Football’s phoney war

The Guardian, 6 June 2002

It may be hard to remember amid the World Cup clamour, but the beauty of football, like other games, lies in its sublime pointlessness. It is an end in itself with no higher purpose. The paradox is that precisely because it is utterly trivial, sport becomes saturated with meanings.

Tomorrow’s encounter between Argentina and England is so riddled with subtexts it could keep an army of deconstructionists busy for years. Never mind the long epoch of informal English colonial rule, never mind the blood spilled 20 years ago in the south Atlantic, there’s Maradona’s “hand of God” goal in 1986 and the Beckham-Simeone pantomime in 1998. Most immediately, for England fans, Argentina are the hurdle that must be climbed if England are to survive in the cup.

In Argentina, the context is starkly different. Economic catastrophe has immiserated millions and left Argentine football reeling. Clubs face bankruptcy, players’ wages are unpaid and social tension has spilled over into stadium violence. While the England players have been promised the highest win bonus of any team in the tournament, their Argentine opponents have been told that there is no money in the kitty for bonuses, even if they take home the cup.

In times of national crisis, national performance on the global sporting stage bristles with connotations. But just what this super-charged spectacle will amount to in the end is hard to say. Would an Argentine victory reinforce the advocates of IMF-rule or their opponents? And will it have more impact on the popular mood than a reopening of the banks?

Ever since Baron de Coubertin launched the Olympic movement, the grand claim for international sport is that it promotes harmony among nations; for nearly as long the reality has been otherwise. In the era of globalisation – a process that has inflated the commercial value and cultural presence of sport many times over – the old mission has been cast in a new light. Sport has become a televised spectacle of competing national identities, underwritten by multinational corporations.

W hen Yahoo joined Fifa’s exclusive club of “official partners” in the great World Cup venture, the tie-up was hailed as a natural one – because both football and the internet cross national barriers with ease. But the same companies that solemnly preach the virtues of a borderless global market have been investing substantial sums in egging on a wide variety of national standard-bearers. Adidas covers its bets by sponsoring France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, China and Argentina. Coca-Cola is backing England and Argentina.

Many of the familiar logos with which the World Cup telethon is festooned belong to US-based corporations. However, there are only a few high-profile global events in which sportspersons representing the US compete against sportspersons representing other nations – and even fewer where the US has a serious chance of winning. Under the right circumstances, these events become infused with aggressive nationalism. After September 11, the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City were transformed into a celebration of a nation united in the “war on terror”. In the parade of nations, the US contingent was led by the tattered stars and stripes rescued from the World Trade Centre. The small Iranian contingent was referred to by the host broadcaster, NBC, as part of the “axis of evil”.

Most significantly, sponsors and advertisers – including many of the companies currently backing the World Cup – vied with each other to pump up the patriotic volume. They did so because it was the best way to make the most out of their investment in the telecast and the event. That’s an imperative that crosses national borders, but it is also one that exploits those borders, and sometimes turns them into minefields.

Despite the hype, the England-Argentina football rivalry is by no means the most fraught in world sport. That honour belongs to another game, cricket, and to India and Pakistan. Cricket relations have often been interrupted by war and diplomatic impasse. When they have managed to play against each other, their encounters have attracted huge public interest and frequent controversy. For many years, the demand to cut cricket ties with Pakistan was the rallying cry of the most extreme elements on the Hindu right; following the Kargil conflict of 1999, and initially at the prompting of one of Indian cricket’s commercial sponsors, it became government policy – long before the present military stand-off.

The last time the national teams met on the cricket field was two years ago in Australia. In the days before the match, the clash was promoted incessantly on Star-ESPN, the Murdoch and Disney-owned satellite sports network, under the single word slogan “Qayamat!” -apocalypse – accompanied by explosive strobe-like flashes and a rumbling, distant thunder soundtrack. To adapt George Orwell’s definition of international sport, this cricket match was being advertised as “nuclear war minus the shooting”.

Such nationalist fires may seem to burn only in remote lands, but it should be remembered that tomorrow many millions of people with little interest in football will turn on their televisions to follow England’s fortunes in Sapporo. They will do so because a chorus of vested interests has drummed it into their heads that this football match is something of great moment to all those who consider themselves “English”.

Sports patriotism is often misleadingly described as “tribal”. In the age of globalisation, it is less rooted and more malleable than that. Whether paroxysmic and febrile, or laid-back and ironic, it remains curiously hollow and, as in the US and India, can easily be turned against imagined national enemies, within and without.

Thankfully, the dreary choreography of commercial interest and national identity comprises only one of many World Cups currently on view. This coming together on the level playing field of talent drawn from across a highly unequal global economy is also an arena of upended hierarchies (Senegal’s victory over France), unscripted drama and unexpected heroes. It is still possible to enjoy it as a form of play, a beguiling mixture of the spontaneous and the organised. As Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan novelist, observes: “The more the technocrats programme it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, soccer continues to be the art of the unforeseeable.”