The Meaning of All Those Goal Fests

Crushing scores have become strangely ubiquitous in top-tier soccer lately. Manchester United, which last year embarrassed Roma in the Champions League with such a score, this year got a taste of the same horrible medicine at the hands of Liverpool, which also dispensed it to Real Madrid – then nearly succumbed to the same treatment against Chelsea. Bayern Munchen gave my favorite Portuguese team, Sporting, the drubbings of its life in both legs of their recent Champions League encounter – only to suffer much the same fate at the hands of Barcelona. Porto was humiliated against Arsenal, only to come back and outplay Arsenal’s proven better, Manchester United. To fans of the winning team, of course, such inflated scores are the stuff of fantasy. Yet these are indeed inflated scores, more fantastic than real. They make the losing team look like utter crap, forever vanquished, and the winners like invincible supermen who will rule forever. If soccer were truly war, would not such routs mean the absolute conquest of a nation, even annihilation of a race? In fact, though, Roma is neither crap nor vanquished, nor is Sporting Lisbon in danger of vanishing or even of just ceasing to be a top European team. And that Bayern and Manchester United and Liverpool are not the godly teams that their goal fests would make them out to be was recently demonstrated by the humbling results they obtained against Barcelona, Porto and Chelsea, respectively. Scoring routs, then, may be spectacles especially pleasing to fair-weather fans mainly interested in seeing their team win, by the more crushing a margin the better. But the game’s true aficionados know such scores between well-matched teams are fairly meaningless, no more than aberrations that do not truly reflect the history, character, quality or future performance of either team and arise only in weirdly dysfunctional matches in which one team acts as if it had somehow been crippled by a sucker punch. After all, even in war, easy routs are not to be trusted, usually meaning far less than they at first appear to: consider what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Heat of Color

The strip of the soccer team I grew up supporting – the Sporting Clube de Portugal, also known as Sporting Lisbon, with its horizontally green and white striped shirt, black shorts, and green and white striped socks – has never ceased to give me a thrill that I can be deceived into thinking derives from the colors themselves, independently of what it is I associate them with. It is difficult to imagine a different set of colors provoking a similar reaction in another team’s fans, yet I know they do. For such is the power of color, of colorful banners, flags, uniforms, to arouse passionate identification – a power so great as to seem independent of the power of what is represented by the colors. It is as if it were the colors that were lending appeal to what they represent, rather than the other way around. And that may at least partly be the case: it seems to me that poorly colored teams do tend to be lackluster, as nations with uninspired flags tend to inspire little patriotism. Whence this power of color to promote and indeed to intensify or even replace identification with a group? I imagine it has to do with the fact that, in nature, it is color that primarily enables us to group things. First there is light, which renders things visible; then form, which lets us distinguish one thing from another and classify it; then color, which is so effective at letting us group things that we tend to think of their colors as their primary attributes, as if they were their colors. In other words, color is naturally an attribute of the group, of the team, and sports have simply, and wisely, copied nature. But not all sports – not, say, baseball, which uses club colors sparingly, with uniforms predominantly white or gray, and so cannot hope to arouse the passion that color-reliant sports like soccer do. And the relatively recent introduction of color uniforms into cricket may not only have marked but perhaps caused a heating up of a traditionally very cool sport.

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 Frustration of the Adult Soccer Fan

The child who is a soccer fan may, after an inspiring game, grab his ball, run outside and play at being an athletic god like Cristiano Ronaldo. The adult fan has no such ready outlet for his inspiration. After the game, he usually has no choice but to face the fact that it has altered nothing in his own life. This may account for the popularity of golf among soccer fans over thirty. After watching Tiger Woods, even a middle-aged man can go out on the links and feel inspired to improve his handicap.