In his introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer engages in an uncharacteristically tender retrospective of the manner in which he originally wrote the book. Looking back at his twenty-four year-old self through the uncompromising mists of time, Mailer highlights the frailties that were present in his early writing and discusses both the strengths and weaknesses of what was his first major work.
Tellingly, Mailer admits to the somewhat over-written nature of the novel being of little concern to him. In his mind it was more important for the book to have ‘vigour’, to be daringly naïve and unceasingly engaging of its readership. Sure, there were imperfections, but to Mailer the book represented ‘what [he] learned about compassion’ and the raw pleasure of unabashed optimism.
When we indulge in some reflection on the history of football—particularly that of the first sixty years of the twentieth century—we are regularly overcome with a similarly cavalier sense of nostalgia. Though the majority of us were not alive to see it, the thought of crowds of flat-capped men watching heavy-footed players dressed in calf-length shorts and billowing shirts, their dye running off into the mud, often fills us with an indefinable yearning for the past. Granted, the game may have been less technical (more naïve) in those days, but therein lays Mailer’s joy of unconfined enthusiasm. We tell ourselves that that was a simpler time, a time when football was ‘pure’ and ‘unpolluted’ by the social and financial forces of modernity. But what exactly is this ‘modernity’ that we can be so hostile towards, and what impacts has it had on our game as it has evolved into a wholly globalised product for an extreme form of mass consumption?
The problem with modernity is that it is can be an awfully difficult concept to tie down into a single, digestible definition. Viewed through a purely sociological lens, the modern is of course what has come to be recognised as the post-Enlightenment age, the socio-economic structures and trends prevalent within the industrialised world. Conversely, political modernity dawned with the rise of the French and American republics in the middle of the eighteenth century and has come to form the ideological basis for what could very loosely be termed the ‘age of liberal democracy’. Artistic modernity, however, draws a far clearer dichotomy between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, emphasising the necessity of change and constant innovation. It is this artistic view of ‘the modern’ that I believe can be applied, at least in part, to some of the shifts we have witnessed in the aggrandisement of football culture over the last few decades.
In his book Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, British sociologist Anthony Giddens identifies the key characteristic of modern social institutions as their inherent dynamism, their radical undercutting of traditional customs, and the global nature of their impacts. When we take a step back and assess to just how great an extent football has developed in terms of the internationalisation of its key institutions and the marketing of its ‘product’, it’s hard to argue against the game as having been heavily subjected to those very forces of artistic modernity—albeit having been dragged through the neoliberal economic model at the genesis of this change.
Football is emphatically the most highly globalised game on the face of the earth. Its stars are recognised everywhere from Germany to Japan, and you’re just as likely to be able to buy a Real Madrid jersey in the shopping centres of Seoul as you are in the Spanish capital itself. Just ten or fifteen years ago, however, this wasn’t necessarily the case. In the mid-nineties the Premier League, for example, was a division in relative isolation from the rest of world football; foreign players were thin on the ground and the majority of clubs didn’t sell merchandise on a national scale, let alone an international one.
Teams were, until relatively recently, still products of their communities rather than the glimmering figureheads of this crusade of sporting globalisation that we see today. In short, football did not even loosely conform to Giddens’ conditions for modernity until the time of, or just after, the 1994 World Cup. Of course, the game has been regularly played on an international level since the 1930s, but global impacts and ‘radical undercutting of traditional customs’ were not processes associated with the sport’s development for much of that time. Internationalisation was sparse, perhaps even non-existent, in its contemporary sense.
While the 1994 World Cup seemed to provide a watershed in terms of the amount of advertising in the game and the inter-continental movement of players, I would argue that the 2002 competition, hosted in Japan and South Korea, was the primary harbinger of football’s relationship with the forces of a particularly hyperactive brand of modernity.
A new frontier for football’s showpiece event, the space-age stadia and aggressive marketing of the 2002 tournament marked a ramping-up of the intensity of the relationship between football and the constant innovation of ‘the modern’. With the on-field drama set against the backdrop of the world’s most technologically advanced societies, one could almost physically witness football adapting itself to the age of instant communication and digital monopoly. Football’s journey from pastoral hobby to quasi-cultural symbol of the globalised age seemed to be complete.
No better was the conclusion of this transformation represented than in the shape of two of the players who took part in that tournament; David Beckham and Hidetoshi Nakata. I recently wrote a short piece on my own site on the subject of Nakata and how the former Japanese international midfielder can be said to have been the first footballer to have crossed an imagined divide and become a transcendent modern cultural icon. Indeed, the height of Nakata’s global fame—as was also the case with Beckham—can be traced to the aftermath of the 2002 World Cup, both players quickly becoming the instantly recognisable face of a horde of iconic brands.
Of course, the use of footballers to advertise a range of consumer products is nothing new; Gary Lineker has promoted crisps in an excruciating fashion for years, Ian Wright once humiliated himself over a plate of chicken, and George Best and Bobby Moore were once deployed to eulogise about products as wonderfully parochial as ‘Milk’ and ‘Pubs’ respectively. The superstardom of Beckham and Nakata, however, represented a seismic shift in the status of players within the global economy and their relevance to the narrative of ‘modernity’. The role of the footballer in marketing was no longer only as a novelty in the commercials of regional biscuit manufacturers; they were now the chiselled, stony-faced frontages of transnational corporations, significant bolts in the ever-strengthening framework of globalisation. If we are analysing this transformation using the work of Giddens as a reference point, then the idea that a radical undercutting of traditional customs—a hallmark of the onset of modernity—has taken place seems particularly apt to this situation.
Football’s apparently untroubled passage towards what is a rather generic form of materialist modernity has been lamented by many. Hugh McIlvanney, the great Scottish sports writer, wrote in worried tones during the 1994 World Cup, seemingly concerned by the march of commercialisation and compelled to remind his readers that “sport has less to do with expansionist dreams and commercial projections that with the celebration of the moment.” I wonder what he would have made of a couple of recent decisions taken by FIFA’s executive committee.
Indeed, the decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar surely marks yet another waypoint on the road to the wholesale generation of a full political and material form of contemporaneousness. While Sepp Blatter may insist that the decision was made in order to spread football to areas as yet unconquered, an extension of his solipsistic ‘legacy’, the vastness of the tax-free riches that will be available through the Gulf state’s petrodollars were undoubtedly at the heart of the conclusion reached by football’s murky governing body.
Of course, if there is one thing that has defined the modern era of interdependence it has been oil. Almost willfully forcing itself into the global political meta-narrative, football’s journey from amateur pastime to ubiquitous socio-economic institution, whether welcomed or not, is almost complete. That pastoral age of working-class heroes and what we may hazily reflect on as the game’s ‘traditional’ values of sportsmanship and community has been tortured—slowly and painfully—over the last fifteen to twenty years. It may still exist in pockets around the world, but it is forced to live a clandestine life, seemingly chased into hiding by FIFA’s aggrandisement of the commercial side of the sport.
However, like Francis Fukuyama, it would be all too easy to predict ‘the end of history’. The FIFA presidencies of Blatter and João Havelange before him have sent the game down the road of financial gain, but that is not to say that football is completely detached from its local and humanitarian roots. There are footballing projects engendering greater community cohesion and gradually healing deep social wounds around the world, initiatives which open a window on the game’s true identity. Football as an entity may have modernised to an extent almost beyond recognition, but that daring naïvety expressed by Mailer, that great pleasure taken in uncynical optimism, is not dead yet.
Christopher Mann is the editor of The Equaliser, a football blog dealing in subculture, nostalgia and occasional analysis. He can be found on Twitter here.
Read More: David Beckham, Globalization, Hidetoshi Nakata
by Christopher Mann · January 17, 2011
Holy heck.
Speechless.
I wish I could add something but…
“Of course, if there is one thing that has defined the modern era of interdependence it has been oil.”
Bloody brilliant, Chris.
A really well written piece, Chris. I think this links well with the piece that was written on twofootedtackle last week about football going through a punk renaissance.
I’d like to thank run of play for convincing me that there is space for elaborate ramblings and analysis of football in my PhD and giving me the conference to write a thousand words on Barcelona media assemblage sand the Ronaldo-image into my thesis. Cheers!
Thanks. This was excellent. If you have a high threshold for academic writing, you may be interested in Globalization and Football (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book229013). It’s an interesting analysis and summery of some of these specific issues.
@Brian *summary* that is.
@Brian Which is only appropriate, because it’s actually a very autumnal book.
“the aggrandisement of football culture”
…
…
Aggrandisement?!
That’s quite a mouthful. And a delicious word while you’re at it. Take the day off, sir.
@Marquis Escalier I apologize for the two separate paragraphs of ellipses my blog’s use of non-tiny words made your brain experience, or something.
An interesting article but I’m far from convinced that modernity equates to commercialisation. Some of the more relentlessly modernist movements of the early 20th C, for example, took quite an explicit anti-capitalist/consumerist line. The danger with associating modernism exclusively with ‘marketing a product’ is that we risk assuming that the latter is inevitable or somehow progressive – at which point it becomes timely to namecheck Fukuyama again – while indirectly condemning the likes of McIlvanney* as hopeless romantics.
*Who is incidentally still writing and almost certainly made his opinion of FIFA clear on the back page of the Sunday Times
By the way Brian, is that header image van Doesburg?
Very interesting — what I find curious is that it seems to me that the initial attraction of “the rest of the world” to the Premier League in the 90’s was the tribalism, the singing, the strong links between club and community – the idea of 3 generations of supporters, all of whom live withing 5 miles of the stadium going to matches together — all of these things that made/make english football attractive are going to disappear because as more people around the world “sign up,” the fewer people as a percentage of the supporters will be local. I’ve been a Man City supporter for nearly 20 years and have never been anywhere near Manchester, but because of the internet, I feel a lot closer to the club than ever (although finding mature supporters on the internet to discuss the club can be a challenge)… Ah, the heady days of having to go to the library to look at a 4 day old Telegraph to see how City did over the weekend…
No way, I’d just been on The Equaliser before reading this (they’re both next to each other in my favourites)! Brilliant stuff as always.
@Fast Eddie, I disagree. Anti-consumerism (by which I also assume you’re referring to anti-capitalism/globalisation) happens with each economic collapse, and there was a massive one in the 1920s/1930s. Economic history shows that each financial and economic crisis tends to bring about calls for protectionism, it’s not a case of what’s “modern” at the time. Ironically Marxism, one of those modernist movements of the early 20th century, believed that it was the inevitable, natural progression from capitalism.
The defining economic characteristic of the last 20 years has been globalisation, and by its textbook definition football has adopted this characteristic. Whether the effects of it are good or bad are debatable (see Joseph Stiglitz), but I’m confusing myself now so I’m going to look at some cold, hard facts on Zonal Marking.
Perhaps the modern would not even be were it not for the consumerism and capitalization of it (no pun intended) that actually did take place. Would we label it an era of “modernism” or simply continue with the prior era’s?
You make it seem as if the game is suffering, saying how football is being tortured and dragged along this path by FIFA and other forces. With teams like Barcelona trailblazing new styles of majestic play never before seen, how can we say the game is declining? The beauty of the Barcelona/Spanish game surely cannot represent a tortured sport, yet a revolutionized and enlightened one. How do we know a game is being tortured? What is being tortured are the fans. Although the fans play a major role in the whole “experience”, the “game” has nothing to do with fans.
I am also not clear on the mentioning of Nakata, although I admit I’ve yet to read your separate piece on the matter, Nakata was a household name for many asian football fans such as myself for many years before 2002. His use as a symbol, merely a way to make money, did nothing in deterring what he did on the pitch or what he meant to teams of opposing teams symbolizing the effect that all this hype surrounding football had on markets (which lets remember are fueled by people like yourself) but not on the game itself!
@ao Just to be clear, I didn’t say that the entire game was being “tortured”, I was trying to say that the ‘traditional’ British idea of football as a working-class game of sportsmanship and honour has been made increasingly obsolete (but is still not completely dead).
As for Nakata, I fully realise that he was famous before 2002, but he was not – from what I have seen and read – as internationally ubiquitous before that point. My argument has nothing to do with his abilities as a footballer, rather I am holding him up as one of the first examples of a player who blurred the boundaries of sports and international marketing. That’s all I was using him as reference for, a manifest hybrid of product and packaging.
So what we are yearning for is that “feeling”? Again, our feelings are unimportant when talking about football, what we must dwell on is the sport itself and how it is played, not how its presented to the world. I agree all this commercialization is not healthy, nor sustainable, but what is its effect on how the game is played, minus a few morally-off players, what is the relevance of it all when we see football played the way it is at the Camp Nou? There have been remarkably brilliant tacticians of the sport since the beginning , and regardless of how much money or popularity the sport attracts, which it was bound to attract, there will be those few that understand and orchestrate the game so seamlessly. I respect connections of football to social philosophies, but they just don’t strike a cord with me.
Stupendously brilliant piece of writing. This blog continues to surprise…
@ao With respect I think you may have missed the direction of the article.
What I wrote about isn’t meant to correlate with the game as it is played on the field at all, but with the pervading culture and marketisation in a wider cultural sphere. You may not want to recognise that and only focus on the physical game itself – which is fair enough – but I don’t think you can just disregard the changes that have shaped the organisational and material structures of football, however much you may want to.
The processes I describe haven’t had a significant effect on the way the game is played, I don’t attempt to claim that at any stage, but on the way it is organised and ‘sold’ I believe they have been hugely influential.
Tracing your line of thought of which many parts I agree with, it seems there are some things missing from my point of view. Particularly with regard to the World Cup 2022 decision. FIFA taking the road of modernity is a phenomenon from the dictates of the global economy and not merely Blatter sinking his teeth in the riches of the region. Who is to say that Blatter is not sincere in his advocacy for the expansion of football (the game in particular not the business). Though we can say that the commercial aspect that surrounds it is inevitable through this process, FIFA is not at fault. If we are to take on modernity the global capitalism/imperialism are principally to blame.
The 94 WC of the USA IS relevant in terms of upping the commercial value of the sport, but in true American expansionism, do you think the sport wouldn’t have had the same turning point without them hosting? I think the USA would one way or another have gotten their hands on a clear market that has a wide range of consumers. If FIFA had chosen England or USA for the 2018 and 2022 WC it’s cultural impact would’ve been redundant (assuming its impact in the USA would be measured commercially) and thus it’s globalization would’ve saturated itself. It needed Qatar for the money but it needs Qatar for the game.
FIFA is an instrument of imperialism? Or is FIFA a proponent of it? With all the corporations who coincide with football’s regulations and general commercial life I think it’s safe to say that if oil marks this point of global industry then it equates itself with football’s aggrandizement , regardless of how Blatter feels. Imperialism is to blame and I think it should be clearly stated, at least from here in the third world, FIFA is trying it’s best with the baggage globalization has forcibly put on it.
This was a great read my take on Qatar is here http://redcards.wordpress.com/
Hugely enjoyable as ever although I feel that modernity may have been ushered in for the 1974 World Cup rather than in Korea and Japan in 2002. The 66 and 70 events seem now to hail from a more distant, innocent age – the Bobby Moore bracelet incident notwithstanding. Color TV has a fair anount to do with that (although 1970 was in color of course). If we are talking purely in artistic terms, the Dutch total football certainly provided hallmarks of the “shock of the new”, not to mention some tenets of the playful formalism of their countryman Piet Mondriaan.
@Chris Well yes then, this is true, the existence and popularity of this very site testament to this change, fuel to the fire if you will. As following football becomes more and more transparent, exposed, and less isolated and specialized, it begins taking a singular shape, losing its pluralism, much like what many propose is and will happen to society and culture. (Also why FIFA will not be able to continue on a corrupt path). This in my opinion is the fate of any sport, as at the end of the day, the game is the same everywhere (not the experience, the game). What will remain, and save the diversity of football from turning into a product of globalization is the physical game itself, hence my recognition of it, and disregard to cultural changes surrounding it. Like I said, its great that we are conscious of this, but we must not also submit to it. As long as we continue seeing revolutionary styles of play, which we will, football will not be destroyed by globalization, and the culture will, as we like to say, be all right! My point being whichever lens you decide to look through, what it comes down to is the physical aspect of the sport, this is the elephant in the room, and is a stronger force than globalization and nonsense others choose to impose. Football is king.
@Chris
The processes I describe haven’t had a significant effect on the way the game is played, I don’t attempt to claim that at any stage…
But that’s a whole other interesting argument, isn’t it? There’s a case to be made that the modernization of the sport has had a huge influence on the way the game is played—i.e. now that the top teams are drawing from an essentially limitless global talent pool, are traditionally nation-specific styles of play being homogenized out of existence; is the rise of a superstar marketing system influencing the way players think about success (and thus on-pitch behavior, cf. increasingly camera-oriented goal celebrations), etc. Immensely complicated questions, but I’d say that it’s at least hard to separate “the game” neatly from the organizational and material structures you’re writing about—which gives the questions in your piece that much more urgency, of course.
A thoroughly enjoyable read.
Nike swoosh on the header image too. Subversive.
@Fast Eddie you are right. Look at Howard Brick’s Transcending Capitalism for antimarket alternative models of modernity and modernization
Bravo.