Champions League 2021-22: What A Long Strange Trip

In a lot of ways this season's Champions League passed me by, because I really only started watching it at the semi-final round. On the other hand, that's actually earlier than I started watching either of the two previous seasons, because with WFH I've been finding it oddly harder to tear myself away from work to check out matches in the middle of the day (and because I didn't have Paramount Plus until last summer).

Yet it's been a weird one. Not in the sense that Real Madrid won it, because this is the fifth time in a decade that Real has won the tournament, making it probably Real's most dominant period since the 1950s. But it's weird because Real's path to the final involved beating the champions of France and England (PSG and Manchester City), and the current Champions League holder (Chelsea), in addition to Liverpool, who came in second in the Premier League just the weekend before. As the football podcasts and pundits noted, everybody made a big deal of Real losing in the group stage to Moldovan minnows Sheriff Tiraspol, but then they fought their way through to win the whole thing.

As I noted on social media before the final, the last time a Spanish team lost in the Champions League final was 2016, when Atletico Madrid lost to Real; the last time a Spanish team lost against non-Spanish opposition was 2001; and the last time Real Madrid lost in the final was 1981, against Liverpool in Paris. You wonder how important a stat like that is, but there does seem to be some feeling of ownership that Real has over the Champions League, which no other team seems able to match.

The verdict is also that Liverpool appeared out of sorts, not just in this final, but in the two domestic cups that they won and for the last few weeks of the league campaign. You could argue that when Real beat Liverpool in 2018, it was the triumph of skill vs will, where the cohesion and dark arts of Real won out over what English pundits like to call Jürgen Klopp's heavy metal football. By now, Liverpool have calmed down their style of play, but this time it was Real whipping themselves up into a frenzy to win.

There was also a sense that Liverpool were outplayed, despite having put more shots on target than Real. It seemed clear to me that there'd be a second goal at some point, likely from Liverpool, given how many attacks they mounted on Real's goal, but it wasn't to be... and in fact, Real could have been two goals up by the end, given that weird disallowed goal that bounced around a bunch before being overruled for offside.

In terms of dominance by the top countries, this was business as usual. In fact, despite Bayern Munich winning in 2020 against PSG, you kind of wonder if it's not time to start talking about Spain and England being the Top Two in Europe, while Germany and Italy get relegated to the second tier with France. At the very least, fifth-place France's coefficient is closer to fourth-place Italy's than third-place Germany's is to England's. More to the point, no team from Germany, Italy or France made it to the quarter-finals, while the only team not from England or Spain in that round was Portugal's Benfica, though they still lost to Liverpool.

In a season or two, the Champions League will switch to a new format, which will further entrench the main countries and add a couple of places for teams based on coefficients rather than actual league performances. This is expected to let in teams like Manchester United or someone if they have a bad season or two, though in the short term it looks like it'll benefit Dutch or Portuguese teams.

I've aired my dissatisfaction over this state of affairs on Facebook, but been reminded that no one really cares to watch the Belgian champion when they can watch Real Madrid vs Barcelona or Juventus or Manchester City. These are fair points, and it feels like King Cnut ordering the sea not to come in, but I can't help thinking that a more democratic European league system would mean that Belgian, Portuguese or Eastern European sides could afford to hold onto star players and make for better competition with the big teams. 

Also, as exciting as it is to see the absolute giants of European football play each other, ratings have declined for anything before the knockout stages, because it's clear that such match-ups aren't special anymore. Real Madrid and Barcelona already play each other twice in the league each season, plus usually in the Copa del Rey, and then potentially in the Champions League. During their pomp, there were seasons when they met five times, thanks to various super-cups and so on.

I always say it'll be interesting to see how the competition shakes out next season, but let's face it, we'll get another match-up like this one, between two fabulously wealthy teams from the richest leagues. The only hope will be that at least we get wild nights like when Real beat Manchester City in the semi-final at the last minute, having been behind across both legs.

In Praise of the History of Rome Podcast

At some point during the pandemic, I saw an author (possibly Adrian Tchaikovsky but I haven't been able to confirm) mention several podcasts on ancient history, as potential sources for story ideas. These were The Ancients, The Ancient World and Fall of Civilizations, all of which I checked out. The Ancients is a weekly show that highlights different topics and has weekly guests, so I've dipped in here and there to download episodes that particularly interest me.

Fall of the Ancients is a narrative podcast by Paul MM Cooper, in which he talks about a different empire's collapse in each episode. I've downloaded them all but so far only listened to the first, about Roman Britain. 

The Ancient World is also a narrative series, with the podcaster, Scott Chesworth, starting from the very beginning of recorded history and going through most of Near Eastern History, prior to Rome. I downloaded the whole of the first slate of episodes, which started out by doing periodic surveys of what was happening all over the world in the earliest ancient times, including in South America. I haven't listened to his other sub-series, but at some point he mentioned Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, which I duly also checked out.

The first thing that struck me about the History of Rome was that the episodes were super-short, at least at first. My main experience with history podcasts was Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, which regularly features episodes exceeding three, sometimes four or five hours, so episodes lasting less than 20 minutes were quite an inducement (though I should note that I do enjoy Hardcore History, length notwithstanding).

The other thing about History of Rome is that it started from the very earliest, semi-mythical origins of Rome and went through to the fall of the Western Empire. I decided a few years ago that I wanted to investigate Roman history a bit more, since what I knew was picked up from scattered (sometimes fictional) sources, and I wasn't left with any sense of how it went from kingdom to republic to empire, or really what happened after it became ruled by the emperors. I read Mary Beard's SPQR a couple of years ago, but for whatever reason very little of it stuck in my mind, whereas the short, focused episodes of History of Rome have given me a better understanding of how the empire played out following the assassination of Julius Caesar.

What's interesting is that Mike Duncan isn't an academic, but a political science major who just decided to start doing it at some point in 2007, and kept going for 179 episodes until the fall of the Western Empire. His Wikipedia page claims that he was working as a fishmonger during part of the recording of the podcast, but that he's since also served as a consultant on a Netflix series about Ancient Rome and an episode of the Simpsons. This, of course, makes him a good example of the DIY ethos that I used to love about the old Nerdist Podcast.

I'd say my grasp of the back-and-forth of Republican Rome is still incomplete (through no fault of the host), because there are a lot of names and wars to keep track of, so it gets hard to sort your Scipii from your Brutii from your Marian reforms and Sullan dictatorships. Though the fact that I now know Marius and Sulla were political rivals is thanks for Duncan's efforts.

On the other hand, since the switch to the Empire, in which he focused heavily on the emperors themselves, I've learned the order of emperors, so now I can name them all from Augustus to Pertinax. Presumably by the end will really be able to impress the ladies by naming every (western) emperor through Romulus Augustulus.

Jokes aside, it's easy to get confused about the order of emperors, since some of the craziest emperors, like Caligula, came quite early in the empire's history. By contrast, some of the better emperors came a century after Augustus, and it's been good learning about the Five Good Emperors and putting their achievements, like Hadrian's Wall, in historical context. 

This is all important to me because, being Italian, it's part of my heritage, however remotely, and because whenever I go to Rome, or really anywhere that has Roman ruins or artifacts, it would be nice to understand how those ruins or relics fit into the wider history. To put it another way, now that I know who Vespasian was, I can appreciate the Colosseum's place in Rome's history, and understand why Hadrian built that wall in northern England (which I still have yet to see, but that's by the by).

I'm still going through the podcast, having taken a quick break before the episodes about Marcus Aurelius to catch up with the rest of my podcast backlog. I expect to finish it at some point this year, though, and may pick up listening to another podcaster's sequel series on Byzantium (though that's still not complete even though it's at almost 250 episodes). I'm also considering checking out Revolutions, Duncan's follow-up.

Overall, though, I'm enjoying these bite-sized (usually under 30 minutes) episodes of a history that's always fascinated me, so I urge you all to check the show out, even if it did end ten years ago.

Haaland and Lewandowski moves underline Bundesliga's limitations

When I read yesterday Bayern Munich striker Robert Lewandowski wants to move to another club, my first thought was, where would he go? The answer appears to be Barcelona, which makes sense as one of the few places that could either afford his desired wages or put up a large enough transfer fee for him. The other thought I had was that this move, along with Erling Braut Haaland leaving Borussia Dortmund for Manchester City, suggests that the Bundesliga isn't quite at the level of the Premier League or Spain's Liga.

I've spent a lot of time, on this blog and on Twitter, railing about competitive imbalance in the Champions League, and how weird it is that Spain, England, Germany and Italy each automatically get four group stage spots, to the detriment of other, perhaps more deserving leagues. My focus has been Italy, which has performed woefully for the last decade or so and not justified having more spots than France (though there are problems there, too), but I'm being forced to consider that maybe Germany isn't justifying having four spots either.

Here are the numbers: A German team (Bayern) last won the Champions League in 2020, beating Paris St Germain 1-0. Prior to that, a German team hadn't been in the final since 2013, when Bayern beat Dortmund, which led some excitable souls to suggest that an era of German dominance could be in the offing. I was basing that prediction on the fact that Bayern had also reached (and lost) the final in both 2012 and 2010, and the fact that these performances had won Germany a fourth Champions League spot. The thing I was right about, way back then, was that the following decade would see the Bundesliga become the connoisseur's league, but more in the sense that it's the league for hipsters to brag about how knowledgeable they are (because they know what's happening in that league). 

The center of gravity shifted instead to Spanish teams, which promptly won the next five tournaments in a row, and English teams, which won two of the remaining three and contested one of those five Spanish wins. This year, in fact, will be a repeat of that final in 2018, when Real Madrid beat Liverpool. Admittedly, other than 2020, the only other team to reach the final during this period was Juventus, which lost twice to Spanish teams. I don't think I'm harsh when I suggest that Italy should have three spots, but by these measures it's reasonable that Germany also drop to three.

As for Haaland and Lewandowski, you could make the case that they're the continent's two most exciting forwards. Both have been breaking records for a while now, with Lewandowski in particular showing up as the Bundesliga's top scorer in the last five consecutive seasons. They aren't about to usher in a prolonged period of Ballon d'Or dominance like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo did, because Haaland is twelve years younger than Lewandowski, but they're in a similar mold.

When Haaland's move to Man City was announced this week, it felt like a natural (ish) step. I qualify that because City isn't the best team for forwards, and because it manages to score tons of goals without a traditional target-man, like Haaland is. He was linked before this season began with Manchester United, which seemed a slightly better fit but given the shambles they've become this season, he must imagine he's dodged a bullet.

Likewise, it feels natural that Lewandowski should move on. As I said, he's been Germany's leading scorer for five seasons in a row, for a team that's won the league ten seasons in a row. I wouldn't be surprised if the game's gotten a bit stale for him there, and now that he's 33, he might be looking for a final new challenge and a place to cement his reputation. At the national level, he's always done well for Poland in qualifying but never seems to deliver for them in tournaments, so Barcelona or Madrid, or even one of the English teams, seem like good places for him to show his talents. Imagine him in the front line at Arsenal or Spurs, for example - it's not likely, but he'd bring some class to whichever league and team he ends up in.

Wherever he goes, it's notable that both of the Bundesliga's marquee players are leaving the league at the same time. The league's become ridiculously uncompetitive, more so than Serie A, where at least Juve has lost its dominance (I say "at least" even though I'm a Juve supporter). Even Spain has two teams that habitually win the league, and Atletico Madrid is in there from time to time. Yet in Germany Dortmund has failed to mount a serious challenge to Bayern's dominance since Jurgen Klopp left.

If Lewandowski does leave, it'll be interesting to see how Bayern adapts, and whether that gives the other German teams a chance to win the title again. Just as it'll be interesting to see what impact he makes at Barcelona or whichever club he ends up playing for.

Just as long as it's not PSG.

Nobody Understands the First Amendment

I'm part of a Facebook group aimed at journalism school alumni, and as can be predicted, from time to time someone comes out with a statement I disagree with. My favorite was the person who used the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine to say he hoped people stopped worrying about pronouns - as if gender dysphoria is a luxury that doesn't matter in the face of geopolitics.

Statements like that are stupid, but not really "hateful" per se, so I don't feel the need to report them. That changed when some other guy decided to hijack a post with a thread about someone's unrelated argument with a right-winger on Twitter. That is, someone posted something about a TV show, and this other guy responded with questions and insinuations about an unrelated matter. Content moderators understand that this is trolling, and I think most will remove this kind of content.

I duly reported the comment, both to the group admins and to Facebook (though admittedly there wasn't an option on FB to report things for hijacking a conversation). A few minutes later, I got a text from one of the admins saying they couldn't boot him because of "1A", and how it means people can say what they want.

I argued a bit, but not too strenuously, because I wanted to continue to be on friendly terms with this person. A couple days later the offender I reported came back with their own post, sharing misinformation about the 2020 election. I reported them again, both to FB and the admins, but this time didn't get a response.

What got me about my classmate's "1A" argument is that it's a complete misreading of the US's free speech protections. The most obvious is that the First Amendment applies to the government, not to Facebook groups. Indeed, it's in the preamble to the amendment: "Congress shall make no law..." (emphasis mine). That doesn't mean you can go around saying whatever you like, wherever you like; if you could, newspapers would be required to publish every letter they receive and every article they're pitched. I think we can agree that's untenable.

If you want to get really granular, I'm sure you can make an argument that the amendment as written only bars Congress from limiting the freedom of speech, whereas the President could theoretically sign an executive order making it a crime to speak negatively about the US (a normal president likely won't do this, but let's see what happens next time the Republicans take the White House). The Supreme Court can also impose limits on speech (and has) depending on how it rules on proposed curbs, for example various sedition acts passed during wartime that made it a crime to disparage the war effort or the government.

But back to Facebook. It's a bad argument on the face of it that you have to allow all posts in a group because of "1A": the group is devoted to posting for jobs, asking for contacts, and general topics of interest to J-school alumni. Grinding an axe against someone for a conversation that happened on a different platform isn't appropriate. Though I didn't object when the same guy previously raised this topic in a separate post all its own: I ignored it, as it deserved.

But more to the point, with the second post sharing election disinformation, the poster was going against Facebook's own policies. It seems silly to protect speech on a platform that said platform doesn't permit.

The free speech argument advanced primarily by Republicans is dishonest on the face of it, anyway. They claim that conservative voices are being silenced on social media, which is why they were so excited about Elon Musk's plans to buy Twitter. But they don't acknowledge that the speech being silenced is not simply racist or homophobic or xenophobic, but typically is actively inciting abuse of other people on the platform, like that Milo character from Breitbart who got banned for unleashing a bunch of right-wing trolls on Leslie Jones.

Another example is Alex Jones's lies about the Sandy Hook shooting being a false flag operation. He might claim it's his right to say that, but the Supreme Court doesn't consider that there's a constitutional value in false statements of fact. And indeed, he's been found guilty of defamation and ordered to pay damages to the parents of the victims.

So, no, "1A" doesn't mean some idiot can come to your Facebook group and spunk either election disinformation or off-topic ramblings all over it. The quicker we stop making excuses for dummies like this, the quicker they'll go away.

Lower Decks is the Best Star Trek in Years (Spoilers Abound)

Star Trek's history is littered with attempts to get back to basics, starting with Voyager and its desire, after Deep Space Nine, to go back to the planet-of-the-week storylines we'd seen with the Original Series and the Next Generation. Enterprise was a further attempt, this time going back to before TOS, although it effectively killed off the franchise for a few years. The JJ Abrams movies were another attempt, complete with recasting and timeline shenanigans, but while those movies were popular, there didn't seem much appetite to bring Trek back to TV.

Discovery changed that, and while it wasn't exactly an attempt to get back to basics, that was clearly part of its remit. How else to explain the setting, a few years before TOS, or the various references to TOS characters and storylines? I've recorded my thoughts on the first two seasons of Disco elsewhere, so won't rehash them here. I've also shared my thoughts on Picard's first season, which was at least laudable for going forward in time, rather than back.

When Lower Decks was announced, though, I was pretty skeptical. It didn't strike me as a "back to basics" type show, but the idea of animated Trek comedy just worried me a bit. This is not unreasonable: Trek has always had trouble with comedy, with DS9's absolute worst episodes coming when they tried to mine the premise, especially around the Ferengi characters, for laughs (Little Green Men isn't too bad, but it's still a bit stilted).

Nevertheless, I decided to give Lower Decks a try, and at first my fears were confirmed. Not only that, but it seemed to be mining the same vein of irreverence as Rick & Morty - a decent show, but it didn't feel like the trick was working on Star Trek. The comedy seemed to come from the straight-laced striver Ensign Boimler and the foul-mouthed, free-spirited Ensign Beckett Mariner playing off each other, and the jokes about how she did better than him by breaking all the rules initially fell flat. These were ideas I'd seen elsewhere, done better, and my tolerance for them was already not the highest.

Yet... stuff filtered through. Jokes and references and cameos. Tendi and Rutherford added a different dynamic, and the characters all developed beyond the initial sketches. I started to enjoy it more around the fifth episode, Cupid's Errant Arrow, where Boimler gets a girlfriend and Mariner thinks she's an alien. The sixth episode, which features a murderous software assistant named Badgy, was also good.

By the time the tenth episode rolled around, I was already onboard, but I remember being impressed with how the creators had turned the Pakleds from a TNG-era punchline to an actual threat. And when Riker and Troi come to the rescue, voiced by Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis themselves, I was close to cheering, right there in my living room.

The second season built nicely on the events of the first, with Boimler initially stationed on Riker's ship and the Pakleds remaining a threat that popped up throughout the season. The second season finale has a moment easily as satisfying as the Titan's rescue in Season 1, where the Cerritos crew all pull together to save another ship (captained by a minor character from a second-season episode of TNG, no less) from crashing into a planet. There, rather than getting me out of my seat, that last-minute rescue moved me, which I found to be an interesting reaction.

Comparing Lower Decks to Rick & Morty again, I'd say Lower Decks has more heart. Rick & Morty seems to be based on showing how outrageous Rick can get, and excusing his bad behavior by acknowledging that it comes from a place of hurt, but not actually having him reckon with it. That may be why Rick & Morty fans are famously trollish. Lower Decks started out from the same place, but does a better job of having the characters reckon with why they are the way they are, and it's clear that they all care for one another, whereas it's never quite so clear how much Rick cares for Morty.

The other obvious comparison is the Orville, which also tries to look at Star Trek through comedy. There are some decent episodes there (I've only seen Season 1 so far), including some really thoughtful ones that could have been lifted from TNG. It's clear how much Seth MacFarlane loves TNG, though frequently the references to the absurdity of the premise get in the way of the story. On the other hand, Lower Decks is in the Trek universe, so it can comment on the most absurd parts of Trek lore directly. Importantly, those jokes are only ever throw-away lines, rather than interrupting the flow of the story by having us hone in on them.

When I say that Lower Decks is the best Trek in years, it's because the show has managed the trick of getting back to basics, through understanding what those basics were. The thing that caught fans' imaginations in the 60s was the vision of different people working together, bringing their different skills and backgrounds to bear. TNG continued this tradition, but DS9 (much as I love it) decided to tell a different kind of story. Each subsequent back-to-basics show seemed to think that the important thing was the flying around the galaxy, rather than the characters' relationships. Disco and Picard, on the other hand, suffer from their attempts to be too much like the movies: serialized storytelling is great, when done well, but at least in the first two seasons, Disco did a poor job of developing the crew, and then ended with two big space battles. Exciting, but the best old Trek was explicitly about not fighting.

Lower Decks's main characters all have different backgrounds, but play well off each other, whether they're agreeing or disagreeing. Each one gets to show what skills they bring to Starfleet, with even Boimler's approach to following the rules coming in handy from time to time. Their differences are celebrated by the show, both for themselves and for how they mesh with the others. And that, more than space battles or aliens with weird foreheads, is what Star Trek is all about.

And yeah, the jokes are finally funny, which also helps.