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.

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.