Know your Mark Hughes from your Marcuse? With the World Cup less than a week away, even the intellectuals are muscling in on the beautiful game. Peter Lennon reports
Predictably French philosophers, sociologists and literary critics are muscling in on the World Cup, peddling their cinq sous worth on the origins, motivation and significance of the game.
One new book, Le Football et l’Art, connects football to expressionist and pop art; Patrick Mignon in La Passion du Football claims that football mirrors the development of the industrial society, and Messieurs Patrice Delbourg and Benoit Heimermann have produced for the tournament, Football & Littrature, “an anthology of pens and studs”.
The trouble with intellectuals invading the pitch is that they are an unpredictable bunch, as likely to spread alarm and dismay as appreciation.
Take Umberto Eco. In 1978 he told that the effect of seeing a football match aged 14 made him lose his faith in God. “Watching this cosmic meaningless performance for the first time,” he wrote, “I doubted the existence of God.”
The experience, he said, led him to suspect that “the world was probably a pointless fiction and the supreme being may be (or may not be ) simply a hole”. If he had said “a goal”, then fans (of both soccer and God) would not have been so upset.
And what use is a pusillanimous fan who can’t tell joy from despair? As most schoolboys don’t know, cheering at a football match terrified Arnold Bennett.
“More terrible than guns,” he described it. “This massive cheer reverberated round the field like the echoes of a battleship’s broadside in a fjord. But it was human, and therefore much more terrible than guns. If such are the symptoms of pleasure, what must be the symptoms of pain or disappointment?”
When you do get an intellectual actually playing the game he behaves like an irresponsible cad. Vladimir Nabokov played in goal for Cambridge. Cheated, he felt, of the glory which the continentals afford their goalies, he spent most of his time leaning against the post composing poetry. “Small wonder I was not very popular with my team-mates,” he said.
It took a French intellectual, Albert Camus, also a goalie, to restore gravitas to the debate. In 1957, in an interview with France Football, he made his celebrated declaration: “What I most surely know in the long run about morality and the obligations of men … I learned it with the Racing University of Algiers.”
In 1992, critic and biographer Ian Hamilton made a determined attempt to muster status for football in Britain with his Faber Book Of Soccer.
But there was a trace of desperation in his introduction. “Soccer is notoriously a sport without much of a literature,” he wrote. “Unlike cricket or rugby it has few links with higher education. The soccer intellectual tends to treat soccer as an off-duty self-indulgence, like old movies or detective novels – it’s a strictly trivial pursuit. But soccer fans do think,” he pleaded pathetically.
Regrettable, since the off-duty intellectuals here have made little headway, unlike in France where the government has appointed a sociologist to the Ministry of Sports to perorate on the social implications of the game.
Cricket – that somnambulistic ritual whose fans appear to be more in need of a psychiatrist than a sociologist – is the game more congenial to British intellectuals. This has given birth to acres of poetry.
GF Grace wrote of “The lost ball” which … “fled in the golden sunlight,/ Like the devil away from psalms.”
Then there was the rousing 19th Ballade Of Cricket by TW Lang: “Alas, yet liefer on Youth’s hither shore,/ Would I be some poor Player on scant hire,/ Than King among the old, who play no more, -/ THIS is the end of everyman’s desire!”
Soccer does not inspire such tea-and- crumpet doggerel, perhaps because the name itself, plundered inelegantly from AsSOCiation FootballER, does not invite reverence.
The best kind of intellectual, or at least literate fan, approaches football in much the same way William Hazlitt did pugilism, the favoured sport of 18th century literary gents. Hazlitt’s essays on The Fancy were knowledgeable and tolerant, reverence in check but enthusiasm on the loose.
This is the approach of the Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, who in Football in Sun and Shadow, admits that the football fanatic “is a fan in a madhouse”.
“But when good football happens,” writes this international spirit, “I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.”
Football, by the way, was once in danger of being erased from the national curriculum. James IV, entering the King Canute stakes of 1491, banned the game. “It is statute and ordained,” he declared, “that in na place of the Realme there be used Fute-ball or uther sik unproffitable sportes”.
Jimmy the King could not have been further offside. In the following century football was reported to be in rude health: “Causing fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel-picking, homicide and a great effusion of blood.”