Why do we love football? This is a difficult question to answer—anyone who accepts the mantle of being a football fan is faced with a series of increasingly clear problems with the sport. The moral panic of the 1980s over violent, “thuggish” football fans (i.e. white working-class men) has lost its sway in the UK (though not in places like Germany), but all is not well with football. Putting aside the familiar (and justified) complaints about “simulation” (i.e. players pretending to have suffered mortal injuries at the slightest physical contact), the structure of the game has become distorted.
At the club level, the game is dominated by the wealthy teams, able to assemble at exorbitant expense unstoppable squads of outrageously talented players, such that four-in-a-row English champions Manchester City could afford to leave £100m Jack Grealish on the bench for most of this season. Seemingly able to avoid, evade, or challenge any financial rules that might constrain them, the super-rich clubs represent only the pinnacle of a much deeper commercialization of the game. This has led some commentators to conclude that football is a social democratic game in a neoliberal age, on its way to being completely commodified.
Some commentators conclude that football is a social democratic game in a neoliberal age.
It is indeed hard to argue that commercial pressures are not distorting football. One of the clearest effects of these pressures—at least until the advent of a pan-European rich clubs league, the European Super League—is the sheer volume of football that we can watch. As the 2024 European Championship, whose 32 group stage games are now to be followed by the knock-out matches, fills the gap between two league seasons, we are presented with the ever-approaching possibility of Total Football. This is not the Total Football pioneered by the Dutch in the 1970s, which transformed matchplay through its use of space and interchange of personnel between positions, but the Total Football of the broadcasting networks’ dream of a totality of never-ending football to sell. It is the Total Football that expands to fill every week with an international friendly, or a Bundesliga / Serie A / La Liga match, or the Club World Cup, or a pre-season tour. The women’s game, so long overlooked outside of North America and some parts of Northern Europe, adds yet more matches to the list. The overproduction of football as a commodity is a problem. The mountains of butter and lakes of milk of the Common Agricultural Policy are being replaced by an immense accumulation of Europa Conference League qualifiers and Champions League group stage dead rubbers, pushed not by the EU but by UEFA.
The overproduction of football is a real problem for the game.
The real danger, however, is not the familiar problem of overproduction but a newer and specifically managerialist one. The introduction of technical support to officials, including the Video Assistant Referee (VAR), has transformed the role of the referee on the pitch. Previously refs were at best tolerated as the boffin-ish cleanshirts who were necessary for the game to go ahead, and at worst subject to verbal and physical abuse as corrupt or incompetent onanists.
The referee, though, was the representative of the “rules of the game” on the pitch, a widely challenged and often capricious figure, but one with an ultimately final authority, and sometimes grudgingly respected as such. Indeed, the Italian referee Pierluigi Collina even achieved a measure of fame in the early 2000s, featuring (rather than a player or a manager) on the cover of the Playstation 2 game Pro Evolution Soccer 3. Today, though, VAR undermines the authority of the referee on the pitch, subjecting each decision to exhausting (and often protracted) review and relitigation. More serious than the interruption to the flow of the game—and more serious than the genuine unfairness of some inexplicable VAR decisions disadvantaging specific teams—is the trade-off that VAR asks us to make. Promising us a utopia of perfect rules, flawlessly implemented, VAR advocates consciously or unconsciously promote a view of football that is about justice rather than beauty. Detaching decisions from the person of the referee, VAR (unlike sensors to check whether a ball has gone “out of bounds”) places the objective rules over their subjective implementation. It is the abstract laws of the game, rather than those tasked with implementing them, that today rule football. This is the bureaucrat’s dream; the tyranny of justice can be pursued at all costs, and pursued endlessly, since the mistakes and errors of the referee will remain, at a second (or third, or fourth) level of remove in the interpretations of the VAR (or the VAR-reviewers, or the VAR-reviewer-reviewers). This is the direction all football now moves in, away from fans and amateur players towards the frictionless requirements of fair treatment at the superelite level.
VAR advocates consciously or unconsciously promote a view of football that is about justice rather than beauty.
However bureaucratized and overproduced football becomes, though, the product keeps on selling. It does so through a combination of the spectacle of fast, technically impressive elite players and the “brand loyalty” of fans to club and country. At a deeper level than loyalty, though, we do still know that football (for all the clichés of the self-appointed promoters of the sport) is a beautiful and meaningful game. Just as human labour can never be fully eliminated from the production process, the truly human qualities of football that give it its beauty and meaning can never be eradicated. Dennis Bergkamp, the Dutch forward of the 1990s, is remembered today for two goals that are almost impossible to explain: a physics-defying pirouette and pass into the net against Newcastle for Arsenal and a perfect three-touch long-ball control and smashed finish against Argentina in the World Cup in 1998. Controlling a long ball from Frank de Boer in the last minute of the match, in scoring this second goal, Bergkamp shows his unbelievable awareness, technical ability, and coolness—a combination of skills that football fans over the world instantly recognize and respect, calling them “class”.
With Bergkamp’s goal against Argentina, we are in the presence of something we cannot understand, something sublime but human, something that is undeniably “sheer class”, something impossible, and yet something we could do ourselves, if only we had Bergkamp’s skill. Football, Bergkamp said, is a game of “moments”. This is why we return again and again to the field or the 5-a-side pitch to play, or to the pub or the sofa to watch: we know we might experience or see one of those moments. Bergkamp’s goal put the Dutch through to the World Cup semi-final (which they were ultimately to lose to Brazil), but anyone who has played football anywhere will have their own collection of moments. For some, it might be a college game played at a level almost comically far below the one of professional footballers, let alone world class players like Bergkamp. Having been put through on the right side of the 18-yard box and facing the last defender, we might have feigned to shoot with our right foot and instead cut the ball back, leaving the defender to slide to block a shot that never came. The moment that sticks with us might not even be the scoring of the goal (we might have known, like Bergkamp, that at that point it couldn’t go wrong), but the weightlessness of changing direction, right to left, to open up the goal and move the defender out of the way.
With Bergkamp’s goal against Argentina, we are in the presence of something we cannot understand, something sublime but human, something that is undeniably “sheer class”.
Time slowing down and speeding up simultaneously—without the tens of thousands watching in the stadium, or millions watching on TV—is the promise that football gives everyone who kicks a ball around. While in other sports we might have the perfect shot, the perfect stroke, or the personal best time or set, in football it is the perfect moments which stand out. Maybe all team sports have this, but football is one where perfection and performance are not always linked. You can have an ugly goal and a beautiful passing move that ends in nothing; it is for each of us to decide which means more to us as players or spectators. It might be because of the rarity of goals in football—a sport that can have a genuinely interesting contest finish with neither team scoring—that every pass, tackle, shot, and save feel so weighty.
The Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson once wrote that capitalism was the best and the worst thing to happen to humanity; it propelled human productive potential to hitherto-unimaginable levels, while it destroyed the past and imposed universal exploitation on the species. Football is the worst and the best sport in a similar way: it combines the increasing reality of an almost entirely mediatized spectacle grimly ruled over by a series of increasingly abstracted rules, seemingly possessed of their own agency, with the simplicity and joy of watching and playing a simple, joyful game and the possibility of transcendental moments of connection and beauty.
As the Euros roll forward, before segueing into the new season, and on and on, it is not always easy to remember that all this football is, ultimately, a gift. The writer Eduardo Galeano admits that he is a beggar for good football—whether it is our team or not, playing or watching something brilliant keeps us coming back for more. Those of us doomed to love football will always be beggars for good football and those elusive moment, no matter how many times we are disappointed or how many obstacles the sport itself might put in our way.
