Putting the Microscope on Liverpool, 2019-20 Premier League Champions

Well, it took some doing, but Liverpool finally clinched their title on Thursday, with Chelsea's defeat of Manchester City. It's not quite the fairy tale that Leicester's title win consisted of, but it's a pretty exciting achievement, given Liverpool's dominance this season and the long wait since their previous league title.

Now, when I say it's not a fairy tale, it's not to take away from Liverpool's absolute dominance this season, especially given how close they came to winning last season. However, even if they don't have the financial clout of a Gulf petro-state behind them, Liverpool are far from a scrappy newcomer to the Premier League - though it's worth remembering that Leicester's win was also bankrolled by some pretty deep pockets.

In fact, in the 30 years since Liverpool last won the league title, they've won 15 trophies (including this season's Premier League). Most of those were FA or League Cups, but notably they won the Champions League twice during that period, including last season, and the Europa League at some point as well.

To put this trophy haul into context, Liverpool lags behind both Manchester United (29 trophies during the same period) and Chelsea (20), but ahead of both Arsenal (13 trophies) and Manchester City (11). Liverpool have won fewer league titles than any of those competitors, in part because of United's dominance for the better part of three decades under Alex Ferguson bringing 13 Premier League titles. But Liverpool and United are tied for most Champions Leagues won, at 2 apiece, while City and Arsenal haven't won any European titles in that time.

Comparing trophies under their current managers shows that most of Manchester City's trophies (6 out of 11) have come under Pep Guardiola, compared with 4 for Liverpool under Jürgen Klopp. This number is fitting, when you consider that until 2008 City weren't the powerhouse that they are now. But it's also worth remembering that for all the domination of Guardiola's City in the last few seasons, he still hasn't won a Champions League since 2011, with Barcelona.

Because Guardiola's arrival at City coincided with Klopp's first full season at Liverpool, it's also possible to compare their league standings for the past four seasons. Other than 2017-18, when City steamrolled all before them to win the league with 100 points and 106 goals, having won 32 out of 38 games, Liverpool have nipped at City's heels every season, most notably last year, when they squandered a lead in mid-season to end just one point behind City.

To put it another way, in their two most recent title-winning seasons, Manchester City averaged 2.6 points per game, compared with the 2.6 and 2.0 points per game that Liverpool managed in 2018-19 and 2017-18, respectively. This season (which is still incomplete), Liverpool have clinched the title with 2.8 points per game, compared with 2.0 from City. Those numbers may change with the remaining seven matches each team has to play, of course.

The secret to Liverpool's success seems also to have come in the transfer market. It's hard to compare the money spent on signings by Klopp and Guardiola, because you can massage the totals and averages to reflect whatever you like. But it seems clear that Manchester City under Pep Guardiola have bought more players - so far, so uncontroversial.

On the other hand, of the 8 notable first-team signings that Liverpool have made, the most expensive has been Virgil van Dijk, for £75 million, which makes him more expensive than any of Guardiola's signings at City. Liverpool's second-highest transfer fee paid was £66.8mn for goalkeeper Alisson, which also beats any of the signings that Guardiola has made.

You can't argue that Guardiola has gone for a policy of galacticos, because the teams he's built over the past few seasons have dominated pretty comprehensively in both the seasons they won, and the quality in the Premier League is such that just sticking a bunch of expensive attackers in a side won't net you much. But the preponderance of attacking midfielders and wingers and creative players shows Guardiola's preference in terms of players, whereas Klopp's purchases seem to have involved rather a gradual tinkering to shore up the weak points in his team each season.

Alisson is a great example. After errors from goalkeeper Loris Karius cost Liverpool the Champions League in 2018, Klopp went and bought a replacement in Alisson, from Roma, the team that possibly gave Liverpool the biggest scare en route to the final that season. This is after having picked up van Dijk to shore up the defense, so it's clear that a key part of Klopp's strategy for building a winning team has involved strengthening the back line.

In fact, not only has Klopp made four of Liverpool's five most expensive signings, but the other two after van Dijk and Alisson are either central or defensive midfielders: Naby Keïta for £45mn and Fabinho for £33mn, respectively. It's not to say that Klopp favors a stodgy, defensive style of play - but it's notable their average goals conceded declined from 1.1 goals per game in 2016-17, Klopp's first full season in charge, to 0.6 goals per game in 2018-19. Manchester City, by the way, did the exact opposite from last season to this - conceding just 0.6 goals per game en route to winning the title, vs conceding 1.1 goals per game (so far) this season to place second.

None of this is meant to take away from Liverpool's achievement, since they've won with a record seven games to spare, and currently stand 23 points ahead of City. But it's clear that Liverpool's win has come on the end of years of meticulous planning, getting the team composition exactly right, to then be able to steamroll the rest of the league, and fairly mercilessly too.

As ever, the question is what next season will hold. Leicester ended up flopping a bit after their title-winning season (which incidentally, I consider now to be ill-starred since that summer Britain voted to leave the EU and the US elected Donald Trump). But Leicester's achievement, while mighty, came at a time that the biggest clubs were all in disarray, with Mourinho self-destructing at Chelsea, and both City and Arsenal's managers at the time unable to eke out any more from their players at the time. Leicester ended up having a torrid time, sacking Claudio Ranieri mid-season (and then eventually sacking his replacement afterwards, and the replacement for him), and only this season have emerged as a credible Top 4 side, if not title challenger.

It'd be a surprise if Liverpool had the same difficulties. True, City's defense isn't the same since their captain, Vincent Kompany, left, but they're still a formidable team. Rather, this win stands in a continuum with the previous seasons, where they improved measurably each season. At the very least, it's easy to expect them to place in the Champions League spots again, though there's always the danger of the team tiring out the way Dortmund did in Klopp's last season in Germany.

Time will tell, as I always say. But in the meantime, congratulations to the reigning European, world and now English champions, Liverpool FC.

Mission Impossible vs The Fast and the Furious

I've come to realize over the last couple of years that the true line dividing our society is that between those who enjoy the finer things in life - a good drink, talks with friends, Vin Diesel driving a car off the Burj al-Arab - and those who live lives devoid of joy. Those, in short, who prefer the Mission Impossible movies.

Forget left vs right, atheism vs belief, or Coke vs Pepsi. Our culture is riven by the war between those who prefer the adventures of Dominic Toretto, Han and Ludacris vs watching Tom Cruise jump off of stuff. I think you can tell from the preceding paragraphs where I fall in this important question.

Now, it's worth saying that I've watched almost all of the Mission Impossible movies, and am indeed taking a quick break from watching Fallout, the most recent of the series. I expect once I've finished this essay I'll go back to it (only 45 minutes to go, joy), but in the meantime, please be prepared for SPOILERS:

So why have I watched all the Mission Impossible movies? I dunno - maybe it's a certain masochistic completionism, or maybe I keep hoping there'll be something to love in them. The trailers always look impressive, and I can't deny that the stunts really are amazing. In Fallout, for example, Henry Cavill and Tom Cruise skydive out of an airplane INTO A THUNDERSTORM and land in Paris. Mid-jump, Cavill gets knocked unconscious and Cruise has to save him in mid-air.

Fairness compels me to note that this is probably a better set-piece than my favorite Fast & Furious one, which is the sequence in Fast 5 where they drag that safe through Rio. It's also better than the sequence in FF6, where they're on that enormous plane that's taking off for ages and both Han and Giselle (seemingly) die to save the world... and that's a pretty darn good action sequence.

I guess my objection to the MI movies is that I still haven't forgiven the series for the first three movies. The first, which came out when I was in high school, was an okay bit of fluff, with Tom Cruise jumping around and doing crazy stuff, and it was fine, I guess? Though I disapproved of the ending twist where the guy who'd been running the team in the old TV show turned out to be the bad guy (which is why Jon Voight played the character and not Peter Graves).

The second remains my least favorite movie ever, and probably damaged John Woo's career here in the west. The characters, down to their names, were stupid and obnoxious, and to top it all off, a cat jumped under my car as I drove home afterwards - while I won't imply there's a causal relationship here, it certainly makes you think.

(Btw, I seem to remember seeing the cat hop back into the bushes along the road afterwards in my mirror, so I'm hoping it didn't actually get killed. But still - fuck that movie)

MI3 I don't even remember, because it's one of the few films I ever fell asleep while watching. Granted, I was jet lagged, but it's hardly an endorsement, is it?

So I resisted watching Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation for the longest time. Eventually I did break down and watch them, and they were... fine. I suppose. But the problem is that they're so serious, and they lack the sense of fun that characterizes the FF movies. Not only that, but the first half of the series didn't really build on any of the previous films (much like the James Bond movies), and it's only in the last three films that we've had a running storyline about Tom Cruise's guilt about abandoning his wife.

Compare that with the complicated mythology that grew up around FF, where it starts as a bromance about Paul Walker and Vin Diesel, but then they keep making friends with their adversaries (e.g. the Rock and Jason Statham). The way that Michelle Rodriguez seemingly dies, then is back, and all the drama that ensues.

Now, let's not pretend either of these series is high art, of course. But when I say the MI films are silly or implausible, what I really mean is convoluted - climbing around Emirati skyscrapers or jumping through lightning storms may look good, but I'm sure there are less complicated ways of achieving your goal. The plots are weird and hard to follow, and this might sound counter-intuitive, but what drives me nuts is that if I glance away at my phone for a moment I lose track of what's happening.

When I say that the FF movies are silly, I mean they're over the top, stupid and proud of it, but they aren't making any pretense of being any more than silly actioners. Though I will say I miss when they were just heist movies, rather than a series about foiling global terrorism by driving cars at bad guys.

Anyway, I have to get back to watch the end of Fallout. I hope there'll be some good spectacle in this final 45 minutes, on a level with the car chases and sky dives of the first 90 minutes or so. But in my heart of hearts what I really want to see is Tom Cruise driving a super-car off of something high and maybe killing a helicopter with it. That's something Vin Diesel could pull off.

Why Is It Controversial to End Racism?

This is the question that's going around on a bunch of memes at the moment, and when a friend posted it on Facebook yesterday, I had a bit of a brainstorm as to why it is. It involves pop culture and cognitive dissonance, and the endless talent for self-justification that people have for their own bullshit.

Pop culture comes into it because Hollywood has taught us what racists look like. They're either old fat Southern men, who drawl epithets casually, or they're Germans. Racism in the movies is easy to spot because people are using the N-word and burning crosses and such. It becomes an easy - even lazy - way of showing how bad the villain is. After all, when Ron Perlman's character in Blade 2 asks Wesley Snipes if he can blush, that's like a reverse Save the Cat moment, where we learn all we need to about that character.

This isn't to take away from the fact that racism really is evil, of course. When you call someone a racial slur, for example, you're taking away all of the things that make them a unique individual, basically saying it doesn't matter what you've accomplished in life, you're just a... whatever. But this gets elided in pop culture, because pop culture can't convey nuance.

And that leads to the cognitive dissonance. We're so used to seeing racism depicted in a certain way on TV and in movies, we ignore when our words or behavior are racist, because we aren't Germans or policemen from the Deep South (most of us aren't, at any rate). We've built up this righteous anger on the behalf of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, but it makes us smug and blinds us to the ways we're casually or even overtly racist in real life.

The most spectacular way that this manifests, by the way, is in the far-right marchers in the UK who have responded to the threat of vandalism to statues of Winston Churchill by... giving Nazi salutes? F Scott Fitzgerald would have called this a sign of a first-rate mind: being able to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still being able to function.

That depiction of racism as being done exclusively by certain people is also class warfare, by the way (you know, just for good measure). We may say or do racist things, but we don't think of ourselves as racist because we feel superior to so-called "poor white trash". This serves to perpetuate splits between poor whites and poor minorities, and allows more well-off whites to justify why they don't mix with "those people".

Of course, the description above only refers to people who aren't "openly" racist. They might tell racist jokes at the pub or something, but aren't actively campaigning for race wars or sequestering African-Americans and Jews in special "homelands" in the South. It doesn't apply to those who actually do say out loud the stuff that for most people is only ingrained racism - and yet, the so-called alt-right benefits from the stereotypes I listed above. All these young, well-groomed men who like to flash Nazi salutes at alt-right karaoke nights know that we won't take their racism seriously precisely because they aren't sweaty old fat men with Southern drawls. This is, in fact, just how the New York Times has gotten hoodwinked into running a bunch of normalizing profiles of "the well-dressed racist next door".

So next time you wonder why people are counter-protesting against Black Lives Matter, remember that they (and we in general) are only playing out this narrative that racism only comes from certain people. And as long as we aren't "those people", we're in the clear... right...?

Solidarity