An early morning tweet from @7amkickoff piqued my fancy today, a comment on the Bayern Munich “leadership” (and I put that terms in quotes because with leaders like these who needs – or wants – such leaders?). Bayern President Uli Hoeness and CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge took to the press to complain about how horrible said press has been to them (even threatening them for their reporting) about the team’s current performances. I wish the press hadn’t shown up to hear their whinging – the oxygen given to them validates their hollow and cowardly complaints.
Their complaints follow their vile targeting of Mesut Ozil after the World Cup. It is standard order power play and victimization politics for this era. These powerful men target an outsider, Ozil, charging him with inferiority and failure to serve his sport – all while cleverly and mendaciously wrapping this in with soft praise. The soft praise is cynical and insincere, a ploy used to to fool the most gullible of a target audience into making them seem reasonable and fair-minded, when in fact their real aim is to deride their victim, to exert power and dominance over someone they wish to portray as weak and insufficient. It was, regarding Ozil, a cloak of cowardice disguising their racism and xenophobia. Today they cover their own weakness by pretending to defend the honor of Manuel Neuer, Jerome Boateng, but their “defense” of their own players is cover for their own moral bankruptcy. The moment they invoke the names of their players is the moment to ignore their proclamations. The players are just human shields, nothing more. These men are the ones in control, role playing as the oppressed completely in defiance of the actual, extant power structures. Hoeness and Rummenigge hold the cards. They call the press conferences that the media scramble to cover. They are the ones who decide whether to pay or play their talent, and can use their clout to ostracize the labor force if they choose. And then they hide, like the small men that they are, behind that labor force.
This dynamic is why, as an older sports fan, I have become an ardent and unapologetic supporter of players and their ability to extract every last penny, every last iota of leverage over team leadership and ownership. When I was younger I bought into the default media criticism of high-priced free agents who signed large contracts and didn’t live up to their billing. As a US-based baseball fan this was easy to do, player movement was as free as it got for our domestic major sports leagues and the money got silly pretty fast. The media – ever in desire of access to the powerful, were fed stories by team leadership in the interest of guiding us to think the players were the culprits, stealing *our* money, laughing their way to riches while exerting minimal effort. These “fat cat free agents” were the powerful, the ones in control. In reality these employees merely took their chance to make as much as they could in that one moment where they had leverage. I was gullible. Naive. No longer. I begrudge no player their chance to make as much as possible when they have the opportunity. To go where they want, to play where they choose, for as much as they can. They have brief, fleeting moments of control, and they should take them every chance they get.
The obvious reality is that the power structures in sports, in economics, in politics, wherever, they favor those who have the power. Today’s display of cowardice from the Bayern leadership reminds us of this. These two men have inordinate sway – they call the press conference and the media leap to cover it. They decide if a player will be jettisoned, or strapped to the bench, their earning power diminished, their livelihoods impacted. An they can, and will continue, to do this with impunity. They can malign a player such as Ozil for his upbringing, his otherness, while not saying anything directly, they can sway popular opinion (or at least set the narrative in action), and they know it. These comments today are a moral failure from corrupted men who mean only to assert their dominance. Hoeness and Rummenigge perfectly represent our times, where the powerful harness their own power to bully, to marginalize the “other”, to remind us all of who is in control while hiding behind those who control nothing.
It is sickening.