revenue, thanks to Le Prof’s investment, Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal are the 7th richest club in the world, and a coin-flip away from winning the Premier League for the first time since 2004.
“...Can you even hear me? / Do you even know my name?”