Soccer, the Beatles, and Competition
I grew up playing soccer. I played competitively through high school, then pretty much stopped in college. When I moved to New York in my late twenties, I started playing pickup games, first in Prospect Park, then Harlem, then Long Island City. I enjoyed playing again, but it was always a struggle to get a good game. Either there were too many people at a field, and you couldn’t get a spot, or the level of play wasn’t right. It’s no fun playing with people who are too far above or below your level. You either feel dispensable or indispensable, neither of which is good for a team sport. Another problem is ball hogs. No one enjoys just watching a teammate dribble, and anyway, it’s futile for someone to try to dribble through an entire team. There’s a certain etiquette to being a good soccer teammate. You have to pass the ball, move to get open, and come back to help on defense. Some people aren’t interested in doing any of that.
Now I live in Newark and play every Sunday afternoon (weather permitting). My friends and I played for a few years in Branch Brook Park in Newark (which, by the way is a beautiful park, designed by the sons of Frederick Law Olmstead, the guy who designed Central Park and, now that I think of it, Prospect Park – so I’ve played soccer in two Olmstead parks 😊), then more recently in Nutley, but this year we started playing at a brand new park in Kearny, which is just across the Passaic River from Newark. It’s pretty easy to get a good game going in Kearny – there’s plenty of space, and a decent number of skilled players usually show up. I don’t want to jinx it, but we may have found our Goldilocks park which, incidentally, is pristine, with all types of playing fields, each featuring the new artificial turf that has the depth and buoyancy that older, carpet-style artificial turfs lack. It’s a thrill to have the ball in open space on one of these fields. You just glide along.
. . . .
Lately, I’ve been reading a book my girlfriend recommended to me on non-hierarchical businesses, called Reinventing Organizations, by Frederic Laloux. It’s actually a pretty interesting read, and I’ve just made my way through a section on the profit motive and competition. A non-hierarchical business owner in the book says that profit is important, but it’s not the primary goal of his business, which is to employ people in his area and produce a high-quality product. He goes on to say that for him, “competition is idiotic”. I thought, “Well, that that’s kind of a simplistic formulation.” But it got me thinking about sports and what it is that I enjoy about them. And I think where I land is that competition is not idiotic, but it also isn’t the whole story on achievement.
For example, when I play soccer, I do want my team to win, and it definitely irks me when we don’t. If the opposing team takes the lead, I redouble my efforts to try to avoid the loss. If we win, I’m relieved. But there are other feelings and motivations running through my head at the same time. I have a certain standard of play that I know I’m capable of, and there’s a sense of satisfaction if I match or exceed that standard. There’s pride in good play, which persists past the result of the game. If I play well, and we lose, I don’t feel as bad as if I play poorly, and we win. I also just want to pull my weight and not let my teammates down – it’s embarrassing to not perform well. And anyway, moment to moment during a game, much of my brain activity is unconscious, or reactive, or pre-verbal. That’s why soccer, and other hobbies, for me are kind of like therapy. Psychologists talk about “being in the zone” or “losing yourself.” It’s the Zen-like quality of play. Time passes unnoticed. All of my brainpower is occupied with trying to get the ball, then deciding quickly what to do with it. Even my opponents aren’t really a consideration most of the time. And winning or losing is an abstraction that fades into the background.
These dynamics are at play in any other human activity – business, art, whatever. They say that competition prompted the Beatles to create much of their music, that Paul and John competed with each other, and the group as a whole competed with the Stones and the Beach Boys. I think that’s true – Paul’s recent dismissal of the Stones as a “blues cover band” reveals a startling insecurity in a man who many believe to be the greatest songwriter of the twentieth century.
But that wasn’t all there was to it. Watching some of Peter Jackson’s new documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, one gets a sense of the joy the lads could still derive from making music, even at their most fraught and divided moment, with John on heroin and George ready to throw in the towel, the Hare Krishnas and Yoko lurking in the background. And there was an urgency to produce, not so much due to competition from other bands but because the show was set for two weeks hence, and the Beatles had a certain standard that they expected to achieve. They didn’t want to let their fans down, didn’t want to give a poor showing. So yes, people produce great things through competition, both with other groups, and within their own group. Perhaps more importantly though, people produce great things when they take pride and pleasure in their work, and when they want to come through for their community.
For competition to be worthy of the name, there must be worthy competitors vying on similar footing. It’s why, in pickup soccer, if one team is dominating, we remix the teams to make it more competitive and therefore more interesting. The goal for us, after all, is not fidelity to some antiquated Darwinian notion, but rather our own enjoyment. We set up the system to serve us, not the other way around.
Often competitors exist within the same geographic area. Otherwise, they belong to the same community of competitors, by definition. So the distinction between community and competitor can be fuzzy. And although the desire to crush the competition is common, something closer to the opposite feeling is also common, especially among those who love what they do. In the latter situation, competitors recognizes how much they benefit from each other, how much they inspire each other to improve, and in fact, how the relationship is more like symbiosis than survival of the fittest. These competitors realize that they may be the only ones in the world who truly understand certain things. If the dedication and skill are at a high level, the competitors probably respect each other more than they do anyone else.
The upshot to this view is that it’s not beneficial for the competition to be eliminated. On the contrary, good competitors thrive when their own good competitors thrive. Smart restaurateurs understand this – they benefit from a healthy restaurant ecosystem, which attracts more customers as a whole, and within which ingredients, equipment, know-how, and inspiration can be shared. And of course, the public thrives with more options, better prices, and better quality. I’ve also heard the term “news ecosystem”, which is a similar idea. Different publications serve different niches, and together they meet the needs of a larger population. Thinking about it this way, one arrives at the conclusion that those who want to destroy their competition don’t actually want to compete. They fear it. They’re insecure in their craft. They would rather be the last tree in a desert than one of many in a thriving garden.
That’s why dynasties (and blowouts, for that matter) are boring for everyone except the winning team’s fans. No one wants to watch a charade, or a foregone conclusion. I think the majority of the country was relieved to see Alabama lose to Georgia this year (and I’m not just saying that because I’m an LSU fan 😊). But the fact that Bama made it to the championship game, yet again, after winning it all, more recently, in: 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2017, and 2020, and getting to the championship game in 2016 and 2018, tells me that they have something like monopoly power. In college football, I’d estimate that 70% of the game is won by recruiting well. And recruiting is analogous to amassing wealth – the rich get richer. The best players want to play at the best schools, and it’s their right to do so, but when one school stockpiles the lion’s share of the best players, year after year, it’s no surprise that other schools can’t compete. The feeling for a viewer is one of stagnation and inevitability.
. . . .
After World War II, America witnessed a gargantuan economic expansion, commonly referred to as the postwar boom, or the Golden Age of Capitalism. Over the course of the next thirty years, GDP septupled, the middle class exploded, and by the 1970s, the US economy comprised over a third of the global output. Since the 1970s however, the boom has petered out. Wealth inequality has grown and social mobility has declined. There’s less new business formation, or investment in existing ones, and more concentration and consolidation across industries.
Not coincidentally, the 1970s saw the rise of the so-called Chicago School of Economics which, in contemplating anti-trust law, placed emphasis on “consumer welfare,” rather than monopoly formation per se. Prior to this, government regulators would examine, for example, whether a company was growing too big. With the Chicago-style analysis, however, regulators look at effects on consumers – for example, whether the price for the good being sold is increasing. If, in that case, the price is not going up, then the company’s size and tactics are acceptable. Predictably, as the Chicago framework became the dominant one, anti-trust enforcement dropped, and that’s where we find ourselves today. It’s rare right now for a monopoly or aspiring monopoly to be restricted by the government, because it’s easy for that company to make the case that the short-term effect on consumers of the company’s size or tactics will be negligible. Many tech companies are particularly difficult to rein in, because they don’t sell traditional products. Take the case of Facebook, which is free, the “payment” being consumers’ personal information (whether they’re aware of it or not).
All of this is to say that much of America’s economy now isn’t capitalistic; it’s monopolistic. Monopolies don’t want to compete; they want the market to themselves. A typical tactic of a giant company like Amazon or Wal-Mart is to price products at below cost, thus actually losing money in the short term in order to make it impossible for smaller companies, who don’t have massive reserves of money and a huge market share, to compete with them. Another tactic for monopolies is to simply buy up (or merge with) potential competitors, like Facebook did with Instagram and What’s App.
The story is intuitive. Every American can think of a nearby town, if not their own, with no local newspaper and empty storefronts where thriving local businesses used to be. I often marvel at the example of Mitt Romney’s father, who was president of American Motors Corporation from 1954 to 1962. George Romney turned down several annual bonuses, because he “believed that no executive should make more than $225,000 a year (which translates into almost $2 million today).” If a CEO expressed a similar belief today, he would be called a communist. Fittingly, American Motors was eventually bought by Chrysler, which then merged with Fiat. In 2020, Fiat Chrysler’s CEO, Mike Manley, made $14 million in total compensation, which is actually low compared to other automotive CEOs. Manley’s term ended last year, as FCA merged with Peugeot.
Monopolies are hurting the country, so why don’t we do anything about them? Because they have lots of money, and they are allowed to use that money to pay politicians to keep things this way. By my lights then, getting money out of politics and ending monopolies are two of the most vital issues we face in America, and they’re intimately intertwined. I was heartened to see that Biden has appointed Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. She seems very capable and very serious about bringing anti-trust regulation back. Time will tell how successful Ms. Khan will be.
The idea, paradoxically, is to save capitalism (or reinvent it) by regulating businesses again. Because capitalism is dying, if it hasn’t died already. Ironically, in order to fix the problem, those benefiting most from the current state of things need only look to their own long-term interests. If our system, which is commonly referred to as capitalism, isn’t working for most ordinary people, then eventually the people will turn to another system not called capitalism. If America’s aristocracy refuses to budge on reasonable anti-trust law, and with it a reasonable quality of life for everyone, it will preside over the killing of the goose that lays its golden eggs. After all, the difference between America and less wealthy, less dynamic countries is our big, prosperous middle class, initially built during the Golden Age of Capitalism. But that Golden Age ended, and the middle class is now shrinking, due in large part to monopolies. It bears repeating: the system exists to serve us, not the other way around. If we can only behave like participants in a pickup soccer game, we will adjust our system so that it promotes our own flourishing.