The Coronavirus pandemic gave many a chance to explore paths which would never have been ventured were it not for the deadly outbreak. Michael Calvin’s touching piece ‘Whose Game is it Anyway’ probes an insight into the role of football in our lives but for the author, the effect of the sport during the pandemic in which he lost his father in-law. Calvin said that he has fallen out of love with football because of the recent hyper commercialisation of the sport in comparison to the game which he was raised with. Therefore, the book stands as a timepiece for football. We are shown a transformation from ‘the beautiful game’ to a sport plagued by political ignorance which doesn’t consider the ‘long-term outcomes of its actions’. Calvin has had the privilege of travelling to 80 different countries as a journalist and has witnessed the decline of what he fell in love with. The author claims that the financial hierarchy of the game has made the football industry ‘weak’ leaving many teams to ‘survive’ in the dog-eat-dog modern football world which has created a vacuum literally sucking the life out of the poorer clubs; this was only worsened throughout the pandemic.
