Loading ...An everlasting ode to the Beautiful Game
Almost everyone I know lets football dictate large chunks of their life. Big matches can feel as sacred as medieval saints’ days, with a general consensus that they’re up there with family bereavement as an excuse for not getting work done. Which is why, instinctively, I disagree with the idea behind Jason Cowley’s book, The Last Game.
Cowley, the editor of the New Statesman, argues that the 1989 Arsenal-Liverpool match at the end of that First Division season, the eponymous last game that Arsenal needed to win by two clear goals in order to become League Champions, marked a turning point in English football. The game went from being a national sport to a multi-national business.
So, Chelsea are owned by a Russian billionaire who’d rather buy a Bacon triptych than a bacon sarnie, families can’t organize their weekends around a 3pm Saturday kick-off but are subject to the whim of the Sky TV schedulers, and players whinge when they’re forced to see out £120,000 a week contracts. I do hate all of that, but I still love football.
When I was thirteen, nine years after football apparently finished, I promised myself that within two years I’d become my school’s equivalent to Marc Overmars. For those of you unfamiliar with Arsenal’s 1997-98 double-winning side, Overmars was Dutch, played on the left-wing, and could, apparently, outpace Linford Christie over 100 metres. I am not Dutch, nor am I left-footed, nor am I good at football. Nevertheless, everyday I’d stride onto the playground, convinced of an imminent call-up to the school C-team. One of my friends, Max, was so addicted to the PC game Championship Manager that his mum, frightened that he might never get a GCSE, or use any real drugs, banned him from playing it.
It’s also true that those rubbish changes to football were accompanied by, and helped to prompt, some excellent ones. For football to be an internationally marketable product, it had to try to stamp out all that racism and those vicious two-footed challenges that curtailed the careers of strikers like Marco Van Basten. Though, while stamping-out is something you should do to racism, it seems to me to risk exacerbating the problem when applied to dangerous play.
Really, when people complain about the changes to football, they’re complaining about the modern world. What’s happened to football is only a reflection of what’s happened to everything else. The free market has killed off lots of traditions, which is sometimes a shame, and sometimes a relief. It’s a shame that there are fewer village post-offices, it’s a relief that the people who run them find it harder to get away with saying rude things about black people.
The point is that much of football’s real significance is as a metaphor. I’m not even the 500th person to say that, but I do think it’s worth pointing out that the sorts of metaphors we use say something about us.
Deploying the football metaphor is a way of saying, “I’m a man. A real, proper one,” which isn’t to say that that it’s done disingenuously. When I was thirteen I loved playing football just as much as I loved the feeling that it established my credentials as one of the lads.
But there’s a limit to the extent that you can get away with telling everyone you’re a man without coming across as a boy. That’s the sort of thing teenagers are meant to do, but it’s a bit much when grown men, like Cowley, disappear up their own metaphors, and write about ‘football’ when they mean ‘their lives’, or ‘the 1990s’.
It’s akin to amassing an encyclopedic knowledge of 60s music instead of having sex with actual people, which amounts to saying that you’re radical, sensual and free whilst demonstrating that you’re anti-social and repressed, with a flair for bureaucracy.
There’s something cowardly about bemoaning football going to the dogs when, if it really has, then so has everything else. No matter how awful things get, football will still be exciting. And, only a game. If what you really think is that everything is rubbish, you should probably say so.
