Football

Maradonna supports the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

class war, Football
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The Argentine football team supports the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo at the worldcup

As you should know Bob, during the Argentinian dictatorship of the seventies and early eighties, the Argentine military waged a dirty war against its own people, disappearing thousands of trade unionists, activists, socialists and other leftists and all other sorts of socalled subversives. Most of the disappered were first tortured then killed, were often young, in their tens, twenties or thirties, sometimes had children of their own who also disappered, being adopted by the very same people who tortured and murdered their parents. And it was not just leftists who got disappeared: ask too many questions and you would be tortured and murdered as well. But some of the mothers of disappeared people refused to be intimidated and kept asking the government where their children were and when they got no answers, they started a silent protest on the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, keeping up throughout the dictatorship even though several of the original mothers were disappeared in turn. They did not stop when the dictatorship ended, but kept up demanding answers, keeping up their weekly protest until 2006, when finally a government was elected that wasn’t interested in continuing the coverup. In later years, as the truth did start to come out the mothers also campaigned for the truth about the children of the disappeared, those adopted by their killers.

It’s not surprising then that the Argentine football team chose to honour these women at the start of the Worldcup, by calling for them to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. If any groups deserve it, they are. What is surprising is how little attention this gesture got in the mainstream meda. I myself only read about this today, on Inveresk Street Ingrate. You would think this should’ve gotten more coverage, as such a political statement is not exactly common amongst footballers. The Worldcup itself after all is tainted by having been held in Argentine at the height of the dictatorship, in 1978. Perhaps this is why it was slipped by almost unnoticed?

They all think it’s over

Football
Published on 2 Comments on They all think it’s over

the ball was over the line

But unfortunately the referee decided otherwise. It can be difficult sometimes to see if a shot that doesn’t thunder into the back netting has actually crossed the line, but not when it’s half a metre or so behind the line. But the linesman was too far away to see properly and the ref didn’t overturn his decision and so England was denied a valid goal that would’ve been the equaliser. If England now exits the Worldcup it would be the ideal situation for the tabloids to wallow in that sense of outrage and injustice they like so much when it comes to football. But it should never have happened. Goal line technology is neither exotic nor expensive and it would’ve seen what the refs couldn’t.

You might wonder why such a multi-billion dollar industry like football doesn’t use such technology in its most important tournament, but it all comes down to seventyfour year old FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who adamantly refuses to introduce it. The Dutch football commentators at Voetbal International seem to believe it’s a combination of his age and his belief that it would be too expensive to use as it would need to be used in qualifying games as well and poorer countries couldn’t afford this. This last reason is of course utterly silly, as it is up to FIFA to make the rules and they could easily decide to only use it in the finals, hence sparing themselves this embarassement.

But you wonder if there’s more going on than just the innate conservatism of an old man. Using goal line detectors and other technology means referees are going to make fewer subjective calls. leaving less room for error — and fraud. Because we know there’s a multi-billion dollar betting industry sprung up around football as well, not all of it legal and we also know that players and referees both have been bribed in several national leagues to throw games already. Can we therefore be sure the Worldcup is safe?

Football is going home?

Football
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UPDATE: no.

“I just got this email from a German colleague,” announces Justin Steed. “The subject line was ‘Official FIFA schedule’. Tue.: France vs. South Africa in Mangaung. Wed: England vs. Slovenia in Port Elizabeth. Thurs: England vs. France at Airport Who said the Germans weren’t funny? Oh.”

From The Guardian’s live commentary yesterday on France v South Africa. It sums up the expectations of neutrals for England. Football may be going home prematurely again tonight, if the English can’t manage a miracle and actually do some proper football today. It would fit the general trend in this Worldcup of underperforming European teams. France has gone home, England needs a miracle, Germany and Italy are still in danger as well, while Holland may have qualified but not with that much conviction — good enough, rather than good football.

The question is why this is so. Have the resat of the world caught up, with even supposedly weak teams being able to mount reasonable defences against the favourites, no longer in awe of them? Or is it something endemic to Europe, with the supposed powerhouses being revealed to have feet of clay. France obviously has its own story, but it’s suspicious that countries like England, Germany, Spain and Italy all have strong national competitions which are largely populated with foreign superstars. Players like Roony or Terry are used to play with the best of the best of the world in their club teams, but you can’t say the same about their mates on the national squad…. Has the ever increasing commercialisation and globalisation of football hollowed out the national teams?

It’s certainly telling that countries with “lesser” competitions with fewer foreign superstars playing in it seem to do better…

If I cannot have football, I do not want your revolution

Football, socialism
Published on 2 Comments on If I cannot have football, I do not want your revolution

Swiss player Gelson Fernandes scores a scrappy goal against Spain

On the whole Terry Eagleton’s opinion piece on football is quite sensible, sketching out how the beautiful game functions in our capitalist societies. It stumbles at the end though, as he slips in the necessity of abolishing it if we want to be “serious about political change”:

If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse. It reminds us of what is still likely to hold back such change long after the coalition is dead. If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football. No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead.

[…]

With football, by contrast, there can be outbreaks of angry populism, as supporters revolt against the corporate fat cats who muscle in on their clubs; but for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.

Football serves as a safety valve, as something that gives meaning and a common purpose to the lives of countless people in a society where so many other communal ties have been deliberately broken. In that sense Eagleton is correct to see it as something that helps prop up capitalism, a modern variant of Rome’s panem et circenses. But he’s wrong to therefore assuime that football needs to disappear before a revolution is possible. That’s just confusing a symptom for the disease. In our hypercapitalist world anything and everything is co-opted and used by capitalism for its own ends. It’s therefore easy to, as Eagleton does here, confuse the trees for the forest. The problem isn’t that football has been co-opted, but that there is a capitalist system to do so.

Which doesn’t mean that we should just accept capitalism’s influence on football (or other sports), but that if we want to fight this influence, we have to do so because of the love for the game itself, not out of some abstract desire for a world revolution. Because that trick never works.