Soccer and the Culture Wars

I'm almost finished Susan Jacoby's lucid "Age of American Unreason" which follows the decline of the American intellectual tradition since the 195os, and I can't help but wonder where modern football culture lies on the spectrum between low(er) and high(er)brow culture (presuming for a moment there is such a thing, as many postmodern thinkers would disagree). My first thought is that it covers the spread, as a brief survey of the most popular football publications bears out. For every hardcore aficionado of "Football Factories" there is a subscriber to When Saturday Comes; for every Sun sports reader there is someone trolling through the Sports section in the Guardian; for every person reading Eduardo Galleano there is someone absorbed in Wayne Rooney's most recently updated 'auto'-biography.

Some might argue this mixture of higher and lower cultural elements in sport is not unique to football. Baseball for example has produced some navel-gazing ruminations, published in hardcover and sold in 'finer' bookstores, on the capital 'M' Meaning of America's favourite past-time, even while the sport inspires the endlessly shallow logorrhea of AM dial Sports Talk radio. But there is a difference. For highbrow baseball-watchers, the game is simply an empty form in which to sound off about the lilting pastime of the America of old, where men were men, the scenery was quiet and undisturbed by the satanic mills of industry, and the skies were not cloudy all day. A modern development like the propensity for players these days to gobble up steroids like scooby snacks will get attention from the highbrow merely because it is a potent symbol for the get-don't-earn ethos of modern American capitalism and not because of its real-time day-to-day influence on the direction of the Major League, something they presume is best left to talk radio to sort out.

Highbrow soccer culture on the other hand (I'm thinking here of writers like Brian Glanville and David Goldblatt, WSC sometimes) will at its best focus on the nitty-gritty particulars of the game over its ideal form, often diving headfirst into developments in UEFA, the increasingly populist image of FIFA and how it disguises their global realpolitik, individual player-transfer sums, the status of third-world football associations, the growing financial inequality within the league structure in England, sectarian chanting, the political and social demographic fault-lines between supporters of Inter and AC Milan, the relationship between colonialism and the shifts in the footballing talent pool since the 1960s, the list is endless. In short, consumers of highbrow football culture love the game not for its power as a 'symbol' for something greater and more important than its lowbrow spectators have the capacity to recognize (the dance, utopian cooperation, the perfect merger of the strong individual and a strong society), but for precisely the same reason: that it is football and not anything else, a ninety-minute ball game. This enigmatically simple reason is what draws the 'yobs' and the 'snobs' to Emirates Stadium together in droves (if sometimes in differently priced sections).

Football's unique status as a sport that attracts knowledgeable interest from all cultural quarters sometimes produces some awful literature, as witnessed for example in the idealistic, multicultural ravings of the anti-globalization left who humourlessly attempt to hoist their own idealogical mantle onto the game, usually with mixed results. Franklin Foer sits in this camp, who in his presumptuously-titled book "How Soccer Explains the World" denounced Tottenham and Ajax supporters as anti-semites and declared his admiration for Barcelona not for their footballing prowess or familial attachment but for the fact they are controlled in large part by their fans and that, up until last year, they had no corporate sponsors on their shirt.

Equally on the right in North America, the sport's perceived cosmopolitan and European flavour has led to the view that soccer is a game for the so-called 'elites,' rich suburban soccer moms who vote Democratic, and therefore like fine wine, evolutionary biology and global warming it is not to be trusted. Sometimes one fantasizes about sending one of these gasbags to the Den to see how 'elite' the game really is, but they're not likely going to switch over from all-American Football (derived from rugby, which split from soccer, hence the name 'football') to watch a soccer game any time soon.

The point of all this (I know, is there one?) is that football is so ingrained in the regional and national cultures that have embraced it that it cannot be compartmentalized and partitioned to one social group over another, even in firmly or previously class-based societies like Brazil and the UK. In the US, where sport, like music, cannot be left to its own devices but must have an identifiable demographic, there are clearly lowbrow sports (NASCAR, the NFL), middlebrow (baseball) and highbrow (Formula 1, golf). Perhaps the traditionally broad appeal of soccer is one of the reasons why America, a country painted in red and blue states and with one of the highest rich/poor gaps in the developed world, sees fit to ghetto-ize it in the preposterously hokey MLS with its franchise-y names and side-line cheerleaders and self-consciously direct appeals to recent immigrants who, it is presumed by the powers-that-be, should know the game 'from back home.' More likely it hasn't taken root because of American isolationism/exceptionalism, but I can't help of think of another sport with the potential of reaching across the divide the way that football has...