The Olympic Games and football’s World Cup share the global spotlight in the international media’s sporting calendar. Both are special events in two ways. Firstly, they are quadrennial, not annual. Secondly, they involve the vast majority of the world’s nations. So whilst some other major spectator sports can lay claim to more sustained audiences and followings – athletics, whenever it’s sufficiently well-organised, and the Formula One motor-racing circuit, for example – the specially rationed nature of the Olympics and the World Cup preserve a sense of expectation and aura around the events.
For the Olympic movement, the Los Angeles Games of 1984 were a turning point, bringing Hollywood-style design principles to the production and presentation of a Cold-War fuelled extravaganza. Jimmy Carter had dragged the USA out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, in protest at the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union and most of its allies responded tit for tat in 1984 and the way was clear for the USA brazenly to politicise the Olympics on a scale unsurpassed since the Berlin Nazi Olympics of 1936. In 1936 huge audiences were mobilised in a perfectly executed and ruthlessly organised political pageant. LA followed suit almost a half century on. These were the first Olympics presided over by the International Olympic Committee’s new top man, Juan Antonio Samaranch, who would expand the business until he stepped down in the summer of 2001.
The LA lore followed hot on the heels of the successfully expanded football World Cup finals in Spain in 1982, the first to line up 24 finalists. This fulfilled a pledge given to Third World countries by the Brazilian João Havelange, boss of football’s world governing body, FIFA, who had taken over in 1974 and was to dominate global football business until his retirement after 24 years – at France ‘98, the first 32-team finals. Between them, the Olympics and the World Cup have gobbled up billions of revenue for television rights and hugely lucrative sponsorship packages, and have fuelled bidding rivalries between cities and countries across the world keen to get in on the PR act and promo show that modern sport’s highest profile events must now be. All this is based upon the belief that these events fire the imaginations of millions of fans and billions of viewers.
Sydney 2000 was the Bumper Summer Olympics. It welcomed more than 11,000 athletes, several thousand officials and coaches, and as the 16 days whizzed by estimates of the number of mediafolk in town reached 21,000 – although official estimates had been initially put at around 15,000. Athens 2004 plans to cater for 18,000 media. The Main Press Centre at the Olympic Park was vast, and the International Broadcast Centre was dominated by US broadcaster NBC, who’d paid $705 million for the rights, and mobilised a workforce of more than 2,000. More athletes, more sports, more professionals. Bigger, bigger, bigger.
How do we watch sport? You have a choice. Go to any English football ground and you can see it now, clearer than ever. All-seater stadiums have zoned the fan culture. We couldn’t see this nearly as vividly when the crowd was a standing, swaying mass of upright individuals. Now we sit among the singers and the chanters and the ranters. We can see what they’re wearing, tell them to sit down – if we dare – so that some of us can watch the football. Those who stand up are led not by the flow of the contest on the pitch, but by the dynamics of the interaction with the rival fans. Two recent renditions by Burnley fans flaunted the deep roots of homophobia and racism in the traditional constituencies of the people’s game in England. Winding-up Watford’s absent Chairman Sir Elton John, Burnley fans in the singing sections of Turf Moor bawled with a grinding regularity, ‘If you’re queer as fuck, stand up’. So excitedly was this grunted (it would be a decimation of English usage to say ‘sung’) that many grunters jumped up on the second line. Repressed expression of sexual complexity, or post-modern irony? ‘Town full of Pakis, You’re just a town full of Pakis’, chanted many Burnley fans at the local derby game at Blackburn Rovers’ Ewood Park ground. You can sit among this category of traditional fan and see and hear a frothing regional jingoism and racism that wouldn’t be out of place in the meeting halls of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet a few blocks away will be old men in trilby hats or ratters (peaked cloth caps), recalling the days when the action on the pitch had more cadence, when the main abuse directed to the referee was to call him ‘four-eyes’, when the Bovril was cheaper, the meat-pie choice was less stressful, and the world was a simpler place. Among them will be some younger fans, keen to distance themselves from the aggressive element, their deep-seated affinity for the club expressed in more hesitant singing styles or loud one-off opinions. And a few rows down from the desperate, racist Neanderthals there will be family groups, kids-for-a-quid admissions encouraged by clubs to join the football family, to see in their local club a place for a party. ‘Mum, what does “queer as fuck” mean?’
On the other side of the world at the Sydney 2000 Olympics, the cabby in Melbourne corrected me. I’d just been in the ABC studio doing the breakfast show, talking about Olympic sport and the commercialisation of global sport, and I was on my way back to my hosts at the University of Melbourne, who’d invited me down to give a public lecture on the state of world sport. It was good to be able to talk about the Olympics and the football tournament in the Olympics. Most of the city of Melbourne had something else on its mind that week, the Grand Finals of Aussie Rules, a mini-tournament of the top teams that drew crowds of 90,000 to 100,000, and took place between teams representing different areas of the city. The cabby was a football (or, for Australians, soccer) man and we were talking about the forthcoming Olympics match at the MCG, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, between Australia and Italy. It was a sell-out already, and I remarked that it must feel great for him to be able to see a few of his favourite Italian players in the Italian line-up, and cheer on his home nation. Speaking with the strongest of Italian accents he put me in my place, saying that he and all his five children would be rooting for the ’Roos. He was an Australian and he wouldn’t pass over such a chance to reaffirm this, with and for a new generation, at the game.
I didn’t manage to get to that game, but South Africa versus Brazil (in the men’s tournament), at the BCG (Brisbane Cricket Ground), seemed a reasonable alternative. And Norway versus Germany was shaping up as one of the semi-finals in the women’s tournament. Walking over to that game from my base in Sydney might be a good chance to mingle with the Olympic football fans. Brazil strolled carelessly towards defeat, by 1–3, in Brisbane. The young South African players were elated, and back at their hotel base, the Novotel, they looked as if they still couldn’t believe it. Perhaps they never quite came down to earth, following up this result with a mediocre performance that kept them out of the next round. But it was the fans that were interesting. There weren’t many Brazilians on show, and scarcely any visible presence of South African fans. So who was there? It was expatriates, one generation removed perhaps, with a lineage soaked in football commitment – like the young man walking back through Brisbane’s spectacular riverside arboreal gardens, in his Blackburn Rovers shirt. With football taking a higher profile in Australia, and English Premier League action relayed back to his old country by Murdoch’s global initiatives, the world history of the game could be injected into the bloodstream of the embryonic fan culture of this most multicultural of nations. I asked him why the Blackburn shirt? It was status as much as history that inspired him, Blackburn having been champions of the English league when he’d started following the game in the early years of the Premiership. But he’d stuck with them, since their fall from these heights. And families were there. There were fathers with daughters, mothers with sons; admen’s whole dream families. Not always in the Juventus, Manchester United, Real Madrid or Brazil shirts either. In the half-time snack queue – Hunter Valley Chardonnay here, a nice change from Boddington or Thwaites back in North-East Lancs – I asked one father about his. Another cultural misreading. His was the strip of a suburban team in the Brisbane area. He wore his local team’s shirt proudly, mingling with the England, Arsenal, Liverpool, Juventus shirts and the rest.
The women’s semi was back in the heart of the Olympic event. Sydney was strange. Strategically, I thought, where might you meet fans an hour or two before an Olympic football semi-final? A big pub on a main junction ten or fifteen minutes’ walk from the stadium seemed about right. There was no sign of a world sporting event in there though. Pokies (the ubiquitous upmarket one-armed-bandit machines catering to the Australian gambling fixation) whirred away. Telescreens showed pony-racing and offered odds and commentary on that. Throughout the pubs and bars of the city, life went on as if the Olympic football was happening at the other side of the world. Maybe I’d picked the wrong spot, though a party of mildly carnivalesque Norwegians came in, had one or two drinks, shared a few droll exchanges and trudged on stadiumwards. At the ground it was the same as Brisbane, but even quieter. Cocktail party chatter rather than terrace chants. This was the semi-final of one of the two biggest tournaments in world women’s football. The ground was nowhere near full. The football flowed fitfully. The German centre-half set Wagnerian bells ringing, looping by with a backheader, a harmless upfield punt over her oncoming goalkeeper, sending the band of Norwegian fans into a restrained jig of delight. Most of the crowd was quiet and comprised family groups and – though by no means in an obvious majority – women. It was a nice walk back towards Sydney Central and the city, like coming out of the Opera or Sadler’s Wells – satisfied consumers, rather than rabid fans. There was something missing, some edge or other just not there. But it was better than being leaned over by riot police on horses or snarled at by trained killer dogs, as I would be at Bramall Lane in Sheffield, nine months later. ‘You’re worse than the Stasi, you lot’, observed my brother.
‘Is that right?,’ responded a rattled riot cop in full operational mode, shielded and armed, ready for action, but bemused by this verdict in cross-cultural studies.
The opening match of the Euro 2000 football championships took place at the King Baudouin Stadium, at Heysel, on the outskirts of Brussels. This was the biggest game in Brussels since the tragic encounter at the same stadium between the Italian side Juventus and England’s Liverpool, in the final of the European Cup. There was much to prove and there were searingly painful memories to transcend. In the first game Belgium took on a subdued Swedish side, winning despite a nervy start. The opening ceremony was more memorable than the football, as much for its arcane symbolism as anything else, inspiring writer Harry Pearson to wonder out aloud in the next seat to me how the hell he was going to write anything coherent or interesting about it for the Monday morning Guardian. At least he made it for the next issue of When Saturday Comes: ‘Someone has just broadcast the news that the opening ceremony will only last 11 minutes. There is a palpable sense of relief … The finale comes when a giant humanoid form is wheeled onto the field and kicks a white football straight into the air. Hard to know what it was all about …’ Thanks, Harry. Around the stadium – well served by underground, trams and buses – the fans were polite and patient, the police were restrained. It was only later in the centre of the city that tensions would explode, as stand-by police played chase with mainly Belgian revellers. It was like a magnified weekend night in any English town from Harrow-on-the-Hill to Hull.
The friendly little ground at Bruges was a bus ride from the town centre and the railway station. The world champions France had just cruised past an an over-respectful and ultimately insipid Danish challenge and soon the horns on the Viking headgear of the Denmark fans looked like mere bravado. But the fans knew that they were outclassed by a team in its pomp, and they weren’t going to let mere defeat stop the party. ‘Well-played,’ I ventured to some red-shirted, horn-wearing, battered-looking Danes as I settled in for a pasta on the edge of the old town. I couldn’t decipher the reply but the looks said it all: ‘Don’t patronise us, you English git. We were crap.’ Younger Danish fans filled some of the liveliest and most fashionable bars in Bruges, where they drank, chatted and danced with the French fans and with the Belgian locals. There was no trouble whatsoever to be seen, and no observable police presence. ‘Yes, we’re going to Ibiza, yes, were going to have a party’ they sang along in the late bars in Bruges, confirming the Club 18–30 spirit of the evening after the game.
Many said that a football World Cup in the United States would be a disaster. But it wasn’t. If a US audience knows that it’s watching the best thing in the world of its kind, whatever the expertise or the feat, serious or trivial, there’s the likelihood of a respectful and captivated – albeit ignorant – audience. This was the case in USA ‘94. Except there had been a huge sigh of relief among the international football community when England failed to qualify, happy that its largely troublesome fans wouldn’t be flooding across the Atlantic. Los Angeles – or more accurately, Pasadena’s Rosebowl – simply saw the World Cup final as just another, but rather parochial, big sports game.
World Cup final eve was quite the party. We were based in Santa Monica, the Brighton of California, where the cheapest pier and seascape is available for the quick location shot by the movie industry. The Brazilians and their fellow travellers brought a taste of Brazilian carnival to Santa Monica’s streets and promenades. The bars, restaurants and night clubs were seething with people mostly bedecked in the gold-dominated colours of Brazil, mingling with a sizeable minority sporting the Mediterranean blue of Italy. Most of those whose teams had been knocked out in previous rounds adopted Brazil as their favourites. Third World first here, as devotees of the world’s most popular game rushed to be associated with its most dashing cavaliers. As the bars emptied into the streets in the small hours of Cup final day a noisy, but peaceful, face-off ensued between fans and adopted fans of the two finalists. Amidst much flag waving, swaying and dancing, orchestrated alternate chants of ‘BRAAA … ZIL, BRAAA … ZIL, EETAL … YAH, EETAL … YAH’ rang out into the clear California night sky. The partygoers were women as well as men, youngish cosmopolitan consumers. This was a shared celebration of respective national identity and friendly international rivalry. Both sets of supporters were in good voice and good humour. There was no chance of any trouble between them and the greatest threat was posed by policemen and policewomen lurking in the shadows. They had never experienced anything like this before at a sports match. The cops stood off 20 metres, nervously fingering their riot sticks and wondering.
FIFA and the US soccer federation were delighted by the lack of hooliganism. Ironically, the most disruptive element came from another nation which failed to qualify, France. But even the French hooligan fringe was limited to one troublemaker, who, when he was not fighting with security guards, was roughing up opponents in the midfield at Old Trafford. Napoleon, dumped on the beach on Elba, could not have struck a pose more full of Gallic indignation than Eric Cantona’s after he had been ejected from the Giant’s Stadium for thumping an official. For the fabled ‘true’ English supporter who had travelled to the USA simply to soak up the atmosphere of the World Cup finals, the absence of his national team engendered mixed feelings. We met a group of Lancashire lads who were combining the World Cup with an American holiday and they expressed the dilemma eloquently. ‘It’s those cockney bastards who spoil everything’ explained the car salesman in his replica Blackburn shirt. ‘If England had qualified they would have spoiled it, causing trouble wherever they went. It’s sad that England aren’t here, but it wouldn’t have been the same. There would have been a few who wanted to fight and we’d all have been tarred with the same brush.’
The walk to the ground had a dream-like quality. The sunshine and heat, the brightly coloured, happy, noisy crowds, the sprinklers watering the extensive gardens of the millionaires’ houses which surrounded the stadium, the bumper-to-bumper traffic, the big, yellow buses and the black-and-white highway patrol cars, and the street vendors – hundreds of them selling T-shirts, flags, balls, hats, bottled water and cold minerals – and the ticket touts doing a brisk trade with tickets marked up at around eight hundred dollars.
On the way into the ground we had formed orderly lines to be searched before reaching the turnstiles. As we were funnelled towards our entrance we found ourselves shoulder-to-shoulder with a man wearing a Brentford FC shirt. ‘Fair play to you, pal, it takes guts to wear that in public.’ He did not respond at first. Then he looked towards the sky, made a barely audible whistle and said to nobody in particular, ‘Of all the gates in all the world – I’ve travelled three and a half thousand miles to get stuck in the queue with a fucking Scouser!’
We sat with Tony (originally from Belfast, now with a small business in New York) and a few seats away there were three more Ulster men from Coleraine. They held aloft between them a large Ulster flag, the red cross of Saint George against a white background with the red hand of Ulster and a gold crown at the centre. They were here to support any team that had beaten the Republic of Ireland and had celebrated long into the night when the Dutch repeated King William of Orange’s victory at the battle of the Boyne in 1690, by knocking the Irish and their mercenaries out of this competition in Florida. The final presented them with a real problem because both teams represented devoutly Catholic countries. They resolved this problem by supporting nobody, sitting stoically and silently for the duration of the game. These silent, sombre, sad and sinister figures were the exceptions. For the rest of the world gathered in the Rosebowl it was carnival time. Flags, replica shirts and painted faces emblazoned across one of the largest cosmopolitan gatherings of all time.
Football generates extraordinary levels of commitment and passion. Footballers can be the butt of jokes, the object of adoration; heroes one moment and villains the next, in an unremitting soap opera of hope, despair and refuelled hope.
The World Cup and the Olympics attract two very different sorts of fan. For a start, football fans follow their teams on the national trail as an extension of their support for clubs. This carries with it a draining baggage of expectation. Players at international level know that they face pressure from a public that is potentially hostile and abusive, and that if they underperform in the national shirt, they could be vilified and abused. Olympic sportsmen and women are in a different, lower league of celebrity and prominence. The odd truly global superstar may emerge on the Olympic scene, affecting generations world-wide. At the 1972 Games the Russian gymnast Olga Korbut was iconic in this sense, an image or what we now call a role-model, having major influence on the way in which the Olympic spectacle is staged, and on the activities and aspirations of generations. But apart from the professional athletes in the classical athletics disciplines, or those with the potential to make professional careers such as boxing, Olympians often come and go, living relatively low profiles between the events themselves. Who remembers the gold-medal winning clay-pigeon shooter or yachtsman? Olympic competitors also represent the UK, in the Great Britain Olympic team. Only Steve Redgrave and his team won gold in Atlanta in 1996, and the gradual benefits of lottery funding showed in the UK medal tally in Sydney – 11 golds, and up from 36th at Atlanta (hot on the heels of Ethiopia) to 10th (one place behind Cuba) in the overall medal table. But it was a roll-call of Olympic winners of whom only specialist minorities within the British sporting public would have heard. This might change afterwards for some. Returning as medallists, they would be fêted and sometimes courted by the media and the sponsors. But many of them would be opening supermarkets rather than listening to offers from Hello magazine, doing good grass-roots school work and proper sport development rather than boosting up personal fortunes helped by hustling agents. Sydney gold medallists – boxer Audley Harrison, heptathlete Denise Lewis, and rower Steve Redgrave – have been used by the FA to promote football, appearing on the pitch just before the England–Germany game after Sydney, and participating in the draw for the FA Cup tournament. Some Olympians will sustain national profiles. But for most Olympians, it is a fundamentally different relationship between follower and performer than that between the football fan and the football star. It is a less volatile relationship, a special date rather than an ongoing passionate relationship.
In the eyes of the public a European Championship or a World Cup is just one more event in a crowded cycle of ambitions and expectations. It’s special of course because the eyes of the watching world might be turned your way, and it’s a bit of a lark to brandish your banner, if you’re from Rochdale or Brentford, in front of an audience of millions, product placing your local roots at the England game. You don’t see many Union Jacks at England football matches – too much Scotland and the rest in that one. You see the revitalised stark image of the flag of St George, an obstinate-looking throwback to some vague myth of national superiority – or maybe a cultural separateness coming out of its shell in a post-devolution UK.
At the Olympic Games it’s the Union Jack on display, that’s waved by the flag-carrier in the opening ceremony, raised when there’s a medal triumph, and carried by the fans. There may be thousands there from the UK, but they’re there for a lot of different sports. And of course so that the four UK football associations don’t get their special status at FIFA questioned, there are no Great Britain football teams entered in the Olympics. So no football fans, or Barmy Army cricket fans. Olympic spectators are more discriminating and heterogeneous.
Nationalism is at the centre of Olympism. Although the modern Olympic Games were founded – by French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin – to create what he called a free-trade of the future, and to champion peaceable internationalism rather than war, they inexorably stimulated nationalist trappings. This happened right from the beginning in the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, when Greece used the event to boost national sentiment and bolster a fragile monarchy. But tempered in appropriate ways, the nationalism of contemporary Olympism can be subdued. All nations are on display in the parapahernalia of nationalism, and all countries can participate in at least some of the action. The myths and rhetorics of Olympism play down the intensely anatagonistic undercurrents of Olympic sport. The athletes might not be able to stand the sight of each other, but unless they are on such a prima donna level of mega-stardom or the organising committee bends its rules for its own, they on the whole live in the athletes’ village together. And there, real internationalism can certainly come into play. There was a daily condom allocation to all athletes – men and women – in Sydney. The Cuban team was reported to be the first to ask for more, the Oliver Twists of the youthful hedonism truly at the heart of the Olympic theme of the unity of youth.
The Olympics can be like a giant playground, with things going on all over the place, for journalists as well as fans. In Sydney all the journalists were chasing a story, and yet always had one eye on an event elsewhere, like celebrity spotters at a socialite party. Conversely, the football event is concentrated and intense. It has the pattern of the sexual encounter, the build-up, the encounter, the locked passions, the climax, and the comedown. In the Olympics there’s another set of dynamics across the village or down at the waterfront. Next to the relational intensity of the football event and the World Cup, the Olympics is like a series of teasing flirtations. The spectator body moves on, to another line-up, another queue, another thrill, like punters at Disneyland.
In the most intense of Olympic moments – and these are usually in the Olympic stadium itself – a global dynamic can sometimes be almost tangible. In such cases the individual champions can transcend the narrow nationalism of nation versus nation. Cathy Freeman, the Aboriginal Australian 400 metres champion did precisely this in the Sydney Olympics. Standing, too, for women as well as her race, she lit the torch at the opening ceremony and so enhanced the universalism of her image. The world then all but willed her to her individual victory in the second week of the tournament.
Beneath the manipulated and orchestrated surfaces of Olympic ceremony and spectacle nationalist currents run strong. In order to build up momentum as the Australian team, confident of successes, chased its target of 60 medals, the Games organisers scheduled the swimming events in the first week, putting its ace swimming team centre-stage right from the start. There were even rumours that the pool at the Olympic Park was designed to favour Australian techniques such as its turning strengths. The US team felt provoked by this, and early Australian successes. The international press salivated at the US team’s gloating prediction that it would smash the Australian men’s relay team like guitars. When the Australian men won, they mimed the playing of their unsmashed guitars. The seats were scarcely full of the hoi-polloi –not at those ticket prices, and with the high-profile political and cultural figures in the best seats – and so this could be defused as high spirits rather than provocation. In the big-screen outdoor live sites of Sydney itself, cheers accompanied the Australian victories, from groups of individuals rather than fan cultures. They gathered – women alone, family groups, all ages – with their picnic blankets and supplies, waiting for the Freeman race or the Ian Thorpe swim, drifting off immediately after the outcome of the contest. The infrequency of the event, and the transience of the fan base, meant that nationalist passions were not channelled or built-up in any sustained way, not really deeply aroused.
During the Sydney Olympics the Australian media were narrowly nationalist in their concerns and coverage of the events, puffing up Australian hopes and picking out glamour figures from the pool, including the women water polo champions, the track, the beach volleyball. This was matched by the crowds at events and viewing sites. In the boxing hall, anything Australian – the bout referee for instance – would get a loud home cheer. The loudest jeers and boos were reserved for anyone American, closely followed by anyone from Great Britain. So this playful expression of nationalist resentment and hostility was directed at the old imperialist oppressor – whose Union Jack flag, ironically, adorned every Australian honour tucked away in the corner of the Australian national flag – and at the new global oppressor, at least culturally, the US. But in the end it was all friendly and harmless stuff, on home soil, cheer-leading rather than rabble-rousing.
Without a doubt football is tribal. This is not meant in any atavistic sense. It refers more neutrally than that, to the collective and divisive nature of football loyalties. We know that football can be a marvellous global calling-card, an Esperanto of the body. Football is a pretty simple game and fans world-wide understand it. Whether it’s with a cabby in Brighton or Australia, or a stranger in a Manhattan urinal, football can launch you into the most unexpected of conversations. But for most fans it is essentially excluding of others, assertive of local collective identity. Local derbies and the fierce partisanship expressed by neighbours are the most compelling cases of this feature of football and fan culture. Football fan cultures based on place as the main source of distinctiveness testify to the fragility of claims about the overall globalisation of the contemporary world. And despite the gentrification of football and its European glitzification in the English Premier League, other European domestic leagues, and the Champions League, the football tribe has at its core a traditional set of values – tough, working-class masculinity. In no Olympic city or around any Olympic event will a set of sports fans capable of the excesses of this traditional rump of football culture be present. But there’s a hard-edged, class-influenced, hard-man xenophobia and racism that still colours parts of the traditional football culture, and especially so in the English case.
Sports in the Olympics offer a completely different basis for the fans. The extended agenda of Olympic contests in Sydney covered 28 sports, and athletics with all its disciplines and events was just one of these. Aquatics covered swimming, synchronised swimming, diving and water polo, and swimming itself of course is subdivided into a range of specialist events. Sydney introduced two new sports for their Olympic debuts, tae kwon do and triathlon. And two sports that first appeared at the Atlanta Games, softball and beach volleyball, were again featured in Sydney. So the Olympic events are watched in a multitude of ways. If you can’t get a ticket for one event or your favourite sport, you can find a ticket for something else, just to be there. At Bondi Beach the beach volleyball attracted lager-swilling lads, as well as family groups. There wasn’t much discussion of team tactics in this audience. It was a good-time crowd, oblivious to the niceties of the sport, animated by a DJ master of ceremonies. Without taking anything away from the athleticism, dedication and commitment of the players, it was staged as a cross between a beauty contest and a television game show.
The Olympics can look like a bloated beast, but one grain of optimism as some of us try and salvage some positive values from the debacle of consumer excess, organisational scandal and jingoistic nationalism, is that the proportion of women competing at the Games has risen dramatically. The old Soviet Union and other East European states always knew how to win lots of medals: pick obscure sports, people with some physical aptitude, train up on drugs and dedicate lots of resources to esoteric activities. Do this with your women athletes too and most of the West’s hopeful beauties won’t stand a chance. China’s followed the formula well too, with its women athletes and swimmers. So has Australia, with strong lobbying by sportswomen in its corridors of policy-making power. There it was argued that the general profile of women’s sports, and the country’s position in the medal table, would rise if more women’s sports appeared on the programme. So the Australian Olympic Committee supported, prepared and sent loads of impressively athletic and fearsomely competitive women to the Games. And it makes an interesting counterpoint in Australia to the nation’s top four team sports – rugby union, rugby league, cricket and Australian rules football – all male sports and not on the Olympic programme. Nor should we forget the major Australian sport for women and girls, netball, again not featured in the Olympics.
There is something about the national holiday at the Olympics, with international guests thrown in. This is mildly carnivalesque at times, but has more the innocent character of the family day-out that goes well, or the school sports day. It’s an unthreatening joy in seeing the country have a go (and, in the Sydney case, do unprecedentedly well to boot) and for a home nation to demonstrate that it can put on a good show. British sports fans cheering Steve Redgrave’s row into immortality were not a lot different from earlier generations cheering on the record-breakers of the amateur era. This was an Englishman cheered on for Great Britain. Stephanie Cook would be cheered to her modern pentathlon gold by similar proud and non-aggressive fans. It’s the old distinction – a keen patriotism and pride in national achievement, rather than an aggressive nationalism. At the Olympics the Great Britain achievements were in some senses a renaissance of amateurism – performers on sabbaticals, supported by funds and grants from the national lottery. They were cheered to success by spectators and supporters worlds and cultures apart from the male-dominated ranks of the England football fans.
The big football event always has an edge. The European Cup final of 2001 between Bayern Munich and Valencia filled Milan’s San Siro with the red and the orange of the respective teams, and an incredibly sustained and infectious chanting from the fans. Before the game, almost a hundred black-clad performers from La Scala reaffirmed the staged meeting of the high culture with the popular, prompting star UK journalist Hugh McIlvanney to splutter ‘what’s the fuck this got to do with football?’ A dramatic penalty shoot-out went the German club’s way. The disappointed fans of Valencia trooped out of the stadium as soon as they could, leaving the Bayern fans rapturous in their triumph. The squares and streets of Milan were not littered with the debris of hooliganism or riot. The Spanish side and its fans took defeat with dignity. The German victors and their followers were rapturous but not triumphalist in the bistros of the gallerias and plazas. The Italian police looked relaxed and Mussolini’s monuments weren’t molested or defaced. There’s always an edge in these orgies of passionate nationalism. But, thinking of the twentieth-century history of the three nations involved, I’d leaned over to my colleague in the press box at the game and noted that this was a hell of a lot better than fascism.
The edge is at its tensest when England fans are in the picture. Top IOC man Dick Pound, runner for the IOC presidency in the summer of 2001, had, unprompted, asked me a couple of days before the San Siro match, ‘What are you – England – going to do about your followers and your hooligan fans?’ He was dismissive of the position of the sports authorities and the government on this question. This is a world-wide perception and seriously hampers aspirations to bring more sporting spectacles to England and the UK. There is one solution and one only to the high-profile minority for whom continuing hooligan wars have so much attraction. It is not a pleasant or a comfortable solution for democrats or libertarians. It is to continue to seek to identify those England fans for whom the cocktail of toughness and nationalist posturing proves irresistible, and to deny them access to the sites of football’s greatest spectacles. The Sweden fans singing in the bars of Brussels’s central square at the heart of the city – like the Danes in Bruges – were partying energetically, singing lustily, and downing innumerable lagers. But without a hint of menace. England’s hooligan wars will not be solved by cosmetic changes to the administration of the sport spectacle; nor, long-term, by the control of individuals’ movements across national borders. It is a much more cardinal issue than can be blamed upon football organisations. It is a question of whether a deep-rooted English masculinity, often traditionally working-class and xenophobic, can be disassembled, and an alternative formulation of national pride and collective passion articulated on football’s greatest stages. It is possible, as vignettes of cosmopolitanism and audience diversity from events at LA ‘94 and Sydney 2000 in particular reaffirm, to have passionate crowds meet in intensely competitive circumstances and settings, with no sub-text of aggression or violence. But it is usually less possible when England is on the march.
Note: When you go behind the television screens and get up close to the two biggest media events in the world your interpretations will inevitably be selective and impressionistic. But what else is there? If we’re honest about these things we have to make our observational interventions, linking these to a sound historical understanding and a context provided by (quite as selective) macro-research, on audiences and consumption for instance. The section on LA ’94 in this chapter is drawn from John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson, ‘One day in LA’, Leisure Studies Association Newsletter, 1995. The University of Brighton has given me consistent support in getting up close to the big events, and I remain grateful for this. My brother John Tomlinson and my sister Jill Connors have given me extensive help and understanding in much of my time following Burnley Football Club.