12 Questions for Rory Smith
The New York Times Global Sports Correspondent on his relationship with God, being a husband and parent, English soccer fans, his bizarre relationship with memory, and more.
Ever notice the owner of a soccer team sitting in the stands, watching ‘their team’ play with the look of a mind existing in at least a hundred places at once; deals to negotiate and contracts to be signed and stocks to be divested and enemies to crush and ex-wives to be tempered and kids to get out of trouble and colleagues to fire and underlings to consider and taxes to be evaded and then oh, would you look at that, we’re losing three nil, this team I’ve invested five hundred million dollars in isn’t doing too well, how’d we get here in the first place? I don’t know, I wasn’t completely paying attention, just signing checks while nodding and saying ‘don’t let me down,’ but wow this sucks. They can’t really lose themselves in the youthful spirit of the game, these owners, it’s beyond them, never again possible, not even with a bout of high-dosed ketamine therapy. Thank God I’m not a rich owner of a multibillion dollar soccer team, I think every single day, as one naturally does.
Ideally, unlike the rich, I’m able to indulge in the simple pleasures of life, losing myself like a child in the drama of sport, in gamified luxuries, the hyped-up arena of latent homosexuality. With delight, I might add; the sheer beauty of a middling man’s dream coliseum. But, unfortunately, that’s not entirely true. I’m regularly miserable and unable to be happy or exist in the present, and to boot (sorry), I don’t even own a sports team, never mind an apartment or a car. Moments of joy are rare but they come alive now and then; I try to grasp them when the opportunity becomes available, here and there, for a few minutes per week, which sometimes occurs during the duration of a particularly exciting game. Existential dread dissipates, a volley from thirty yards nestles in the top corner. I might’ve even had sex that morning. Life isn’t so bad; sport (and sex) plays its role. It puts everything into perspective, the most popular leisure activity in history, as Rory Smith puts it. Another thing that’s recently made me happy: the gorgeous way this lengthy interview unfurled, how Smith made himself vulnerable, easing in to the material, allowing soccer to serve as the catalyst to make himself become known.
***
My Dad was a writer, in some sense a great one who only found minor success. I’m a writer, too. You’d think my youth was filled with much writerly conversation between father and son. But the reality wasn’t so. While he's an emotional, delicate artist with much to say in an aesthetically poignant manner, he’s also Scottish, born in the mid-50s to Jewish parents, Jewish parents who survived the destruction of World War II. This didn’t exactly make my Dad the most capable of intimate discussions with his immediate family, never mind the inherent complications that exist between father and son. Since art, literature, and film served as imperfect destinations for my father and I to bond, we were left with nothing else but the gamified zone; soccer.
Growing up in lower-Manhattan, he’d walk me several days per week to a sprawling field on the Hudson River called Pier 40, where the majority of my travel team’s practices and matches took place. On the off days, we’d go there together to kick the ball around. He enjoyed watching the games, sitting far behind the other hysterical parents, observing and contemplating from a healthy distance, providing feedback on our way home. You’re improving, your touches are getting better, you need to look up a little more though when you have the ball. Stop looking down for no reason, why do you do that? I got older and moved out and gradually played soccer less and less, due to injury, not choice. My father and I would still get together on Saturdays and Sundays to watch the Premier League, maybe throw in some words about Martin Amis or Mike Nichols and whatever’s been nominated for the foreign language Oscar. Did you see the Arsenal match? It was incredible, son. Come over and watch the United City game with me at three next week, alright? Good game this, isn’t it? Have a girlfriend? Doing OK? That was an amazing cross, Lukaku’s gotta score that, with all the money he makes. I was gonna say, that Bong Joon-Ho, he’s brilliant, isn’t he? The stuff he has to say about disparate class politics is really genuine, powerful. Wow, what a goal that was. Oh you’re moving, again? To what neighborhood? Can you believe they scored in the final minute? Are you still writing, son? Working on anything good? By the way, I love you, Gordon. Christ, Chelsea have sacked their manager, that club’s in complete shambles. Oh, what’s that? A new tattoo? Soccer is the buffer, as they say. Why is it sports, the place of competition and adrenaline, that gives way for the father/son relationship to develop and prosper? Is this a crutch, or a normal form of development? A real lifeline, that’s for sure. I don’t know where my father and I would be without soccer, despite how we ended up doing the same thing in life, essentially writing stuff on paper, hoping others would be interested.
In our interview, Rory Smith discusses the anxiety after becoming a father, constantly worried of something happening to his children, of a love that’s overwhelming (my father was also constantly anxious of something terrible happening to us, it was extremely annoying). With that much care and responsibility, I can understand why a leisure activity that’s both entertaining and casual can serve as a form of enduring white noise, everlasting background, one that keeps such a powerful and odd relationship from consuming itself. The bond between father and son is almost too strong. Something like sports could in fact be a necessary element for its survival; an entity altogether competitive, relative, a little bit senseless.
***
I’m drunk on the supposed strength and capacity of my argument. I reach out with a question to the writer Christian Lorentzen: ‘For an intro to an interview with Rory Smith, why is sports such a common mediator between father and son, in that consistently bizarre dynamic and the theater of the relationship? What does this have to do with the theater of sport itself?’
‘My father wasn't into sports.’
‘What was your relationship like?’
‘It was fine.’
‘Do you think it’d have been better if you both liked sports?’
‘It would have been better if we were rich.’
For a while I don’t ask why. And then I decide to ask why.
‘Because we would have had more money and he wouldn't have had to work as hard.’
To avoid being a nag, the question I choose to not respond with goes as follows: ‘Well do you think if he were into sports it’d have been a little more than fine? Perhaps have made up for the deficit of the crushing economic factors that are out of our control?’ I don’t think Lorentzen would have enjoyed entertaining that one. Asking another man about their relationship with their father is an assault on their senses. I may as well have asked Christian to send me a photo of his rectum. In fact, I think he’d have preferred that.
Lorentzen, in his fatherly disposition to the writers coming up around him, has become a de facto guardian in his quasi-mentor role. Garrulous and dependable, cigarette dangling off his lips, Lorentzen carries himself with natural authority. But as soon as someone becomes a proxy father in even the slightest way, as soon as that line is crossed, the ability to ask everything and anything, to broach all uncomfortable topics in search of insight and perspective, goes completely out the window. The hierarchy and ensuing respect create an environment of unease, even if said respect exists merely out of habit, as opposed to being earned (with Christian it’s earned). I think, though, this is why I prefer mentors who are female. There’s more room to ask whatever you’d like, the environment feels to a greater degree open. Sure, I suppose having a male mentor makes it easier to discuss masculine literary topics like sex and aggression and the despair of having a penis and not being able to successfully procreate among ourselves, but I’ve found that the most impressive female advisers take on these themes with nuance, offering an outside perspective that a man just never could. I guess this is all not a universal truth, but more a testament, as they say, to my own fucked up shit.
I did wish, over our WhatsApp conversation, that Christian and I could turn on the TV, put on a sporting event, create a zone of distraction where our synergetic intensity could brew. Perhaps I could say something like, do you think you ever exported your nascent economic frustration onto your father, onto your parents? Did you place your disdain for society all on his shoulders? That must have been overwhelming for him, your father. Woh, what a shot, did you see that? Ah, Dad, Daddy, I mean Christian, now I think I understand what you mean when you say that your relationship with your father would have been better if you were rich. There’d have been more room for love, less distraction over petty garbage. Hm, this is lovely, this match, this tournament, this game, the dynamic we’ve created. Do you think I’ll die alone or will I live a successful life? I can’t help but think that I might be gay, or at least now and then have an urge to touch a man more intimately than normal. It’d be easier to ask Mom these things, an unconscious voice in my head not so subtly screams out.
So much can be attributed to one's enduring love for sport.
***
There’s trouble in ceding authority to any soccer writer, never mind Rory Smith. Since art and personal matters were an almost non-starter, soccer was the place where my Dad was on the pedestal, not that he had many unique or interesting theories on the game in the first place. The tragedy is that he had far more fascinating opinions on society, art, and literature, so as long as there was an environment where he felt comfortable enough to be vulnerable, susceptible to his emotions (if alcohol is an environment). I keep saying had and am regularly mixing up the past and present tense. Let me explain. My Dad’s still alive, just incredibly sick and no longer himself. Depending on how I’m trying to describe him, it’s difficult to discern whether an aspect of his persona still exists, it’s a game of constant, immediate weighing — yeah, I guess he can still do that, OK, present tense — but then a week later it changes and that mode of behavior is consigned to the past, like an item that’s expired. So one thing is dead but another is alive and an attentive interlocutor can be forgiven for possibly saying: I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’m confused, is the man in question still around? Not really, I’d respond.
I still long for my father’s moments of cerebral normalcy. Now that I’m an adult, I’m filled with regret. Despite him still being alive, there’s so much to mourn, so many opportunities not taken and topics of conversation never encountered (scrolling a web-forum late at night designed for support, here’s something I came across, paraphrased from memory: ‘A family member with Lewy Body Dementia will cause you to encounter the strange feeling of grieving someone still alive, a lot of sorrow that seems possible to fix, as your relative’s pulse still beats, but in fact never will be. This is a feeling similar to a disease that you’ll have to learn to live with. When one person gets sick, so too does everyone around them, each in their own way’). Strange thing, illness. I think my readers must be tired of me talking about my Dad. Is the adage what’s personal is the most creative finally getting old? I too wish for a time when I can begin to write more about topics other than the mystery of grief.
Rory Smith is the only soccer writer I read on a regular basis. Scanning the past, aside from Smith, I’ve read a Knausgaard book on the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Sam Knight’s coverage of Football Leaks, and Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch when I was in high school. Sometimes I’ll read Tariq Panja’s deep dives, but I see them more as geopolitical thrillers; ‘soccer does have a habit of finding new and interesting ways of surprising you, and it remains probably the best way to explore quite a lot of subjects that might otherwise be dry and uninspiring,’ Smith says in our interview. Not only is sports a buffer, but also a gateway drug to the more mystifying, actually interesting elements of life. And again, fascinating that men need this buffer and gateway drug while women, on the other hand, have the intrinsic quality of getting right to the point of the emotional matter — and apologies in advance for the binary and over-generalization, I’m merely writing from the standpoint of my experience, it’s the best I can do. So Smith, Hornby, Knausgaard, Panja, Knight, all second fiddle to my good old man. I do sometimes wonder, though, after he passes, whether I’ll begin reading soccer writers more intensely, consistently, a useful form of grief, a surrogate for the inevitable void. Or if, following the inevitability of his death, I give it all up entirely and cease to find it interesting. I’ll find out at some point, but please God not soon. I hope soccer prevails for as long as it can.
They can be constructive, these leisure activities.
GG: As a Liverpool fan, what are your thoughts on your new manager, Arne Slot?
RS: I have done a very bad job of keeping my allegiances secret. When I started out in journalism -- late 2005, early 2006, which I feel was not that long ago but at the same time was before the iPhone existed, so in many ways is the distant past -- it was an article of faith that you did not tell people who you supported. Don't show them the colour of your team or your politics.
That now seems horribly old-fashioned, but I think it’s still a pretty good rule. Fandom is such a core identifier for people — especially online — that there is this assumption that whatever you think must automatically be rooted in who you support. As someone who writes about an awful lot of aspects of football, that tends to be a bit of an obstacle to any debate. You can’t persuade people of your argument if their immediate reaction is: “You’re only saying that because you’re a Liverpool fan.” It means every conversation you have starts with what is basically a presumption of bad faith.
I've had to downgrade it from core tenet to noble ambition in the last few years. I try not to mention it flagrantly, but I'm no longer quite as...fundamentalist. It was probably quite easy not to show your colors in the 1950s. It's harder when you have saturation coverage and the constant grinding churn of social media.
Anyway, that was not the question. The question is how excited am I about Arne Slot. The answer is "not really," but that's kind of a deliberate choice. Supporting Liverpool over the last few years has been exhilarating and thrilling and absorbing, but it has also been really very tiring. I would like them to finish third this season, no more than 12 points off Manchester City. Maybe they could win a domestic cup. It would be better not to be humiliated in the Champions League. But I don't want any excitement.
You wrote a whole book on how data collection and analysis has changed changed soccer ‘forever.’It was published in 2022. Which of your predictions are proving to be correct? What’s changed since your book’s been published? Do you see anything now with a different perspective?
There weren't that many predictions in the book, other than the idea that data would become more and more embedded within soccer: I'm not sure people in the field know exactly where it will go, and I definitely don't. In that one very vague, very obvious prediction, it feels like I wasn't far off. More and more teams use data. More and more fans understand at least some of the (often deliberately obtuse) jargon. The direction of travel is pretty clear.
My relationship with it has changed quite a lot, though. Before I wrote the book, I was very much an advocate of data. That's partly because journalists are, or should be, drawn toward new and interesting things. And it was partly because data promised/promises to deliver things that I think are important: increased understanding of the game, a greater spread of knowledge, a more meritocratic approach for who can work in soccer. There are lots of ways to watch soccer, and lots of ways to enjoy it. Data is just another.
I still believe all of those things, but I worry now if there might be...unintended consequences. The interests of the people who play the sport and those who watch it are not aligned: they want, ultimately, to win; we want to be entertained. The more they know about the inner mechanics of the game, the more they can perfect everything, the risk is that that balance shifts a little too far one way, and I'm not sure that's entirely healthy. The process is inevitable -- teams will not willingly cede knowledge, and nor should they -- but it has made me wonder if this is something we should actually...want.
I don’t know anything about your personal life, which I suspect you purposely keep under wraps. Are you in a relationship? Do you have kids or want them? I’ve asked this to other writers so I’ll ask it to you as well — How would you define romantic love? Do you think someone can exist without it?
I don't know if I am deliberately guarded about my personal life -- I do a radio show in Britain on which my dog makes semi-regular appearances -- or that it's just not especially relevant in the context of my work. This will sound a bit performatively modest but I've always thought of journalists as conduits more than anything. We have a public presence, but our value is related to the information we can convey. I'm inherently uneasy about turning that into a kind of brand. Others have done it, and done it well, and I wish them the best, but it doesn't feel like it fits for me.
I am not sure why anyone would be interested, but I've been married for nine years, with my wife for *does quick maths* 14, and we have two children and the aforementioned dog.
I love all of the beings in that sentence very much, but they are different forms of love. I find my love for my children quite overpowering. Before we got married, we never really discussed having kids: we both knew, without asking, that was what we wanted, even if we weren't in any particular rush. (If my wife was in a rush, she didn't mention it.) I worried, when they started arriving, if I'd be a good father, a good husband, a good example, all the usual doubts and anxieties. It never occurred to me that the emotion generated by their very existence would be something I would have to learn to bear. For reasons that will become clear with later questions, I recognise that a lot of that is rooted in fear, a sort of desperate urge to protect them. But I have moments where the amount I love them feels almost oppressive. My love for my dog is probably just as deep, but it does not feel quite so intense, like it is a thing that might one day hurt me. I am comfortable with how much I love my dog.
I’m filibustering. Or droning. One of the two. You can survive without romantic love, yes: let’s do that first. It makes life more interesting but not everyone needs the same thing. I am lucky in that I have found romantic love. I don’t quite know how I would define it, other than it feels like home. It is the pleasure, the comfort and the peace of being in the presence of someone who makes you feel whole.
That makes it sound quite boring. It isn’t, in my experience: it changes over time. I remember being full on head over heels when I first met my wife. We had that phase. Or at least I did. But I like what we have now, too, which is not a relationship without its challenges but has these roots that make you feel secure in your existence. There’s that reading that literally everyone has at their weddings, the one about how the first flame of passion burns away and what you have left is love. It is very cliché and a bit trite and I suspect people who go to more weddings than I do groan when they hear it start, but there’s a reason it’s popular.
After the departure of Gareth Southgate, who would you like to be the new England manager, and why? Do you think England can play well without a technocrat in charge? I guess while we’re on the subject, why is it that the England national team’s fans tend to be the most irritating, unlikeable of all?
There is an element of playing the hits here, but: I remember at Euro 2016, I went to Toulouse to watch Spain play Italy. I got there quite early, and decided to walk from the station to the stadium. It’s a nice walk, in a nice city. Toulouse is all terracotta roofs and peaceful plazas, and in each one there were little cadres of Spanish fans in bars and brasseries and bistros. They had their flags out and they were drinking and singing, but it felt open: they were facing outwards, milling around, chanting these songs that sound like ditties.
A few days later — or possibly earlier, what is time — I saw England play in St. Etienne. I got out of the train station and found, on the very first square, this massive group of England fans: a couple of thousand, maybe. They were drinking and singing, too, and they had their flags out, but it was all inward: they had claimed the space, formed a phalanx, and they were singing to themselves. The songs didn’t sound like ditties. They sounded like war-cries.
I don’t know if England fans are more irritating or more unlikeable than anyone else, really. I think English football culture has become much more open in the last couple of decades, though it’s not as open as I think it should be. (This is just personal choice.) But that contrast still resonates with me. England go abroad and finds a little corner of a foreign land than can be England for a while. I’m not sure the Italians or whoever do that.
I have no strong views on who should be the next England manager, other than that they should be English. That sounds very, very reactionary, but it’s not: international football is designed to test the strength of your football culture. If your culture cannot produce managers, then that is something that you should have to work on. If you can just buy your way out of problems, then the whole exercise (for major football nations, anyway) is redundant.
Can you tell me a bit about what it was like ghostwriting for Rafa Benitez? Was it disorienting to write for someone who only speaks in broken English, or was it more like the process of translation?
I’ve ghosted quite a lot in my career, for various people, and it’s a strange sort of skill. The main thing you need to do it well — I do not know if I have done it well — is time. The more you get to know someone, the more you are around them, the more you can hear their manner of speaking, their turn of phrase, and (just as important) the way they think. You need that, too, to figure out how to show their working, if you see what I mean: not just to present their conclusion or their solution but to portray how they got there. The tricky thing with Rafa wasn’t so much finding that voice — his English is really good — but with conveying how someone who thinks so strategically, who sees everything as a tactical problem, is simultaneously incredibly warm in person. He had a reputation for being cold then, and probably still does now, but it’s not really true. Capturing that was hard.
Your voice is distinct, how’d you find it? Did ghostwriting get in the way?
One of my old bosses — someone who I will not name but do not like — once told me, relatively early on in my career, that I needed to “find my voice.” I was, at that stage, in my mid-20s and 90 per cent of my output was news stories, which is really vital training for journalists but is necessarily very formulaic. I didn’t really know what he expected me to do. Part of finding your voice is having an opportunity to speak.
I still feel like my “voice” — God, that sounds pretentious — is fairly delicate. I have to be really choosy with what I read, because I find that other writers’ styles tend to drift into my own with surprising and probably unethical ease. I envy people like Jonathan Liew and Barney Ronay who have a much more distinctive, more characteristic way of writing. I feel like I am too easily swayed.
What I do think I have developed is a style of writing that works for me: I like to start with an anecdote; I like to change scene and then tie things together at the end; I like to be relatively light with quotes; I like the language to feel conversational, informal, rather than florid and didactic, but I do like to show off just a little bit; I like to have some reporting, even in columns, and just a flourish of opinion, even in reporting; I like lists of three, one of which is almost a non-sequitur (this list is too long).
I like the construction “Also:” to change the tempo and the tone. Writing funny is the hardest thing to do, but I’m trying to take more risks with it. It helps to engage readers’ attention, offers them a little boost halfway down a piece, but also it’s a nod to the act of what we’re doing. I am writing these words down and then you, wherever you are, are absorbing them in your brain. That relationship is strange, and funny, and should be acknowledged.
Why are athletes often so boring to interview? Does this make your job more difficult?
Quite often, they’re boring because they’re being asked boring questions. The problem with a lot of interviews — certainly in sport, and presumably in quite a lot of elements of culture — is that there isn’t really any purpose behind them.
Athletes are famous, so when you are offered the chance to talk to them, you obviously have to take it. But in most cases that means you have nothing specific to ask and they have nothing specific to say. They’re just some person talking about their job, most likely in a stilted environment in which they are not comfortable. It’s not a recipe for fascinating conversation.
The way around it — and I’m lucky here, beyond lucky, that the New York Times has never been quite as thirsty for words as the national press in Europe has to be — is to do interviews with people who you actually want to talk to, whose perspective on whatever subject is valuable. If you go in with a good idea, then what you get is much more worthwhile.
Who are some writers, living or dead, that you’d love to interview? What questions would you ask them? How come those questions, why those writers?
The one element of writing that is completely beyond me — I think — is fiction. There’s lots of journalists I would love to talk to about the craft of reporting, about how they find their stories and the questions they ask and the way they construct what they do: David Remnick, Ryzszard Kapuscinski, David Grann, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Sam Anderson. I’d love to know how younger writers, or at least writers I assume are younger than me — Lauren Oyler, Anna Merlan, Jia Tolentino, Amanda Mull — deploy that millennial/Gen Z tone so effectively in print. (I’ve not included any football writers here, not because I am not interested or do not admire them, but because I can ask them these questions.)
But the main thing I would love to ask, say, Stuart Turton — whose books I have read over the last year or so and have genuinely stopped me sleeping for days at a time — is: how the fuck do you come up with that?
Can you tell me a bit about what it was like growing up in Yorkshire? When people talk about Yorkshire they hardly ever talk about food (I know there must be a reason, England, etc.) But I’m into the ‘culinary world’, so I’m curious, what foods did you enjoy eating growing up? Is there anything, other than the pudding, that’s distinctly Yorkshire that you just can’t get enough of?
The thing about the north of England is that if you ask someone in Liverpool what their city is like, they will tell you it is the best city in the world. If you ask someone in Manchester, they’ll say the same thing. But about Manchester, obviously. If you ask someone from Leeds, they will say: “It’s alright.” This is the defining trait of Yorkshireness. We are intensely proud. We feel that it should be obvious to you why we are intensely proud. But we do not feel the need to bang on about it.
I was really lucky to have a pretty idyllic childhood: garden to play in, parents who loved me, brother I adored and sister I tolerated (until we were 16, we’re very close now and I love her very much), the community of a village but a half hour bus journey into two different cities. Naturally, I couldn’t wait to leave.
But I must have enjoyed it because, as I got older and we got a dog and had kids, there was always this pull, this voice that said you go back. I was resistant for a while because returning always seemed to be like an admission of defeat — I have tried to make the world my own but it is too big, so here I am, small again — but as soon as we did, I had literally no idea why I had ever moved away. I wish I had lived abroad for longer, and that might be something we choose to do for a bit, but Yorkshire is my place.
What do you miss most about Yorkshire that no longer exists? Is there any change you appreciate?
Hmmm. It has become a little bit more cosmopolitan, but that was coming from a very low bar. There is one (1) Vietnamese restaurant now. I like the fact that it has embraced its nature, in both a literal and a figurative sense: the biggest shift between leaving and coming back was that everyone now seems to own a bike. This has, sadly, let to a rise in the amount of times you hear the word “Strava” in conversation. What I miss most about Yorkshire is how people didn’t used to talk about Strava. Oh! I didn’t do the food bit of the last question. Is there a distinctly Yorkshire food? Not really. But obviously the fish and chips in Yorkshire is better than it is anywhere else. That’s just common sense.
What’s your relationship with irony? What about with sincerity?
Like all British people — or at least like all British people used to be, it’s changed a bit now — I find it very difficult to be sincere about anything, because earnestness is an American trait and it hints at an emotional openness we find unsettling. My general default is irony. That might not be my fault: I think technically I am a geriatric millennial — I was born in 1982 — but I suspect I have the cultural markers of Generation X.
What’s the scariest thing about soccer in 2024? What are the greater socioeconomic / political factors that may have led to this?
There’s a million ways to answer this and I have a feeling that whichever one I go for will feel, in hindsight, insufficient. There are so many problems — the calcification of hierarchies, the drift away from sport and into content, nation states owning teams, the distortion of the market, networks of clubs robbing teams of purpose and subsuming their identities, player hoarding, player trafficking, the saturation of the calendar, the endlessly inflated hype, the toxic online tribalism — but a lot of it can probably be gathered together under a single umbrella: there is nobody, nobody who thinks about the health of the game as a whole. The leagues, the clubs, the organising bodies, the fans: they all think about their little bit, about maintaining their tree while the rest of the forest burns.
Football has basically become too big for its own good. It is not designed to withstand the assault of private equity and Saudi Arabia and Netflix and social media and influencer culture and Jorge Mendes, all at the same time, and it has no idea how to cope with all of these challenges. Football is the most popular leisure activity the world has ever known. It has this incredible value, both financial and cultural. And in quite a lot of ways it is perfectly understandable that it has no clue whatsoever how to deal with that status.
What’s your relationship with religion, with God?
Weirdly quite settled. I wouldn’t define myself as religious, particularly, and I certainly wouldn’t wander around calling myself spiritual. But I believe in something: it’s fairly indistinct, and it’s not the sort of thing you have to go to a church to do, but it forms a sort of moral skeleton in which I make most of my decisions. I’ve always assumed that if God is omniscient, you probably don’t have to perform your belief. Making us do that sounds a bit needy for a deity.
Any healthy, thriving literary/journalism scene has rivalries, and I think these rivalries are integral for the production of work that’s any good, any worthwhile. Who are your rivals and why? What would say to this rival if you’d really want to get under their skin? Further, what, in your opinion, makes your work stronger, more vital, more necessary, than the work of your rival?
My rivals, I suppose, are all of the people I think are better than me at what I do, and that is quite a long list. The highest compliment I can pay to someone, professionally, is that they have had an idea or written a piece or come up with a line of argument that I wish was my own. The people most guilty of this are: Jonathan Liew, Ken Early, Barney Ronay, Jonathan Wilson, Miguel Delaney, Dion Fanning, Sam Wallace, James Gheerbrant, Adam Crafton, Oliver Kay, Mark Ogden…see, a long list. It is not comprehensive, obviously. It’s the ideas that I really struggle with. I hate it when I see someone look at something in a way that should have occurred to me, and write it down, and publish it.
How do you spend your time when not watching and reporting on soccer?
As a sort of butler to two children and an emotional support human to a dog. That is not a complaint. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Well, I’d kind of like the dog to be a little bit more self-assured. Young children don’t leave much room for hobbies. As a middle-class man, I play padel occasionally. I play football when I can. I see my family. I try to find television shows that both my wife (whose tastes tend toward Norwegian murder) and me (“The Complete Works of Katherine Heigl”) can enjoy. I read, albeit in flurries. I went through a phase of trying to re-engage with video games but I don’t have enough time to commit to it, not properly. I stare at my phone and regret it.
Nabakov said there are two kinds of people, those who can sleep and those who can’t. He found people who slept well somewhat plebeian, complacent. What’s your relationship like with sleep? In your sleep, what manifestations of reality come to fruition? How does it then affect your day, your life?
I mean I don’t want to contradict Nabokov — and I don’t want to be repetitive here — but he should try telling the parent of a two-year-old that they’re plebeian for sleeping deeply and soundly. I’ve never been a great sleeper, really; or, rather, I wasn’t a great sleeper until my kids came along and made it feel less than optional. I sleep especially well if I read before I go to bed. But nor am I a great dreamer. I have a recurring dream about my teeth falling out, which is apparently a sign of stress but I think is a sign of eating too many Maoams. If you really pushed me, though, and asked me to name my favourite trait about myself, I would say (eventually, because I had been backed into a corner) that it is that I can wake up on very little sleep and reliably just…be fine. Occasionally I’m a bit grumpy, for a while, but as a rule: just get up, maybe have some coffee, and get on with it. It really annoys my wife.
Where did your love for the game come from? How did it develop and change over time?
It feels like it was just…always there. The pictures that exist of me from the age of about four onwards all feature a Liverpool shirt, some Liverpool shorts, a football: some sort of nod to the fact that it was a core part of my personality. I think the fault for that lies with my half-sister, who lived with us at the time, and was a more active fan than my Dad was.
What interests me about it, though, is watching that process play out with my son. Football has truly kicked in for him over the last two years, say, and it seems to me that it is driven by the crowd, as much as everything: he loves, as he puts it, watching people go crazy. He will watch someone score a bundled header and someone score a 35-yard screamer and tell me that both goals were amazing; I think what he’s watching is the reaction from the crowd.
The difference, of course, is that he can watch football basically whenever he likes, screen time limits permitting. I had Match of the Day, which was on late at night and I presume I was not allowed to watch. So I guess I must have loved football because of playing football.
I’ve written a bit about ‘scenes’ within the art world. What’s the scene like among sports and soccer journalists? How would you describe it? How do you interact with it?
My guess is that this has been changed irrevocably by the internet, and the demands that sports journalists now work under. You hear all of the stories of what happened in the pre-digital era, when reporters would go off to cover European games and engage in a rich variety of basically fairly objectionable behaviour for several days, but none of that is really possible now: there’s an expectation for most that they will provide a pretty constant stream of content of whatever sort, which tends to negate a lot of the socialising. We do spend time together, before big games or at major tournaments, but calling it a scene is probably pushing it. It’s middle-aged men bitching about colleagues they don’t like, and occasionally arguing about Mauricio Pochettino’s career trajectory. It’s indistinguishable from any other workplace gathering.
Is there a fictional or non-fictional character from a book, play, or film that you’d love to sleep with? If so, who and why? If not, how come?
This is a great question. It's like those jokes you see every now and again where couples are asking who their hall passes are and one partner names a load of famous people, and the other goes: "Your best friend and that woman from work." Those jokes are probably problematic now, but I would contend they are objectively funny.
If I say a character from a TV show or a film here, even if I explain how attractive I find their personality or the fact they're a murderer or whatever, I am in effect just writing: "I find this actress hot." And that actress is not fictional. So it seems safer to name someone from fiction. Or history, I suppose. But like distant history. Not recent history, for the reasons outlined above. Even that, though, seems potentially like an issue. So I might say Cassandra, the Trojan princess, partly because I always loved Greek history and partly because it would be nicely ironic: nobody would believe me if I told them I'd slept with a princess.
Do you ever fantasize on writing about topics other than soccer, like delving into literary or genre fiction? Or becoming a political pundit? (Which I suppose is less far-off.) What would this alternate world of Rory Smith writing look like?
Fantasize might be pushing it, but it is something I’ve always wanted to do. Maybe not politics — it feels like maybe there are enough people out there writing about politics — but certainly other types of journalism. The balance of what I read now is probably a little more eclectic than it was a few years ago. I’m more likely to read several thousand words on how technology intersects with culture, say, or an essay on some mystery from the 1950s in Borneo (this is a hypothetical example) than on the youth system at Benfica. The explanation for that is probably just that the latter feels too much like work, but there’s maybe a little bit of…not tedium, but familiarity with the subject that has settled in now. Having said that, soccer does have a habit of finding new and interesting ways of surprising you, and it remains probably the best way to explore quite a lot of subjects that might otherwise be dry and uninspiring. I know that I don’t ever want to say definitively that I don’t write about soccer any more. The prospect of that is something I find weirdly unsettling.
How did you end up starting your journalism career in Bolivia? Can you tell me about your time there?
Back in the good old days, when everything was far less structured and wildly unqualified people could just go and do things — albeit with a healthy dose of unearned privilege — I just kind of…went. Taking a year between school and university is pretty common in Britain. I knew I wanted to go to South America, thanks to a longstanding and only quite predictable fascination with both Boca Juniors and Che Guevara. I also knew I wanted to be a journalist, though I don’t remember ever making that decision in a conscious way. Anyway, I found out that there was an English-language paper — the Bolivian Times — in La Paz, and they did not appear to be especially choosy about their staff. They had a connection with an organisation in Britain that sent (also wildly underqualified) English teachers around the world, and so I signed up. I spent about eight months working for them. I’m not sure any of my work there would stand up to scrutiny, to be honest, but I was lucky enough to meet several really good actual journalists who steered me in roughly the right direction. I think strictly speaking the paper still owes me money. That’s probably the most useful lesson anyone can learn in journalism. They really don’t want to pay you.
What’s your relationship with death? How often do you think about it? How does death define your work? How does death define your approach to life?
This is one that I will either linger on for hours or keep relatively brief: let’s find out which! Five years ago, my little brother died quite suddenly. He had a brain tumour. We only found out about it — he only found out about it — a few days before he died. He was 31. I loved him very much. It’s something I’ve tried to write about before but find essentially impossible. I’m quite good at compartmentalising serious things — I’m very melodramatic about the trivial — but it is something I still can’t really look in the eye. I can talk about him quite openly, but it is as a concept, rather than as an actual memory, as someone I knew. Whether this is an advisable way to handle grief I have no idea, but I have also learned that grief is intensely personal, and that however you deal with your grief, and we all have some, is entirely up to you. I read an essay a little while ago by Taffy Brodesser-Akner about trauma, and the traumatised population, which I think is probably all of us, and it was the first time I had ever considered myself traumatised. But I am, and it shows in the way you see the world. I now believe firmly that the most likely outcome of any given situation is the one that is the most horrifying. I’d been very lucky until 2019, in that I’d lived a life in which nothing really bad had happened to me. And then something unfathomably bad happened, and to some extent now all I see is bad things, hovering just out of vision, waiting for me. It’s especially hard when it comes to my kids. I am, if I am completely honest, permanently and actively terrified of anything happening to my kids in a way that I think I probably wouldn’t have been if Rob was still here. It is a real, genuine, rooted panic, and it is very difficult to control. But that is the nature of trauma, I think. Also it should be stressed at this point that my brother was fucking brilliant, and I am very lucky I got to have him as my best friend for 31 years.
Best goal of all time? Best save of all time? Best 0-0 of all time? Best red card of all time? Best match of all time? In regard to the last one - why?
These are all really subjective, except the last one. The last one has a definitive answer. The absolute pinnacle of all soccer was the 2022 World Cup final. It is the only sporting event that has ever given me a full-on existential crisis. It was perfect: Messi’s apotheosis, the greatest player of all time claiming the one honour that had eluded him, a game of ridiculous drama and incredible technical ability, played out on the most absurd stage imaginable, in this golden Xanadu in the desert that existed for no other reason than to stage the pinnacle of modern soccer, a monument not just to the popularity of this leisure activity but to all of the malignancy that has attached itself to it. It took me six months, at least, to care about soccer at all again afterwards. I think to some extent it has probably changed my relationship with it for good. No game will ever come close to having that impact.
What’s your relationship with memory? How do memories define someone? Can you share a memory of yours that’s gained meaning and significance over time? How has this memory changed? How has it defined your current perspective?
I am going to not answer this question, but instead tell you two things. The first is that I quite often say, in what I think is a wry way, that I have very few memories before the age of 27. My wife thinks this is a joke. Not a hilarious joke, but an exaggeration for effect. It is not. It is entirely true. I can tell you quite a lot about Vladimir Smicer’s career, but very little about my life between birth and Xabi Alonso’s move to Real Madrid. I have an awareness of certain things that happened to me, but I do not feel them, not really. They’re like things I watched on TV. This is, I think, related to something my Dad said to me at some undefined point in my past. We had a photo of my Grandad — his Dad, a former professional soccer player — on the mantel when I was growing up. It was him, and me, shifting logs in a wheelbarrow. I would have been maybe four. He died a year or two later. I would occasionally say that I remembered him, and my Dad, who is wilfully contrarian, would always say: what do you remember? Do you remember shifting logs with him? And I would say yes. And he would say: You don’t remember him. You remember a photo of him. A photo is not a memory. And now, however many years on, I have no idea what is a memory and what is a photo.
No matter how old I get, soccer players on TV always appear older than me. There’s someone of the child in us that never disappears when we sit down to watch a game. I’m wondering, how would you define childhood in relation to adulthood? What changes, what’s lost, what’s gained?
I’d never thought of this before, but it is absolutely true about footballers. You always assume they are older than you. But I don’t think it’s to do with age, so much as status. It’s related to the power balance: you are dependent on them, and so you feel somehow lesser than them. Even when they are a teenager, and they have a name that was not a name when you were young. I’m not sure I have anything especially profound to say on the relationship of childhood to adulthood. I see a carefreeness in my kids that I envy. Adulthood is just the accumulation of worries, really. And presumably some sort of wisdom, at some stage. I think the times that you’re happiest as an adult is when you get to see the world as a child again. That’s maybe one of the things, and this is very much a stream of consciousness sort of situation, that journalism allows: you go and find stuff out, knowing nothing about it, and that’s basically what it is to be a child.
What do you now enjoy that you never have before? What do you no longer enjoy? Is there anything you’d like to enjoy, take pleasure in, that you’re simply not able to?
This is quite a poignant way to end. I suppose, really, the thing I no longer take pleasure in is soccer: or, rather, it provides me with a different sort of pleasure. I’m very rarely able to view it through any prism other than the professional. Even if I am just at a game, what I suppose someone who is less self-conscious than me would describe as the “reporting muscle” never really relaxes; you’re always, on some level, looking for a little bit of colour, searching for the spark of an idea, rather than just letting it wash over you. I’m not sad about that — it’s still a form of pleasure — but I suppose there is something that has been lost, there, something that has gone, some sort of irony that you lose sight of the thing that you loved because you look at it too closely. Also I wish I did not know about my microbiome.