Keeping the beautiful game simple
The overanalysis of football
Hello all. The Berlin launch of my novel ‘Midlands’ was great. Thanks for all who came – do get yourself a copy here. Next online sale is the 200th!
I’ve been a bit under the weather the last few days, so I’ve rejigged a piece from pre-Stack times to tide you over. Normal service will resume next week.
The modern football conversation is a thing of wonder. People, who often until recently have been strangers, striking up a discussion about the state of their team or teams, and finding an effortless common language. Impressive too is the sheer thought which goes into it; the easy exchange of hypotheticals, opinion and analysis; imagining a team’s fortunes if this player hadn’t got injured, if this player had been signed and crucially, if this one had been played more. It can be lovely to just sit in a pub and listen to the sophistication and collegiality of this discourse, which is of course always about much more than football. Football is its ostensible subject, but is in fact only a template upon which concepts of loyalty, scepticism and passion are developed and exchanged. And memories are long.
Yet of late, listening to or participating in this chat, another type of conversation has been coming to mind; that of the political discussions I also overhear on England’s streets and airwaves. There the interlocutors’ knowledge is often paltry or false, the exchange terse, the analysis crude. People can discuss for some time propositions which are almost entirely untrue, such as Covid vaccine conspiracies. And whereas earlier the contrast of this with the fluidity of how people discussed football amused me, it has recently begun to unsettle. Crucially, there has started to seem to me that some kind of deep psychic connection between the sophistication of our sporting discourse and the poverty of our political one – as if the latter was some obscure broom cupboard in the magnificent palace dedicated to our national sport.
Take the most commonly-issued description of our politicians by the not-particularly-engaged observer, ‘They’re all the same.’ At no point in my adult life has the UK been closer to a genuinely pluralist polity; a different party, for example, governs each nation of the UK and independents run countless local councils. And yet still, ‘They’re all the same’, a sentiment which naturally leads to the conclusion ‘Which means I don’t need to think about them.’ This nihilistic credo completely refuses the idea that citizens in a democracy may have some responsibility to keep themselves basically informed.
Now imagine the very same commentator saying it about football. No football fan would ever claim that ‘All football teams are the same’; Merseyside football fans, for example, would tell you in no uncertain terms that there are irreducible differences in club culture between two teams who play in the same city, in the same league, and whose stadiums are located less than a mile apart. The same football fan can elucidate the difference between Dundee and Dundee United exactly but then claim there is no real difference between politicians with impeccable anti-corruption credentials and those who have been bought and sold.
Of course, in a world beset by turbulence, the stability of a football club is ever more attractive; your football team, after all, will never leave you, although fans of say Bury FC or Wimbledon might dispute that. But the fate of those two clubs and the organization of their fans in response indicates that football too is a site for activism. Take the current campaign for safe standing in UK stadiums, or the brilliantly-effected 2016 walk-out of Liverpool fans over high ticket prices, which led to the club’s owners scrapping the priciest tickets. Yet in fact such social engagement only raises further qualms, for if football fans prove perfectly capable of acute political analysis in matters relating to football, this surely suggests that a little more of the energy of such fan culture could be diverted into, or at least contextualised within, a wider culture of civic engagement; after all, if you think paying £240 for a match ticket is bad, imagine paying one million quid for a house.
I feel this particularly because my own team, Liverpool, is now so good, and I don’t care. I don’t care about Jürgen Klopp’s departure in the context of the homeless people I see when walking to the pub to watch the game; I don’t care how good the bread and circuses are now the suffering they are held to distract from has become so painfully evident. For people like me, children of the 1980s’ middle class, it’s hard to escape the feeling that football, and perhaps competitive sport more generally, has developed into a sort of modern Glass Bead Game. In Herman Hesse’s 1943 novel of the name, this was a game played by an intellectual elite, a strange hermetic pursuit into which mental energies were absorbed in deliberate ignorance of wider social realities. Nowadays when I read some sophisticated piece of football journalism I find myself asking if the mind who produced it might not have been able to contribute more substantially elsewhere.
All this may strike you as a rather gloomy or spoilsport view: After all, who am I to tell people what to like, especially when times are tough? Yet I’ve felt even more conflicted in recent years, as football itself has grown ever ethically murkier, with clubs increasingly serving the purposes of political actors who accuse the act of mentioning their nature to be ‘politicizing football’, rather than their acquisition of clubs itself. The contrast between the underdevelopment of our political discourse and the disproportion of our footballing obsession only seems to be becoming more evident.
Still, if the Premier League does ever, as some predicted, enter a post-Brexit decline, its diminished pull might see us addressing some of the other problems in our country instead. I would like England to win Euro 2024 so we would never see winning a football match as the height of our national ambition again.
Get well soon, James. (And #COYB.)