A little book about football, democracy and how to build a society extract

C.S. Lewis once wrote that those who say that football is just about scoring goals haven’t understood anything about the game. Saying that football is about scoring goals is like saying that football is football, he opined.

Of course football involves scoring goals, otherwise no one would win any matches. But stating that this is what football consists of is just as reductive as defining human life by saying that we’re born to die. It’s certainly true. That we’re going to die is about the only thing we know about our lives with any certainty. But at the same time it’s a statement that says hardly anything at all about who we are or what a human life entails.

So, what is football?

In connection with the Football World Cup in 2014, the American extreme right-wing ideologue Ann Coulter wrote a widely read column. In it, she asserts that more and more Americans are becoming interested in football as a result of the immigration laws that were introduced through Ted Kennedy’s initiative in 1965, as it’s unthinkable that a single third-generation American would get into the sport. Fundamentally, she considers football a completely unamerican activity. She gives a number of reasons for this. 

She claims that individual contributions aren’t a decisive factor in football, viewing it as a game without room for heroes, villains or personal responsibility. Football is quite simply too collectivist to satisfy her libertarian fundamentalism. Besides, football is readily accessible to both sexes, which she says would only appeal to liberal soccer moms. She also sees the fact that football matches often end in a draw as a sign that the game suppresses a healthy winner-takes-all culture.

She also marks down football for not involving a substantial risk of personal humiliation or severe injury, in contrast to some other sports, meaning that it lacks that which sport should represent: sublimated warfare. Moreover, in football, you’re not allowed to use your hands, those physical attributes with their opposable thumbs that distinguish us from soul-less animals.

But above all she rejects football as unamerican on the basis that it represents something foreign, specifically, European. She compares it to the metric system, which was developed during the days of the French Revolution when people weren’t too busy committing genocide with the help of a guillotine.

She considers it significant that it is liberal newspapers that write most about football, and that the sport is promoted by the same people who have opinions about human rights and support liberal or left-wing politicians. Football, she asserts, undermines everything American as viewed from her extreme right-wing position, and every increase in interest in the sport should be seen as a sign of America’s moral impoverishment.

I’m willing to concede almost all of these points, and can simply state that, to a large extent, it is for these very reasons that I have come to love football as a sport and an expression of culture.

My heightened interest in football emerged at a fairly advanced age. I had of course played a bit growing up, but it was rarely anything more than in hastily arranged teams consisting of those kids who happened to be on the pitch in Vitabergsparken in Stockholm. As there were often too few of us to have a full match, we played hybrid forms such as ‘drivboll’, that is, forms of play that aligned with the concept of football – scoring goals against the opposition – but with rules that limited possession of the ball and freedom of movement on the pitch so that the two teams would be evenly matched.

Apart from that, my interest in football was the same as most others’: I followed the big tournaments on TV, maybe went to the occasional game in the top Swedish division and absent-mindedly skimmed through the league table in the sports pages of the paper. As the only child of a working mother, there were few role models in my own life that could lead me into the world of sport, while gym classes in school fluctuated from pleasure at the physical experience to shame at my own physical limitations and the gym teachers’ oppressive bullying.

My real engagement with the sport essentially started when my youngest son began playing in a boys’ team at the age of seven or eight. It was a learning experience even for me to see how these young people’s understanding of the game and their own role in it grew in line with the progression of the team’s approach from a ball-chasing cluster to an idea about cooperation and structure where everyone on the pitch has a task and forms part of a whole. Since then, the fascination hasn’t released its grip on me.

This background explains why this book about football contains only a handful of references to specific matches, names only a few players and only fleetingly retells a couple of anecdotes from football’s history. It is intended as a thought-provoking book about how to build a society with football as a cohesive metaphor and starting point. For some, it’s going to seem as hopelessly nerdy as a bespectacled 11-year-old schoolboy once felt in gym class, when he was always among those picked last and often just got to watch the game from the bench.

These pages can certainly be seen as just a bookish ponderer’s ridiculous attempt to offer opinions about something of which he has little physical experience. If that is the case, I can accept this. I have a feeling that, up in the stands at a game, I’m far from alone in this position.

A large part of the thought processes that went into this book germinated on the terraces at Söderstadion in Stockholm. Despite these thoughts only arising while a member of the crowd, part of the fascination of football is that the sport isn’t carried along by its practitioners alone, but just as much by its billions of fans around the globe.

Football has a dynamic relationship with its fans. The fact that they choose to return to fundamentally the same spectacle time after time depends of course on many different things, but one of them is the inexhaustible variety of possibilities that football offers. Its objective can be considered simple – that one of the teams’ assortment of skills trumps that of the other as measured by the number of goals scored in a match – but in reality it’s all much more complex than that. This is why even a goalless draw can be full of meaning and content for both players and the crowd.      

In many ways, football has parallels with art. Just like art, it pursues an end result but, regardless of what that is, the route there is never in vain. The act of creativity involves adopting a worldview that tells us that the sensate and sublime give substance and meaning to the world. This reminds us not least that creativity isn’t something that ends, but rather is always ongoing, and that we have a responsibility to it.

Football undeniably has aesthetic and sublime qualities, in terms of both individual players’ efforts and the collective’s teamwork and interpretation of an idea of play. But football also offers an understanding of the world that says that the building of a society and solidarity are possible even in situations of strong opposition. Like all games, it is an educational project that time after time re-forms and reinvents itself.

In conversation with President Barack Obama, the American author Marilynne Robinson expressed the following: ‘Democracy is something that we ourselves have created and something that is never complete. We have to continually reinvent it’.

I consider that the building of society based on a zest for life and an abundance of energy, on which democracy depends, can also be found as a model in football. It’s possible that this even contributes to the sport’s popularity in extremely authoritarian societies, as it provides an outlet for the natural impulse for equality that, despite substantial evidence to the contrary, I’d still like to think is part of being human.

With that said, I wouldn’t want to downplay the terrible outbursts of brutal and destructive populism expressed in the stands of football stadiums. This is a form of populism that is also an inherent risk in democracies, a societal form that we’ve seen be subjected to intense pressure given events in politics around the world in recent decades.

In this book, I try to describe football as a site of experimentation that, through ritualised performances, time after time attempts to test how a functioning society can be built. I also see football as a metaphor for building a society, which isn’t really the same thing. I ask the reader to indulge me when the distinction between these two perspectives becomes blurred. This book is about the nature of football, or rather about how it is an expression of culture.

I mentioned above that a lot of the intellectual content of this book was first generated in the stands of Söderstadion. I’m fully aware that a football stadium with that name no longer exists, with it instead being named after the company that sponsors the ground. I nonetheless persist in calling the place by the name of the old stadium on a neighbouring plot, a name that was linked to its geographical location and not in which company’s accounts it is included.

Just like society in general, professional football has become increasingly commercialised in recent decades. At the same time, we’ve seen how democratic powers in a range of places around the world have lost ground and legitimacy for many, while the political sphere has been hollowed out by populism and plutocracy. My possibly naïve hope is that football, like democracy, will be able to survive these destructive forces.

The British author Martin Amis once stated that intellectual football fans are despised as much by intellectuals as by football fans, which should really decimate the potential readership of this book. However, no one would be happier than me if these lines were to provide someone with the spark for a more burning engagement with democracy or with football.