reintroduction.
A number of things happened over the course of the 07/08 season that made me question my previous scope of understanding regarding football. I was paralyzed by Hicks and Gillett and their rapidly unraveling ball of yarn, haunted by the image and the afterimage of Fernando Torres, appalled by Valencia's breach of dignity, and frustrated by my inability to carve out enough time and space so that each game, each event, each breaking news item could be properly absorbed.
My traumas were not limited to the excrement of the footballing world. One of my university professors equated Fever Pitch to a petty indulgence in liberal white guilt, and while on an academic level his accusations are somewhat warranted, I also believe that he misjudges Hornby's motivations terribly. Another university professor (a world-famous one at that) made the class read an anti-soccer article he'd written -- and gotten published in -- a journal of economics. I'm generalizing his arguments, but he basically outlined various economic reasons why soccer is "egalitarian" and "risk-averse" and therefore un-American, why its tenets cannot hold up in a society with American economic sensibilities. I raged about his misunderstanding of how the game works, lack of imagination, and reluctance to accept the inherent drama of the sport to my classmates, but secretly I started to reevaluate my own sports fandom.
In the past two years, I've started watching a lot of sports and accumulating information, history, and analysis at an alarming rate -- American football and hockey share a lot of my fan consciousness now, and I even find myself absorbed in basketball and baseball at the playoff level. I was afraid that my tastes were either conforming to what commercialized sports industry deemed important, or else shifting toward the instantaneous pace of North American sports fandom in general.
Add to those factors the fact that I was also struggling through my spawn-of-Frankenstein B.A. thesis, and football seemed slower, messed up, guarded -- it felt like navigating for new life forms while suspended in a sloe of molasses. It was all I could do to read the Guardian headlines and watch game highlights on YouTube, much less let the minutiae and the marginalia incubate and acquire meaning in my brain.
But now there's really no excuse. I'll be done with college in two weeks and graduating in three, I have a decent part time job that will let me pay my rent and keep up with my various sports fandoms, and the internet connection in my apartment seems to have relented to my demands for the time being.
The problem is, where to start? I mentioned this book as a new point of origin, a framework for consumption and digestion. It's eye-opening in all the best ways. Weighs like a text book but weighs on the mind like a fortuitous discovery of lost treasure. It reads like a breezy summer novel despite the astonishing breadth of its subject matter.
The introduction, titled "Life and Death, Love and Money," takes two quotes by Sepp Herberger and Bill Shankly, sets them in relief, and goes on to explain why we care so much, and why we should care. I've typed out all but three paragraphs, because it was worthwhile.
Life and death? Can anything be that important? Football has claimed enough innocent victims in its hellish fires, tragic crushes and vicious little knife fights to ask the question. Important enough to be distrusted and banned by the last nervous Ottoman Sultanate, the neurotic demagogues of China's Cultural Revolution and Iran's revolutionary theocracy. Important enough that football has either outlasted its oppressors or forced them to relent. For football is driven by love and money, and if anything trumps life and death then they do.
Love of playing the game. Because before the great club colours were chosen and the monumental stadiums were raised and filled, people just played anywhere. They still do. No one knows how many people play football; how could you count them? But FIFA has tried -- and their guess is that around a billion people play the game reasonably formally. That's 50 million referees, balls and pitches and 25 million kilometers of white lines, enough to circle the earth over a thousand times.
Love of watching the game. Because before the pitch was circled with fences and turnstiles, before the earth was circled with television satellites, before giant screens and action replays, people just came to watch. To capture singular moments of brilliance. Ninety minutes of grind and plod for a sly feint, an impish dribble, an unstoppable, rifled shot -- and goals, always goals.
Love of following the game. Because the game is not just an art, it's drama too. It has great metropolitan and minor provincial theatres, with free-spending and penny-pinching impresarios and their megalomaniac obsessive directors. It has legions of critics and a fantastical rotating cast of angels and devils, geniuses and journeymen, fallen giants an rising stars. It offers the spotlight for individual brilliance while relishing the defiance and heart of collective endeavour. It has staged tragedy and comedy, epic and pantomime, unsophisticated music hall and inaccessible experimental performances. It does imperious triumph, lucky escapes, impossible comebacks and stubborn stalemates. It captures the brilliance of unpredictability, the uncertainty of the human heart and the human skill, of improvisation and dance. And those that follow it are not merely the crowd; they are the chorus. Consumers and commentators, spectators and participants, without whom every goal is just a ball in the back of the net, every victory just three points in the bag.
Love of us and hatred of them. Because, before clubs became global brands, before club crests competed with corporate logos, football had become entwined with every conceivable social identity and the social divisions that surely follow them: derby day in Glasgow, Belfast and Dundee pitches Catholic against Protestant; in Calcutta it aligns Hindu Mohun Bagan against Muslim Mohammedan Sporting. In Athens, AEK are the migrant refugees from the Graeco-Turkish war contesting the turf, eighty years later, with the locals of Olympiakos. In Manchester, Turin and Munich, wealthy outsiders and parvenus play off against the authentic heart and soul of the city. In Rio, rich and poor, elite and mass, white and black take to the field alongside Fluminense and Flamengo. In Soviet Moscow, Dinamo play Spartak and the lumbering communist leviathan faces off against its surly public. Through the multiple acts of playing, organizing, watching and following, people have defined and expressed who they think they and their neighbours are.
And all for what? Because football matches do not change social structures. Because no victory, however comprehensive, can shift the real balance of power, or change the actual distribution of wealth and status. It is for the glory. For winning, and winning in style. For wining because you were the best, the quickest, the cleverest. Because, when it came to it on the pitch, when the whistle blew and money, power, status, reputation and history were all sent to the bench, you wanted it more.
But, in the neverending arms race of competitive sport, glory -- even the chance of glory -- must be paid for, schemed for, planned for. From the first Lancashire industrialist coughing up for the works team's boots to Nike's virtual ownership of the Brazilian national squad, victory has been pursued through the relentless expenditure of hard cash. So relentless that football has not been and cannot be too choosy where it comes from. If money is not the currency of power then other more basic political means will do. Power, authority, threats and violence have acquired squads, built stadiums and ordained results. Football has served the greater glories and fed on the brute power of every imaginable political institution; all to borrow or steal their share of glory.
And yet the historians and the sporting press want to separate what is obviously connected: football and history, sport and politics, the game and money. The historians do so on grounds of causality; the press on the grounds of morality. Perhaps the historians are right. Football has not altered the course of history. Football did not kick-start the industrial revolution or build the world's cities. Football does not start, end or replace wars; it does not make the peace or redraw the borders of the world. But is it not extraordinary that, in an epoch characterized by unprecedented global interconnectedness, the most universal cultural phenomenon in the world is football? Is it not worthy of note that, the moment male urban working classes have had a bit of time and money on their hands, they have chosen, almost everywhere, to play, watch, organize and follow football? Is it wise to recount the history of the modern world without some reference to this? Whether the historians like it or not, football cannot be taken out of the history of the modern world and the history of the modern world is unevenly, erratically but indisputably etched into the history of football.
Much of the sporting press would prefer us not to bring the big bad world into the game at all. Football has its history, its traditions, its turning points, but they are the work of great players, charismatic managers, unrepeatable performances, unquenchable team spirits and the serendipity of interlocking personal histories. History, yes, in the guise of heritage and urban myth, but economics, politics, never. And perhaps the reporters are right. The drama and its outcome cannot be decided by the forces of money and power. Victory should not be bought. Allegiances should not by imposed. Love is not tradable, nor can it be ruled. Yet so often it is. Referees have been bought, linesmen have been corralled and games been thrown. Players, clubs and fans have been exploited, liquidated, mistreated and thrown on the scrapheap. Across the world, football's bureaucracies have been run as personal fiefdoms and political campaign machines. Violence, racism and bigotry have constantly staked their place on and off the pitch. So what alternative explanations are there? Sepp Herberger expresses the virtually autistic refusal of the football world to see its own enmeshment with the social institutions and ideas of its day; its resistance to seeing the game explained by anything other than its own internal rules of chance; its meaning and significance restricted to its own protected times and spaces. Herberger lived the firestorm of the rise and fall of the Third Reich as Germany's national team coach. In his 361 notebooks compiled daily throughout the cataclysm there is not a single reference to anything other than football. But if you flee from theory, conjecture and engagement with power, what are you left with? Are these pathologies simply the work of evil men? Are they the random and unfortunate consequences of a few bad apples, secret coteries and plots?
No, and in this football expresses the Faustian bargain that all modern societies have made with the forces of money and power. For the modern world comes with strings attached. The logic of the market is to price, buy and sell everything. The logic of power is to control, monitor and regulate everything. Can your health be priced? The market will try. Can dignity or loyalty be bought? Money will ask the question.
Football, in its transition from a chaotic folk ritual to a sector of the global entertainment industry, has encountered the same dilemma. In the world of football, glory has the final say. The bottom line for those who follow football is not calculated in money or power, but in victories and pleasures. But spectaculars require backers, the circus must be paid for. Football attracts and must therefore deal with money and power and they will always be looking to buy or take their share of glory; and glory bought or stolen turns to dust.
So, what bargain can be struck with these forces? How will the line be policed? Who will seek to cross it? It is not just the bureaucrats and the moneymen, the cynical professionals and opportunists politicians who must make their deal, but everyone who plays, watches and follows football. We want to see the best professionals play at the highest level, but we cannot bear that their wages might diminish their heart and their hunger. We want to see grace and invention, but we will settle at halftime for a single grubby point. We want pantomime crooks and villains as club owners, but we also want them to obey the health and safety laws. We hate the way the media barons try to buy the game, but we pay our subscriptions anyway. Money and power, capitalism and the state: can't live with them, can't live without them. Football, the game the world plays, offers a metaphor for the dilemmas that sit at the very centre of any moral framework or political programme that takes the reformation rather than the abolition of modernity as it starting point.
David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, xiv-xviii.
My traumas were not limited to the excrement of the footballing world. One of my university professors equated Fever Pitch to a petty indulgence in liberal white guilt, and while on an academic level his accusations are somewhat warranted, I also believe that he misjudges Hornby's motivations terribly. Another university professor (a world-famous one at that) made the class read an anti-soccer article he'd written -- and gotten published in -- a journal of economics. I'm generalizing his arguments, but he basically outlined various economic reasons why soccer is "egalitarian" and "risk-averse" and therefore un-American, why its tenets cannot hold up in a society with American economic sensibilities. I raged about his misunderstanding of how the game works, lack of imagination, and reluctance to accept the inherent drama of the sport to my classmates, but secretly I started to reevaluate my own sports fandom.
In the past two years, I've started watching a lot of sports and accumulating information, history, and analysis at an alarming rate -- American football and hockey share a lot of my fan consciousness now, and I even find myself absorbed in basketball and baseball at the playoff level. I was afraid that my tastes were either conforming to what commercialized sports industry deemed important, or else shifting toward the instantaneous pace of North American sports fandom in general.
Add to those factors the fact that I was also struggling through my spawn-of-Frankenstein B.A. thesis, and football seemed slower, messed up, guarded -- it felt like navigating for new life forms while suspended in a sloe of molasses. It was all I could do to read the Guardian headlines and watch game highlights on YouTube, much less let the minutiae and the marginalia incubate and acquire meaning in my brain.
But now there's really no excuse. I'll be done with college in two weeks and graduating in three, I have a decent part time job that will let me pay my rent and keep up with my various sports fandoms, and the internet connection in my apartment seems to have relented to my demands for the time being.
The problem is, where to start? I mentioned this book as a new point of origin, a framework for consumption and digestion. It's eye-opening in all the best ways. Weighs like a text book but weighs on the mind like a fortuitous discovery of lost treasure. It reads like a breezy summer novel despite the astonishing breadth of its subject matter.
The introduction, titled "Life and Death, Love and Money," takes two quotes by Sepp Herberger and Bill Shankly, sets them in relief, and goes on to explain why we care so much, and why we should care. I've typed out all but three paragraphs, because it was worthwhile.
Life and death? Can anything be that important? Football has claimed enough innocent victims in its hellish fires, tragic crushes and vicious little knife fights to ask the question. Important enough to be distrusted and banned by the last nervous Ottoman Sultanate, the neurotic demagogues of China's Cultural Revolution and Iran's revolutionary theocracy. Important enough that football has either outlasted its oppressors or forced them to relent. For football is driven by love and money, and if anything trumps life and death then they do.
Love of playing the game. Because before the great club colours were chosen and the monumental stadiums were raised and filled, people just played anywhere. They still do. No one knows how many people play football; how could you count them? But FIFA has tried -- and their guess is that around a billion people play the game reasonably formally. That's 50 million referees, balls and pitches and 25 million kilometers of white lines, enough to circle the earth over a thousand times.
Love of watching the game. Because before the pitch was circled with fences and turnstiles, before the earth was circled with television satellites, before giant screens and action replays, people just came to watch. To capture singular moments of brilliance. Ninety minutes of grind and plod for a sly feint, an impish dribble, an unstoppable, rifled shot -- and goals, always goals.
Love of following the game. Because the game is not just an art, it's drama too. It has great metropolitan and minor provincial theatres, with free-spending and penny-pinching impresarios and their megalomaniac obsessive directors. It has legions of critics and a fantastical rotating cast of angels and devils, geniuses and journeymen, fallen giants an rising stars. It offers the spotlight for individual brilliance while relishing the defiance and heart of collective endeavour. It has staged tragedy and comedy, epic and pantomime, unsophisticated music hall and inaccessible experimental performances. It does imperious triumph, lucky escapes, impossible comebacks and stubborn stalemates. It captures the brilliance of unpredictability, the uncertainty of the human heart and the human skill, of improvisation and dance. And those that follow it are not merely the crowd; they are the chorus. Consumers and commentators, spectators and participants, without whom every goal is just a ball in the back of the net, every victory just three points in the bag.
Love of us and hatred of them. Because, before clubs became global brands, before club crests competed with corporate logos, football had become entwined with every conceivable social identity and the social divisions that surely follow them: derby day in Glasgow, Belfast and Dundee pitches Catholic against Protestant; in Calcutta it aligns Hindu Mohun Bagan against Muslim Mohammedan Sporting. In Athens, AEK are the migrant refugees from the Graeco-Turkish war contesting the turf, eighty years later, with the locals of Olympiakos. In Manchester, Turin and Munich, wealthy outsiders and parvenus play off against the authentic heart and soul of the city. In Rio, rich and poor, elite and mass, white and black take to the field alongside Fluminense and Flamengo. In Soviet Moscow, Dinamo play Spartak and the lumbering communist leviathan faces off against its surly public. Through the multiple acts of playing, organizing, watching and following, people have defined and expressed who they think they and their neighbours are.
And all for what? Because football matches do not change social structures. Because no victory, however comprehensive, can shift the real balance of power, or change the actual distribution of wealth and status. It is for the glory. For winning, and winning in style. For wining because you were the best, the quickest, the cleverest. Because, when it came to it on the pitch, when the whistle blew and money, power, status, reputation and history were all sent to the bench, you wanted it more.
But, in the neverending arms race of competitive sport, glory -- even the chance of glory -- must be paid for, schemed for, planned for. From the first Lancashire industrialist coughing up for the works team's boots to Nike's virtual ownership of the Brazilian national squad, victory has been pursued through the relentless expenditure of hard cash. So relentless that football has not been and cannot be too choosy where it comes from. If money is not the currency of power then other more basic political means will do. Power, authority, threats and violence have acquired squads, built stadiums and ordained results. Football has served the greater glories and fed on the brute power of every imaginable political institution; all to borrow or steal their share of glory.
And yet the historians and the sporting press want to separate what is obviously connected: football and history, sport and politics, the game and money. The historians do so on grounds of causality; the press on the grounds of morality. Perhaps the historians are right. Football has not altered the course of history. Football did not kick-start the industrial revolution or build the world's cities. Football does not start, end or replace wars; it does not make the peace or redraw the borders of the world. But is it not extraordinary that, in an epoch characterized by unprecedented global interconnectedness, the most universal cultural phenomenon in the world is football? Is it not worthy of note that, the moment male urban working classes have had a bit of time and money on their hands, they have chosen, almost everywhere, to play, watch, organize and follow football? Is it wise to recount the history of the modern world without some reference to this? Whether the historians like it or not, football cannot be taken out of the history of the modern world and the history of the modern world is unevenly, erratically but indisputably etched into the history of football.
Much of the sporting press would prefer us not to bring the big bad world into the game at all. Football has its history, its traditions, its turning points, but they are the work of great players, charismatic managers, unrepeatable performances, unquenchable team spirits and the serendipity of interlocking personal histories. History, yes, in the guise of heritage and urban myth, but economics, politics, never. And perhaps the reporters are right. The drama and its outcome cannot be decided by the forces of money and power. Victory should not be bought. Allegiances should not by imposed. Love is not tradable, nor can it be ruled. Yet so often it is. Referees have been bought, linesmen have been corralled and games been thrown. Players, clubs and fans have been exploited, liquidated, mistreated and thrown on the scrapheap. Across the world, football's bureaucracies have been run as personal fiefdoms and political campaign machines. Violence, racism and bigotry have constantly staked their place on and off the pitch. So what alternative explanations are there? Sepp Herberger expresses the virtually autistic refusal of the football world to see its own enmeshment with the social institutions and ideas of its day; its resistance to seeing the game explained by anything other than its own internal rules of chance; its meaning and significance restricted to its own protected times and spaces. Herberger lived the firestorm of the rise and fall of the Third Reich as Germany's national team coach. In his 361 notebooks compiled daily throughout the cataclysm there is not a single reference to anything other than football. But if you flee from theory, conjecture and engagement with power, what are you left with? Are these pathologies simply the work of evil men? Are they the random and unfortunate consequences of a few bad apples, secret coteries and plots?
No, and in this football expresses the Faustian bargain that all modern societies have made with the forces of money and power. For the modern world comes with strings attached. The logic of the market is to price, buy and sell everything. The logic of power is to control, monitor and regulate everything. Can your health be priced? The market will try. Can dignity or loyalty be bought? Money will ask the question.
Football, in its transition from a chaotic folk ritual to a sector of the global entertainment industry, has encountered the same dilemma. In the world of football, glory has the final say. The bottom line for those who follow football is not calculated in money or power, but in victories and pleasures. But spectaculars require backers, the circus must be paid for. Football attracts and must therefore deal with money and power and they will always be looking to buy or take their share of glory; and glory bought or stolen turns to dust.
So, what bargain can be struck with these forces? How will the line be policed? Who will seek to cross it? It is not just the bureaucrats and the moneymen, the cynical professionals and opportunists politicians who must make their deal, but everyone who plays, watches and follows football. We want to see the best professionals play at the highest level, but we cannot bear that their wages might diminish their heart and their hunger. We want to see grace and invention, but we will settle at halftime for a single grubby point. We want pantomime crooks and villains as club owners, but we also want them to obey the health and safety laws. We hate the way the media barons try to buy the game, but we pay our subscriptions anyway. Money and power, capitalism and the state: can't live with them, can't live without them. Football, the game the world plays, offers a metaphor for the dilemmas that sit at the very centre of any moral framework or political programme that takes the reformation rather than the abolition of modernity as it starting point.
David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, xiv-xviii.