THE World Cup is the planet’s long-awaited festival of friendship and neighbourly goodness. President Vladimir Putin certainly thinks so. In his opening speech at the unveiling of the 21st World Cup finals on Thursday he said: “Football brings us together in one single team and we are united by our affection … by different language, ideology or faith”. All that missing was an exhortation for us all to join hands together in a rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
The Greatest Show on Earth isn’t a carnival of peace and goodwill; it’s predatory and materialistic and a quadrennial celebration of the credo that might is right and greed is good. Nor can football fanatics like me who fancy ourselves to be all liberal and enlightened claim it has only lately come to be this way and that it has fallen victim to corporate and financial muscle: it’s always been like this. You can add other stuff to the brimstone and treacle like xenophobia, national paranoia, revenge and the mentality of the mob.
The second World Cup held in Italy in 1934 and won by the host nation did not feature Uruguay, the tournament’s first winners and hosts in 1930. Even after four years the South Americans were still nursing a grievance that Italy and several other European nations had refused the invitation to compete in Uruguay. There were loftier reasons the Uruguayans could have cited for their absence, none more so than Benito Mussolini using the tournament as a showcase for his fascist dictatorship and the lingering suspicion that he had personally hand-picked the referees for games involving Italy.
Argentina’s military junta copied Mussolini’s opportunism when they hosted the World Cup in 1978. It was well-known that thousands of Argentinians were ‘disappeared’ by the regime on suspicion of disloyalty but FIFA, football’s governing body, obviously felt this was a trifling matter and one that had nothing to do with football. The rest of us too shut our eyes and passed by meekly on the other side of the road. We do this every time the World Cup comes about and we do it when it comes to the Champions League and to our own domestic competitions. Where football is concerned we become amoral automatons, happy to overlook petty corruption, profiteering and the sort of attitudes towards fairness and equality that make Jacob Rees-Mogg look like the president of Unicef.
In our real lives we might march against poverty and rail against low wages and unemployment. We seek fair distribution of wealth and an end to the huge gaps in health and education that exist in our society caused by social inequality. When it comes to football, though, we leave all of these ethics at the turnstile. You could fit the wage bill of the entire Scottish Premier Division inside the payroll of my team, Celtic, and there would still be some change. Yet, not a jot do I care.
I celebrated a second successive treble in the same manner as I would have done if we had defeated Real Madrid and Bayern Munich on the way. I am impervious to the privations of other clubs. Celtic were forced kicking and screaming into paying the Living Wage for its lowest-paid employees and then only after withdrawing the bonus scheme these people had previously relied upon. This didn’t stop me renewing my £627 season ticket. Do I want my club to share some of its riches with the honest and deserving poor amongst its fellow clubs? I most certainly do not. In life I am a socialist but football has made me a capitalist and an implacable one at that.
Football really does think it’s a force for world peace and reconciliation. In reality, though, its mere presence endorses and exonerates regimes involved in crimes against humanity. And it anaesthetises the rest of us into a sort of moral stupor where we suspend any notions we might previously have had about constitutes right and wrong. We even find ourselves exhibiting some of the most wretched tendencies harboured by the World Cup. I was desperate for Egypt to beat Uruguay yesterday afternoon and not because of the pyramids and Mo Salah. Rather, I still haven’t forgiven Uruguay for kicking Scotland off the park at Mexico 32 years ago. Reconciliation: aye right.
When FIFA’s World Cup comes to town the host nation is expected to pay tribute by suspending its normal customs and conventions. The first to go are usually those built around decency, honesty and compassion. Thus in Brazil in 2014, in cities with some of the most appalling rates of poverty and multi-deprivation, vital infrastructure projects were suspended to help pay for the swanky new stadiums. Contracts were carved up by government-favoured companies with links to organised crime.
FIFA, you see, operates as a mendicant global superstate unhindered by the conventions of the EU, the UN or NATO. It does as it pleases and the corruption that riddled it went unchecked for decades simply because national governments feared the popular consequences of sanctions being applied to its football teams. No wonder Vladimir Putin was beaming from the best seat in the house at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium on Thursday. He knows that for a few weeks the world will conveniently choose to forget his crackdown on the LGBTI community as the Russian police are tasked with seeking out any displays of physical affection by gay people.
Yet I have dutifully set my television to record every game of this World Cup and have already spent a right few quid trying to fill my Panini World Cup sticker album. Football, for all the shallow caprices at its core, retains those values that first attracted us to it in the purity and innocence of childhood: the feeling of belonging to something important; of finding a common interest that overcomes feelings of inadequacy. In my own west of Scotland it still provides the language by which some parents rendered sullen by an aggregation of social defeats can communicate and reach out emotionally to their children. It provides moments that come to form part of our families’ shared memories. It permits children whom the elite have judged and found wanting to dream of glory and a lifestyle beyond their expectations. And it lets the rest of us simply derive pleasure from seeing some of them do so.
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