Biases and False Equivalencies: Finishing vs. Canceling the Season

Photo by PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images

In some corners of the Internet, “null and void” is still a viable option. Funny how that opinion always benefits their preferred team.

Safety first! Cancel the season! The only fair solution is null and void!

We’ve heard some combination of the above for over a month now. The statements always come from people who present themselves as having the best intentions in mind. As if “safety” can be discussed in anything other than “relative safety” these days. As if canceling or voiding the season (they’re not the same!) wouldn’t create more problems than they would solve. And unsurprisingly, these arguments are always coming from those who support teams that would benefit most from voiding the whole season.

Perhaps Liverpool fans would be taking the “null and void” position if they swapped points and league position with Tottenham, though I doubt it. Twenty-five points clear after more than 75% of the season finished? Anything less than Liverpool winning the league would be massively unfair.

But so what? This is a Liverpool blog. We are Liverpool fans. Of course we think it’s massively, criminally unfair not to end the season with the Reds lifting the thing that has eluded our grasp for three decades. We want to finish, or at the very least resolve, the season in a way that ends with some Liverpool employee having to change the “18” to “19” on the “Walk of Champions.”

We are biased. Of course we are. And we’re doing no favors to ourselves or to others to pretend otherwise.

However, just because we’re biased doesn’t mean we’re wrong. Nor does it mean that our bias is equal to those supporting other clubs.

There is a key difference in favor of Liverpool’s position that clubs such as West Ham and Tottenham (the two loudest “null and void” voices out three) don’t have. We earned our place in the table. We earned our title. No one can reasonably argue that we wouldn’t have won the title, probably over a month ago, under normal circumstances. Winning 27 out of 29 matches—after earning 97 points and becoming Champions of Europe the season before—did not happen by accident.

Whereas Liverpool have earned their desired league position, West Ham and Tottenham have not. Spurs have been a thoroughly midtable side all season. Sitting on in 8th place on 41 points—exactly half of Liverpool’s point total—they’re 7 points behind Chelsea for 4th, and 4 points behind Manchester United for 5th. Spurs might “need” a spot in the Champions League for financial reasons, but they’re nowhere close to deserving one.

And West Ham, sitting in 16th, level on points with 18th placed Bournemouth, have been equally unconvincing in their attempt to avoid the drop. Moreover, they’re only 2 points ahead of 19th-placed Aston Villa, who have a game in hand. They might “want” or feel that they “need” another season in the Premier League, but they haven’t earned it. With 9 or 10 games remaining, there are any number of scenarios that could see them lose their place in England’s top flight.

Simply: the bias of wanting what you’ve earned is in no way morally equivalent to the bias of wanting what you have not.

Moving past the obvious biases, there is the issue of safety, and the issue of football “not being a matter of life or death.” Safety, of course, is paramount. No one is Bill Shankly these days, arguing that football is more important than life or death.

There shouldn’t be a rush to return, especially since we have no idea what next season will look like, or whether there can even be a next season. But on the other hand, if playing matches behind closed doors in relative safety would help millions, literally millions, around the globe deal with the mental strain of social distancing and isolation, it isn’t a crazy or irrational pursuit.

Football should not be a matter of life or death (a lesson Liverpool fans know too well), but after this crisis, we can no longer simply declare that it doesn’t matter. If it didn’t matter at all, we’d simply call the season as is, and resume playing in a couple of years.

It clearly matters. Fans around the world are begging for it.

It matters so much, that denying Liverpool a title is of paramount importance to some rival fans. It matters so much that footballing rivalries can’t be put aside, even for this pandemic.

Source: liverpooloffside.sbnation.com