Why Soccer Can’t Heal Nations

The five-day 1969 conflict between El Salvador and Honduras indelibly linked the words war and soccer (or football). But there are those who claim that it is in considerable part due to soccer – to the way in which it satisfies nationalistic passions without bloodshed – that Western Europe owes the peace that has lasted since the Second World War. It certainly is pretty to think so – as pretty as it was to think that the Iraqi team’s success in the Asia cup last year, celebrated euphorically by Iraqis of all persuasions,  would have helped to unite and pacify that nation. Alas, more carnage soon followed. And at this Euro 2008, it was pretty to read that even the Basques were supporting the Spanish team; but it’s doubtful that ETA separatists will soon lay down their arms as a result. And it was pretty to think that the Turkish team’s amazing, agonizing feats would inspire their nation and heal its East-West divisions. Alas, a week or so later, former generals who had been critical of the Islam-leaning government were being arrested. As much as we would like to think that sports are not pure entertainment, that they do have transcendent value, evidence contradicts it, showing us that the emotions released by a sporting event, even one as seemingly earthshaking as an international soccer final, have a very short shelf life and usually no lasting repercussions in society.

English Fans’ Euro 2008 Alternatives Expose Racism

Another English writer has remarked on how much more enjoyable Euro 2008 – and soccer as a whole – is when you are not cheering on your own nation’s team, when you can be more objective about the tournament and the sport. This time it is no mere journalist but, surprisingly, the novelist A. S. Byatt. “I wondered whether Euro 2008 would be exciting or gripping with no national team to support,” she writes in The Guardian. ”It has, in fact, been infinitely more pleasurable, more varied, and more interesting. This has caused me to think about the emotions that go into ’supporting’ a team. … But when you look closely at ’supporting’ it is a weird emotion and bears only a tangential relation to admiration of skills and courage in players.”

But Byatt, when she notes that “I myself tend instinctively to substitute northern European teams if there is no English interest,” also brings up an issue that she does not get around to addressing. Perhaps it simply slipped her mind, or the editors snipped it. But I’m surprised that no one else has addressed or even simply made note of how, in the many columns and press contests devoted to whom the English fan should support in lieu of England, the choices offered or suggested were usually race-based. Rarely was a southern European or even Slavic country chosen or suggested, as if it were presumed natural that the English fan could see his way clear to ”identifying with” only those countries that are racially closest to his own – Holland, of course, seeming to come closest to the ideal choice.

The Soccer Wars

No sport should arouse the passion that national-side soccer football does, in competitions like the Euro and the World Cup. The red-mist fervor blinds you to the sport itself; the pleasures you derive from watching it become less proper to a sport than to a bloody spectacle, to the wars that such competitions in effect stand for and perhaps have helped to avoid: terror, panic, orgiastic euphoria, bloodthirstiness, suicidal despondence. Watching a game in which much is at stake for my nation is more ordeal than fun, I have found: though normally an admirer of the embellishment, the display of flair, and clean play, I suddenly become a Germanic ogre of anxious pragmatism, intolerant of anything that is not directly aimed at triumphing and willing to condone the dirtiest tactics if they will ensure victory. So I am with with those English sports journalists who, like Simon Hattenstone in the Manchester Guardian today, have written about how much England’s no-show has enabled them to enjoy Euro 2008. Us soccer fans could learn from the fans of American sports, who allow a dash of irony to keep them well this side of hysteria and so do not let a defeat of their team ruin their lives too much.

The Value of True Reporting in Sports

In the Manchester Guardian, Duncan Castles offers an example of something that is in short supply in sportswriting – true, post-mortem reporting at the level of individual games. How was Germany, until then lacklustre, able to pull its act together, move into high gear and viciously upset talent-laden Portugal at Euro 2008? One suspected that something unexpected and mysterious, a sinister coup of sorts, had occurred. But the usual commentators and supposed pundits were in no way enlightening about it, as they usually are not, with all their opinion-mongering and makeshift pseudo-expertise. With Castles, true reporting comes to our rescue: He goes behind the scenes and gets the scoop from coup leader Michael Ballack, who speaks about his private meeting with other players, his protracted strategy session with the Joachim Low, the secret rehearsal the day before the game. (No doubt Ballack is going to be one great manager when he retires from play.) Now I would like to hear the Portuguese side of the story. Why did they fail to anticipate German preparedness? Why did Scolari not have any tricks up his sleeve? Or even a thinking leader on the field, good not only with his feet but on his feet? Why would he even go so far as to announce that he did not, and to let the Germans know whom he would be fielding and in what formation? Why was Portugal not better prepared to defend the deadly deadball plays and to counter Schweinsteinger’s threat, which was old news to Scolari? Why was he rather too sportingly embracing Ballack (whom he had repeatedly praised before the game) after this shock defeat of the Portuguese team? And what of Russia’s snuffing out of Holland’s orange fire? How did treacherous Guus Hiddink engineer that? Reuters had coach Marco van Basten denying his team’s loss had anything to do with his deciding to rest his best players the game before (something which, notably, Scolari also did, for the game against Switzerland.) But van Basten was not asked to advance his own theory of what occurred. Yet these are upheavals of historical significance to the sport, so they ought to be thoroughly and intelligently reported. Why have we never found out why, last year, Manchester United played so badly, so strangely heavy-legged, against A. C. Milan in their second game in the Champions League? These are the stories most worth reporting in the football pages, stories that can serve to illuminate the workings of the sport. Yet, because they are also stories that require actual leg work, they mostly go unwritten, their absence camouflaged from readers by the proliferation of the cheap, thumbsuck blather of columnists and bloggers who know little more than the average TV-watching fan.

What’s Wrong With Showboating?

In a live report in the Manchester Guardian, the writer condemns a scissor-kick cross from Quaresma in Euro 2008 as ‘an unecessary bit of skill.’ More casual fans tend to love showiness in an athlete, drawn as they are to the spectacle of the sport; but the most hardcore fans can be hostile to it. They perceive a threat in it: although spectacle helps any sport succeed, too much of it and the sport can die, turning into sheer spectacle, something akin to professional wrestling or the Harlem Globetrotters.

Intelligence in Sports Writing

Even in sports writing you can sometimes denote a sign of intelligence. Most English writers assigned to cover the Portugal-Switzerland game in the first round of Euro ‘08 just phoned it in, making no attempt to sound interested. How do you make a good story out of a game that doesn’t mean much to either team? Henry Winter, the writer for the London Telegraph, found a truly smart way: he wrote it as a study of how Scolari, the new Chelsea manager, operates. It created a whole new perspective on the game and was fun to read.