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It now falls to Thomas Tuchel to join Karl Marx, George Frideric Handel and the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in the bracket of Germans who did their finest work in London. When Chelsea FC cashiered Frank Lampard as coach this week, the lean Swabian and hipster’s darling became, by my count, the 15th man to lead the team since Roman Abramovich juiced it with petrodollars in 2003. Not even a playing style — a “philosophyâ€, in football’s preening diction — links them.
As with Italy and its prime ministers, or Mickey Rooney and his spouses, such churn tends to connote waywardness, if not dysfunction. But Chelsea have been the most successful club in England over the period, with a lower net spend than two rivals in the past decade. Compounding their impatience with coaches (if “compounding†is the right word for something that works) is a similar tack with young players. Not until a buying ban did the club favour crude potential from its own academy over the Brillianteered diamonds of the transfer market.
The parable of Chelsea is that short-termism can work. Or at least that planning and strategy — industries unto themselves — have limits. A generation has passed since Will Hutton rued the quick-buck ethos of shareholder capitalism in The State We’re In. His counter-model was the patient investment culture of Japan and other managed economies. The book has aged better after a quarter of a century than it had after a decade. A taste for quick returns — the league title next season, or else, in footballing terms — had a part in the 2008 crash. But there is no getting around Japan’s lost decade(s). Or the phasing out of its all-commanding Ministry for International Trade and Industry (a star of the book). If the quarterly profit motive has perverse outcomes, so too does a synoptic view of the economy, centrally conceived by horizon-gazers.
At its best, short-termism is really a kind of predictive humility. It prioritises immediate outcomes not out of nihilism but because so little can be known about anything further off. Correspondingly, long-termism at its worst amounts to rigidity in the face of a changeable future. Does any phrase in the English language chill the spirit quite as much as “planned city� At some point, intelligent people believed that Chandigarh (or Detroit) was the way of the future. Pretensions to clairvoyance were given concrete and asphalt form. In the long run, it seems, we are all dead certain.
As Chelsea signed off on severance package after lush severance package, Arsenal mounted Olympus and savoured the long view. As well as keeping a coach for 712 years, the club husbanded a cash pile that became reputedly the largest in world football. The bet was that new rules against outside finance would curb the likes of Chelsea, freeing clubs that made their own money to raid the transfer market. In the end, Zimbabwe-grade inflation in that bazaar devalued the cash, and the vaunted rules turned out to be eminently get-roundable. In a yet worse act of hyperopia, Arsenal would patiently keep failed players on their books, trusting them to come good, as an abandoned dog awaits its master.
For all this, Arsenal were hailed for their wisdom (their “classâ€). This season-ticket holder can attest to the inverse relationship between the club’s moral standing and league position.
If this sporting fable does not bring home the merits of short-termism, perhaps real-world events will. One reason we are not now in some Cormac McCarthy hellscape, eyeing each other hungrily, is that governments, even those without the fiscal licence of the US, have sprayed the world with borrowed cash. Most have done so without a plan, much less a domestic consensus, as to who pays when the bill comes.
In a much deeper sense than the economic, too, the year-long memento mori has exposed the foolishness of patience. I am surer than ever that long-termism is the source of the worst life advice: that scrimping for a home beats living your prime years in the rental of your dreams, that the quest for eternal love trumps lots of fun flings. The point is not just that tomorrow is unknowable. It is impudent enough to assume that it is coming at all.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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