We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Will the damp squib of English football manage to tighten its belt, avoid the precipice and weather the storm, or will the bubble fade? Football: is the bubble about to fade and die?, asks Jim Thomas. No Jim Thomas, it is not. It may be about to burst. But bubbles don’t fade. Further figures of speech surge forward. “Damp squib”, “Macbeth levels of scheming”, “weathering the storm”, “walking towards the precipice”, “belt tightening”. Mix and mismatch at will.
Aside from this linguistic oddity, this short piece is quite interesting, listing some of the financial grief now afflicting various English soccer clubs. Thomas singles out Arsenal and Aston Villa for praise. Apparently, they have not been spending loads of money recently, hence their ability to weather the storm, avoid the precipice, etc.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Who cares?
In fact I wish they would all go broke and disappear.
Bubbles fading and dying isn’t much of a linguistic oddity in this context. It comes from the song “I’m forever blowing bubbles”, which is chanted by the supporters of West Ham United on the few occasions more than five can be found and gathered together.
Ah, soccer. Thank God for American exceptionalism.
Well I wish TT would go broke and disappear, horrible twat.
Perhaps the bubble is bursting. Clubs with smaller debts to service, e.g. not covering their major costs of infrastructure (stadiums, training facilities, youth academies etc), player fees and wages (I’m not 100% sure, but I think my club Sunderland falls into that category) are much more likely to come away with fewer scratches than clubs who are still trying to service such costs (e.g. Portsmouth, West Ham and of course, Newcastle [alright there Nick M?!]).
Still, “die”? That’s just ridiculous. Even a non-league minnow like Warrington Town or Colwyn Bay has its’ supporters. There can surely be few things more commonly felt across the whole of the British Isles than the emotions of following a football team.
Personally I have loathed football since being forced to “play” it at school. If other people enjoy watching it and playing it good luck to them they aren’t doing me any harm. I don’t have a problem with footballers getting vastly inflated wages, it doesn’t cost me anything. I find football as tedious as I find stories of the players’ sordid sex lives.
Oddly, I find cricket fascinating, work that out if you can.
“Oddly, I find cricket fascinating, work that out if you can.”
I’d rather spare you the shameful memories. Now I happen to like cricket too, but the attempt to come off all intellectually superior because of your preference for cricket over football is vain.
One of the strange things about sport in Britain is the way it reflects social class. If you’re a toff, then you played cricket and/or rugby as a boy. If you weren’t a toff, then you played everything else but most likely decided that football was, by far and away, your preferred sport. The intellectual and social contempt heaped upon football merely because it is played by and large by the “lower orders” (or, in the U.S. because it is played by “girly men” or poor countries with chickens running around in the streets) is simply bigoted.
Football (if only you have some competence at it) is one of life’s purest joys, similar, I think less to other sports than to the playing of a finely-tuned musical instrument – and that’s just doing it on your own (I used to spend hours as a kid just practicing keepy-up and ball control skills with my brother out in my parents’ back yard). As part of a team, and playing against another team, football is much more like a musical ensemble. And it will always be one of those things, which, if you’ve played it with some degree of competence, you’ll appreciate what I’m saying instantly, and if not, your soul will never know just what it was missing.
mike: Just before the last World Cup, I posted a piece to this blog on the game of soccer, in which I denounced the game and expressed contempt for it from the perspective of a certain kind of Australian. As expected and intended I received an impressive number of hate comments. What I did not necessarily predict was the direction that the attacks came from. The Australian voice was intended as parody, and was intended to be at least as rude to Australians as it was to any English football supporters. This was fairly predictably missed but understandable, as my English readers were not familiar with the targets I was aiming at.
What did surprise me, though, was that I received a few comments to people who read the criticism of soccer and told me to go back to the pages of the Guardian where I belonged. That is, my criticism of soccer was taken as the sort of “intellectual and social contempt heaped upon football merely because it is played by and large by the ‘lower orders'” that you describe.
And yet, if you want to hear the sort of contempt expressed for soccer that I was parodying at its loudest in Australia, go into a white, working class pub. The traditional Australian criticism of soccer in Australia (that certainly persists, although it has been fading in recent years) is that it is a crude and effete game lacking in proper skills (and proper violence) that is unfit to be played by proper working class people, who play such things as rugby league (in Sydney and Brisbane) or Australian football (in most other places).
That is, soccer is unmanly. The argument will usually be expressed in terms a good deal more homophobic than that. The original draft of my post was a good deal more homophobic than that, but one of the other writers on this blog suggested I tone it down before posting. I’m not sure I was right to. There may have been some anti-immigrant sentiment in this attitude too, as in my childhood soccer was mainly played in Australia by immigrants from southern Europe (Italy, Greece, Balkan countries) and their families. The contemptuous term “wog-ball” to describe soccer is not much in use any more, but it exists. (“Wog” as an epithet in Australia means “southern European” and is much less offensive than the same term in England, by the way). Again, this has faded as these groups of people have integrated into the rest of society.
Middle class people in Australia are much more open to the game than are the sort of folk who are the heart of the game here. The sort of people who are the heart of the game here are the sort of people who in Australia despise the game the most.
As for “Football is one of life’s purest joys, similar, I think less to other sports than to the playing of a finely-tuned musical instrument”, I won’t dispute that the level of joy you describe can be gained from the game and that the game has all the attributes that you claim, but I am dubious that it is somehow special and different from “other sports” in this regard. Partisans of many sports make claims like this. I will sometimes make lengthy claims about cricket along these lines, but they are best taken with a grain of salt. (Cricket is the closest thing to a national sport Australia has, by the way. It’s played by just about every social group in Australia, but is strongest as a working class sport). Thinking that the sport you love is more sophisticated and better than other sports when the real situation is that you know it better than you know them is a trap one should try to avoid.
As an Ipswich FC fan, I can endorse Mike’s view that
there are few things more boring than
anti-football snobbery. I love cricket, rugby
and many other sports. If people want to
use sport for some broader class or cultural agenda,
they can forget it.
“The traditional Australian criticism of soccer in Australia (that certainly persists, although it has been fading in recent years) is that it is a crude and effete game lacking in proper skills (and proper violence) that is unfit to be played by proper working class people, who play such things as rugby league (in Sydney and Brisbane) or Australian football (in most other places).”
Oh yes, I know – the same view is quite common among Americans (or certainly those I know) with their American “football”. The line I often hear is something about if only the “brothers” would take an interest in “sawker”, then…
“Middle class people in Australia are much more open to the game than are the sort of folk who are the heart of the game here. The sort of people who are the heart of the game here are the sort of people who in Australia despise the game the most.”
I’m not sure about your first sentence there, but I understand the point you’re making in the second. Certainly, football in Britain has its’ core support among the working class – but I’m not sure this is true for the European countries like Italy, Germany and Spain, or for the South American or African countries.
“…I won’t dispute that the level of joy you describe can be gained from the game and that the game has all the attributes that you claim, but I am dubious that it is somehow special and different from “other sports” in this regard.”
Oh OK you can have that (I like other sports too). I suppose what distinguishes football from just about any other sport I can think of is its’ comparatively low cost – at a minimum you simply need a ball, you don’t necessarily need any of the other equipment (boots, kit, football field, goalposts etc) and the process of learning the basic skills does not necessarily require the presence of team-mates. The same thing cannot be said of cricket, baseball, golf, tennis, rugby, volleyball, basketball, hockey – of those, basketball comes closest, but still requires more than just a ball. Football’s very low ratio of expense and contingency to skill acquisition and enjoyment has surely contributed to it’s global popularity.
Jonathan: I think people have been using sport for class and other broader cultural agendas since at least the ancient Greek Olympics. It would be nice if this were not so, but I doubt this is realistic. I think the broader agendas are why a lot of people who follow sport do so, like it or not.
mike: When I said “here” I was referring to England. I agree that the sport’s base is often broader in many other European countries.
With respect to your final point, I am again not sure I completely agree. I played too many games of cricket in public parks with tennis balls and planks of wood being used as bats to think the game needs much in the way of equipment for people who really want to play.
One of the defining attributes of humans is the opposable thumb. Any game which specifically prohibits the use of such an essential characteristic of the species is silly. Soccer is a sport for horses.
I can’t bear to watch football, although I have been known to enjoy playing.
Incidentally, the last time i played i did so wearing my work boots, with a can of stella in one hand and a joint in the other, in the middle of a council estate. Those unemployed dole-scroungers were much fitter than I! It was just like being back at school: bags and jumpers for posts and constantly-shifting teams as various locals arrived and left.
I haven’t had so much fun since.
” I played too many games of cricket in public parks with tennis balls and planks of wood being used as bats to think the game needs much in the way of equipment for people who really want to play.”
That’s true, but even assuming you’ve got serviceable equipment (for a while I probably went through cheap cricket sets faster than I outgrew my shoe size – the most common problem was the glue holding the bat together) you cannot just up and play cricket whenever you feel like it. When I was a kid out in the countryside during the summer holidays, one of my constant frustrations was trying to coax the other kids out away from their computers and consoles to come and play cricket. Of course you don’t necessarily need twenty odd other people, but my experience was that we needed a bare minimum of four or five of us to make it worthwhile; batsman, bowler, wicket-keeper and one or two fielders. Another problem would often be that nobody wanted to field, or that only one of us had any competence at bowling. So in adding that to your consideration – I really think you’d have to concede the point about football’s uniquely low ratio of expense/contingency to skill acquisition and enjoyment. 😉
“I can’t bear to watch football, although I have been known to enjoy playing.”
Doesn’t it depend what sort of football you’re watching? For the neutral, Ipswich Town beating QPR 2-1 in an ordinary league game isn’t going to be anywhere near as exciting as say a 4-3 score in a Champions League quarter-final between Manchester United and Real Madrid or the legendary 4-4 playoff final at the old Wembley between Sunderland and Charlton. And then on top of that there’s the difference between watching on TV and actually being at the game and then the further difference between being at a game post-Taylor report shift to all-seater stadia and being at a game prior to that with terracing – as evidenced in this entertaining thread about a match at Anfield some thirty years ago.
Football with just a ball isn’t really football though. The rules of Association Football mandate a proper sized goal, a proper sized pitch, a properly trained referee, and so on. So why exactly can’t you play rugby with just a ball or cricket with just a bat and ball?
‘Playing with a football’ is not ‘playing football’ anymore than batting at the cages is cricket. Which isn’t to say it’s not important in learning the skills of the game.
You could alway play to beach cricket rules, you don’t need all those fielders when a passing yellow labrador has stolen the ball.
I am still not sure that “It is easier to find a few people to play a social game of soccer than it is to find a social game of cricket” says that much about the game other than that it is more popular where you are. Try this in Calcutta, and I am sure the opposite is true.
In Australia, particularly in New South Wales or Queensland, but in the whole country, people looking for a social game of something who only have a ball and want a game with relatively simple rules are more likely to play what is called “touch football” or simply “touch” than soccer. This is basically a non-contact form of rugby league, and to play you need a field (or a beach) and a ball, and that is about it. It’s very enjoyable to play, too, at least it is as long as you are fit, because it involves a lot of sprinting. Games evolve into simpler social versions of themselves, and once again this is not unique to soccer.