You can set your clock by it: every time one of the big football tournaments, either the worldcup or the European championships comes around, there will be some normally sensible leftist/socialist having a freakout about the perfidious influence of football on the class struggle [1]. There will be sneers about bread and circuses for masses, earnest arguments about how nationalism, even football nationalism is bad, mokay, and debates in the backpages of the Socialist Review on how competitive sports are inherently incompatible with a true socialist society. It’s all somewhat embarassing, silly and I supect motivated as much from the fact that quite a few diehard lefties were the kind of bookish kid who were always the last to be picked at gym as from sincere conviction. It’s cringeworthy, but it’s as inevitable as the fact that some yankee wingnut is going to write a column about how real men only play American football and soccer is for wimps; it’s just a matter of time before somebody embarasses themselves.
I refuse to get excited about some wealthy misogynist jocks tossing a ball around in the name of patriotism and product endorsement. Mistrust of team sport as a fulcrum of social organisation comes naturally to me. I’m a proud, card-carrying member of the sensitive, wheezy, malco-ordinated phalanx of the population for whom the word “football” still evokes painful memories of organised sadism and unspecified locker-room peril.
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Liberal alarm bells can’t help but start ringing when a bunch of overpaid PE teachers get together to orchestrate a month of corporate-sponsored quasi-xenophobia; however, as soon as World Cup fever rolls around, members of the otherwise uninterested bourgeois left feel obliged to muster at least a sniffle of enthusiasm, sensing that not to do so is somehow elitist.
This is a misplaced notion: football is no longer the people’s sport. Just look at the brutal contempt that the police reserve for fans, or count the number of working-class Britons who can afford to attend home matches, much less the festivities in South Africa. Then there’s the uncomfortable fact that the World Cup is only and always about men.
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There is something suspect about a people’s sport that violently excludes more than half the people, and boozy, borderline misogynist pseudo-nationalism is the last thing Britain needs to help foster a badly-needed sense of community. George Orwell observed in 1941 that “in England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small minorities . . . The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious.”
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Meanwhile, the left still has no coherent response to Britain’s bricolage of troubles. The problem with football as commodified nationalism is that it leaves the left wing entirely undefended.
The tacky, tribalistic, red-and-white bandage of cheesy national sentiment is already stifling the healing power of political expediency, and as the people gear up to root for EnglandTM, the left’s best chance to re-organise and re-energise is deflating like a ruptured football, smashed against a wall by idiot children.
All the usual gripes are dragged in: “more serious things to worry about”; “pseudo-nationalism”; “violently excludes excludes more than half the people”; “overpaid PE teachers”; the obligatory Orwell reference [2] — it’s the Worldcup as Kulturkampf, with football no longer a sport or entertainment, but the embodiment of everything reactionary Penny can think of. It’s no different from what the American culture warriors that Roy Edroso writes about do everyday: project their own political feelings on activities that actually cannot be captured in these terms, as they exclude everything worhtwhile from it. Football in this way becomes just another thing to be scored for political correctness, rather than something to be enjoyed on its own terms.
And of course it’s possible to criticise football and the Worldcup, to like the sport but hate the way it has been captured by capitalism as just one more thing to sell to the masses or promote their worthless unnecessary shit. This is hardly unique to football and is in fact inevitable in a capitalist society: everything is mobilised to serve the interest of capitalists, unless actively resisted. It’s the sporty equivalent of moaning how alternative music has sold out, man. To be able to criticise football you have to engage it, be genuinely interested in it first, not just make lazy remarks about “wealthy misogynist jocks”. Football (and sport in general) is one of the few ways in which working class people can still become rich in a society were the odds are stacked against them. Moreover, if it’s not the workers reaping the benefits of their labour, who does Penny think should? They’re after all the people without whom a football club can’t function; if they don’t get those salaries the money would disappear in the owners’ wallets.
So yeah, Jamie’s right when he says “the first paragraph’s bad enough, but the last paragraph’s just surreal all the way through”. An awful, awful article, ill-thought out, dumb and seemingly written out of spite and a desire to show how much better Laurie Penny is than you for not following the Worldcup.
[1] There will also inevitably be the opposite and equally embarrasing phenomenom, the more prolier-than-thou opinion piece by a middleaged middleclass git in touch with his inner worker haragueing “intellectuals” for not embracing some of the more embarassing aspects of football; for examples see Socialist Unity on the English flag.
[2] And what was it that George Orwell said about free loving, sandal wearing and muesli eating invading the left? Seems to fit somehow…