Too many football teams have become unmoored from their local community, and I want to change that in my home town
When the sociologist Michael Young coined the idea of a meritocracy in 1958, he imagined a dystopian future where those who had succeeded on the basis of their inherited advantages would instead congratulate themselves on having done so as a result of their skills and capabilities. In Young’s satirical essay, the elite believed their success was down to individual merit, while a disenfranchised underclass were considered deserving of their social position. Young’s term is now frequently used with a straight face by those who understand neither its original negative connotations, nor what a travesty it is to suggest that merit is the primary factor determining a person’s life chances today.
For a long time, I told myself that my achievements were the product of the meritocracy I was born into, where hard work was both a necessity and a sufficient condition of success. I grew up in Grimsby, and like many entrepreneurial origin stories, mine began at school. To supplement my nonexistent allowance, I sold Opium (knock-off perfume, before you fall off your chair). My teachers called the police, and having spent the morning in the classroom, I sat out the afternoon in a police cell. Thirty years later, I had gone from working on the docks in Grimsby to dealing with private equity investors in New York as a tech CEO; from waking up in a house with ice inside the windows to a home with neighbours from “on the telly” and in the Premier League; from being the son of a single mum who worked three jobs to keep four sons fed and clothed, to becoming a parent who can afford to provide almost anything for my own children.
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