A Matter of Love and Hate
[World Cup Football]
HELD EVERY FOUR years, the World Cup for Association football is now the world’s largest sports event after the Olympics. The present competition brings together thirty-two countries each of which has already survived a ferocious selection procedure. Even countries like the USA, where soccer is not one of the most popular sports, have made a huge effort to be present. It was not always thus.
Largely responsible, in the second half of the nineteenth century, for inventing the modern game of football, and again for having taken the sport all over the world, the English nevertheless chose not to participate in the formation of the International Football Federation (FIFA) in 1904, nor would they go to the first three World Cup competitions arranged for the sport in 1930, 1934 and 1938. In its official history, the English Football Association now describes that decision as ‘a monumental example of British insularity’.1 But perhaps it would be more useful to see the refusal as betraying a tension between competing visions of the role of team sports in modern society and, at a deeper level, of conflicting attitudes towards the whole issue of community and group identity.
After all, the English had long ago set up the first ever ‘international’ game between themselves and Scotland and by the turn of the century were regularly playing Wales and Ireland as well. Such encounters within the United Kingdom were necessarily galvanised by ancient rivalries and resentments. Adrenaline ran in rivers. Indeed, a hundred years later the annual England–Scotland game would have to be discontinued because of fan violence. What on earth would be the point, the English FA must have asked itself in 1930, of embarking on a three-week ocean voyage to Uruguay to play the likes of Brazil and Czechoslovakia?
Rarely articulated in the media, the ‘insular’ attitudes that inspired the English FA in the early part of the century are still thriving, and nowhere more so than Italy whose sense of nationhood often seems to depend more on a series of ancient internal quarrels between erstwhile city states than on any sense of imposing itself on the outside world. In this regard the country is not unlike those families who are immediately recognisable as such because so intensely engaged in arguing with each other. In his speech to the nation on New Year’s Eve 1999, the Italian president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, spoke of ‘Italy, land of a hundred cities, that unites love of my hometown with love of my country and love of Europe.’2 On the website of Hellas Verona, the soccer club of the small town where I live, a fan signing himself Dany-for-Hell@s.it chose to respond in decidedly football terms with a list of all the opposing teams any Hellas fan necessarily hates: ‘Italian unity = Roma merda, Inter merda, Juventus merda, Milan merda, Napoli merda, Vicenza merda, Lecce merda. Need I go on?’3
Always a favourite to win the World Cup, Italy thus often seems lukewarm and ambivalent towards its national team. At a recent local game, more than one fan told me they would be rooting against the national side during the World Cup. ‘The national team is made up of players from the big clubs, Juventus and Milan and Inter Milan. We can’t hate them all year round and then support them in summer just because they’re playing for Italy.’
The word ‘hate’ turns up in private conversation in relation to football in a way it never seems to do in the quotable media, which froth with noble sentiments as the big ‘festival of football’ approaches. Immediately after interviewing me for national radio about a book I have written on Italy and fandom, the journalist removes his headphones and remarks: ‘You know, the wonderful thing about football is that it’s the only situation left where you really feel you have an enemy, someone you can hate unreservedly, someone you don’t have to make compromises with. Even with the terrorists you have to worry about whether you’re indirectly responsible for their extremism.’ ‘Why didn’t you say that on air?’ I asked. He laughed.
But even in football there are enemies and enemies. On the famous Costanzo Show, Italy’s biggest talk show, a veteran player, Causio, insists that despite the fact that the Italian team never sing the national anthem when it’s played at the beginning of the match (indeed some players have admitted that they don’t know the words), despite the low attendance at many national games, nevertheless, when it counts, the nation rallies round. This is the official version and is no doubt true of that part of the public who are not regular football fans and thus not likely to put their local team first. But during the advertisements, the actor sitting beside me on the stage together with Causio remarks off the air: ‘No, football is about hate. When Roma play Lazio [local rivals] I really hate the Laziali. But how can I hate Ecuador? I don’t feel anything.’ The small South American country were Italy’s first opponents, or designated victims, in 2002.
Necessarily, football began at local level and it was here that it took the peculiar and fierce grip on the collective mind that it still has today, in Europe, in South America. This happened at precisely the time when, with rapid industrialisation and better communications, local identities were becoming harder to maintain. Hellas Verona, for example, was formed in 1903, but it was not until 1912 that they beat their nearest neighbours and hence bitterest rivals, Vicenza. Reporting the crowd response when the jinx was finally broken, the journalist for Verona’s local paper was clearly witnessing for the first time a new way of expressing group identity. ‘Verona won! Nothing we could write to express our joy, if such a thing were possible; no declaration we could ever make … could be so eloquent as the powerful, almost savage yell of the crowd each time Hellas scored. The shouting slowly subsided to be replaced by a confused, never repressed clamour rising and falling with the anxious and diligent inspection of every move on the field. Verona won! A victory too long desired.’4 A few centuries before that historic moment, in his Discourse on the Game of Florentine Football, Giovanni Maria de’ Bardi defined the sport thus: ‘Football is a public game of two groups of young men, on foot and unarmed, who pleasingly compete to move a medium-sized inflated ball from one end of the piazza to the other, for the sake of honour.’5
If ‘savage’ is the most interesting word in the first quotation, ‘unarmed’ is the crucial qualification in the second. That day in 1912 the Veronese crowd, savage but unarmed, discovered a new way of expressing their antique enmity towards their nearest neighbours, with whom of course it was no longer feasible that they might go to war, or even engage in a resentful round of trade sanctions. And for the first time that day the Veronese had the upper hand. They could take pleasure, unarmed, in their neighbours’ discomfort. They could taunt and gloat and be cruel within a framework that would allow everyone to escape unscathed and continue their lives as if nothing had happened.
Ferocious taunting is a staple of Italian football matches and indeed this kind of embattled local pride, at once intense but, in the very extravagance of its expression, ironic too, is typical of local fandom all over Europe. ‘SINCE 1200’, read a banner at a recent game, ‘EVERY TIME THE VERONESE GO TO VICENZA, THE GROUND TREMBLES.’ In sharp contrast, when Ireland played Cameroon in the Niigata stadium, Japan, on the second day of the 2002 World Cup, the TV commentator was obliged to remark on how little the crowd was participating in the expensively staged event. How could they? Of what possible interest could it be to the polite, carefully seated Japanese which of these two countries won? They have no quarrel with either.
If we were to ask, what has been the most dangerous emotion of the last two centuries, one possible answer might be: the nostalgia for community, the yearning, in an age of mechanisation and eclecticism, for the sort of powerful sense of group identity that will enable you to hold hands with people and sing along, your lucid individuality submerged in the folly of collective delirium, united in a common cause, which of course implies a common enemy.
This desire for close-knit community at any price was no doubt an important factor in the rise of National Socialism, Fascism, communism and a range of recent and dangerous fundamentalisms. Football fandom, as it developed in the same period in Europe and South America, might be seen as a relatively harmless parody of such large-scale monstrosities, granting the satisfaction of belonging to an embattled community, perhaps even the occasional post-match riot, without the danger of real warfare. The stadium and the game have become the theatre where on one afternoon a week, in carefully controlled circumstances, two opposing groups, who at all other moments of life will mingle normally, can enjoy the thrills of tribalism. Hard-core supporters of the competing teams occupy opposite ends of the stadium generating a wild energy of chants and offensive gestures that electrifies the atmosphere. On the pitch, the extraordinary skill of the players, their feints and speed, the colourful pattern of their rapid movements, the tension as one waits and waits, heart in mouth, for the goal that never comes, create a collective enchantment that prolongs the stand-off between the two enemies, at once determining the rhythm of insults and keeping the crowds apart. At the end, if the police are efficient, and nothing too inflammatory has happened during the game, we can all return home with perhaps only a couple of stones thrown.
‘The civilising passage from blows to insults’, wrote the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, ‘was no doubt necessary, but the price was high. Words will never be enough. We will always be nostalgic for violence and blood.’6 Football, it has often occurred to me, offers an ambiguous middle ground between words and blows. The game appears to be most successful when constantly hovering on the edge of violence, without quite falling into it. Occasionally, of course, things will go wrong.
Innocuous or otherwise, the scenario of opposing fans insulting each other is definitely not welcome at the World Cup. Nothing terrifies the organisers of the sport’s biggest event more than the sentiments most ordinarily expressed at weekly league matches in the major participating countries. For alongside the nostalgia that developed for the tight-knit local community springs the contrary ideal of the universal brotherhood of man, of a world where no one will ever express hatred for anyone. In the early 1890s, having read Tom Brown’s Schooldays and decided that English notions of gentlemanly sportsmanship were among the highest expressions of the human spirit, Pierre Coubertin concluded that mankind could best be served by a festival of sport where national identity would be expressed in pageantry, folklore and athletic prowess, all political antagonisms forgotten. In 1896 the first Olympic Games of the modern era was held. Football was included unofficially in 1900, officially from 1908. For many years it has been the Olympic sport that draws the largest number of spectators.
Coubertin had his enemies, chief among them the nationalist and monarchist Charles Maurras, who was hostile to the Games, fearing the degeneration, as he saw it, of cosmopolitanism. But on attending the Olympics in Athens and watching the behaviour of crowds and athletes, it came to Maurras that in fact such international festivals might work the other way: ‘When different races are thrown together and made to interact,’ he wrote, ‘they repel one another, estranging themselves even as they believe they are mixing.’7 In short, the internationalist theatre might become the stage for expressing not universal brotherhood but the fiercest nationalism.
Maurras’s reflection raises the question: what happens when a team sport, particularly an intensely engaging, fiercely physical sport like football, a game capable of arousing the most intense collective passions, is transferred from local to national level? What happens when very large crowds, many of whom are not regular fans and thus not familiar with the game and the emotions it generates, find themselves involved in the business of winning and losing as nation against nation? For the football team comes to represent the nation, indeed the nation at war, in a way the individual athlete cannot. Before England’s decisive game in the 2002 competition with old enemies Argentina, the Samaritans announced that their staff would be at full strength to deal with the misery if England lost. After Japan beat Russia – another old quarrel – the people of Tokyo danced on the streets, while in central Moscow, where giant screens had been set up to show the event, there was serious rioting and one death. Sensibly, the government banned all further public screenings. The TV in the home is safe enough; in the stadium there are fences and police. But a crowd in a public square watching their nation lose against an old enemy with nothing between themselves and, for example, a restaurant run by their opponents is a dangerous thing indeed. These events serve to remind us that globalisation has done nothing to diminish nationalist passions. Perhaps the reverse.
The tension between the different visions of international sport – the embattled community on the one hand, the brotherhood of man on the other – reached its height at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. At the opening ceremony the crowd sang ‘Deutschland über alles’, after which a recorded message from the now ageing Coubertin reminded everybody that ‘the most important thing in life is not to conquer’.8 Two years later at the World Cup in Rome General Bacaro in his inaugural speech announced that the ultimate purpose of the tournament was ‘to show that Fascist sport partakes of a great quality of the ideal stemming from one unique inspiration: il Duce.’ Whatever that might or might not have meant, the next competition would not be staged until 1950 and was held in Brazil, far away from a still war-ravaged Europe.
The World Cup developed as an offshoot of the Olympic Games and deploys the same idealistic, internationalist rhetoric. But the decision to set up a competition separate from the Olympics came largely as a result of cheating. Olympic football teams were supposed to be amateur, but many players were clearly professional. England, who had deigned to participate and won in 1908 and 1912, withdrew over the issue in 1920. In 1924 and 1928 Uruguay won with virtually professional teams, at which point the only possible response for the offended pride of the other competitors was to acknowledge a fait accompli and get FIFA to set up a competition for professionals. The circumstances in which it was born thus belied the principles the competition claims to uphold.
More than anything else, it has been the growth of television that has shifted the balance of power in favour of Coubertin’s internationalist, pageantry-rich vision of the sport. In the space of a few years football’s main paymasters became the TV companies, not the ticket-paying fans. Experienced away from the stadium, the game loses its local, community-building functions. The possibility of collective catharsis is lost. At this distance the antics of hard-core fans in transport are merely disquieting. Often they look disturbingly like the choreographed extremist crowds of the 1930s. Now every gesture that threatens the sort of positive vision of the world that can be delivered into households where children and grandmothers sit around the TV must be rooted out. The Asian World Cup was perhaps the first absolutely hooligan-free event. Tokyo and Seoul are at a safe and expensive distance from Manchester, Berlin and Buenos Aires. Opposing fans could not come into contact in any numbers. How Coubertin would have rejoiced over that extravagant opening ceremony, with all its colourful Asian pageantry, the charming faces of elegant Korean dancers.
And yet … With the ugly crowds tamed, at least in and around the stadium, the TV cameras free to concentrate entirely on the game, what do we see on the field of play? I know of no other sport where cheating is so endemic, condoned and ritualised as football, where lying and bad faith are more ordinarily the rule. Every single decision is contested, even when what has happened is clear as day. A player insists he didn’t kick the ball off the pitch when everybody has seen that he has. Another protests that the ball has gone over the line when everybody has seen that it hasn’t. Passed by an attacker in full flight, a defender grabs the man’s shirt, stops him, then denies that he has done so. Unable to pass a defender, the striker runs into him and promptly falls over, claiming that he has been pushed. Only a few minutes into the Denmark– Senegal match the players were exchanging blows. During the Turkey–Brazil game, with play temporarily stopped, an angry Turkish player kicked the ball at the Brazilian Rivaldo, who had recently been voted the best player in the world. Hit on the knee (by the ball!), Rivaldo collapsed on the ground pretending he had been violently struck in the face. The referee sent the Turkish player off. In an interview afterwards Rivaldo claimed this was a normal part of football. The organisers, who had said they would be tough on such dishonest behaviour, fined Rivaldo $7,000, barely a day’s pay for a star at his level, but they wouldn’t suspend him for even one game. It is crucial for TV revenues that Brazil make progress in the competition.
One of football’s curiosities is that while among the fans it arouses the kinds of passions that once attached themselves more readily to religious fundamentalism and political idealism, for the organisers it is above all a business. There are few who believe that refereeing decisions are not sometimes made to favour rich teams; FIFA itself and its president Sepp Blatter in particular have been accused of large-scale corruption. When two apparently legitimate Italian goals were disallowed in their game against Croatia, many Italians immediately began to wonder if there wasn’t a conspiracy against them.
After the pomp and idealism of opening ceremonies, then, what could be less edifying than the spectacle itself and the suspicions that surround it? Or more exciting, more likely to inflame the passions? Infallibly, it seems, the overall frame of the brotherhood of man contains a festival of bad behaviour, resentment and Schadenfreude. Far from diminishing people’s interest in the sport, it is precisely the unpleasant incidents and negative sentiments that fuel its vigorous growth. The genius of FIFA in the 2002 competition was to stage an apparently violence-free positive event in Asia while shifting, via television, the riot of emotions, and the occasional riot on the street, thousands and thousands of miles away. We are having our cake and eating it.
That said, football definitely makes more sense and is more fun when experienced at the stadium in the delirium of the local crowd, when it is our community fielding our team, here and now, ready to rejoice or suffer. After Italy’s inevitable victory over Ecuador, experienced by almost everybody who cared about it through the medium of television, a fan writes to his club’s website:
Italy won convincingly … but the elation I feel when I watch Verona play from the terraces is something the national team can never give me, not even if they win the World Cup. It’s a competition where hypocrisy and piety reign supreme. Come on Hellas!9
The name of this local team of course, suggested by a schoolteacher of the boys who founded it a hundred years ago, is the ancient Greek word for homeland.