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here’s the thing about becoming a professional:
once, your talents brought you the keenest joy. now they are the source of all your shittiest feelings.
once, you could experiment. you could play for play’s sake without sweating the results. now, results alone determine whether you are celebrated for your genius or excoriated for your hubris.
once, you woke up each day wanting to do this -- wanting wanting wanting with a passion that made every moment you spent off the pitch feel like a waste of your youth, your most precious commodity. now you are fortunate if your desire to do anything matches your schedule.
“do you ever…” jude starts -- stops; worries the rim of the drink he shouldn’t be having between his lips because to say the word regret is sacrilege. he’s paid an obscenity to reach the pinnacle of his potential in what is, for most people, a mere hobby. a pastime. another afternoon whiled away in the company of whatever kids prefer to spend their summers outdoors, getting told off by their more ornery neighbors. his problems are a privilege.
that is:
to hate yourself for lapses in your technical proficiency is a privilege. to feel disbelief bordering on anger at the ineptitude of your colleagues -- the cream of the crop in this sport -- is a privilege. to fuck up your body through constant (mis)use is a privilege.
but.
“do you ever,” jude starts again, “wish you’d been normal about what you like?”
“wish i’d been normal?” erling sounds like he’s stifling a laugh. “what, about football?”
“yeah,” jude says. “or anything else, i don’t know. d’you think you have enough designer handbags to stash all your stupid pokémon cards in yet?”
“no.” then, after a beat, “but that’s just because the handbags are for the binders and the binders are bigger than the cards.”
“shit, really?”
erling gives jude a sidelong smile.
they are on somebody’s balcony the month before their second full season with borussia dortmund is set to begin. there is -- and has been -- no point to this evening: the rare non-football friend had called giovanni who’d called jude and told him -- hey, ████ is throwing a thing at her house, you game? to which jude had said fine, he’d come, he’d eat on the way, he’d drag erling along (unspoken:) just in case he tired of the dudes’ drunken banter, of flirtations with women who looked like variations on the same instagram filter, of humoring the big football thoughts of people who couldn’t even tell you what nutmegging means, etc., etc., upon relentless etc., and it’d been fun until it wasn’t, just like everything else. he’d as good as blacked out the bit between finding erling fiddling with the phone their host had put on spotify duty and tugging him outside.
“normal,” erling repeats -- like jude has slipped a piece of candy between his lips and he’s trying to tell whether it’s sour under all that sweet. “normal… normal.”
“hard word in your second language?”
“normal,” erling rebuts in norwegian. “no. i guess it’s the same. lighter, maybe.”
“more sing-song-y.”
“normal,” erling trills for emphasis, breaking up when the shove he’d expected meets his shoulder.
they sit with their backs to the party. jude’s legs dangle off the balcony between the gaps in the railing -- bit of a miracle they can fit. erling is next to him, half-reclined, head propped up by one hand and a third -- fourth? -- bottle of beer held in the other. the lake that cuts through the city is a bright, clear blue beneath them, shot with color from the lights of the buildings nearby. it’s a pretty view. and --
“-- it was an honest question.”
“i know,” erling says, then says nothing more.
here’s the thing about being a professional:
your talents constitute your livelihood and someday they will fail you. not once, not twice, but three times over, over and over. your body will give until it gives (in, out). then a newer, better body will take the place of yours on the pitch and that’ll be the end of it.
you knew what you were good for and you perfected that, early. you ate all the right things, did all the right things. you said the wrong things but they were right, too, because of the rightness of the rest of you. and when you are wrong -- when you lose or make a mistake or fuck up where you should have succeeded -- you don’t hear it above the hum of your routine, so rarely broken. it is in fact designed to ensure that you never feel the self-pity that would fell men with lesser discipline than yourself.
suffice to say: you cannot be “normal” about what you love, where that means --
“-- what does that mean?”
“what?”
“normal,” erling says again, in english.
“like -- ” jude clicks his tongue. “not intense, not obsessed. not a part of your every waking hour. not a thing you’re doing or thinking about all the time. not something you’re insane at, or about.”
he pauses.
then in a rush --
“be real with me, bro. how far would you have gone with this game if you hadn’t made it your job?”
erling takes a swig of his beer before clarifying, “if i’d just done it for fun?”
“yeah.”
“well.” erling thinks aloud. “not very far. obviously. no one would waste resources on players who aren’t serious. but i guess the better i got, the farther i would’ve kept having to go to have any fun, so… maybe i would’ve ended up somewhere like this without even trying.”
he glances at jude.
“it’s hard to say no when people always tell you how good you are.”
“right.” jude sighs. “right you are. these leagues don’t select for humility. but that’s the thing -- ”
-- the life of a professional belongs to the institution that sanctions them as such, and in football everything and everyone is evaluated by -- measured against; lauded for -- their contributions to peoples’ coffers.
to football you are a collection of accolades. an investment opportunity. an object for others’ admiration, speculation, and (hateful, loving) abuse. you are two dozen advertisement campaigns for services with only the slimmest of relationships to this goddamn sport. your likeness has become an imprimatur for the (granted: not irrelevant) athleisure brand you rated as a teenager. your performance this season will make or break somebody’s bet on the market -- perhaps some teammate’s, too, if he’s slimy. it is only a matter of time -- a function of the precision with which kalshi and its clones will calibrate viewers’ perception a few years down the line -- before the number of touches you get on the ball in the first half of a match means something to someone.
but what does it mean to you?
“-- lately it’s all been a load of nothing, to be honest.”
erling waits, ever the patient conversationalist, while jude stretches his legs in front of him, pushing the tip of one sneaker against the other behind the railing’s vertical bars.
“the playing’s fine when it’s happening,” jude finally says. “i still like it. i like it especially when we score. but win or lose, it’s…”
“a chore,” erling finishes.
there’s a pit in jude’s stomach that confuses him. chances are he would have chosen another word that means the same but makes it sound less terminal. boring, maybe, sometimes. a bit shite on the bad days. nothing to do with his ambition, which remains formidable. nothing out of the ordinary in this line of work. nothing --
“-- your brain is like an old computer,” erling says. “i can hear its little whirrs all the way from here.”
jude delivers another –- stronger –- shove to his friend’s shoulder.
“shut up, you robot.”
“beep -- ”
-- and, seemingly too lazy to tack a “boop” onto the end of it, erling takes another swig of his drink. conversation over.
neither can tell when their silence stopped feeling comfortable tonight. erling taps the pads of his fingers against the bottle; jude has set his drink down to grip the bars of the railing with both hands, its rust rough against his skin. if he dims the proverbial lights in his mind one degree more he might as well fancy himself and his friend suspended at the top of a rollercoaster, seconds before the plunge.
“dare you to throw your beer into the lake,” jude hears himself say.
“sure,” erling replies, and launches the bottle high above their heads by its neck with no hesitation. they watch it spin and spin and spin until it dips below the horizon of jude’s feet, and a few (too many) seconds later, a telltale plop! follows.
“fucking moronic,” jude mutters, fighting back a smile.
they are friends. that’s a sure thing. it’s sure even if (some speculate) jude attached himself to erling because his star was climbing when jude’s own had only just been born. it’s sure even if (some might say) they play up what is their admittedly natural stupidity for the cameras. it’s sure even if someone might accuse one of using the other for greater fame and recognition, both on the pitch and in the media; sure even as their club recognizes that shit like theirs sells and capitalizes on it (the signing of a reportedly homophobic midfielder notwithstanding); sure even when they’re subjected to more and less conventional forms of fantasy football by an adoring public, because at the end of the day erling does not have the patience for long-term pretense and jude couldn’t hide his true feelings if he tried.
right?
“do you like me?”
erling turns his head to stare at jude.
“like as a person,” jude says.
“of course.” automatic -- except erling looks at jude as if the railing’s disappeared and his friend is one false move from falling. he chews his lip. swallows his own spit. runs his tongue along his teeth and swallows again.
“… is something wrong?”
“i’m being normal,” jude insists. “i’m doing what normal people do, which is having too much to drink and saying whatever the fuck until i feel better about myself or bad enough to go home.”
“but… why now?”
jude shrugs.
“woke up and the world felt wonky. it happens, you know. to normal people.”
it is, spiritually, a third shove to erling’s shoulder. the first one was cheeky; the second one was questionable; but this one is -- or so it strikes erling -- unmistakably bitter.
“… jude,” he mumbles.
“what?”
then, louder: “why wait until you feel like shit to leave the party? let’s head out.”
fifteen minutes later they find themselves at the lake’s edge, leaping precariously between the boulders that dot its shore until they stumble across some seat-shaped ones. there’s no sign of the bottle erling hurled over the railing that either of them can discern. jude sits, very still, eyes scanning the water. erling thinks it’d make a pretty picture if jude looked more at ease, or at least less bemused.
“… do you ever feel this way, mate?”
“no,” erling says, knowing he should have said ‘yes’ because ‘yes’ would have been easy; ‘yes’ would have helped his friend feel less alone.
instead --
“this thing,” he continues, pointing at his own head, “is a saw trap. it does not care about you. the people who care about you give you a minute with your disappointment before they redirect your attention to what you did well or what you want to do better. they can take pride in the parts of the day where you grew a little even if this -- ”
erling raps his knuckles against his temple.
“ -- fixates on the mistake that made your growth possible. they don’t reevaluate their relationship with you when you underperform. they’re not going to conclude you’re the scum of the earth just because they’ve gotten a little hangry.”
“is that what you’d go through before you developed your bonkers routine?”
“no,” erling says again, “because i ate enormous portions and i ate them often.”
next to him, erling hears jude smother his laughter with a sigh.
“whatever. you’re so shit to talk to.”
“i think i said some good things,” erling says with a smile. “maybe you’re just a bad listener.”
at jude’s fourth shove, erling shoves back -- and then they’re scrambling up the small embankment, shoes slipping on dew-wet grass, in a tussle that can’t decide if it’s actually a hug or committed to giving them both a serious injury. erling doesn’t bother caring. he takes some of jude’s hoodie with one hand, splays the other against jude’s chest -- and half a minute later jude’s got him in a chokehold anyway.
“it’s ‘cause i drank less than you,” he smirks against erling’s neck -- dead, for once, to the customarily intrusive thought that their ‘fight’ would make for some wild photos.
“good job,” erling manages. “now get off.”
“nah,” jude says, just as -- and only as -- erling’s grip on his wrist relaxes. “not when i’m finally feeling comfortable. some might even say normal.”
“some might,” erling echoes with a smile. “i’d never.”
“because i’m exceptional?”
“no,” erling says, for the third and final time that night. “because we’re still treating each other like professionals.”
when the arm against erling’s throat tightens, he grins.