Book Review- ‘The Ball is Round’
David Goldblatt provides a comprehensive account of the Beautiful Game’s history- and reminds us throughout that football cannot be disentangled from its societal context
How has football emerged in the past century and a half from being a game played almost exclusively by upper-class British schoolboys to a game which counts as many as 250 million players and, if FIFA is to be believed, up to 3.5 billion fans? While a question this vast is almost impossible to answer, David Goldblatt’s chronicle of football’s tumultuous history brings some key points to the fore, only enhanced by his thorough accounts of the social context within which football flourished.
Though anarchic village encounters had received the demonym of ‘football’ for centuries, serving as a temporary release from the strictures of social order in variants across Europe, it was precisely those sources of authority which gave the game its recognisable modern form in Victorian Britain. Wanderers, comprised of former pupils drawn from Britain’s most exclusive public schools, won the inaugural edition of the FA Cup in 1872; it wasn’t until 14 years later that an FA Cup final would first be contested between two sides from the industrial heartlands (Blackburn Rovers and West Bromwich Albion) whose staggering output had turned Britain into the ‘workshop of the world’—and whose massive population of uprooted factory workers provided a ready-made support base. As Goldblatt notes early in his book, football became a manner of projecting a form of civic pride from below, helping the new urbanites identify with their adopted homes and, in time, shape them in their image.
This process of diffusion took place across the continent, forged through the crucible of the First World War. The picture that emerges from Goldblatt’s account is one of football as a form of self-expression, a form of civic pride given shape from below. If clubs came to embody a city’s fortunes or character, then that was a sign that cities were increasingly identified with their demos– a development which coincided, too, with the belated introduction of universal suffrage across much of Europe in the interwar period. This is the point, Goldblatt argues, that football’s popularity made it indisputably the leading sport, at least in Europe and Latin America; and it gained that popularity as a resolutely working-class sport, hailing a new social mindset.
Yet if football offered the working-class a way of effecting change from below, the opposite urge of using football to impose order from above has also run like a red thread through the game’s social history. The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century based their legitimacy on claiming to represent the best interests of ‘the common people’; though definition of who exactly the common people were and what their interests entailed varied, football was irrefutably their favourite game. It was thus imperative for the central authorities in totalitarian states to control the emerging mass culture by allying wider political agendas to the greatest demotic passion, football. Goldblatt notes this trend, pointing out how competitions pitting teams from different nations often led to tensions boiling over both on and off the pitch, using the Mitropa Cup (a predecessor of sorts of the Champions League, primarily featuring sides drawn from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and its immediate environs) to illustrate how the age of coexistence between different ethnic and religious groups under the auspices of a single empire had hardened into a nationalistic vitriol which, in time, made fair competition impossible; telling is the lament of an Austrian diplomat, said by Goldblatt to have sighed that the Mitropa Cup was ‘resolved more often in the embassy than in than in the stadium.’
Attempts to appropriate the people’s game were, as shown through numerous examples in Goldblatt’s book, commonplace across totalitarian regimes, yet football too offered a way of pushing back and giving the discontent a voice. An example cited in the book is Spartak Moscow, whose rivalry with Dynamo Moscow, the recipient of elaborate state patronage, made supporting them a ‘small way of saying no’ to the state, and a manner of resisting, at least for a few hours at weekends, the suffocating repression of Soviet life. In this description, going to the football and supporting your team emerges into a truly meaningful act of self-expression, a way of expressing one’s morals and attaching one’s identity to an entity which represents one’s values.
One of The Ball is Round’s greatest strengths is its truly global scope, with multiple chapters dedicated to Africa and Asia to supplement the abundance of information on the traditional football heartlands of Europe and Latin America. Here too emerges the dialectic tension between the expressive power of football, on the one hand, as one of the few places in which colonised people could take on their colonisers on a level playing field; and on the other hand, the way that football was used, especially by post-colonial leaders, to create a ‘nation’ from the hodgepodge of ethnic and cultural groups which had been incorporated into a single political entity by European powers. Here again, football emerges as something organic, a chance for the marginalised and the voiceless to mould their own identities and to pipe in in some small way in broader debates about nation, identity and the collective future. Fitting in this regard is Wole Soyinka’s remark, included in block quotes at the beginning of one chapter, that ‘a polity which loses its collective sense of proportion when its football team goes to battle… may indeed be deemed a nation’; illustrating how a sense of national identity could be shaped from below as well as from above.
If Goldblatt’s accounts of the liberating power of football in illiberal societies are eye-catchingly optimistic, then the sociologist’s lens which he applies to the effects of the sport’s commercialisation and ‘mediatisation’ show that the status of football as a unique melting pot of different social groups, a place where sharply-defined distinctions of class and social standing soften and fade, is far from self-evident. In a skein of thought further elaborated on in The Game of Our Lives, Goldblatt’s book on football’s place within English society, Goldblatt takes note of the erosion of the ‘self-regulating crowd’, the proud autonomy which, at least per Goldblatt’s account, ruled the terraces from the inter-war period through to at least the 1980s. At least at the élite level, football has moved ever-further from its oldest and most loyal constituency, the mass men for whom heading to the ground every other Saturday was as embedded into the internal calendar as was appearing on the factory floor or the top of the mine-shaft during the week. Since The Ball is Round was published in 2006, this tendency has only strengthened, with average season ticket prices topping £800 at the likes of Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur and the prospect of a European Super League still openly being cherished by the presidents of several top European clubs in the face of massive opposition.
Yet despite this somewhat melancholy note, your correspondent has witnessed how football can be harnessed as a source of hope in incredibly adverse circumstances. This was at May’s fixture between Borussia Mönchengladbach and the Ukrainian national team, the latter’s first match since the Russian invasion, which your correspondent had the pleasure of attending in person and which resembled a sort of brief national release from the miseries of the previous months. A significant portion of the crowd were Ukrainian refugees, many wrapped in the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag; judging from the packed trains and busses on the way to and from the stadium, many of them had come from rather far afield to bear witness to the match, their folk songs wafting in the air. Your correspondent was sat next to a family who had fled Kharkiv just after the invasion began; on the verge of tears, the pater familias summed up his emotions that evening as being ‘joy and pain and tears mixed all together’. As football chants and the Ukrainian anthem rang around the Borussia-Park, your correspondent was struck by just how powerful a force football can be in binding people together, making solidarity visible and offering breathing space from daily concerns.
Inthehalfspace 