Welcome to The Jerky Loudspeaker - an independent sports and culture newsletter, I’m super excited to have you here! Before you dive right in, let me quickly break down how the newsletter is structured. Think of it like a mini newspaper, with three sections:
Balls, Bats & Baskets - Sports comes first, and in this section I’ll geek out about the happenings in this world of balls, bats and baskets.
Consumption Corner - A weekly review of what I’m watching, reading and listening to.
Deep Dive - Each piece/series in this section will be an in-depth analysis of the thoughts and emotions that arise from my interactions and experiences with the arts
Balls, Bats & Baskets
Loan em’ out
There was an interesting discussion on the Tifo Football Podcast last week about Dele Alli’s future at Spurs. Ndombele’s resurgence coupled with Alli taking up Luke Shaw’s old role of being Mourinho’s constant subject of ire has seen the midfielder pushed to the fringes of the squad. A move to PSG and a reunion with Pochettino has been gathering steam in the rumor columns. But the panelists on the podcast had an interesting perspective on the issue - Mourinho isn’t going to be at Spurs forever and has got maybe 2-3 years more to go. But, Dele Alli is only 24 and still sometime away from entering the prime of his career. He’s achieved cult status at Tottenham and has been one of their most important players in the club’s modern era. While there’s no doubting that Alli needs regular game time, Daniel Levy needs to keep the long term picture in mind and send him out on loan.
The entire discussion got me thinking about the football loan market and how it remains a largely untapped entity. Clubs seem to perceive it as a stop gap solution and players seem to shun its permanence. It’s why the loan market is dominated by young, upcoming players in search of playing time. But, the ever burgeoning squad sizes and diminishing finances could mean that loan moves become more commonplace in the game.
When big money signings don’t hit the ground running, there are two common routes a club goes down:
Impetuous - The transfer fee looms over them and they set about looking for the quickest way to offload the player. It’s how West Ham approached the Sébastian Haller situation, when they decided to sell him at a £25 million loss. There was an acceptance that the investment hadn’t paid off and the focus shifted to cutting losses.
Persistence - When a player doesn’t live up to expectations, the club decides to persist with him in the hope of delayed returns on their investment. The persistence can quickly transform into a stubbornness. The downward slope of a player’s performances matches that of his resell value. The Pogba situation at United is a prime example of this.
But, player development isn’t linear. Confidence, pressure, injuries, adjusting to a new setting are all factors that impact performance. And sometimes the solution to a player’s form woes is a temporary change of scenery. Take a look at the Naby Keïta situation. Despite being at the club for more than two years now, the midfielder has made just 71 appearances for the club and has seen his time on Merseyside plagued by injuries. The arrival of Thiago this season has seen first team opportunities diminish and it’s unlikely Liverpool will be able to get back the £52.75 million they spent on him. Given the circumstances, Liverpool would do well to follow the template Barca used for Coutinho - loan him out for a year to a club where he’ll get a sustained run in the XI, let him build up his confidence and then reintegrate him into the squad the following year.
A high profile loan move that hasn’t worked out has been Gareth Bale’s. The Welshman is Spurs’ highest paid player, but he’s hardly made an impact. At the risk of sounding reductive, I’d argue that his woes at Tottenham can be tracked back to the summer of 2019 and the manner in which Real Madrid handled his situation. They blocked his move to China in 2019 because they wanted a transfer fee. So as a result, Bale spent an entire season sulking on the bench, while still being paid his £600,000-a-week salary. Madrid agreed to pay 60% of his salary when they loaned him out last summer and Tottenham received a player desperately lacking match fitness. He’s made just one start in the Premier League so far. What Madrid should have done was loan him out in 2019 and agreed to take on a portion of his wages. They wouldn’t have had to deal with media circus that came with is ostracism, Bale would have got regular playing minutes and the following summer Madrid could have commanded a sizable transfer fee for him. Their mishandling of the situation was detrimental to Bale, Spurs and most of all, themselves.
While loan moves are a possible panacea for contractual standoffs, they are best suited to helping clubs understand what a player’s ceiling is. While Havertz, Werner and Ziyech dominated the headlines of Chelsea’s transfer dealings last summer, their decision to loan out Ruben Loftus-Cheek to Fulham deserves just as much credit. Football is a fickle sport and it’s easily forgotten that Loftus-Cheek was one of the hottest talents in England a couple of years ago. He made it to Gareth Southgate’s World Cup squad in 2018 and followed it up with a stellar season in which he scored 10 goals in all competitors for Chelsea. An Achilles injury days before the Europa League final that season put him out of action for more than a year. When he finally returned in June 2020, he was visibly off pace and looked a shadow of the player he was. But like Alli, he’s only 24 and he’s got a long career ahead of him. Sending him to Fulham was a shrewd move; he gets regular playing time in the league and being in London makes it’s easier for Chelsea to track his development and look after him.
Technically, a loan move is a temporary solution. But if utilized well, it can become a crucial part of a club’s long term strategy.
(a reading heavy) Consumption Corner
I didn’t watch or listen to anything particularly interesting last week, but I read A LOT of cool stuff. Check out my reading recommendations below, dip into what piques your interest and bookmark the articles you tell yourself you’ll read later but never do.
James Clear’s newsletter - Last week, I subscribed to the Atomic Habits author’s 3-2-1 newsletter. The premise is simple - each week Clear shares three of his ideas, two quotes from others and one question for the reader to ponder over. Just like his book, the newsletter too is concise, sharp and stimulating.
r/Glitchinthematrix - ‘Eye-witness event(s) that cannot be explained with critical thinking’ reads the bio of this fascinating subreddit. The story below gave me chills.
A feature piece published on Variety about how Trevor Noah brought The Daily Show into his home and his plans for the talk-show in the post-pandemic world
The NYT profile on Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was killed in the US Capitol siege, is eye opening. This story of how a woman who served in the US Air Force for 14 years delved so deep into right-wing politics and QAnon conspiracy theories will give you a better understanding of the political and social divisiveness in the country.
Are you sometimes ashamed of the books you read? Do you pick books that never feature on any reading lists? Do you get caught up in the never-ending cycle of re-reading the same old fiction books? If any of the above apply to you, I recommend reading this essay in the Guardian about an author who resolved to read more challenging books in 2021.
I still don’t fully understand what CRED does, but I do know their marketing team is made up of genius copywriters.
The Biography Series
Social media is a threat to autobiographies/autobiographies. Why write a whole book when you can just go live on Instagram? And the pervasive nature of the Internet renders most of the anecdotes and stories in the book obsolete.
But, biographies/ autobiographies are a fascinating book genre. It’s a unique amalgamation of the elements of fiction and nonfiction writing - character meets psyche, narrative meets historical and political context, conflict meets philosophy. It’s a complex genre, but a very complete one.
And, they matter. Their power to inspire and awaken is unparalleled. The real essence of a person’s life just can’t be captured in a Twitter thread.
In the next few weeks, I’ll be serializing biographies and autobiographies of people from diverse backgrounds and sharing what I liked, learnt and imbibed
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Yes, I know it is a hackneyed choice. Some might even call basic. But, there’s a simple reason for kick starting this series with the Jobs biography - it’s the gold standard.
A legacy isn’t easy to build and is even harder to properly document. Steve Jobs was all too aware of this fact. He persistently wooed Walter Isaacson, the noted biographer of figures like Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci, to write his biography. Isaacson repeatedly rebuffed his attempts, but in 2009 he received a call from Jobs’ wife Laurene Powell, who told him about the cancer and Jobs’ deteriorating health. “If you’re ever going to do a book on Steve, you’d better do it now", she said. Isaacson agreed to write the book.
Jobs relinquished all control over the book and told Isaacson he could put in whatever he saw fit. While he knew that he won’t like a lot of what was written, he was unwilling for it to seem like an “in-house book”. To that extent, he even encouraged people to talk to Isaacson and even reached out to foes and ex-girlfriends. Much later, when Isaacson asked him why he’d cooperated with the book, Jobs said, “ I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did”.
Jobs held up his promise of not interfering with the writing of the book. The only aspect he did get involved with was the design of the now iconic cover design. Quite fitting, really.
Steve Jobs was a genius. But, he was also an asshole. a man who created products that transformed the world and whose vision took humanity forward. But, also a man who for the longest time denied the existence of his daughter, wrongly claimed credit for his colleagues’ ideas and would purposely park in spaces reserved for the handicapped.
The beauty of Isaacson’s writing lies in the way he captures the duality of Jobs’ persona. He doesn’t put him on a pedestal, but neither is overly critical of him. He doesn’t try to make readers like or hate Jobs; he just helps them understand him.
This equanimity in Isaacson’s portrayal is maintained by offering differing perspectives from a diverse set of people in Jobs’ life. Not only is the book well researched, it’s also well rounded. It’s what makes it so definitive - read this and you won’t need to read anything else written about Jobs.
Zoom out for a moment and three overarching themes appear in the book:
The creator - Steve Jobs’ vision was shaped by his unique positioning of being an artist with an appreciation for technology. He always held the belief that the two need to go hand in hand to create a good device. He’d spend as much time working on the calligraphy as on the circuit boards of his products. He was as particular about the operating systems as he was about the stage lighting in his product launches. “ He didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art and technology in ways that invented the future”, Isaacson beautifully surmised.
The creations - One of Jobs’ most prized possessions was a CD that contained a dozen or so taped sessions of the Beatles revising Strawberry Fields. He was fascinated by their creative process and how something that sounded so raw in the early recording was chiseled into a masterpiece. ‘They were such perfectionists and they kept it going and going. This made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties. You could just tell how much they worked at this’, he says in the book. Their influence on his process was massive; every Apple product was the sum of continual iterations with attention being paid to the smallest of details. It was always about the journey with Jobs.
Creativity - Few founders paid such close attention to fostering creativity in their companies the way Jobs did. He understood the influence a person’s environment and their interactions with colleagues had on the quality of ideas produced. It’s why he was so particular about how the architecture and design of the company offices and factories. It’s also why the internal employee structuring at Apple and Pixar wasn’t top-to-bottom but was lateral.
One of Apple’s early mottos was ‘Sophistication lies in simplicity’ and Jobs’ biography fittingly stays true to this core value. It’s a simple portrait of a complex man. In an attempt to document his legacy, the biography became synonymous with it
I’d love to hear what you thought of this week’s edition! To share your thoughts, comments or if just want to chat, hit me up at shubhank4@gmail.com!
Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram and Twitter !
In last week’s edition:
The time I saved a penalty from Virat Kohli
Escaping into The Crown rabbit hole
My hopes for the Arts in 2021
Read it here !