Football Against the Enemy

How many football fans are familiar with the following criticism: “I can’t believe you buy into all that hype”? Or, “how can you make such a big deal out of a bunch of grown men chasing a ball around a park?”, “it’s only a sport!”? We quite often respond with a sagely “well it is much more than just a sport” and be done with it, but recently I have been haunted by these questions.

The spark for such doubts was a politically minded friend who challenged me on my own devotion to the game: “You moan about the world’s ills, yet rather than doing something about it, you spend your spare time drinking in front of Sky Sports.” He had a point, one to which a simple, “well it’s more that a sport” struck me as an unsatisfactory riposte. After all, in a post-theistic world, where the cult of celebrity has replaced religion, football could very much be considered an “opiate of the masses” – a distraction of human time and energy away from political and social action.

This wasn’t always the case. Simon Kuper’s classic, Football Against the Enemy, recounts numerous instances where football has played a part in shaping political events and vice-versa. Memorable examples easily spring to mind. In particular, Franco’s support (in more ways than one) of Real Madrid, and the role clubs such as Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao played in resistance to the fascist regime. Never has football been so clearly “more than just a sport”. But, since the fall of the Berlin wall, such cases have been conspicuously difficult to find. Where has football’s political content gone?

The reason is itself political. Ellen Wood has noted that since the end of the Cold War an unfettered neoliberal political project has sought to dismantle the unity between society and individuals – between ‘public’ and ‘private’. “There is no such thing as society” bellowed Thatcher and this has very much been the rallying call of neoliberal ideology since. “Rolling back the state” entailed nothing less than the fragmentation of social life into separate and autonomous private institutions. It is therefore no coincidence that in this same period football should have carved out its own privatised mode of being, a bubble distinct and insulated from the world outside it.

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the Premiership, where unfathomably vulgar wages and transfer fees appear unaffected by a global economic crisis and domestic recession; where Rio Ferdinand ponders the negative effects of cuts in public spending whilst dodging 22% of his tax contributions; where players compare their multi-million pound contracts to slavery; and where supporters pay obscene sums to watch precisely those players they criticise for being ‘removed from the real world’. With such a radical disjuncture between football and reality, it is paradoxically understandable that political issues can be so clearly evident and yet so readily ignored – it represents the very essence of the Murdoch dream realised as an Orwellian nightmare.    

 
So is football now inherently antithetical to politics? Well not entirely. This year saw an unprecedented street protest by supporters of Istanbul’s ‘big three’ – Galatasaray, Fenerbahce and Besitkas – against the ruling (and unabashedly neoliberal) AK party. Earlier that week Prime Minister Erdogan had attended the opening of Galatasary’s new stadium, only to be met with deafening boos. That these supposedly ‘organized protests’ were condemned by the AKP was a farce in itself – Turkey is meant to be a liberal democracy with an institutionalised right to protest.

But when the Chairman of Galatasaray crumbled under the pressure of Erdogan’s comments and pledged to root out and ban the Galatasaray protestors, a wave of indignation swept Turkish football, bringing together otherwise violently partisan fans in solidarity against Erdogan. Moreover, beyond protest against political involvement in football matters, this march struck very much at the heart of the government and its policies. Metin Kurt, a former Galatasary player and head of the Sports Workers Union that helped organise the protests said: “The prime minister has tried to turn the inauguration into a political show, but the reaction of our people, who are weary of his policies and of his eight years in power, has been rubbed into his face through Galatasaray supporters.”

These events demonstrated a clear breakdown in the formal disjuncture of football and ‘the real world’, clearly evidenced in the rapid attempts made by the AKP to re-establish the separation between the two. Erdogan claimed that the booing was not by real Galatasaray fans, while government minister Taner Yıldız laughably announced that he had “suspended” his support for Galatasaray. Today’s Zaman, a government mouthpiece howled of “insolence” and “organized crime” (yes, really!) while insisting “[s]ports and politics do not mix, or at least they shouldn’t.” That the two were, and through solidarity between Turkey’s most divorced clubs, was nothing short of a fundamental challenge to the inherently neoliberal notion of what politics should (and shouldn’t) be.

Now it is not for me to pass judgement on whether such a challenge is (in the words of Today’s Zaman) ‘Good’ or ‘Evil’. Nor is it the place to make bold future predictions. So to conclude with a couple of questions. In our current epoch, which has witnessed neoliberalism’s economic and ideological hegemony shaken to the core, could the iron curtain between football and politics be torn down? Can we expect more political interventions by movements organised around football, and equally more engagement with football by politicians?