Whither (Quitting Football – Part Two)

“German Football, this brute animal, deserved to be drowned in its own urine”

So wrote the French daily Libération in 1984. West Germany’s crime, if you could call it that, involved stitching together a series of tournaments marred by bickering off the pitch and an unpleasant combination of arrogance and malevolence on it, before finally getting their comeuppance in what amounted to a Euro-84 semi-final playoff against Spain.

For West Germany then, read Argentina in 1990, or the Netherlands in 2010: villains in the dramatic sense. As much as you might have hated these teams, it was hard to deny that they were good for the storylines that tournaments need in order to really capture the imagination as events. In a way, they were helpful: the presence of teams that provoke polarised reactions makes it easy to know whom to support.

It seems quaint by current standards; there are now teams and entire leagues cheerily signing themselves away in exchange for vast sums earned from the spoils of money laundering, fossil fuels and indentured servitude. Your goalkeeper has a dodgy moustache and a penchant for violence? Our chairman works directly for people who persecute, jail, and kill dissidents, journalists, and anyone else they feel are insufficiently grateful to be subjects under an absolute monarch.

Almost six years ago I asked this question: Is it possible – is it right, even – to keep following a sport, however much I love it, when it seems so determined to inflict damage on itself and the world around it? The fact that I no longer love it means that (in my case at least) the answer is no. I cannot remember a time when I was not obsessed by football, and as I have said before, the fact that such profound emotional connections are being discarded is significant. The questions of what happened to provoke this reaction, how it happened, and why it happened, are worth asking.

These ‘whats’, ‘hows’, and ‘whys’ of history enable us to answer the question ‘whence?’: to understand the past not as something abstract or dead, but as something that directed us, specifically, here. If you extend that interpretation you force yourself to ask another question: ‘whither?’ Where are we going with this? Because when I ask that question with regard to football, the answers are grim.

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Football might have been born in British public schools but once it broke out of that environment it was inseparable from industry, urbanisation, and capitalism. To simplify, football was mostly built around factory teams sponsored by owners, with workers, their families, and their neighbours on the pitch and in the stands. But just as the capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s is not the capitalism of today, the way football is linked to external power (economic, political, societal, or all of the above) has changed since the turn of the 20^th century, both qualitatively and quantitatively. How many of those who created or sponsored works teams in football’s early years did so to raise their profiles in order to make it harder for the powers that be to imprison them or seize their assets? How many did so to whitewash crimes committed by foreign governments? Even Real Madrid under the Franco regime were not simply a branch of the state as popular myth would have it, and while they became “the greatest embassy Spain ever had”, they were not specifically designed to be that embassy. Contrast this with the insurance value for oligarchs investing abroad, or the specific marketing/propaganda value of investment coming from state actors, where the intention is often clear from the outset.

But just as important as the qualitative difference between, say, Real Madrid in the 1950s and PSG in the 2010s, is the quantitative difference across football as a whole. Six years have passed since Jonathan Wilson described football as becoming “the entertainment wing of the commodities industry”, and this trend has only accelerated. Between starting and finishing his book “The Billionnaire’s Club”, James Montague was forced to restructure it, to reflect how entire sectors of the world economy had started pouring money into football. The use of football in the way Montague has described, its exploitation for personal enrichment, political protection, international reputation laundering, and so on, has never happened at such a scale. At the European apex of the sport, it could be argued that this is now the primary reason for football’s existence. The wilfulness with which associations, leagues, clubs, players, and fans have let themselves be exploited is not just baked into the cake. These days, it is the cake.

Consequently, in countries like Spain or England, football is now too important to fail, which exacerbates all manner of other sicknesses within it. Take the question of doping. There is enough evidence in the open to know that performance enhancing drugs were a problem in football throughout the second half of the 20^th century, and it would be naïve in the extreme to think that this is no longer an issue. Some journalists are trying to keep that story alive, and others refuse to write about certain players and teams, which might be the only valid response if the lawyers cannot let them print what they really think. But that story is not close enough to the surface to become part of the day to day conversation surrounding the game. So worthwhile questions, like whether pressing football is even possible without pharmacological assistance, rarely get posed by the media. The more money that flows into the game, and the more important football becomes as a result, the less likely these questions will ever be asked.

It once was the case that even if the sporting or anti-doping authorities were not given the funds or the tools to catch dopers, someone at a customs check eventually would. It happened, famously, in both tennis and cycling. But would such a find, even were it to happen, go so far now in football? La Liga (never mind football in general) is worth around 1.5% of Spain’s GDP. As one football journalist recently told me, governments are not going to simply allow you to start fucking around with billions of dollars in revenue because you, I, or some customs officer believes in clean sport. And so any doping questions will likely be buried, with potentially devastating consequences for players, their families, those who feel compelled to do the same via the principle of ‘use or lose’, and so on.

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Football’s expanding investment pool and increasing importance beyond the touchline can impact upon those who play the game in other ways. The rewards at the top of the game are now so great that having the right combination of talent, dedication, and luck can transform not just the lives of the players themselves, but whole communities. And this is not only the case for players from rural areas of developing countries supporting entire villages – look at the way Kylian Mbappé’s image has been used to humanise the people of Bondy and justify their existence. Previously it would have been clubs, large or small, that took on the burden of engendering, enhancing, and protecting pride in communities. That this now falls to individuals is not bad per se, but it is worrying given that the pressures these players are already subject to have resulted in an increasing prevalence of mental illness not only in many sports, including football, where those at the top are so far removed from society that they might as well be on another planet. The good fortune required for players to get to the top of the game, and the riches that await them there if they do, make it even harder to deal with any negative fallout because these athletes are acutely aware of the public’s inability to understand any distress they might feel.

Some clubs have started to understand this, but even for those that are helping players psychologically, the end goal is still to add value to the organisation, either on the pitch or off it. That potential value makes the horrors of what happened to Nii Lamptey (for example) less likely at one of the giants of the Champions League, but easily imaginable further down football’s food chain. That footballers are being treated like pieces of meat is not new, but as the commoditisation of footballers continues it takes on new forms that infect more and more of the game. It could be Mino Raiola moving his players every other year in search of a fast buck, or hedge funds buying shares in young South Americans in the hope they’ll be rewarded when Porto or Benfica eventually sell them to a club in the Premier League, or academies with barely any oversight, player protection, or educational aspirations, being set up all over the world either in the hope of finding a bankable superstar, or the certainty of finding dreams ripe for exploitation. The players entering the football pyramid might have enjoyed the game as youngsters, but it is hard to see how they can retain that sense of fun once they’ve been chewed up and spat out by the systems on which the game is built.

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The era of the superclubs has also eroded much of the joy that fans could derive from football. Leaving aside the geo-political aspects of the QSI buyout, in purely footballing terms, is there any way to enjoy watching PSG if playing brilliantly and winning every game convincingly is the absolute minimum requirement? PSG have surpassed their entire previous trophy haul in the 8 years since the QSI buyout, but such is the level of expectation that the truly notable Ligue 1 campaigns in that time are not those that PSG won, but the two they lost, in 2011 and 2016, to Montpellier and Monaco respectively.

It has become clear over the last 10 years that, while exceptional teams can and do win the Champions League, success is no longer dependent on innovation. As Jonathan Wilson has pointed out, “be rich enough for long enough and the Champions League will eventually turn up”. PSG’s current identity in the eyes of the world, due to their inability to perform in Europe, is that of a staggeringly wealthy punchline. But assuming Qatar continue to pump money into PSG, it is likely that they will eventually win the Champions League. When they do, will there be any enjoyment to it? At best, there will simply be relief that the ridicule and sense of inadequacy will pause for a few months before the next season starts, the first points are dropped, and the cycle starts again.

This, for me, is the most significant loss from football since the dawn of the superclubs. When I started writing this blog it was, among other things, in order to connect some of the new writing about the history of the game to the emotional content of what I saw on the field. But most of football’s emotional spectrum has been supressed, and all that remains seems to be rage and recrimination. Fans of the superclubs seem incapable of enjoying the triumphs of their teams, so keen are they to dismiss players, coaches, clubs, and entire leagues as being unworthy of even existing.

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It still occasionally astonishes me that football has turned itself into the villain, because there is so much it can contribute positively to the world, in ways so varied it is impossible to mention them all. Football starts conversations and connects people every single day, the world over. It is a remarkable window into the soul of cultures that no medium other than music can offer as succinctly. It still, in some places, retains the political power that politicians wish they could control, but realistically cannot. Football fans have played significant roles in protest movements throughout the Middle East and North Africa due to their experience in outwitting the police, all the while displaying a talent for sloganeering that major international advertising agencies would kill for.

At the top of the men’s game leading players are squabbling over status anxiety and aiming to win the Balon d’Or for themselves, but at the top of the women’s game the players are fighting for the right to play at all. Every time a women’s game is played, it is, at least to some extent, a subversive act (The Guardian, for instance, still has to premoderate all comments on women’s football articles because of the amount of abuse those articles get). The players at the eighth Women’s World Cup are trying to win the tournament for their own teams, but most if not all of them are deeply aware of how their struggle is also a collective movement in which they all participate, with the goal of showing other women and girls that they can, and should, have the right to be or do anything.

Finally, it must not be forgotten that football has the capacity to produce moments of real joy. Even Twitter, bastion of hate and division that it is, is responsible for one of my favourite memories (football or otherwise) of the last decade. During the 2014 World Cup, Algeria played South Korea, and for 45 minutes they played with the kind of verve and incisiveness that brings elation to the watching neutral, but something far, far greater to those with a deeper connection to what they were seeing, the kind of connection to the emotional content of the game that words barely have the power to convey.

“All I ever wanted was for you guys to see Algeria how I saw them. Wow, best 45 mins of my life.”

That is what football can be. But which direction is football moving in? People like to place the love of money at the root of all the evils in football, but I think that somewhat misses the heart of the issue. What football has is a problem with a very narrow concept of success – trophies, transfer fees, and the Champions League – that refuses to acknowledge (or is incapable of understanding) that which exists outside its orbit. There is a game worth defending, but it might not exist for much longer if no-one thinks to defend it, and more often than not, at the apex of the sport, I am disgusted by what I see.

Football is not just European, nor exclusively male, nor comprised only of superclubs, nor funded only by sovereign wealth funds, nor watched solely by people who have confused being supporters with being volunteer propagandists, nor defined only by the Champions League. But there is a monster that is all of those things astride football, dominating it, and rendering all of the good that football is capable of all but invisible. That monster deserves to be drowned in its own urine.