Dear Rog, on your pod with Rebecca Lowe, you talked about the asterisk that will inevitably be attached to Liverpool‘s league win this year, the irony being that this is one of the winningest sides in the history of football. I couldn’t agree with you more, but for different reasons. Just as 9/11 seems to demarcate the moment that popular culture shifted from modern to postmodern, this Covid crisis will be seen as a inflection point of its own. In the pre-Covid era, our daily lives were infused with snark, irony, narcissism, ostentatious wealth, unbridled consumer capitalism, storylines of multi-multi-million dollar football contracts and foreign owners that play and cultivate teams like they were horses. In a post-Covid era, we will, we must, embrace football, but without this bullshit. If the burning trash pile also known as Donald Trump has taught us anything, it is that we still have an appetite for intelligence, and as two of the most intelligent football commentators of the world’s most intelligent and elegant game (I mean, what football commentator uses the word "interstitial" (correctly) in his pod or interviews a Booker prize nominee?), we can see plainly that to be a champion of football, as Klopp and his team has achieved, is of only limited worth. Most important is health, security, and the protection of safety nets for all people, rich and poor, black, white, and Latinx. The asterisk is present because the historical era that it demarcates, like B.C. or B.C.E., is context already to a world gone by.
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