The shop was five minutes from my house. Single storey, 10 metres by 5, sandwiched between two side streets and the last in a line of shops. Oh, and it was cursed.
The first tenant wanted to sell high-end fashion. My mum and I drove past when we saw the sign. “Gone in 6 months”, we said. And it was. The curse was born.
A travel bookshop came and went. Then a body building store. And of course the mobility scooters. The curse ruled them all. They opened, suffered and died. Each time, like experienced soothsayers, we foresaw their doom. None of them was ever going to work in our neighbourhood. Until one day, a Dominos sign arrived. The curse was lifted. The shop is still there today.
We used to scratch our heads. If we – who knew nothing about retail – could tell in 5 seconds that a shop would never make it in our neighbourhood, why couldn’t the people opening the shops? They were meant to be the experts. How was this so obvious to us but so unobvious to them?
I thought about the cursed shop this week when the smartest people in football told us all about the European Super League. On day 1 it was unveiled. On day 2 it was reviled. On day 3, it was revealed to actually be an embarrassment-causing time bomb. On day 4, the bomb started ticking and blew up.
Here’s the 64 Billion dollar question. How on earth did the richest, most powerful people in football not see how stupendously unpopular their idea was. They had devised a competition that most clubs could never enter, that threatened 200 years of football history and that sent even more money to the richest clubs. Did they outsource their ‘good ideas budget’ to the BFG who then used his dream-catching web to collect the worst nightmares of football fans while they slept?
Had they not noticed the present British Government is attempting to gain a PhD in attacking European elites doing things that normal people take against?
It was like they were trying to rile everyone up. Was there a meeting where someone noticed that the players might be onside? “Don’t worry”, a PR team member piped up, “we’ll add a cap on salaries”. “Sorted. That’s everyone in the riotously opposed camp.”
The only thing that could have been less popular was if Britain’s entry in the 2021 Eurovision song contest had been Nigel Farage singing, ‘You’d all be speaking German if it wasn’t for us.”
I could see it, every football fan could see it. I suspect even my mother – who actively turns off the sports news it’s not about tennis – could see it.
Why on earth couldn’t the owners of these huge clubs see it? I mean these people have made billions from football.
Exactly.
My mum and I never cursed those shops (though I like the idea that we did). We simply knew something that the retail experts didn’t. We knew the people who shopped there. Most of us just didn’t want to spend £300 on a dress, read a book about a place we couldn’t afford to visit or look like an also-run in the World’s Strongest Man. We did like pizza though.
Why are these football billionaires so ignorant about football? They aren’t. They are ignorant about people. It’s easy to be ignorant about people. Just don’t spend time with them.
Most of our ideas of what most people think come from the people we surround ourselves with. That’s why most rich people think they are about average in wealth and why most poor people think the same.
Our biggest divides aren’t about race. They are about wealth. If you’re a relatively rich person in the UK (say a doctor, a headteacher, a barrister) you would have to invite 100 friends around before you got to someone who is unemployed. It’s so easy for us to live in these bubbles. It can be seductively pleasant to do so. But it makes us seductively blind.
And if you are rich enough to own a £68m yacht (Liverpool’s owner), a £100m home in Kensington (Chelsea) or an entire country (Manchester City) then it’s probably fair to say that you don’t often have normal people round.
So, how did these rich successful people do something that every normal person knew was stupid. Simple. Because they don’t know any normal people.