Mason Greenwood and the Weight of Expectations

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Marcus Rashford was not, for a long time, one of those prospects. His coaches at Manchester United’s youth academy knew Rashford was gifted, of course. They could see he had the aptitude and the appetite for success. But he was always a possible, one of a gaggle of young players who might make it, rather than a definite: the one who almost certainly would.

There is an element of mythmaking in the stories of young players coming good, a degree of wisdom after the event. Whenever a prodigy emerges, a squall of profiles inevitably follows, all of them trudging dutifully along much the same path (I have written enough of them to know): stories of an innocent, undiluted love for the game; details of a wondrous talent, obvious to all; harbingers anointed by hindsight, correlation being mistaken for causation.

Those stories are all true, for all the players who made it, but what they miss out is that they also might have been true of all the players who did not. It is no slight to Rashford to say that he made it into United’s first team, initially, because of an injury to Will Keane, a striker last seen playing for third-tier Ipswich Town.

Rashford was not an unknown, but his name was not one of those bandied around in breathless tones by opposition scouts or circling agents. He had been selected only “sparingly,” to use the Football Association’s own phrasing, for England’s age-group teams. And then suddenly, there he was: landing practically fully formed in soccer’s consciousness, a box-fresh wonder boy at the biggest club in England.

Mason Greenwood is different. Greenwood is only 18, but his name has been passed around, in excited whispers, for at least four years. There is no such thing as certainty in youth development — injury, distraction, disruption and the vicissitudes of biology lurk around every corner — but Greenwood, inside Manchester United, has long been regarded as the closest one might find.

More telling, perhaps, is the fact that the anticipation has been no less frenzied outside the club. Scouts. coaches and rivals who had no business in wanting Manchester United to have unearthed a phenomenon could not deny, or contain, what they had seen in Greenwood: two-footed, quick, smart, precise, a cool eye, a fierce finish. Everyone knew he was the real deal.

It is not as surprising as it should be, then, that he has caused such a stir in his first season on United’s senior team: 16 goals, including four in his last five games. United’s form since the Premier League came back from its pandemic hiatus has been enough to encourage fans to dream of a return to prominence. Greenwood’s rise, and the feel-good effect of the emergence of a homegrown sensation, has played no small part in that.

His talent seems so self-evident, his ceiling so high, that no comparison seems too far-fetched. Dimitar Berbatov, a predecessor at United, drew a parallel with Cristiano Ronaldo. Others have suggested he has an echo of the Brazilian Ronaldo about him. Gary Lineker, the former English striker, called Greenwood one of the most natural finishers he has ever seen.

The sky, for Greenwood, seems to be the limit. And yet, as justified as the praise might be, it is worth asking whether all of it is serving to create an impossible task, whether it is condemning Greenwood to fail to meet expectations that should not, perhaps, have been set.

This week, Liverpool took to the field before facing Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium to yet another guard of honor. That is the fifth formal round of applause Jürgen Klopp’s team has received from a rival since clinching the Premier League title almost a month ago. By now, it must be slightly odd for the players experiencing it, all this pomp and circumstance in a succession of silent stadiums.

Liverpool lost that night: one uncharacteristic error from Virgil Van Dijk, followed swiftly by a second from Alisson Becker, and Liverpool’s chance of superseding the 2017-18 Manchester City team’s 100-point tally had gone up in smoke.

Since claiming the title, Liverpool has won twice, lost twice and drawn once. Klopp’s team has not played especially badly: a little flat here, a little slack there, a little reckless in the 4-0 defeat at City. The team’s intensity has dropped by a fraction, its ambition achieved, its purpose sated. Klopp is rotating players in and out, trying out a few things, managing the workload.

Every setback, though, has seen another supposed target slip from Liverpool’s grasp. The chance to go unbeaten through the season disappeared in February, in a defeat at Watford. Its attempt to retain its Champions League crown foundered a few days later. A draw at home to Burnley last Saturday meant no perfect home record. The defeat at Arsenal meant no 100-point season.

All of which has, somehow, given rise to the impression that Liverpool’s season — in which, remember, it claimed a title it has waited 30 years to grasp — has been, well, a bit of a disappointment.

Some opposing fans use it as proof that, perhaps, Liverpool was fortunate to win all but one of its first 27 games. Some of Liverpool’s own fans cry out for more investment in the squad. That this team claimed the title earlier than any team in English history has, only a few weeks after it happened, been completely forgotten.

The more soaring the praise for Greenwood, though, the more likely it is that this same fate will befall him: not that he will not fulfill his talent, not that he will not have a wonderful career, but that no matter what he does, he will be judged as having failed to meet a set of expectations that have been arbitrarily imposed upon him.

That, after all, is the culture of modern soccer, where everyone is either a goat or a fraud, where — as José Mourinho (sort of) observed a few weeks ago — we hold those whose records are blank to be free of blemish, while those who have won and lost a thousand times are seen as flawed. There is a danger that, whatever Greenwood becomes, he is destined to be told he is not what he might have been.

If Greenwood scored 140 goals in his first 200 Premier League games, would that be enough? Yes, surely. But that is what Harry Kane has done, and to tell people that Greenwood might emulate Kane, such is the pitch of excitement that surrounds him at the moment, would be seen as selling him short.

What if he matched Wayne Rooney? Captain of Manchester United, captain of England, record scorer for both, winner of Premier Leagues and Champions Leagues. But then Rooney, when he finally drifted away from the elite, was told in some quarters that he had not fulfilled his talent.

In part, of course, Greenwood and all the others that will follow him have Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi to blame. They have distorted our conception of what is possible, what is feasible, what is reasonable to expect.

But its roots are deeper than that, too, bound into a culture where what you have done is forgotten unless it is constant, where esteem lasts barely 90 minutes, where there is only this game, this shot, this piece of content to be shared on social media, and where no matter how much you succeed, ultimately, it is almost impossible not to be told that you have failed.

The Collector

One Rule for Them

Of all the interpretations of Manchester City’s long-running battle with UEFA over its breaking — or not — of the financial regulations that govern European soccer, the weirdest, by far, has been the one in which City is some sort of insurgent underdog, a plucky little outsider standing up to the man.

It has taken root, partly, as a sort of contemporary twist on City’s long-held identity, like when local theater companies do “King Lear,” only it’s all on Zoom, and partly because the whole idea of Financial Fair Play has been cast (not entirely without justification) as a dastardly plot by Europe’s established elite to keep any potential challengers down.

That City is not “the little club that could” and is, instead, possibly the most expensive sporting project ever undertaken is, of course, self-evident. Its feud with UEFA was never a case of the strong and the weak: It was simply a test of strength between two types of power, one that City has now won.

To many, that means the end of the protectionism that F.F.P. has come to symbolize. But that reading is to observe it only through the lens of the elite, one distorted by self-absorption. F.F.P. does different things in different places. Perhaps in Germany, Italy and Spain it has served to entrench the dominance of a single team. Certainly, in Greece and Belarus and elsewhere, it has undermined domestic competition.

But in Turkey, it has had quite the opposite effect. There, in a soccer culture mired in debt, conspiracy theories and short-termism, it has not only allowed smaller clubs to thrive — by punishing their historical superiors — but it has, to some extent, forced those larger teams to face a reckoning with their own finances. It has, in other words, done its job. It has worked so well, in fact, that it is tempting to assume it was not introduced solely to persecute Manchester City.

What to Watch

The very best games — the ones that draw you to the edge of your seat, that strain your nerves and quicken your pulse — are not always the highest quality games.

We watch soccer for different reasons: we can watch it for the technical expertise, for those moments where it seems to drift into the realm of art, but we can watch it, too, simply to drink in the base, grubby drama. What makes a game compelling is not always the ability on show, but the prize at stake.

Of course, the sport reaches its pinnacle when the two intersect, in World Cup finals and the latter rounds of the Champions League, but given the choice, more often than not a game with high stakes is more compelling than a game of the highest caliber.

This weekend may well be a case in point. There are two F.A. Cup semifinals, with Manchester United facing Chelsea and Manchester City taking on Arsenal. There is the intriguing final day in Spain, where Real Sociedad and Athletic Bilbao, the two Basque rivals, are scrapping it out for a place in the Europa League next season. And Juventus faces Lazio in Serie A on Monday night.

But far more intriguing than the battle for success is the scramble for survival. On Friday in the Premier League, West Ham hosts Watford, a game that can fairly be characterized as winner-stays-up, especially if Bournemouth can beat Southampton on Sunday. No less significant is the meeting between Genoa, in 17th, and Lecce, in 18th, in the 20-team Serie A on Saturday. None of these teams are especially good. But the drama — base and grubby and existential — should be exquisite.

Correspondence

An early leader in my search for an alternative to the phrase “Indian summer” arrives from Tim Megaw, who volunteers the Russian version. “Russians refer to an extended summer, which only means a warm day or two in September, as a Grandmother’s Summer,” he wrote. I think there’s a similar phrase in quite a few European languages, too: an Old Woman’s Summer.

Chris Cann felt it was “a tad optimistic to suggest that Serie A might have an exciting finish, as Juventus look certain to be champions again.” He is right, of course: Juventus has not won for more than a week, now — losing against Milan and then being held to draws by Atalanta and then Sassuolo — but remains clear of its pursuers. I blame Lazio, though Chris’s analysis that a lack of competitiveness in most of the major European leagues is becoming a major problem is both more nuanced and more accurate.

And finally, Burl Wood offers us a reminder that we should not only focus on the economic impact the coronavirus pandemic has had on soccer teams. There is a far broader ecosystem that is now at risk. “All of the little guys out there are holed up with their fingers crossed, hoping this nightmare will pass and their pub will last until next year,” he wrote.

His example is Santa Barbara, Calif., and the “pubs that have relied on football to keep their businesses afloat for years and years: places that will open their doors at any time of day, as long as there is a match on, taking the time to move televisions out into their parking lots,” in accordance with official guidelines. It is frustrating, thinking that your team may not be able to spend this summer, of course, but that is small change compared to what a lot of places that are central to our shared soccer culture are experiencing.