Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that part of the Americans’ genius was their taming of the human pursuit of greatness. Their art was moderate, their religion egalitarian, and their guiding spirit was thoroughly anti-nobility. Their only stab at greatness was in the commercial world. “The Americans,” Tocqueville wrote, “put something heroic into their way of trading.” In all other spheres, 
they were that new human archetype: the bourgeois vanguard of a modern world yet unfolding. In other words, Americans lived in a world already “disenchanted.”
For years, humans lived in a world that was inextricably linked to an “enchanted” realm of meaning. Daily life was interwoven with the transcendent and eternal. In some cases, life was enchanted through reverence for ancestors, while in others community cultural or religious traditions filled the role. Rites and daily routines took shape via their relationship to these immaterial webs of meaning (See “beating the parish bounds” for an example). Participants in such traditions measured glory, greatness, and virtue by these enchanted standards. Was a leader demonstrating sufficient respect for the ancestors? The tradition itself? Were all members of the community behaving in accordance with laws from the divine? Were natural catastrophes proof that someone had deviated from the path of rectitude?
Tocqueville realized—in the 1830s—that the U.S. public sphere was comparatively earthbound. As the rest of the world was soon to discover, modernity wouldn’t link earthly behavior to some eternal chain of natural laws. Human connections to divine and transcendent things were going private: Americans remained devout, but their public life was disenchanted. We built our national institutions like a watch: a check here, a balance there, a little escape valve should things go awry, and a number of animating springs to keep things moving. Add the whole exceptionalism thing, the so-called Founding break from European traditions, the immigrant-fueled pluralist diversity, and “disenchantment” seems almost inevitable. With money to be made and a continent (and—often ignored—its inhabitants) to conquer, Americans simply weren’t interested in political transcendence. Just take a look at our Constitution! We’re about “domestic tranquility” and “common defence” and the “general welfare,” etc: material things.
In a certain sense, this is the fundamental wager at the heart of American life. We keep our public life segmented away from eternal questions. Those stay at home. And that’s how we get from the disenchanted world to soccer. Hyper-hyped beer commercials notwithstanding, we make the same wager with our athletic rivalries as with our politics. Sports are segmented away from eternal concerns—like ethnic identities or defining community causes—and this keeps them from getting too explosive.
Here’s an example: I grew up in a family with season tickets to the University of Michigan’s football games. Naturally, I learned to hate a certain band of villains and braggarts hailing from Columbus, Ohio. They stood between my childhood heroes and the Big Ten title. I loathed them as opponents, as a football team, and as a rival, but that was pretty much the whole of it. There was no deeper meaning to these games, no fundamental existential condition tied to the outcome. (Avenging the Michigan-Ohio War doesn’t really animate either side’s considerable enthusiasm.)
Compare that with another example, from a misty, murky Catalán night nearly a decade ago. FC Barcelona were in the midst of a terrible run (proof that this was truly mystical pre-history). They’ve just dropped another match and sit well back in the table behind hot-as-blazes Real Madrid. I, meanwhile, sit hunched over a table near the Plaça de Catalunya, with a stubborn-as-blazes friend from Boston. He’s arguing with a fellow culé about Barça’s troubles with their Castilian counterparts. My friend is suggesting that the Sox-Yankees rivalry is of greater import, of more fundamental drama, and of much (MUCH) greater size than el Clásico. I’m keeping my Estrella Damm close, and my opinions closer, as he gets worked up.
“After all!” he stammers, “After all—the Sox play the Yankees, what, over a dozen times a year? There’s a lot more money in that rivalry, no doubt, and it’s old, REALLY old—”
The other fellow cuts him off with a raise of the eyebrows and the slightest turn of his shoulders. Somewhere, from out of the dark, a gralla caressed the air, echoing down ageless Roman alleyways and down the length of the bar. “Tell me, then,” he grumbled, finishing his crematand standing up all at once, “How many wars have these cities—New York and Boston—fought against one another?”
He was halfway out the door and donning his barretina by the time he finished. End of discussion. Sit down, guiris, shut up.
Here’s the Tocquevillian point: in European club soccer, games are often (usually?) “enchanted.” They serve as alternative stagings for meanings and conflicts that transcend the action on the pitch. Simply put, the games stand in for other struggles. Take el Clásico : there is no segmenting it from traditions and identity and an indubitable mysticism. While it’s a prominent case, it’s hardly unique.
Heck, a few years before that, I’d found a Celtic-Rangers replay on TV, and casually decided to back Rangers. I didn’t have a particular reason, but I’d settled on them and was getting along just fine. Around halftime, my friend arrived and demanded that I give an account for myself. How could any Catholic (no matter how lapsed) pull for Rangers? Didn’t I know that my kind were unwelcome on that side of the Old Firm?
Forget that he was a (very) casual Episcopalian. Forget that neither of us followed the Scottish Premier League in the least. Forget that I’d come across the match while channel-surfing. Forget that we were watching in Brunswick, Maine. Forget the particulars of the situation—because that’s not how enchanted athletic contests work.
My friend knew that something more was at stake here, that there was a deeper meaning to this game than either of us could casually access. No, this game had ghosts and angels and demons in attendance, all of them watching from just beyond the contours of the match, all just barely out-of-sight. To those appropriately enmeshed in the tradition, they were every bit as real and present as the corporeal figures on the pitch. Partisans and traitors and heroes and villaisn and popes and kings stalked the sidelines—visible only to those sufficiently attuned to the sacred history driving the derby.
This was more than a game. It illuminated a sectarian divide that many thousands of human souls used to orient their lives. It provided them another episode in a conflict with hundreds of years of scorched-earth and bloody cobblestones. By aligning ourselves by our childhood faiths, my friend and I tried to partake (however minimally) in that next level of meaning.
Soccer’s enchanted world is well-populated. Witness the cheerful philo-Semitism of Ajax and Spurs fans, the identity politics behind the Milan Derby, the paramilitary nationalism of Red Star Belgrade’s supporters, or Athletic Bilbao’s “Basques-only” rule. There are meta-athletic narratives “enchanting” teams and their matches across Europe (and throughout the world). Their number is beyond chronicling. My own Catalán sympathies aside, it’s obvious that Barça are hardly the only ones who can fairly claim to be “more than a club.”
When you’re accustomed to the desiccated norms that govern (most) American athletic rivalries, this athletic enchantment is intoxicating. It justifies investing additional, non-entertainment energies into a match that might otherwise be just some men kicking a ball around a muddy field. Once admitted into the club’s enchanted meanings, you don’t just root for them because the stadium’s down the street; you back the cause in solidarity with other supporters. You belong to a community with a defined identity. You have a meaningful history. You have corresponding political and aesthetic and culinary and economic affiliations. Less ennobling—but just as necessary—you have enemies. They know your meaningful history, for it’s theirs as well. Your heroes are their villains, and vice versa. Nonetheless, once you’ve had a taste of club-as-proxy-for-existential-belonging (AND match-as-proxy-for-conflict), it’s hard to lower the stakes. It’s an exclusive club! Who doesn’t like to be part of something greater?
This is why I started with Tocqueville. Writing as modernity’s current was on the verge of overwhelming Europe, he worried that public life without such thick meanings would not satisfy humans. We modern humans will still yearn for enchantment, whether in our politics or no. Commercial heroism is hardly enough to fulfill a human’s search for deeper meaning.
It’s not hard to see how his worry maps onto the twentieth century. As modern politics become increasingly dominated by liberal individualism, some communities reacted—they tried to re-enchant the public sphere with transcendent meaning. Some hoped to fulfill world history. Others promised to restore the community’s former (often imaginary) mystical past. Still others promised newfound ethnic purity or national glory on the world stage. All left piles of bodies in their wake.
Beaten back by the force of arms or empirical collapse, these particular sorcerers lost sway, but the human search for collective meaning remains active. Can’t fight out sectarian warfare on the battlefield anymore? Put it on the (soccer) field! It’s the “moral equivalent of war,” or perhaps a secularized (or not too secularized) religion. It’s a way to keep up a tradition’s continuity in spite of political subjugation or institutional disenchantment. It’s a way, in short, to find an outlet for those human longings for earthly links to eternal, enchanted things.
So on one hand, soccer-as-proxy is healthy. It diverts ethnic conflicts and solidarity around community identities into a defanged realm. Athletics are trivial, leisurely activities, so the worst forms of hooliganism still fall well short of full-scale ethnic conflict. If we can minimize conflict in this way, so much the better.
On the other hand, perhaps Americans ought to jealously guard their disenchanted rivalries. Intoxicating as it may be to raise the athletic stakes, there’s much to recommend disenchanted sports. When the Seattle Sounders play the Portland Timbers, there’s no fundamental existential (or ethnic) divide driving antipathy between the two teams or their supporters. When the New York Yankees play the Tampa Bay Rays, no one brings up 1865, and that’s probably for the best.
It’s not that American rivalries don’t matter. Far from it. It’s just that our teams’ wins are athletic successes, not existential triumphs over historic enemies. Our losses don’t represent threats to who we fundamentally understand ourselves to be. They’re just losses. They’re limited to the sphere of entertainment and athletic experience. When the Minnesota Twins beat up on my Detroit Tigers (as usual) this doesn’t call into question my place in the universe.
Tocqueville understood this, which is why his admiration of Americans’ sensible moderation only grew over the years. He returned to France expecting to see Europe moving steadily towards the disenchanted, egalitarian, individualist world he’d seen in the United States. To his dismay, horror, and eventual despair, the French seemed incapable of finding a stable home in modernity. They were caught in “a struggle to the death” between the old and new. Each new republic was riven by regional and class conflict. Each set of disenchanted institutions eventually collapsed under the weight of old, high-stakes rivalries. He died unsure that the French would ever make the transition to modernity.
So look, Americans—if you find the most enchanted elements of your club’s tradition alluring, by all means develop a fake Geordie accent. Learn to speak Cymraeg or Catalán or Cockney Rhyming Slang. Whatever floats your boat. But recognize what it is that you’re doing. You’re making a choice, and it’s not the only option, nor is it necessarily the most liberal one available. You’re making an anti-modern choice, because, not to put too fine a point on it, turning down this temptation is what the modern world is all about.
Conor Williams is writing a dissertation on the structure of 20th century political arguments. He periodically avoids it by blogging at http://www.conorpwilliams.com.
Read More: American Notes
by Conor Williams · July 27, 2011
“How many wars have these cities—New York and Boston—fought against one another?”
How many between Madrid and Barcelona?
I believe that somebody with “barretina” has told you a nice fantasy, all the “possible wars” between madrid an barcelona were in fact wars between spanish Kings and France (kindom or republic).
But, it is true, this “myth” about wars gibe to spanish “clasico” a different view. But it is only opinions, not real history. Madrid is a imaginary enemy for a lot of catalan people.
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_de_Catalu%C3%B1a
“gibe” [facepalm]
I sorry, please change it
This is brilliant. Thank you.
I’ve also always felt that the nature of Baseball as “the American pastime” tempers a lot of the irrationality which occurs in Soccer. A great baseball team still loses 60 games a year. We can’t get hung up on an individual game the same way as with other sports.
@Francisco Plenty of the conflicts between Castilla and Catalunya were linked to broader international disputes, that’s true. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t still on opposing sides, or that the rancor between Barcelona and Madrid isn’t real. Take a gander at the signs in the stands during the next clásico.
Bravo
Great article, and as a fellow U of M fan growing up, it is sad but true that even at the college level, which has more of the magic than the professional level in the US, there is not the sort of enchantment (with its accompanying good and bad sides) that lives in soccer. It’s an interesting angle from which to contrast the European and American responses to immigration, transmission of values to new groups and whether that’s even possible, let alone desireable, and how that impacts on European perceptions of the “globalization” of their sport. As more and more classicos involve audiences who celebrate the mythology but are de-linked from the underlying communal history, will the enchantment drain out of them, too? For those of us outsiders who love such match-ups because of their resonance with communal histories, how can we manage the degree of our appropriation of what is there in order to respect the continuity with the local identities that are there?
Great piece, and the framework of enchantment is very useful in illuminating the different cultures of fandom. The last paragraph leaves me a little unsatisfied though – I think “liberal” and “modern” are too easily equated. And does modernity really operate on the level of choice (or refusal)? If so, what could be more “modern” than the disenchanted consumption of someone else’s enchanted identity?
@Zak I tried to write about that very question back in the early days of the site.
Very nice writing…. I wonder if this modern approach to sports, and life in the States, is starting to change. Tocqueville might be a little dismayed to see the violence and anger that has started to crop up in American politics and sports. This “us against them” mentality along with a feeling of immovable beliefs coupled with a real anger seems to dominate our current political atmosphere. I wonder if this would be viewed as a regression by your Frenchman. Is sports headed in the same direction where we may have more incidents like the one at Dodgers Stadium? Ironic that as sports becomes more of an entertainment product in the US it also becomes more zealous.
I think that American sports rivalries can, in some ways, reach that “existential triumph over historic enemies” level. Take the Red Sox and Yankees as an example; While it’s true that Boston and New York have never fought a war against each other, the provincialism and history of the two cities do play a major factor as to why their fans hate each other so much. Same thing for the “public school vs. snotty, rich private school” divide that marks the UNC-Duke basketball rivalry. These factors may seem small and frivolous when compared to Barcelona-Madrid or Celtic-Rangers, but that doesn’t mean they should be dismissed outright.
Thank you, this was an interesting article, even though I feel the identification of “liberal” and “modern” in the last paragraph is a little facile.
As someone who grew up a soccer fan outside America, and came late to American sports, I’ve managed to bring a lot of my soccer fan habits to watching American football, which to me includes passionate hatred of the rival team and all that it stands for. This article made me wonder if perhaps my hatred of the New England Patriots was perhaps a little excessive by American standards.
I think perhaps American football, due to its short season and incredibly high pressure games, where any game could end a team’s season, or an individual player’s career, is more amenable to a soccer-like fanaticism than other US sports. There’s simply more at stake in every game, and every moment, than there is in baseball.
I also think certain American football rivalries – Bears-Packers comes first to mind – come close to the “enchantment” of, say, Man Utd-Liverpool (neither of which have ever fought a war against each other – which is in any case a specious qualification for enchantment). Bears-Packers games always seem to be played wreathed in a mist of history, with the ghosts of Lombardi and Halas looking on.
@Francisco I believe someone with “montera” has told you a nice fantasy. Armies commanded from Madrid (since Madrid has been the seat of Spanish king/Government) have fought Barcelona regularly along the last 400 years. As Manuel Azaña said “es ley de la Historia de España la necesidad de bombardear Barcelona cada cincuenta años”.
Since today we do not have (the option to have) an army, it is we great pleasure that we shell 5-6 goals each year.
This is a pretty brilliant piece – and it’s not often I use that term – despite the fact that I must agree with some of the previous comments in stating that the conclusion didn’t resonate with me as much as the rest. As a United fan – that’s Manchester United to you, and there isn’t any other – from India, I’ve had to ignore a lot of criticism from fans of other clubs for being a ‘gloryhunter’, though they themselves are naturally fans of Arsenal, Liverpool, Bayern Munich, Inter, Milan, Real, Barca, or more recently City, Chelsea etc. It’s obvious to me that what you term a choice – the choice to immerse yourself in your club’s traditions, history, heroes, values etc and thereby evolve from supporter to enthusiast to die-hard fanatic – is not a conscious choice just for Americans but for the whole world, excepting those not separated from these clubs by more than one degree of separation (which could be geography, blood relations etc etc). I agree with you so far. Where I differ, however, is in stating that Americans are already incredibly invested in the values of their teams – but unfortunately those teams shall never be football teams. The fact of the matter is that the average American sports enthusiast is bombarded with stimuli from too many native sources – Pro/college American football, basketball, baseball being the most obvious – that the team they choose to give themselves to wholly often comes from one of these sports. (I recognize that this is not often a choice per se because of the geographical proximity to the arenas and homes of these teams, of course). What I’m trying to get at is that Americans are already full-time consumers of American sport, that their identities are already inextricably linked with some American team – and almost definitely not one from the MLS, ha ha – or perhaps fractured and linked with several teams in different sports, as identities are wont to have happen to them in this Baudrillard-esque world. You probably know more about American sport than me, so I won’t claim that you underestimated the enchantment associated with this fandom. What I will say is that most American sports fans have already had their choices made for them – they will simply never have the time to make a choice.
*And what I meant by ‘choices’ in the last sentence was the choice you touched upon in your last paragraph, of course – choosing whether to cross that line in one’s degree of immersion in fandom.
Great read. Using Tocqueville is clever and you tie it in very well. I’m going to bring something up that you allude to in the article, but may be worth further consideration.
I will use England as an example, and you touch on this when you describe Spurs as a “philo-semitic” club. Most clubs were started from the ground up by the community, that is, they were decentralized creations. They symbolized the history and people of the locality. They expressed an identity.
Now, it is true that early American sports teams like the Cincinnati Reds started in a similar way. But at some point American sports diverged from this model. Today, American teams are hierarchical. Someone wants to put a team in City X and the people there will have to then shape it. Compare the Yankees-Mets rivalry to that of the time when the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants were all in NYC.
Just something to think over. There is obviously room to pick apart what I’ve said, but I’d argue that it is a key difference.
@Dave That’s a great point, very meta. Only insofar as we sanctify the individual agency of modern liberalism is it possible for us to choose to reenchant our sporting world. I’m not sure that this assuages my concern, though, since part of that choice is losing any sense of alternatives. If you choose to become a member of Ultra Sur or Boixos Nois, you’re narrowing your view of your club (and its rivals) to a single, univocal point of view. You’re choosing, in other words, to close your mind off to all other options. You’re becoming fiercely intolerant, even if it’s a choice. I think—though I might be wrong—that this plays out the same whether a fan is born into it or chooses it later.
@Matthew @Varun @Ronit @Nick Lot to think about.
1) U.S. sports are lower-stakes because there are more games (except in the case of football). This might be true, but I doubt it. As I wrote above, I don’t think that Americans care less about their teams; they just section off their enthusiasm to entertainment (not politics, religion, etc). Consider Ronit’s Chicago-Green Bay example. There is a mystical history involved, but the figures are strictly participants in the athletics. Halas and Lombardi were involved in past games, not past religious disputes or military battles. Celtic and Rangers fans don’t just call on old players and coaches—they call on saints and kings and popes and God Himself.
2) The geography question is a good one. Perhaps the relative newness of American places has something to do with our wager as sports fans? Perhaps the transient nature of certain franchises affects this? The answer’s probably “yes” in both cases, though I’m not sure this affects all American sporting rivalries. Michigan-Ohio State or Red Sox-Yankees are as old as most Old Continent derbies.
My point is that while @Matthew’s version of the genesis of some U.S. sports clubs is probably right, we still don’t see reenchantment amongst the fans of older, fiercely local U.S. clubs. Why? I think (tentatively) that it has something to do with American pluralism. Local identity in the States isn’t nearly as fixed or partisan as it has been for a long time in Europe. Without stable cultural or political or religious differences between geographic locales, it’s really difficult to get a heightened rivalry going. Without reliable differences of that sort, American sports (in general) can’t come to mean more than on-field activity.
One further clarification: I admire and prefer the American wager, if forced to choose. I think that it’s great that Chicago and New York don’t use Bulls-Knicks games as referenda on theological questions. I’m not exactly cheered by incipient enchantment movements in the MLS.
Thanks again for the comments!
@Conor All very well, but you fail to account for our oldest and greatest rivalry: Yale v Harvard, epitomized by The Game, and accounted for in every aspect of their long histories, an arrogant indifference versus a cordial loathing, mere truth versus truth and light, the noise and vulgarity of money versus the quality of the very best our nation has to offer, the fiercest rivalry in perpetuity. I’m from New Haven, and I’m a TOON supporter. Howayyy the Lads!
As a Rangers fan, I have to say it is upsetting to see the ‘communal history’ that exists between my team and Celtic glorified in this manner. Recalling memories from my early childhood, I can distinctly remember scarfs, flags, pin badges and other ‘memorabilia’ being sold outside our stadium that would directly relate to Rangers’ protestant and Orange Order history. I was confused as to why 1690 was such a featured date and why William III of Orange were relevant, when it was centuries ago. Even though I was only 10 years old or so, I still thought of this as pathetic and irrelevant.
Please do not envy the history of Rangers and Celtic, for it has been the catalyst of numerous deaths, injuries, incidents relating to alcohol and even domestic abuse. (Figures of this would shamefully leap on the weekend of the Old Firm match in Glasgow due to intoxication and disorder). It is inextricably linked with the Troubles and national tension in Ireland and I see no reason why anyone would want to envy what is in these parts seen as a very dark time.
Things, however, have improved greatly in recent years and there have been clampdowns on sectarianism in all forms, e.g virtually all of Rangers’ catalogue of ‘hate songs’ (featuring sing-a-long classic lines like ‘we’re up to our knees in Fenian blood’, ‘The famine is over, now go home’ and ‘Fuck the Pope and the I.R.A’) are no longer sung. This is unfortunately still a work in progress and you will still find evidence of this on match day. However, expect to be vilified and ousted by your own fans to the police if you were to engage in this explicit dialogue at a current match.
There is a generation of my age now, 24, who do not adhere to this wallowing in the past of religious hatred, and loathe Celtic solely because they are the antithesis to our glorious team, Rangers! In fact, it is the European and Non-E.U players who I feel sorry for, because they are unwittingly being dragged into a narrative that the foreign sports media constantly perpetuate, for it is seemingly the sole commercial proposition of Scottish sport. Do audiences abroad watch the Old Firm match because it is the pinnacle of Scottish football and thus deserving of observation? Or is it because your national broadcaster wherever you are in the world is subconsciously spurring on this prolonging of the tragic narrative of centuries of bile, religious hatred that is discernibly vacant from 22 players of mixed nationalities?
Finally, I should admit I envy sports rivalry in the U.S.A. I have witnessed local and school matches (American Football) where thousands attend in jest, proudly wear their scarves, enjoying a beer and genuinely contributing to a positive atmosphere. You should congratulate yourselves on the absence of sectarian and racial undertones to your sporting occasions, I for one would rather I didn’t have to teach my children about the borderline jingoistic nonsense that was weaved itself throughout the tapestry of the history of my beloved Rangers.
@Ali “Glorifying” was not my intent (See the last paragraph). The piece is about how European athletic enchantment is tempting, but ultimately dangerous, just as you write.
@Brian Phillips Thanks for that blast from the past. Is it just me, or does George Trow’s ghost brood in the background of that post?
My mind immediately went to Le Club de Hockey Canadien, which does express an ethnic identity (enforced by religion in the short “The Hockey Sweater” (http://www.nfb.ca/film/sweater/)), and which is often an unpopular destination for free agents for the very reason that the stakes are too high with the fans.
I don’t 100% agree with the idea that American sport doesn’t carry additional subtexts because of some attitude of national pragmatism. I go into this over at my blog at http://www.rodriguezandgrandersonaredead.com/2011/07/identity-and-american-sport-like.html and I’m interested to see what you think.
Brilliant article, horrible conclusion.
I can’t comment on American ‘soccer’ but the distinction between the bold commercial heroism of the US and the burden of history weighing down on European shoulders is a very likely explanation for attitudes towards sports in general either side of the Atlantic.
The reason I hate the conclusion (no offence) is that, for me, every step the world takes down the road of ‘rational’ individualism is a step towards what looks like a horrible, dark abyss.
The great victory of capitalism has been its ability to utterly segregate people by falsely empowering them. The old European awareness of history, of difference, of individual greatness and collective freedom (rather than vice-versa) has been overcome by the (mostly) American ideal of the individual as the absolute.
In short, whilst liberal democracies have (rightly) stamped out older social problems like sexism, racism etc (problems inherently linked to the Old Order), neo-liberalism has us so fixated on these issues that we wilfully ignore the REAL loss of liberty going on every day. We’re achieving our freedom by voting in governments who prattle about ‘individual choice’ whilst outsourcing the control of our lives to multinational corporations whose naked self interest breaks our backs. They call it ‘the ingenuity of the market’.
Every day we’re fed the repetitive idea that everything is wonderful because a woman can be the bread-winner in a household, and she can use her sexuality to her advantage; or that a black man can be a president; or that a work of art need not be ‘pretentious’, it need only have mass appeal.
Great. The woman earning her family’s bread has also become so sexualised as to numb us to any transcendent feelings such as love, attachment, or -cough-, romance; a black man can be a president, sure, but then so can anyone who has been born into the right economic and social conditions, as opposed to the mass poverty which now goes beyond races or nations; and yes, art is now much more democratic – you don’t have to go to art school or have a patron to be published and admired. The trouble is, it’s become shit.
Any resistance to this onslaught of mediocrity is branded as ‘extremist’. I’m not talking necessarily about religious fundamentalists here – the ideas those people have come from a misguided starting point. But the ease with which somebody might be accused of ignorance or even racism, sexism or homophobia for imposing any sort of hierarchy on cultural or social systems is astonishing in this modern world. In our rush to create and embrace every subculture under the sun, we throw away all that was once good about our own. Indeed, this very sentence can make somebody who is essentially an economic socialist sound like a cultural fascist in today’s world. I still can’t quite understand how this has happened.
Sadly, football itself is just one more distration from all this. Maybe us Europeans are the more stupid for investing so much emotion into it. But then, at least we believe in ‘something’. To me, the alternative – a world where the individual is cut off so much from history, tradition, community or culture that the only way in which it can express itself is to consume garbage – is much, much worse. I’ll keep crying when my team loses, thanks.
Rant over
Amazing peice and really good comment discussion. I prefer europe btw. 0
I am reminded of a passage in “The Miracle of Castel di Sangro,” in which the American narrator is trying to understand the depths of meaning, passion and history that underlie Italian fans relationships to their teams. He tries to put it into context of American sport and what makes for a satisfying sports experience, and finally asks an Italian acquaintance (I’m paraphrasing from memory here): “But there are so many ties in soccer. There’s no clear winner. Where’s the entertainment value in that?” His European interlocutor replies: “What makes you think that football is about entertainment?”
@Conor I’ve banged on this drum a few times before, but it seems apt to give it one more whomp.
When comparing American sports with those of any other nation, I think it’s important to make mention of franchising. It’s hard to get worked up in that multi-generational-community-identity kind of way when the league relocates a team every two or three years on average.
Fundamentally, soccer in Europe came about organically, bottom-up. Sports here are a top-down enterprise, a product of that cold financial calculus you alluded to as unique to our breed.
Americans have a more casual relationship with their sports clubs for the same reason a foster child doesn’t dare grow too close to any one family. If we become attached, if our club is a proxy to our identity, who are we when our team leaves? Why risk the heartache when the letdown is inevitable?
That, I think, is why we’re so able to compartmentalize our sports consumption. That’s also why fans of the Packers can support their club with such abandon.
@Brian Davis You’re probably right about this…I’ve addressed a similar response in an earlier comment of mine (responding to @Matthew). In sum: yeah, fans of the OKC Thunder or the St. Louis Rams or the Florida Marlins have an obvious geographical disconnect that interferes with/prevents development of some thick cultural identification. No disagreement there. I’d quibble only with your last point. Packers fans love the hell out of their team, but it’s not a cultural/historical/political love that transcends sport in any oppositional way. Lombardi is a deity in their cult, but he’s a participant in the athletic rivalry. Compare that with the non-athletic figures that shadow some of the aforementioned European clubs: King Billy/Francisco Franco/a number of Popes/Opus Dei/etc.
Anyway, this is the point of the essay, right? It’s not to say that US fans don’t care, but that their devotion is (almost always) driven by entertainment, not existential concerns that transcend the on-pitch activity.
@Conor Firstly, beautiful article! Loved it except the end which I strongly disagree with. I think your assumptions about existential implications of matches suffer as both victory and defeat occur often enough without change or threatening the fundamental self. Secondly, the issue of rivalry and inter-linked identity should be many times greater for international teams but I doubt it is.
As has been noted, Clubs were built from ground up and thus a city feels connected with its club but what got lost in the narrative is the fact that the identity of a club linked with the city is not merely defined by it’s rival and the history between them, rather by what the fan’s identify themselves and their club as an extension and expression of themselves. A place where you celebrate who you are as a community. Bringing it down merely to rivalries is grossly myopic.
Perhaps Barcelona are the most stark example, I need not tell you how once you could only be catalan inside the stadium and celebrate your culture there, how Cruyff in naming his son Jordi broke the “no-catalan-names” policy etc. and thus Barcelona are so strongly linked with the catalan identity. It was the only place it lived, rather survived for so long. And it is because of that Barcelona are associated with everything else about catalan culture from Gaudi to pa amb tomaquet.
In regards with your philosophical conclusion -It’s your opinion hence not necessarily correct, not the best idea to tell people to make decisions based on what you believe- I think Anon up there makes a suitable argument which I agree with wholeheartedly.
Great article. I like the idea of trying to explain to non-soccer fans the social/political implications of soccer matches abroad.
I can think of one US sports rivalry that has a much deeper social context derived from fighting each other is the Missouri/Kansas Border War (aptly named). This 121 year football rivalry (104 basketball) stems from cross border raids during the Civil War between Missouri and Kansas paramilitary forces (Missouri Bushwhackers and the fittingly named Kansas Jayhawks respectively). Not only were several hundred people of each state killed during this period know as Bleeding Kansas, the city of Lawrence where KU is located was burned to the ground in 1863 by Missouri bushwhackers.
well that was a damn fine read