Needless complication, because that's what I was trained to do.
Football, to all intents and purposes, is the simplest game in the world. You need some people and a ball and a couple of jackets for goal posts. All the other stuff - like the twenty-two people required for a proper match, or the ninety minutes that such a match takes, or rules about fouls and free-kicks or, bless it, offside - those are things that you could easily take away, and you'd still have something that you could call football. They are not part of the necessary and sufficient conditions for making something football. Football is football, whether it is played by professionals who are paid frankly obscene amounts of money to do so, or by those ten-year-olds I can see from my window right now (incidentally, they are fortunate enough to have actual goals, though there isn't twenty-two of them - but that doesn't matter; they're still playing football). Could anything be more simple? Could anything be less in need of complication?
It does get complicated, of course - not needlessly complicated, but complicated nonetheless. But at the end of the day, when you've peeled away every layer of complication, it's all very simple. A bunch of people, and the one thing they've all got in common - it might be ridiculously pretentious way of putting it, but there is a general semiotic equivalent, and it might not even be the ball, as one twat of a professor said. It's the frame, the purpose, the basic dynamics of the thing. If you take everything else away from football, you'll still have the story. Stories need agents (or can we call the players, just to make the whole thing that much more obvious and Shakespearean?), and agents need to have goals, and there you've got it, don't you? All the world's a stage, and football would be such an obvious game to be playing on that stage, because there are only two things that you need to do: score goals, and keep the other side from scoring goals. You're in the same situation whether you're Roberto Baggio or Henry V, and it's a very easy situation to understand.
Let's stay with Shakespeare (it is, after all, not a bad place to be), because things get endlessly complicated with him as well. The mere basics of the thing are all very well, but they don't even begin to tell half the story, do they? Will's got words. Words, and more words, and more words, and before you know it, that's what it's all about. That's where all the real drama goes on. Honestly - did anyone ever love Shakespeare for the plots? I digress, I know, and yes - people have actually been known to love football for the goals. Goals can be beautiful things, even when they're ugly. Goals can seem even more beautiful when your team was this close to winning, but the linesman (who deserves to burn in the lower circles of hell) is disallowing it because of some highly debatable offside decision. All of those extra, unnecessary words might just be icing on the cake, but they are making the cake that much more tempting (tempting and cruel and and utterly delicious when it's to your advantage).
And - they make it that much more interesting. For any number of reasons, in any number of ways, but they do have a tendency to make the whole thing rather sordid. Now, sordid isn't supposed to be a good thing. It's supposed to be a bad thing. And when it comes to football, it most certainly can be a very bad thing, because football happens to do sordid very well. It might not get sordid the minute you decide to put eleven people on every team, or the minute you decide to play for ninety minutes, but you were well on your way to making things just a little bit sordid long before that when you let football decide rivalries between neighbouring towns. Let's not kid ourselves, then. Football might have a core of complete and simple purity, but the rest is all very sordid.
There are varying degrees and kinds of sordidness, of course. And there are those who are better at being sordid than others, and there are those who are better at hiding their sordidness than others. For example, let's take a little look at that particular brand of madness: football fandom. Football fans, in case you didn't know, don't always know how to behave. Or, they know how to behave, but they choose not to do so. And they occasionally use the football frame - the setting provided by the slightly altered code of behaviour surrounding a football match - to voice some beliefs and opinions that don't really need repeating at this time, because that's a can of worms all on its own. Most fans, we will repeat once and once again, are nice kids. Occasionally a bit excitable and generally given to saying silly things about the Swedish, or people from Barcelona, or from the south of Italy, or cursing the other team to burn in hell for all eternity - which really isn't a charitable thing to do - but all in all well-meaing people.
But that's not the only way in which football really is a very sordid affair. Surely, there will be those that will remember fondly when football was all about healthy lads kicking about a ball in their free-time - even if the geo-socio-political mess had begun rearing its pretty face back then - and they will lament how it all came to be about money and winning at any cost (though I ask you - when exactly was it that it was not about winning?), and they will talk about Italian football as the root of all that's evil. Italian football may be many things, I think, but I doubt that it's the root of all that's evil, and finding the moral high ground in football is a difficult thing to do, as football is generally played on awfully flat terrain. Still - Italian football remains the prime example of everything that's wrong with football. It's got Ju-know-who and Calciopoli and Lazio supporters, and bloody fucking hell, it's got Berlusconi. (Nevermind the fact that the EPL has Rupert Murdoch.)
Berlusconi is a thoroughly shady character, you know. I know a lot of people who would never, ever support Milan on the sole basis that it's owned by a character as shady as Berlusconi. And it might provide some excuse that Berlusconi appears to be as much as a tifoso as the rest of us, which makes the whole thing a little bit better - but let's not fool ourselves: it's not like he didn't ever use his ownership of Milan for a purpose that isn't supposed to have anything to do with football. But this is stuff that we all know all about, isn't it? Milan is supposed to be among the worst examples of how evil capitalism has come to mean too much in football - and good grief, I've had me some discussions about this, because how could I possibly excuse supporting a team owned by that man (this, by the way, coming from a Juventus supporter)? - and by virtue of being so, I'd say that they're the best. It's so obvious, it's so there - the drama is so real - that when you look at those eleven boys on the pitch, in that context, it doesn't matter much at all; they seem all the more to rise above it.
Of course - before I went and complicated things, quite possibly needlessly - this was always going to be about sentimentality, about reading too much into things, or too little, and constructing your own little play with the facts you've been given. You choose your context - whether it's growing up in Milan, or worshipping the ground that Paolo Maldini walks on, or being repeatedly rendered speechless by the brilliance of their mid-field, or all of the above - and you take your bare essentials; the necessary and sufficient conditions for what makes something football, and then you build it into something that is so much more. I didn't grow up in Milan - hell, I never even lived there - but I do have a decidedly weak spot for Paolo Maldini, and for their mid-field. Milan, by virtue of being Milan, naturally transcends all of these things - the eleven boys right there and their footballing skills, whether they remember to use them or not, and the shady characters in the stands, and the money and the D&G - but you could say that about any club in the world, if you loved it. Leave it to chance, then, to decide where your loyalties went on that particular day, and leave it to our penchant for complicating endlessly to build a context where it matters, and where you can love a team precisely because they're not supposed to be the good guys (but they are, to you) - and of course they really are the good guys, because they somehow contrive to make you care about none of the sordidness that this whole football thing is supposed to be neck-deep in. I could give you a few names and a few examples, and it still wouldn't amount to explaining it - but once someone does succeed in taking the endlessly complicated and making it self-evidently simple again, then it might have something do with love.
Oh, bloody hell. Can't I just say that I love Milan because they're really hot?
(Why, yes. I did take the easy way out and undermined my entire argument. Not that there was much of an argument in the first place.)
It does get complicated, of course - not needlessly complicated, but complicated nonetheless. But at the end of the day, when you've peeled away every layer of complication, it's all very simple. A bunch of people, and the one thing they've all got in common - it might be ridiculously pretentious way of putting it, but there is a general semiotic equivalent, and it might not even be the ball, as one twat of a professor said. It's the frame, the purpose, the basic dynamics of the thing. If you take everything else away from football, you'll still have the story. Stories need agents (or can we call the players, just to make the whole thing that much more obvious and Shakespearean?), and agents need to have goals, and there you've got it, don't you? All the world's a stage, and football would be such an obvious game to be playing on that stage, because there are only two things that you need to do: score goals, and keep the other side from scoring goals. You're in the same situation whether you're Roberto Baggio or Henry V, and it's a very easy situation to understand.
Let's stay with Shakespeare (it is, after all, not a bad place to be), because things get endlessly complicated with him as well. The mere basics of the thing are all very well, but they don't even begin to tell half the story, do they? Will's got words. Words, and more words, and more words, and before you know it, that's what it's all about. That's where all the real drama goes on. Honestly - did anyone ever love Shakespeare for the plots? I digress, I know, and yes - people have actually been known to love football for the goals. Goals can be beautiful things, even when they're ugly. Goals can seem even more beautiful when your team was this close to winning, but the linesman (who deserves to burn in the lower circles of hell) is disallowing it because of some highly debatable offside decision. All of those extra, unnecessary words might just be icing on the cake, but they are making the cake that much more tempting (tempting and cruel and and utterly delicious when it's to your advantage).
And - they make it that much more interesting. For any number of reasons, in any number of ways, but they do have a tendency to make the whole thing rather sordid. Now, sordid isn't supposed to be a good thing. It's supposed to be a bad thing. And when it comes to football, it most certainly can be a very bad thing, because football happens to do sordid very well. It might not get sordid the minute you decide to put eleven people on every team, or the minute you decide to play for ninety minutes, but you were well on your way to making things just a little bit sordid long before that when you let football decide rivalries between neighbouring towns. Let's not kid ourselves, then. Football might have a core of complete and simple purity, but the rest is all very sordid.
There are varying degrees and kinds of sordidness, of course. And there are those who are better at being sordid than others, and there are those who are better at hiding their sordidness than others. For example, let's take a little look at that particular brand of madness: football fandom. Football fans, in case you didn't know, don't always know how to behave. Or, they know how to behave, but they choose not to do so. And they occasionally use the football frame - the setting provided by the slightly altered code of behaviour surrounding a football match - to voice some beliefs and opinions that don't really need repeating at this time, because that's a can of worms all on its own. Most fans, we will repeat once and once again, are nice kids. Occasionally a bit excitable and generally given to saying silly things about the Swedish, or people from Barcelona, or from the south of Italy, or cursing the other team to burn in hell for all eternity - which really isn't a charitable thing to do - but all in all well-meaing people.
But that's not the only way in which football really is a very sordid affair. Surely, there will be those that will remember fondly when football was all about healthy lads kicking about a ball in their free-time - even if the geo-socio-political mess had begun rearing its pretty face back then - and they will lament how it all came to be about money and winning at any cost (though I ask you - when exactly was it that it was not about winning?), and they will talk about Italian football as the root of all that's evil. Italian football may be many things, I think, but I doubt that it's the root of all that's evil, and finding the moral high ground in football is a difficult thing to do, as football is generally played on awfully flat terrain. Still - Italian football remains the prime example of everything that's wrong with football. It's got Ju-know-who and Calciopoli and Lazio supporters, and bloody fucking hell, it's got Berlusconi. (Nevermind the fact that the EPL has Rupert Murdoch.)
Berlusconi is a thoroughly shady character, you know. I know a lot of people who would never, ever support Milan on the sole basis that it's owned by a character as shady as Berlusconi. And it might provide some excuse that Berlusconi appears to be as much as a tifoso as the rest of us, which makes the whole thing a little bit better - but let's not fool ourselves: it's not like he didn't ever use his ownership of Milan for a purpose that isn't supposed to have anything to do with football. But this is stuff that we all know all about, isn't it? Milan is supposed to be among the worst examples of how evil capitalism has come to mean too much in football - and good grief, I've had me some discussions about this, because how could I possibly excuse supporting a team owned by that man (this, by the way, coming from a Juventus supporter)? - and by virtue of being so, I'd say that they're the best. It's so obvious, it's so there - the drama is so real - that when you look at those eleven boys on the pitch, in that context, it doesn't matter much at all; they seem all the more to rise above it.
Of course - before I went and complicated things, quite possibly needlessly - this was always going to be about sentimentality, about reading too much into things, or too little, and constructing your own little play with the facts you've been given. You choose your context - whether it's growing up in Milan, or worshipping the ground that Paolo Maldini walks on, or being repeatedly rendered speechless by the brilliance of their mid-field, or all of the above - and you take your bare essentials; the necessary and sufficient conditions for what makes something football, and then you build it into something that is so much more. I didn't grow up in Milan - hell, I never even lived there - but I do have a decidedly weak spot for Paolo Maldini, and for their mid-field. Milan, by virtue of being Milan, naturally transcends all of these things - the eleven boys right there and their footballing skills, whether they remember to use them or not, and the shady characters in the stands, and the money and the D&G - but you could say that about any club in the world, if you loved it. Leave it to chance, then, to decide where your loyalties went on that particular day, and leave it to our penchant for complicating endlessly to build a context where it matters, and where you can love a team precisely because they're not supposed to be the good guys (but they are, to you) - and of course they really are the good guys, because they somehow contrive to make you care about none of the sordidness that this whole football thing is supposed to be neck-deep in. I could give you a few names and a few examples, and it still wouldn't amount to explaining it - but once someone does succeed in taking the endlessly complicated and making it self-evidently simple again, then it might have something do with love.
Oh, bloody hell. Can't I just say that I love Milan because they're really hot?
(Why, yes. I did take the easy way out and undermined my entire argument. Not that there was much of an argument in the first place.)