Blog 23 - The World Cup And The Five Levels Of Football
Updated: Jul 20
The World Cup, eh? But what is football, and our involvement?
Consider the game at Five Levels –
Level 1 – A social group wanting sporting fun
Teams normally start with something like a workplace, school, college or pub organising football for members to have some exercise and fun. The game is for them, they get a game from being in the group, not from being good at it. It has no great social meaning - just a game, you play it, then do other things with your life. A game doesn’t matter, by definition.
Level 2 – Playing football for itself
But teams change into things in themselves. With needing to get enough players, and wanting to win, players are recruited from outside the original social group. The team drifts away from it, often carrying the original name but now with no connection to it. It becomes purely a football team or club. And clubs are started just to play football. This is my favourite level of football – they train, everyone can play the game, they play as a team. Its ordinary folk doing something well, individually and collectively, just for self-expression and achievement.
Level 3 - The Bandwagon and Mass Identity Level
Football being an entertaining contest, people will watch and support good teams. They pay to watch and it becomes a professional operation. They will identify with the teams and talk like it means a lot. But they are just getting on a bandwagon - sharing the glory, and the hope and despair, of other people’s efforts; and feeling themselves of greater worth because of the team’s public significance.
They think they are a collective but have no real relationship with the players, the club – really an entertainment business - or with each other. They are just individual consumers, paying for entertainment.
I’m swimming against the global flow here, obviously…
And in fervently following the national teams, there is nothing between supporters outside that. They hate each other in club football – check England, Scotland, Italy, Spain and Argentina. And most don’t do anything towards their national football cultures, from which you get good national teams.
It’s really just individual band-waggoning. And the national identities are based just on all living in a piece of territory controlled by governments that most don’t think much of.
And why, anyway, should anyone care about how well some other people play football? There’s plenty to support fellow-citizens about that matter a lot more than how well they do at footie. Are fans all socialists, supporting good public services for each other? Trade unionists, supporting each other at work, in making a living? Some, but most, no.
People do bond positively over it, in a lightweight New Year’s Eve sort of way. Multi-nationally too. Maybe that’s a good thing. But how much does it carry over to real
public life and politics?
I say its all daft, but does that matter if people are enjoying themselves? I still do the fervent supporter thing, with one of the big teams, at matches. But it only has meaning for me as a game, not an identity.
It matters because people’s mental framework matters. Club game identities divide us amongst ourselves, viciously, swamping perceptions of common interests as workers and the need for unity as workers. The national identities stifle awareness even of the existence of classes of fellow-nationals, the respective business classes and their conservative representatives, who are hostile to the interests of the great majority. It unites workers with them and binds them to their military aggressions against the ordinary people and workers of other nations.
Better than this would be not hating each other over clubs, over rival cities and regions, but identifying with each other as citizens in a deeper sense than just support for footballers or other sportspeople. Admire and support how some play football or any other sport, but not with fervent identities based on nothing of any great meaning.
Level 4 – Organising The Game
For all the fervour, fans have almost no say in how the game is run. A newspaper columnist wrote furiously against the hydration (advert) breaks FIFA allowed at the World Cup. I agree. And there’s all the rest of FIFA’s shenanigans. But he spoke, as fans do, as if the game is ours. It isn’t, it belongs to FIFA, the FA’s and the business people who own the professional so-called clubs. It’s the same as in the rest of society, especially in the core relationships in the production of goods, services, wealth, incomes. Those who organise, the football administrators and the business classes, dominate; and the rest of us are mostly just atomised consumers and workers (unless unionised).
Level 5 – The Actual Game
Lastly, the game on the pitch. There’s been great play in this World Cup. But while officials have forensically examined, with stoppages for VAR, offences that are careless or reckless, and, with offside and contact between hand and ball, minute, they have allowed constant deliberate use of hands and arms on opponents – clearly barred by Law 12 – including thuggish assault. Players with the ball have to resist being man-handled so can’t move freely. It stifles positive play and aids defensive play. It restricts the flow of the game. Football has become Wrestleball. There’s so much of it, affecting key pieces of play like goals, that, while I take what enjoyment I can from, for example, some of the great play in the World Cup, I can’t take the results seriously. The FA’s instruct the officials to allow this manhandling to ‘let the game flow’, for fear of losing TV audiences. Because it’s an entertainment business, right?
But no need for much here about all that. Because it’s all just some people playing football! A great art form and entertainment, but not a vehicle for fervid identification, when we don’t identify like that as caring fellow-citizens or a class, where our real interests are settled.
See more in Why People Over-Do ‘Where They’re From’, Why People Over-Do Football Identities, and Groups With Real Meaning between pagers 202 and 228 in the full work.
Here is the Link - https://9945a8ca-5ec8-4cc3-90a4-2e676d906269.filesusr.com/ugd/e8d212_f7911e9cda934f0a8f8b96dcde950e61.pdf
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