What is football for?

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/apr/29/marcelo-bielsa-aston-villa-goal-leeds-proud

Why do people go, week in and week out, to watch teams that very rarely come close to achieving anything close to their ambitions, and at times can barely be bothered even to trot through the motions? Why do they expend so much emotional energy in entities that at any moment can be taken over by the corrupt or incompetent? What’s the point?

Fans get angry quickly these days but disillusionment takes much longer to set in. There is far more booing in stadiums than there used to be, and social media gives public vent to the grumbling that was once confined to pubs, which probably inflates it and at times gives it a performative aspect. But attendances are far more stable than they used to be. People keep going.

Yet disillusionment had set in at Leeds United. Crowds have fallen from an average of nearly 40,000 in 2001-02 to under 22,000 in 2015-16. There had been a recent upturn but, still, what has happened this season has been astonishing. Marcelo Bielsa has given Leeds something to believe in again.

What happened against Aston Villa on Sunday, when he instructed his side to concede a goal to cancel out one that had been scored against the spirit of the game, will cement his legend. A win would have kept Leeds’s hopes of automatic promotion alive. This was a match that mattered. The gesture had consequences.

What if Bielsa had not ordered an equaliser? There would have been condemnation from some quarters, as well as the delicious prospect of John Terry, Villa’s assistant manager, fulminating about fair play, but others might have concluded that the protocols over putting the ball out for an injured opponent are not fit for purpose and that it was only a matter of time before this sort of chaos ensued. Others might have noted how controversy seems to dog poor Stuart Attwell, a referee once fast-tracked to the Premier League but now essentially a character from a 1970s sitcom, beset by implausible misfortune despite his best intentions. But Bielsa preferred not to win in such a way.

Perhaps it was not quite such an act of, to use his term, nobility as that of Stan Cullis, in his last game for Wolves before retiring, refusing to bring down Liverpool’s Albert Stubbins when he was clean through on the final day of the 1946-47 season, allowing him to score the goal that ensured Liverpool, and not Wolves, won the title, but it was similarly born of the belief that winning should not be at all costs.

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