Views on Sport

Ancient Rome propagated the theory of ‘panems et circenses’ (bread and games), in which the appeasement and subjugation of the populace could be ensured so long as these two critical factors were sufficiently provided for. This metonym for state-sanctioned diversion, I think, holds considerable water in our modern age where sport has flourished to occupy an unrivalled place in our collective imaginations.

My views may seem heretical to some, or maybe just obstinate, but on a personal level I have managed to arrive at a place where sport has virtually no influence on my life at all. I'm constantly aware of it, I know it persists within very close proximity rather like drainage systems snaking unseen around buildings; yet I have allowed myself to descend into a wilful blindness towards it all.

Such is the stranglehold that sport (and in particular, football) has on Western culture, that when meeting someone new, very often their first impressions are fired in the oven of personal sporting allegiance. When faced with the awkward abseil down a precipitous social encounter, sport is very often the equivalent of the safety harness in which you can descend in as much comfort as possible.

On countless occasions I have met someone for the first time only for the question of sporting preference to arise and for my unhelpfully dissenting reply to trigger an almost visible mental reaction in them as they rapidly slam conversational doors shut and scramble for ways to accommodate this social leper within their field of reasoning.

It was not ever thus. Like every other young boy I played in a local football team, inspired by the glorious summer of Euro 96. My enthusiasm slowly waned as I realised my destiny wasn’t to turn pro, and was further compounded by being coerced into playing for the school rugby team. During the winter, every Saturday morning I would be trampled into the cold and rain-soaked mud by simian schoolboys who I presume all had the advantage over me that they had at least watched a rugby match and were aware of the rules.

But the umbilical cord binding me to sport was finally severed by the electric guitar I received for Christmas aged 13. This was the distorted, dissonant and often infuriating escape ladder that I ascended to the safe haven of music.

My present antipathy towards sport though was cemented by the year I worked in a construction site office in Manchester. For the first time I was exposed to the almost militant fanaticism that inflected almost all of those who worked there, from the young labourers right up to the foremen and engineers, football was a kind of morse code through which everyone could communicate on an apparently level playing field.

On one occasion, seeing me with a book during my lunch break, a gruff site foreman thrust a book that was positively wilting from re-reading at me, with the words “this is the only book you need”. It was Brian Clough’s autobiography…

Amongst them though were a handful whose professed allegiance to their particular team didn’t quite seem to ring true, and I became convinced that actually they had as much disinterest in football as I did, but had grown to accommodate their ‘support’ in the same way as an animal evolves to survive in response to its harsh environment.

So much of the ‘banter’ that was exchanged week-in week-out, was predicated around risibly antiquated, yet clearly deep-seated, regional rivalries; to the point where the football itself appeared to be nothing but an illusory scaffold on which to construct the most out-dated tribalism. At its most puerile, people would invoke tragedies like Hillsborough, Munich ’56, and the Leeds fans stabbed in Istanbul, as shot puts to be lobbed clumsily into argumentative sandpits.

Just before this summer’s World Cup, I found myself watching a BBC programme in which David Beckham was sent deep into the Amazonian rainforest, presumably in an attempt to abandon his revered place in modern culture and begin a new life in the jungle like a footballing Colonel Kurtz.

At one point, he ingratiated himself with a primitive forest tribe, a self-sustaining nomadic collective of people who remained isolated from 21st century civilisation. Men, women and children alike were all shown pulling together to forage and collect resources for the mutual benefit of them all, thereby maintaining their humble existence.

Meeting with the tribe’s patriarch – a sturdy, oil-skinned man wearing nothing but a loincloth – Beckham, never the most articulate, attempted to try and explain the concept of football and his role as its ambassadorial idol. It was an encounter that was both symbolic and revealing. Here was Beckham, the closest the secular West has to a demi-god, an icon of our times, trying to express the concept of a sport in which players kick a leather ball from one end of a field to the other, to someone completely oblivious as to the fevered significance that this trivial pursuit could hold for a sophisticated society.

On the programme, this was framed as a way of revelling in just how isolated these people were and how alien our modern world was to them. To me, it reinforced just the opposite; that this was a dignified indigenous community and it was us who had travelled so far beyond the realms of reality and into a collective delusion when a ball game is so sanctified and its leading lights lavished with such odious levels of fame and fortune. As far as I could tell, it was the tribe who were truly free.

I'm aware of innumerable psychoanalytic theorems relating to our obsession with following competitive sport; like so many brooms frantically sweeping to glide the curling pin nearer its intended target. Fundamentally, humans crave attachment to reliable forms, we yearn to be a party to an accumulation of others who gain strength from the weight of their numbers. We like to place our faith in a particular team, that by their success or failure we will experience the corresponding highs and lows that pay dividends according to our level of emotional engagement. Whereas, in times of antiquity, we placed our belief in mythology and the gods, intrepid explorers or hardened warriors; modern-day hero worship is channelled through the prowess and status of elite sport stars.

As well as this, what I've often sensed about sports fans is that, for a large proportion, the real allure lies not in the skill, the athleticism or the tactical mastery but rather in the potential for gambling that is associated with sport. It seems to me that very often, the primary aesthetics of sport are very often subordinated in favour of the opportunistic winning of money. This is analogous to those who drink alcohol, not to appreciate the varying tastes and nuances, but just as a means to get drunk.

For the state then, it is far from being a sizeable leap of the cynical imagination, to interpret sport as being an innately powerful distracting agent.

The more energy, time and scrutiny the masses expend on the pursuit of sport, the more their focus is averted from, at the macro level, the activities of the state itself, and at the micro level, their own 'personal lot in life'. This is certainly the case in America, where the endless analysing and poring over of statistics and performance-related numerology is the primary means of interaction with the otherwise static practice of spectating.

It is predictable then that elite sport, and football in particular, has become relentlessly commercialised and corporatized in precise lock-step with the neoliberal capitalist epoch of the last 30-or-so years. Traditionally a game for the working classes to enjoy from the terraces on a Saturday afternoon, nowadays a ticket to a Premier League game is oversubscribed and prohibitively expensive.

As economic elites have revealed numerous corrupt machinations to widespread public opprobrium, so too has sport been buffeted by the high seas of scandal to far less outcry - from athletic doping trials, to Lance Armstrong's deception, Formula 1's dodgy advertising deals, to Rugby's 'bloodgate' incident and Pakistani cricket's match-fixing allegations.

Meanwhile, Sepp Blatter with his FIFA 'droogs,' as well as the IOC, chauffeur themselves around the world championing the investment of vast sums of capital into extravagant Olympian boondoggles that rarely yield any lasting benefit to the host nations other than serving as a gigantic marketing campaign.

I always found it baffling how at the height of the last recession - when the Occupy movement had entrenched the symbolic notion of the '1%', and the anti-banker hysteria had cranked up to fever pitch - people remained so faithfully deferential to the sporting Mammon, which dictates that restless oligarchs buy clubs like ordinary people buy shoes, and footballers are paid a higher wage each week than a nurse or teacher might earn in 5 or even 10 years!

And this in an era in which investiture in the creative arts has plummeted. This could quite easily be argued as suggesting a declining interest in the arts, but evidentially this is far from the case. In literature (where authors' mean annual salary is now a paltry £4,000), you need only look to the panoply of creative writing courses, book clubs, fiction competitions and literary festivals that abound. Similarly in theatre and music, there has never been so much eclecticism and choice; yet coupled with the harsh reality that its perceived cultural value continues to decline.

The problem that I believe the arts face is that, contrary to sport, they are adverse to large-scale monopolisation yet exposed to piracy to a greater extent, and proceed largely at the often unpredictable whim of the prevailing fashion or trends of the day.

For this highlights another critical psychological truth. Whereas we like to envisage the world, society, and our lives as a steadily inclining line of linear progression; actually we crave the comfort of routine, the sanctuary of predictability and cyclical time and this is, on the whole, what the following of sport represents.

As one sporting season ends it is only a brief lapse before it all begins again, the clock pushed back to the start; tournaments and major events come around like religious festivals or satellites constantly orbiting our lives. Of course, there are fluctuations in the fortunes and performance of one team or athlete over another, but these are as ephemeral as a change of government, in which the faces and policies might change to exert some minor influence on the country, but in the long run prove largely inconsequential.

Instinctively, I think the majority of people know this and yet don't much mind, for their support is ensured not on the basis of success or failure, but on the principle that the practice of supporting in and of itself is enough.

Running is a physical activity free from any associated costs. Same with walking, cycling (apart from the initial cost of a bike of course), and any ball game organised by a group of people of their own volition. These are pursuits that should be encouraged far more fervently; and where costs are associated, i.e. with playing fields, swimming pools, coaching fees, these should be covered by funds reallocated from the hyper-inflated investment in major sporting events that very often end up being lucrative promotional tools for corporations like Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Cadburys.

For surely, in an age of increasingly sedentary working lives, technologies that facilitate general laziness, and rising obesity (particularly amongst children), the emphasis should be placed on greater participation at a grassroots amateur level rather than continuing down the moribund road of idolising elite sport and just being satisfied with our daily allocation of bread and games.