The view from the ferry this week as I headed into Vancouver.
This weeks notes and noticing:
- July 14, 2025: transform: transforming conflict, dialogue and community
- July 15, 2025: people doing things they are good at: handy apps, polymaths and women’s football
- July 16, 2025: seeing the treasure: local placemaking and the Golden Ratio
- July 17, 2025: I’m in awe..: complexity, constraints, governance and amazing medical science
- July 18, 2025: the threat to beauty: AI, and the threat and promise of true creativity.
Let your curiosity carry you. And if you are a blogger sharing links and little notes like this, the part of me that chases rabbit holes would like to add you to my blogroll.
Summer nights at the football. Our little band of TSS Rovers ultras celebrates one of the 9 goals our teams scored on Wednesday night.
The summary of notes and links published on the Parking Lot blog over the past week:
- July 7: heavy lifting. A new phone, a new US political party and a new season
- July 8: annals of democratic renewal: political violence, democracy, youth engagement and the role of community foundations
- July 9, 2025: here’s what I’m reading: A review of Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light and short story season begins
- July 10, 2025: playing at home: my Rovers win big and send a couple of players off to the professional leagues.
- July 11, 2025: the Kanesatake resistance: personal reflections on the events of this day, thirty five years ago.
ChatGPT made this image of a cranky psychology professor playing soccer while a bellicose commentator looks on and the players stare bewilderingly at the proceedings that are not a part of
Imagine a scenario in which a well known radio host with a penchant for American sports talks with a Jungian psychologist weirdly obsessed with the culture wars, about football tactics. Neither one knows what the hell they are talking about, but they have large social media followings so somehow we should listen to their opinions. ChatGPT helped me out here, because I’m incapable of writing this dialogue without losing my mind.
Chuck Dugan:
Welcome back to The Morning Yardage, I’m your host Chuck Dugan—gridiron guy, diamond devotee, and, uh, recently inducted into the world of world football! That’s right, we’re talking soccer. And with me today is a real thinker, Dr. Leonard Ambrose Penwright, a Jungian psychologist and… well, something of a European football aficionado?Dr. Penwright:
Thank you, Charles. It is both a privilege and a burden to speak into the void that modernity has fashioned around our ancestral games. Soccer—what the Europeans call “association football”—is, fundamentally, a sacred reenactment of the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus.Chuck:
Yeah. And that’s why they play it on grass.Penwright:
Precisely.Chuck:
So, let’s get into it. There’s been a lot of talk about this whole “false nine” business. What is it, Leonard? I saw it on a YouTube video, and I gotta say, I didn’t see anything false about the guy wearing number nine. He looked real enough.Penwright:
The “false nine” is emblematic of post-Freudian identity collapse. It’s a striker who refuses to strike—like a lion who meows or a Protestant who dances. He descends into the midfield, displacing the masculine telos of the goal. It’s essentially a Jungian shadow figure, disrupting the natural order.Chuck:
So… is he like a tight end?Penwright:
No, he is less than a tight end. He is an archetype of the dispossessed prince. Tactically, this was pioneered by the Belgians during the Crimean War. Or possibly the Dutch during the Enlightenment—it’s disputed.Chuck:
Right, right. And that brings me to the diamond midfield. Everybody’s talking about it. You stack your midfield like a fantasy football draft: you got the quarterback, the wide receiver, and then two guys hanging back to clean up spills. I think that’s how Real Manchester beat Liverpool United in the Champion’s Bowl back in ’96.Penwright:
You’re close, Charles. The diamond is a sacred symbol—four points, representing Carl Jung’s four functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensing, and… something else. When deployed correctly, the diamond midfield becomes a psychic mandala. This is what separated the 1934 Prussian national team from the decadent Hungarian Romantics of the same era.Chuck:
A classic rivalry! I remember my dad telling me about that match. Ended 2-2 in overtime, right?Penwright:
It ended in ideological fracture, Chuck. The referee was a Catholic. That was controversial.Chuck:
Well, switching gears here—everyone’s talkin’ about the high press. I assume that’s when the goalie comes out with a lot of pressure? Like a blitz package?Penwright:
Incorrect, but spiritually adjacent. The “high press” is an attempt to enforce rigid cultural hierarchies. It’s when every player acts as the superego, suffocating the id of the opponent. It is, in many ways, fascist.Chuck:
Love a good fascist play.Penwright:
Indeed. That’s why the Italians did it best in 2006.Chuck:
Okay. One more thing—what’s your take on VAR? You know, the video robot referee thing?Penwright:
Ah, VAR. An insidious manifestation of late-stage digital panopticism. It neuters the spontaneity of the masculine heroic quest. It is Orwellian in scope and TikTokian in attention span. When a man cannot dive theatrically in the penalty box without being surveilled, what is he but a serf?Chuck:
So you’re against it?Penwright:
I’m against what it represents. The end of myth. The death of story. Also, I don’t understand how the offside rule works.Chuck:
Me neither, pal. But hey, that’s soccer! Stick around, folks—we’ll be back after this with more tactical analysis and possibly a Jungian interpretation of corner kicks.Penwright:
Ah yes, the corner kick—the final protest of the oppressed ego against the collective unconscious…Chuck:
We’ll be right back.
Now, Imagine Chuck is Joe Rogan and Penwright is Jordan Peterson and remind me again why their conversation on climate science is relevant to anything at all?
The conversation between these two influencers is as absurd as the one I had a robot create. Being open to other points of view does not require you to listen to complete nonsense in the service of somehow expanding your worldview.
Spending the past few weeks immersed in football culture in England and back home at Canada fed my soul. There is so much about football that I love, from the complexity of the game, all through to the culture and atmosphere of the stadium. I have been a dedicated and deeply involved football supporter of the Vancouver Whitecaps (2010-2018, ended over a series of unresolved sexual abuse scandals) and of TSS Rovers (2017- the present). The thing that drew me to football as a kid was hearing Liverpool supporters singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” on the BBC Match of the Day broadcasts when I lived in England in the late 1970s. The SOUND. The sound of a big stadium full of enthusiastic supporters is unreal. It’s not something you are likely to witness in professional sports in North America except in soccer. And being present on a European night, like Finn and I were a couple of weeks ago as Tottenham hosted Eintracht Frankfurt, is absolutely magical.
The essence of football culture in the rest of the world is its organic and participatory nature, from the creation of tifo to the penning of songs and chants. As a songwriter, writing songs for my football teams has been a passion of mine. I especially love coming up with player chants, which are even more meaningful at the lower league levels, where young players ply their trades in relative obscurity, loved only by a small handful of fans.
As a complexity practitioner, I love watching the way football supporter culture ebbs and flows and wanes and flows again. I love the way we try songs out that flat out fail, or we have some instant inspiration that locks itself in as a tradition.
Recently the podcast 99% invisible did a nice piece on football songs, including some deeper history of this cultural practice that I wasn’t aware of. Even though it’s pitched at an American audience, and it is focused somewhat on Arsenal (I’m a Spurs fan, remember!) it’s well worth a listen. It gives us insight about what culture really is and how it really functions.
One of the things I love about sport is the real life that happens out there. Nothing is predictable, nothing is a given. Competitors try themselves against each other, supporters follow and cheer them on and time is marked by transcdent moments on and off the field of play. The game is the setting for stories that are singular in occurrence or narrative arcs that span generations.
While most of the world of sport has its attention turned to the Olympic games, my own attention yesterday was fully devoted to a critical match for the men’s team of the soccer club I co-own, TSS Rovers FC. TSS Rovers are a club with a men’s and a women’s team owned by three majority shareholders and 440 community owners. I’m one of the Trustees for the Spirit of the Rovers Supporters Trust that represents our ownership group on the club board. Yesterday was the Championship Final of the League 1 BC playoffs and having already won the league, our men were poised to take to the field against our rival from North Vancouver, Altitude FC. Because we play at Swangard Stadium in Burnaby, and Altitude plays across Burrard Inlet in North Vancouver, our rivalry is called the Ironworkers Derby, named for the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Bridge, which connects the two cities.
Over the three years our league has existed, this has been a tightly contested derby, and we have had the upper hand in general. Altitude’s men’s team has had two tough seasons, but this year, they finished second in the league and beat the Vancouver Whitecaps Academy to make it to the final. They chased us all the way and if it hadn’t been for a tough 1-0 victory against them, they might have won the League title.
For our part, we have had a historic season. We won our first league title a few weeks ago with a game to spare. Three of us travelled to Kamloops to witness the historic occasion. After two years of more heartbreak and diabolical situations than I could ever describe, and two second-place finishes, we finally won, which meant we qualified for the third year in a row for the Canadian Championship, Canada’s FA Cup competition. Representing League 1 BC, we have the distinction of being the only semi-professional side to knock a professional club out of that tournament when we beat Vaklour FC of Winnipeg 3-1 on April 18 last year.
Our path to the two-round playoff final for League 1 was straightforward enough. We beat Harbourside FC last weekend 4-1 and prepared to face our rival at Swangard Stadium, our home and also the neutral venue chosen by the League for the finals day.
It was not a beautiful game of football.
We went ahead seven seconds into the game with a set piece that came off perfectly from the kickoff and got another goal in the first half from our towering centre-back, Nik White. In the second half, Altitude came back with relentless attacking energy and got a goal back on the hour mark but went down to 10 meant at the 76th minute. It didn’t seem to matter, as they threw everything at us and finally got some reward from their havoc by tying it up on an 84th-minute penalty. Three minutes later, we were awarded a penalty taken by a long time club veteran, Erik Edwardson. In a crazy game in which there was no certainty, Erik’s penalty was the closest thing to a safe bet.
Needing to defend our 3-2 lead, we bunkered down a bit, and Altitude got at us, resulting in a corner off of which ANOTHER penalty was awarded in the 90th minute. In a moment of utter heartbreak from our rivals, the penalty taker skied the kick, and we were able to kill off the six minutes of added time to win our second playoff championship and our first double trophy season.
A million storylines are woven into this match. We started the season with a team stocked with veterans and former professional players who joined us for another chance to play in the Canadian Championship. We took Pacific FC deep into injury time with a 1-0 lead before the professionals scored on the game’s last attempt and then beat us on penalties. Many of our veterans got injured or retired during the season, and players who have been with us for many of the six seasons we have been in existence stepped away from the game. Professional clubs picked up a few, including two of our more prolific strikers, Devon O’Hea and Gurman Sangha. We needed to play kids, literally, with players like 17-year-old midfielder Tristan Otoumagie staking a regular role for themselves on the side. Our coach, Brendan Teeling, had to manage a team going through a generational transition over twelve games in our short and intense season. We held the top spot in the table for most of the season, being pipped only by Altitude and the Whitecaps Academy during a week in which we had games in hand on them. We battled through curses, heartbreak, and a seemingly systemic inability to finish games dating back a couple of seasons. We got a lot of monkeys off our backs last night and saw our team pick themselves up from disappointment and refuse to give in.
And yesterday, we won our second trophy of 2024 and celebrated with many players who have been with us for many years and many who probably played their last games for us yesterday. At the celebration party last night, it was bittersweet thanking and saying goodbye to these players, and exciting to see the young ones clutching their winners’ medals and watching wide-eyed as the veterans of the team heard their songs for the last time and heard some of the stories of what it means to play for this club, Canada’s only supporter owned team, with one of Canada’s most vocal and creative lower-league supporters groups.
When you own a team and are involved in creating the culture and the conditions for people to shine and thrive, whether on or off the pitch, these moments of success are important markers of meaning. They catch and encapsulate the heart of what it means to co-create something, and they mark collective progress in the long development journey. As Colin Elmes, one of our founders, said, “We’re in the relationship business – the soccer just comes along for the ride.“
What we are doing is community.
Trophies aren’t everything, and there are dozens of stories from this season that make me proud to be involved in this club, whether it’s watching our players turn professional or seeing some of our former players like Julia Grosso, Jordyn Huitema and Joel Waterman playing for Canada’s National teams. It could just be getting to witness the inimitable Maddy Mah, a player whose college career was derailed with a concussion before she got to play and who spent three years recovering before finding her mojo again with us last year, board a plane to Toronto to finally start at university and play for the U of T Blues. And it’s about honouring players like Erik Edwardson and Kyle Jones, Ivan Mejia and Gabe Escobar and Justyn Sandhu and Danylo Smychenko, who have been with our team for three years or more, finally savouring the fruits of their work.
These relationships and moments will last a lifetime for all of us, whether we are players, supporters, owners or staff and they give us all a tangible memory of what it means to create community and why it’s important to do so.