football is... failure

Illustration by Ed Richards

No one likes to fail. As soon as we are conscious, we strive to avoid it. We try very hard not to fall off our bikes when riding for the first time without stabilisers. We hope we don’t flop our Year 6 SATs. We pray that we won’t be left out when we start secondary school, that we won’t fail to make friends. We send messages on MSN after school to our crushes – ‘Hey, how boring was English today?’ – and will them with all our might to respond, to reciprocate, to not reject us. Later, when we have passed or failed the big scary exams which mark our entry into adulthood, we go to university or start work, hoping that what comes next will live up to our wildest dreams. In short, we want our lives to be a series of success stories. But we don’t always get what we want.

Aaron Ramsdale was recently sold to Southampton for eighteen million quid, potentially rising to twenty-five million quid if certain performance-related add-ons are met. In any other field, one business paying another business between eighteen and twenty-five million pounds in order to enlist the services of one individual worker would be extraordinary. Take me. I currently work as an administrative assistant at a school. I would be absolutely thrilled, if a little surprised, if another school came in with a similar offer, not to mention a payment plan of a hundred and twenty thousand pounds a week. Yes, to those not inured to the insane sums of money paid to young men to kick a bit of synthetic leather around, that is every single week. I make, ahem, slightly less than that. Surely then, this transfer must have been seen as a resounding triumph for Ramsdale? Well, not quite.

Arsenal bought Aaron for twenty-six million pounds back in August 2021. The deal was met with befuddlement from many fans. We had a solid if unspectacular German between the sticks called Bernd Leno, a dead-eyed shot-stopper who was very good with his hands but slightly less good with his feet. Ten years ago, that would have been fine, but we live in post Pep Guardiola times and now all goalkeepers are contractually obliged to be very good at passing the ball around, not just booting it as hard as they can. Arsenal bought Ramsdale because he was a bit better at kicking the ball than Bernd, but we got him from Sheffield United, who had been relegated the season before. Some of our fans said some not very nice things about Aaron on social media. They thought he wouldn’t be very good. They were soon proved wrong. Leno was eased aside to make room for Ramsdale’s big hands and even bigger feet, roaring his way around the penalty box like a deranged lion, blonde hair flashing, tongue stuck proudly out to rile opposition fans. On one occasion, after Arsenal had beaten their greatest (well, oldest) rivals Tottenham, one Spurs fan was so incensed at Ramsdale’s audacity that he took it upon himself to kick Aaron up the bum as he was collecting his water bottle at full time. This, in many ways, was the pinnacle of Ramsdale’s Arsenal career.

Everything was going Rambo’s way – yes, he’d even been given a nickname by the fans. In his second full season with Arsenal, the club were involved in a closely fought title race with Manchester City, or Abu Dhabi FC, I forget which. City came out on top, but Ramsdale was named in the Premier League team of the season. He signed a new and improved contract, increasing his wages and supposedly cementing his place as the club’s No. 1. And then Arsenal bought a Spanish man named David Raya, and everything changed. Mikel Arteta, the Arsenal manager, claimed that he would rotate the two goalkeepers, that he would even sub one off for the other mid game. Eyebrows were raised. Raya played one game, then another, and another. Ramsdale sat on the bench, presumably expecting to be brought on in the 70th minute in a game-changing substitution, but it never came. He was to spend the rest of the season sat on the sidelines, remaining there even when Raya made a series of glaring mistakes and there were calls from the fanbase to bring back our Rambo. He didn’t complain. He maintained his upbeat demeanour and was the first to celebrate with the on-field players after a big win. But inside, he must have felt the sting of being cast aside. He spent the rest of the season watching his teammates have another brave but ultimately unsuccessful tilt at the title, this lion of a man now caged within the confines of the subs bench. Over the summer, Arsenal took pity on him and sanctioned the transfer to Southampton, newly promoted to the Premier League, quite a big step down whichever way you cut it. Aaron Ramsdale failed.

Or did he? There’s the obvious rebuttal that he was still being paid millions of pounds a year to sit on the bench, but he’s a passionate professional who wants to make the most of a relatively short career by playing as much football as he can. I doubt it feels like success to be paid a lot of money to not do the thing you love. Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to me. For many years, I was paid no money to not do the thing I love, which in the failure stakes definitely ranks higher than Aaron’s predicament. I was an actor, which is why I’m going to make the rest of this blog post all about myself. I went to drama school, did lots of rolling around on the floor in tights, got an agent, started going to auditions, and then…didn't get a single paid job in five years. Living the dream. I did other jobs, oh yes, lots of them. I worked as a temp in an office; I gave out free samples of pretzels which weren’t actually pretzels but little crunchy balls which tasted of cardboard; I was a childminder, a carer, a dog walker. Whenever someone asked me what I did, I said I was an actor, then proceeded to shrink inside my skin as they asked what I’d been in recently and I mumbled something about a short film a couple of years back and how hard Covid had been for the industry. In short, I did not feel like a success. I didn’t have grand visions of becoming the next Brad Pitt, although that would have nice. (Have you seen his abs in Thelma and Louise?) I just wanted to be a jobbing actor, to get paid for prancing around on stage pretending to be other people. Sounds a bit silly when you put it like that, but it is really, really fun. I just wouldn’t recommend trying to make a career out of it. Misha Patel, or Misha Graham, or Misha Graham-Patel (I kept juggling the English and Indian parts of my heritage to try and get jobs), failed.

Or did he? I was travelling in India earlier this year and someone asked me what my greatest failure in life had been. I was sipping a piña colada on the beach at the time, so I was slightly taken aback. I had another sip, then said, ‘acting.’ Then I thought about it. Had it been failure? Yes! screamed the Nazi commandant in my head, you failed absolutely and without exception, you are worthless and you’ll never amount to anything. My morning mantra for the past five years. I set out to be a professional actor. I am not a professional actor. Not achieving our goals is failure, right? Falling short of our dreams equals defeat. Just ask Aaron Ramsdale. He didn’t make it at Arsenal, and now his life is over. Same goes for Eddie Nketiah and Emile Smith-Rowe, both Arsenal academy graduates who threatened for a while to become first team players, but due to injuries or bad luck or maybe just not having exactly the right skills to suit the exacting demands of a very particular manager, they didn’t quite make it. They failed. Eddie now plays for Crystal Palace, Emile’s at Fulham. The horror, the horror.

But is there a world in which not achieving our dreams doesn’t necessarily equal failure? In which the very pursuit of them is some kind of success? I’m sad that I didn’t get to be an actor, but I’d much rather live with that sadness than with the maddening regret of not having tried. I reckon 'what if?’ is usually worse than what was. One benefit of going out and chasing our dreams is reaching the point at which we realise we need to let them die, for the sake of our own sanity. Aaron will probably never win the Premier League, almost certainly not with Arsenal. If he tortured himself with not achieving that dream for the rest of his career, he’d be miserable, but he could be bloody brilliant at Southampton and become a club legend. There came a point with acting, specifically being rejected for the Oxfordshire tour of a children’s improvised musical and screaming into a pillow for an hour, that I realised that continuing to pursue this particular dream was not good for me. If we experience enough of it, failure can become unbearable, the idea of hurling ourselves yet again in to the wind, baring ourselves to yet more disappointment, unthinkable. But perhaps dreams can change. Or we find new ones. A therapist recently told me that I wasn’t allowing myself to dream anymore because the dream of acting had died such an ignominious death. Is it my dream to organise teachers’ break duties? Not that I’m aware of. But it just about pays the bills, and I’ve met some good people doing it. It’s not a fairy tale, but very few people get to live those.

Southampton played Arsenal a couple of weeks ago. In the fairy tale version, Ramsdale would have been man of the match, repelling wave after wave of Arsenal attacks, inspiring his new team to snatch a heroic victory. In reality, he let in three goals and Southampton lost. In an interview before the game, he said that he’d rather play week in week out at Southampton than win the Premier League sitting on the bench. I’d rather get up every day and go to a job that gives me a sense of purpose, however small, than sit at home waiting for that phone call from my agent. I don’t know what my dream is now. I’ve just woken up from the last one. But I know that in Aaron there is at least one other soul out there, and probably countless others, trying to piece together a good life with the fragments of their dreams.

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