... from the Beautiful Game

"That barbaric amusement"

[DISCLAIMER: The following fragment of diffuse and random verse was found etched onto recycled plexiglass outside FIFA Headquarters, which is outside Zurich, Switzerland, which is near FIFA Headquarters, which is the place where Sepp Blatter, disheveled and sporting a 5 o’clock shadow, stumbled upon IT — and had his gourd completely fucking blown.]

I.

“Poor people who didn't have money to buy things that made them happy had football, that was free. But now they don't have it anymore. So what happened to football? Football is originally a popular property. In its essence, football is a popular property. Why? Because poor people have very limited access to buy what makes them happy, because they do not have the money to buy them.”

- Marcelo Bielsa interview, Copa America 2024

A People’s History of Soccer (Mickael Correia, 2018, trans. 2023) tells the story of the control, enclosure, discipline, and commodification of the game of soccer, or football, by public and private power. It tells the story of the political, communitarian, and imaginative possibilities of sport. It tells the story of “the individual at the service of the collective, with the productive aim of scoring goals.” It tells it all through a medley of micro-histories, from Sao Paulo to Dakar, Barcelona to Palestine, that throws our reality into sharp relief.

For some reason we had never thought to apply a critical lens to the world’s most popular sport, one of the great cultural spectacles in human history (measured by World Cup final viewing numbers, if nothing else), “our last sacred representation” (Correia). We hadn’t gotten much encouragement from the esteemed journalists and pundits of Goal.com, ESPN FC, Sky Sports, Marca, etc – guys who spend much of their time discussing the possible sale and purchase of human beings who are good at soccer, or other catnip. But Correia has a refreshing clarity of insight, and he lays out how football began not just as a game but as a manifestation of power: the field itself, the land, being a site of political contestation:

“In the county of Ely, in East Anglia, a football game was organised in 1638 with the aim of deliberately wrecking the dykes built to dry out the fens and convert them into arable land — drainage works that were the target of popular protest throughout the 17th century. In Kettering, Northamptonshire, a football game was played in 1740 with 500 men on each side that destroyed a mill taken into private ownership by Lady Betey Jesmaine. A similar thing occurred in 1765 in West Haddon, where the locals, opposed to the enclosure of 2,000 acres of common land, organised a football match on the land in question that was merely a pretext to tear up and burn the new fences. Five players were imprisoned, but the organisers of this anti-establishment protest were never identified. In Holland Fen, Lincolnshire, meanwhile, the month of July 1768 alone saw three football-based disturbances in the fens, involving 200 men and numerous ‘rebellious women.’”

In other words – these early games weren’t games, or at least the players weren’t playing. The key word: organized. The key action: protest, destruction, protection of common ground (literally). But no group is greater at thievery and cooptation than the ruling class. And repressive, disciplinary forces began to take notice. In France, 1811, a worried subprefect pathologized football as that “barbaric amusement that a good police force would have forbidden a long time ago… This disorder and tumult are frequently an excuse for acts of vengeance and always give way to reprehensible excesses.”

Correia sets out the multi-century response to this barbaric amusement. The field went from being unbounded, stretching acres and acres, to contained and standardized, players went from in the hundreds to just 11. Football was recreated in the image of its new father: imperialist, colonialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. This was enshrined/inscribed/produced in a variety of ways, like how, in England, to be a good footballer required a strong dose of Civic Virtue, and visa versa:

“For such works, you must be a man of initiative, a good football player, not afraid of blows, always agile, quick-minded, while retaining sang-froid; you must (to use the beautiful Yankee expression) be self-governed.”

Or like the layout of the field:

“As a result, the monopoly on violence maintained by central institutions, together with parliamentarianism as a mode of managing power, prefigure modern football. Just as in the House of Commons the Whigs (liberals) and Tories (conservatives) faced each other across a hall divided equally in two, football would henceforth by played on an enclosed pitch, with symmetrical sides and under the control of a higher authority.”

And, almost in the present day, echoing laws and punitive techniques of legislatures and police forces in 2024 the world over, Thatcher’s law and order regime in the ‘80s criminalized the particular form of delinquency being exhibited by English football supporters. That delinquency also, antithetically, became a way to hypothesize and practice rebellion against Thatcher’s neoliberal austerity state. But the state responded with its own radical, repressive imagination, using hooliganism as an excuse and a testing ground for new forms and technologies of state domination:

“By 1982 the criminalization and repression of hooliganism had been facilitated by the creation of a new custodial sentence for minors, as well as by increasing the police presence at matches and installing fences to segregate supporters. In 1985, the Sporting Events Act specifically targeted hooligans, prohibiting the consumption of alcohol in and around grounds, banning fireworks and flares, and expanding the police stop-and-search rights… [more Acts]… imposed a whole series of security measures against supporters and introduced new specific offences such as pitch invasion and throwing a projectile. The fight against hooliganism became a laboratory for new police practices, and football grounds sites of experimentation for preventive crowd management and the targeting of ‘suspect’ individuals. The installation of surveillance cameras in sports venues became widespread. The first banning orders, or even bans on travel abroad, were issued, even if this meant violating the right to free movement of persons within the European Community member states.”

Sometimes these counterforces aren’t coopting, surveilling, or imaginative. Sometimes they’re simply murderous. See Exh. A. And Exh. B.

TLDR: Global leaders of fascism, colonialism, austerity and all the other awful crap effectively dismantled, retooled, reorganized and deployed the beautiful game with frightening, almost quiet expertise. What can be at its essence the purest form of common play has been not just neutralized in its professionalization but actually used to further surveillance (ultra group bans and electric-only ticketing); to further elite capture (Barca, the “people’s club”, selling their shirt sponsorship, relinquishing UNICEF for Spotify); to normalize deforestation, crisis, oil statehood and the like. Still – within the game there is, always, the game. Meaning there is, always, something to be reclaimed, something that is our commons.

II.

“In front of his lawyers wearing the Besiktas jersey, the first defendant, called to the stand, honors the magistrate with an ‘eagle salute’, the distinctive sign of the Carsi ultras [Besiktas fans]. The judge then questions him: ‘Are you the leader of the group? Did you participate in the coup attempt?’ — ‘No Carsi can give orders to another Carsi,’ the supporter replies mischievously.”

- Correia, A People’s History of Soccer

There is a purity… There is a core… There is. I remember playing pelada, which is the Brazilian word for street soccer or pickup (pelada literally means: naked), on a torn-up street in Salvador Brazil, summer 2014. My feet were getting cut up by glass and pavement. Two knee-high solid little goals. Two versus two with Brazilian kids half my age, trying to best each other with flashes of the sublime, smiling, collectively and individually, back and forth, dialectically, one flowing past the other until: a hum. Creativity with the ball just being an extension of any other kind… teamwork and hustle, the same… The collective: an experiment in common living, common expression…

Theories, strategies, prophecies abound on how to reach communism, since the big man KM manifesto’d it in ‘48. Less common, infinitely more difficult, are concrete visions of what such a world would be, a world without material want, a world with an ethic of care, mutual aid, and healing. There’s plenty out there about what it wouldn’t be – monied, state-controlled, class-stratified. But like the beautiful game, our existence, individual and social, is so dictated by systems of control it’s near impossible to imagine life outside of (beyond) them.

Unless …. Maybe it isn’t?

Brief, ecstatics visions of communitarian life exist, vibrant threads waiting to be seized upon, lived in even for a second, and unspooled into a fabric nearly utopian. How else to describe the feeling of playing a one-two with your teammate – your comrade – in a tight space, your feet and body moving in sync with the ball, with your teammate running into space, with your other teammates dancing, cutting, halting, maneuvering in spontaneous choreography, performing – even for a second – both as individuals, true to their selves, their strengths, their beauty, and as a collective?

Communism – or whatever a truly free and equal communal existence is called – necessitates sacrifice and role playing. It requires, counter to USA-ian capitalism’s persistent propaganda, radical individuality – in service of the collective. How else to describe the stubborn groundedness of a #6, working in tandem with the #8, fluid and measured, alongside them; the #10, euphoric, unpredictable, reckless, poetic. And on, and on, and on, and on. Or better yet, each player encompassing every role — total fluidity, escaping the borders and boundaries of class, race, “gender” along with position… A game of pickup. Two Brazilian kids darting on glass and pavement, melding into each other.

What separates us and ties us together on the pitch, like money, is the ball. Everyone needs the ball, or thinks they do. Everyone wants the ball. But unlike money – or like it? – no one can hold it for too long. And what some discover – maybe, in some abstract way, what Marx envisioned – is that really the only meaning to be found is in all of us sharing it.

Property is theft, especially when you linger with the ball at your feet and miss a chance at goal. But football’s collectivity is more than that. There is joy in the pass, relinquishing the ball – your means to prosperity, your individual wealth, for just that second – to your comrade. There is joy in knowing where your teammate will be; not because you know the future, but because the two of you, the 11 of you, the 200 of you, the 11,000 of you, are melded in collective experience and collective visions of failure and success. There is joy in the egalitarian communal structure that can be formed – that MUST be formed – to defend against attacks; the sneaky run of the opposing #9, or the tendrils of capital and state power.

There’s also that omnipresent, tricky to pin down word — verb, value system, theory of change, etc.: “organizing.” Like a labor union — organized in structure, fluid in personnel, persona, creed and action — the game necessitates some kind of organization, “formation.” Today, with our perceptions of the game molded by social media accounts lapping up “aura” and pre-game betting odds swinging based on the manager’s decision to play a 4-2-3-1, we have difficulty extending our idea of organizing the beautiful game beyond parking the bus.

But in the throes of dictatorial Brazil, Sport Club Corinthians Paulista, spearheaded by the midfield maestro Socratoes, self-organized transcendentally, briefly actually (almost?) owning the means of their own production through a type of radical direct democracy dubbed Democracia Corinthiana. In the early 1980s, the squad players of Corinthians took control over the management of the team: challenging the normative hierarchical structure of football club management and the military dictatorship ruling the nation with an iron fist. The footballers themselves discussed, debated and voted on all matters that affected them, “ranging from what time they would eat lunch to challenging the concentração, a common practice in Brazil where players were practically locked in a hotel for one or two days before a game.”

According to Wikipedia, Corinthian Democracy was

“… an idealistic but effective political cell that fought against the authoritarian way the club's management controlled its players, a microcosm of the way the country was governed by the military. … One of the most notable decisions they made was, in 1982, having "Vote on 15th"^[2] printed on the back of their shirts to motivate fans to vote in the first Brazilian multiparty election since the 1964 military coup.”

If riots are a rehearsal for revolution, perhaps Corinthian Democracy was a special one-week showing of the real deal, lifted from the streets or the halls of government and implemented by its revolutionary actors on the football pitch. The formation taken by Socrates and co. was certainly tactical – but it had greater aims in mind than defensive fortitude and converting xG.

Historically, Correia writes, football was also a tool to organize actual off-the-pitch direct action. Think back to those early games in Ely, Kettering and West Haddon, where locals organized matches with hundreds of “players” per side with the only goal being the destruction of private capital, the preservation of public land. Think of the uprisings surrounding the Arab Spring, where rival ultra factions teamed up to fight to protect their occupied public spaces.

In our gilded age of (post?) neoliberalism, there are barely any, maybe zero, real, “commons” (at least in the USA) to try to protect. Perhaps the moment a ball touches a foot, though, perhaps during the milliseconds of pure communitarian pursuits of collective prosperity, the commons can be reclaimed…

III.

Today, soccer as a collective practice of joy has pretty much been eradicated at every level save the local and familial. The best players in the world, often from Brazil with its particular pathologies, or, generally, the Global South), are castigated by fans, refs, and fellow players (along typical lines of social dominance and discrimination, usually) for tricks, skills, and celebrations.

There is a racialized history to this. Today Pele is held up in Brazil and beyond as one of two or three undisputed “greatest”s. And Garrincha (“little bird”) is close behind. But as Correa reports:

“Young, talented, inventive: Garrincha and Pelé reflected a Brazil with a promising future. For the managers, however, they remained non-white players first. Still traumatised by the 1950 defeat and gripped by debate over the whiteness of its players, the federation sought to discipline the Seleção and keep a strict watch over their physical and psychological condition. The footballers regularly visited medical centres, revealing their malnutrition and poor general health. Upon arrival in Sweden, the players were confined to their hotels. Their diet, movements, family life and sex life were closely monitored, and the female hotel staff were hastily replaced by men. … The psychologist Joao Carvalhaes, called in by the technical committee to select the players most mentally fit to compete, judged Pelé 'unquestionably child-like.’ He added: 'He lacks the necessary fighting spirit, and doesn't have the sense of responsibility that is essential for any team game’ … Garrincha, meanwhile, was judged to have a lower-than-average IQ and not suited to high-pressure games because of his lack of aggression.”

Inventiveness — born often of brutal poverty or, in Garrincha’s case, a physical “irregularity,” i.e., “dis”-ability (one leg was longer than the other, a fact that actually aided his ability to bypass defenders) — was treated as something akin to subversion; joy, individual and collective, was coded as weakness, as it always is by aspiring dominators. These fascistic currents still swirl through the game, despite soccer being a sport where poor and working class athletes regularly penetrate elite spaces before cooptation.

After Neymar transferred from Brazilian club Santos to megaclub Barcelona for countless millions of dollars, he was regularly subjected to abuse in Europe by opposing players for performing tricks, skills, and flicks that were simply beautiful, uncommon, and difficult. Taken to be a form of insult or injury, show-boaty and childish, these ruses were actually necessary survival tactics & techniques for a player like Neymar, who is constantly being hacked down and limited, on and off the field.

Now the same thing happens to Vinicius Jr, another one of the world’s best players, who is racialized and scapegoated for his success, wins, dancing (with and without the ball), and well-earned rage.

The “professional” game may be past saving - co-opted beyond recognition, transformed from radical and populist into boutique advertisement with a Joga Bonito mask, like Whole Foods or a natural food coop. But maybe … maybe the game, can never really be taken from us. And maybe it can still be a site of contestation and struggle.

A seventeen-year old kid has recently captivated the footballing world and reminded us of what a certain kind of PLAY looks like. A certain fearlessness and confidence, like a young artist, in the face of everything. It doesn’t look like Lamine Yamal cares, and when he scored a goal in the European Championship this summer, he flashed the area code of the working class neighborhood Rocafonda where he grew up, where his father had recently been involved in an altercation that drew the attention of the media, and Spanish prosecutors. Vox, a nationalist, far right party in Spain, had set up a tent in Rofaconda, a place they had demonized as a place of immigrants and lowlifes. Yamal's father, Mounir, was fined €600 for throwing eggs at the Vox campaign tent while shouting "fascists" and "racists." In court Mounir testified on his own behalf: "I had my motives. I am a human being. On that day my son was travelling with the Spanish national team to represent this country and these racists came [to our neighbourhood, Rocafonda] and stood next to a school where there are people of all kinds of races."

Earlier this year, a Spanish commentator was sacked for a racist slur he made about Yamal live on air. Yamal's mother was born in Equatorial Guinea, and his father is from Morocco. The racist, imperialist, colonialist, white supremecist, capitalist patriarchy resents Yamal’s success without qualification; it particularly resents the joy with which it’s expressed.

But the game is, after all, a game. The point is practice and experimentation, not performance and dubs. When we loosen up a little bit, and play a game of pelada just to play, we see models and metaphors of degrowth, decentralization, and disarmament:

“Playing on a half-size pitch with seven on a team de facto eliminates specialization, as each player can become a defender or a striker as the game proceeds. As for the self-management of refereeing — it is up to each team to claim a free quick when they deem one is required — it transforms the opponent into a partner in the game, without delegating to any authority the regulation of conflicts on the field…. If there is a problem, we discuss it and decide… We don’t put limits on the pitch, or if a player runs like crazy to catch a ball and it goes a bit behind the goal line, we give him the chance to make a beautiful cross. It’s the beautiful actions that we care about… For the pleasure of dribbling a bit more, a striker might wait for his defender to catch up before shooting at the goal.”

When we play we can envision something different; where the game is just the game, and also much more; community, something that lives hand in hand with a picket line, a neighborhood picnic, collective self-sustenance. Soccer in the morning, the same radical collectivity in some other form in the afternoon. Gender roles cast aside like a nine shirking a one-on-one chance at glory in favor of the cutback pass, capital relinquished like the spotlight of the ball at your feet in favor of ….. something we can’t imagine (yet). Something we only feel in fleeting moments, like when the ball leaves your foot, my foot, our foot without us realizing.