Here are two beliefs which seem to be widespread among intelligent soccer fans online.
1. That football is too much in the pocket of business interests whose treatment of the game as a commodity weakens its ties to local communities and takes it away from its traditional fans.
2. That racism and regional prejudice have no place in football and should be stamped out.
Most of the time, I think, these beliefs are seen as complementary: if you’re opposed to money controlling the game, if you want to return the game to the people, then you also believe that the people should be free to enjoy the game without being made victims of prejudice.
My question, which is innocent in the sense that I really want to hear answers from people who have thought more about these issues than I have, is whether there is actually some significant tension between these two beliefs.
Isn’t it the case, after all, that local communities, as compared to diffuse global fanbases, are far more likely to use the game to reinforce local identities, in a way that precisely lends itself to accentuating regional conflicts and racial differences?
Hasn’t the trend against racism in soccer largely coincided with, even been motivated by, the increasing corporatization of the game?
Wasn’t the “golden age” for the fans also the era in which the game lent itself most easily to mass prejudice and nationalist manipulation?
Is it possible that globalization, with its disruption of strong identifications between clubs and communities, is actually the best hope for defeating racism in football?
EDIT: It’s remiss of me not to point out that this post was to some extent prompted by the illuminating discussion on racism in Italian football that Martha began on The Offside last week, and that Roswitha and Vanda brilliantly continued elsewhere. Apologies to all for the oversight.
Read More: Football as War, Globalization
by Brian Phillips · January 23, 2008
I think it depends on the way you want things to change? Globalisation is the best way to get football to conform to a set of rules defined by the giant market, and how those rules negotiate with our own concepts of morality or justice, etc, may not always stay constant, now or in future. I do think that how we perceive racism, *and* anti-racism measures in England, which is a fully globalised football market, has been heavily influenced by its corporatization. So it has had some effect on racism in the English game; but I don’t think it’s been a trade-off that has particularly benefited society, and as we see time and again, has made a pretty cosmetic difference in some cases.
Perhaps the best we can hope for thanks to globalisation is some kind of percolation, both of awareness and resources, that allows people, in small groups, to go back to the grassroots and start impacting the game from the ground-up, in positive ways. Because that kind of folksy, personal involvement, flakey though it may seem to someone looking at the bigger picture, may just be the only way to make some kind of lasting impact that does not require some kind of Faustian deal, major or minor.
Wow, I should go to bed. *mumbles, gets coat*
I found this article from almost five years ago, it says plenty about the reasons why bloggers complain so much about money in the game
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,957727,00.html
As a complete coincidence this article dates back to the day issue 1 of the Onion bag was launched – 5 years on the arguments haven’t really changed.
I think one of the answers to your question could perhaps be summarised as the difference between patriotism and nationalism; that is to say, the difference between exalting the object of one’s own loyalty, which may inherently entail rivalry with others, but is not intrinsically aimed at denigrating them, and a form of devotion to one’s own cause which is predicated upon superiority vs the innate inferiority of others. Football support can be the former rather than the latter, that is to say patriotic rather than nationalist… (I refer here of course both to club sides and national ones)
Rather perhaps than globalization, we need a more sophisticated model of the interrelation of local identity with other, wider identities. If one boils the identity right down to the smallest level, it becomes a sustainable sporting identity without being a functional identity of any other kind, a kind of reductio ad absurdum which means that local communities & traditional fanbases have to establish the limits of the possibilities of their footballing loyalty. That’s a social and intellectual shift rather than one tending towards corporatization, I think.