Image by William Pomares from Pixabay.

Football: the grass-roots pastime that became association, sociability, and subsequently an avenue for socialism. The modern money-clad game’s contemporary disposition saddles the contradiction of its humble origins in working-class organisations and social clubs, to its current material substrates such as saturation in sponsorship, monetising its loyalty of fans and its allure for foreign investment. And so, football is the simultaneous image of the best and worst of our world.

In 2016, football purists knew full-well that West Ham’s departure from Upton Park was for none other than monetary gain. How then, does “the beautiful game” maintain its essence while situated in the contextual hands of capitalism? Simon Critchley, author of What We Think About When We Think About Football, believes it doesn’t. For him, football is analogous to an open wound, a contradiction that doesn’t resolve itself. To be a football fan is to live within this contradiction, precipitated all the more by the ardent desire for one’s supported club to acquire the best players in the bi-annual transfer market.

However, it is here that we may question what indeed the essence of the football club really is, and whether our concern for the above paradox is well-founded? Observing a football club is to witness a transient, ever-changing conveyer-belt of players, annual kit designs, fleeting managers and owners, and generations of fans who come and pass. If the defining, individuated aspect of what a football club actually is cannot be identified as any of these, we might seek to affirm the club’s identity in its home ground. However, this too (especially in the modern era) is untenable as clubs flee the nest, as it were, for the abovementioned economical incentives. 

We are then left with one last redeeming feature: the club emblem. Again, even the crest is re-designed and given a modern embellishment every few decades. When we likewise subject, for example, Manchester United to reductive analysis, we discern no essential, enduring property by which we can identify what the organisation is in itself. Any concept of United is not grounded in any rational, substantial reason. The football club then, is a fiction. 

Furthermore, it should be noted that to lend credence to, say, the liver bird of the Liverpool FC logo is for one to pledge allegiance to a mythical being. This creature, adorning most club insignia, illuminates the often hard-nosed football fans’ implicit totemic relation to a fairy-tale entity of which instantiates no material reality. It is interesting to discover that a game often grounded in aloof masculinity clings dear to the convenient fantasy that is the football club, with all its emotional investment. Moreover, the common conception that the home ground represents the core of the club is something akin to sanctity of place worship – no less than a religious notion. For the devoted fan, the idea of the sacred is the experience of their team’s home turf.

This holy connection was evident in the triadic relationship between the Liverpool team of the 1970’s, with the infamous figure Bill Shankly manifesting links between himself (the manager), the directors, fans, and thus forging the expression of a way of life for Liverpool as a city. This relationship demonstrates the is-ness of Liverpool in a manner that other art forms cannot. Critchley reconciles this notion with the implicit contradictory nature of football, terming it a “working-class ballet.” Interestingly, unlike other art forms, football resists the disjunction whereby certain artistry is not deemed worthy of one’s attachment, like that of a drama series that doesn’t take our fancy. 

Contrarily, football is compelling enough as a live, volatile phenomenon within its own boundaries that one can accept it in a way that is perhaps incongruous with other art forms; in that it doesn’t have to be of a certain standard to acquire our attention since it is convincing enough as its own discipline to do so. 

In acknowledgement of this, football reveals itself as a kind of theatre – a safe forum within which fans can harbour hatred of another club, without wanting to inflict violence on its associates. There is a complicit meta-expression (that is, a level of expression that refers to itself as opposed to the object of its discussion) of emotions and humours that may otherwise be dangerous. This point was reified in Shankly’s most telling avowal:

“Football is not a matter of life and death, it’s more than that.”

Because football is perhaps meta-expressive, it presents a manageable fulcrum for the limitless, boundless theatre of human emotions, which here can be played out amid the perimeters of marked white lines. Nevertheless, to describe football as theatre is not to say it is inconsequential. Theatre is important. When humans are presented with something in a direct or parched manner, it is unlikely to be absorbed.  If, on the other hand, it is conveyed in the form of story, myth, or other theatrical devices, the chance of permeating the recipient dramatically increases.

Therefore, football comprises an indirect, theatrical presentation of things that make us... us. In this way, football does not adhere to the paradigms of a sport in the conventional sense. It is, as Hal Foster observes, the stage where the sometimes obscure operations of fate work themselves out – especially national fate. Football is a theatre of identity, family, tribe, city and nation. But it is the mediation of identity in its evanescent, intricate juggling of forms by which the players and fans relent to the metaphorical drama on the pitch.

When attending a football match, this particular theme endures. Football concerns materiality regarding its involvement of bodies in motion and grass, but it is more a spectacle. We nudge through the turnstyle (for example, at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis) and subsequently traverse through broad windowless halls inhabiting over-priced concession stands before our ascent toward the daylight – or better – the floodlight, to locate our seat. We look out upon a shimmering pitch and an entire stadium so expansive our retinas must adjust to the depth of field. Our tacit familiarity with the players who we feel we know so well personally, is somewhat violated when their transcendent television appeal is mortalised before us in the form of a living, breathing being.

In such surroundings, one endeavours to orientate themselves to what appears as a hyper-reality or a movie – an intentional fiction which is at once real and unreal – something Critchley coins as the “middle kingdom.” In the psychoanalytic sense, football occurs in the realm of ‘phantasy’: it is neither subjective delusion nor is it objectively real. It is that which structures and saturates what we conceive as ordinary life, yet in intensely articulated form. It is almost overwhelming, like a cinematic experience with an entirely immersive surround sensorium, or “sensate ecstasy” as Critchely enunciates. Nonetheless, we are not merely dupes nor are we reluctantly being deceived. We are rather willing participants and beneficiaries of this spectrum – we make our ritualistic sacrifice.

Necessarily, there is no immediacy in football, no direct access to a world demarcating objectivity or subjectivity. Football is unrelentingly mediated. And mediation means a third-party intervention between what something is and our perception of it, therefore football in fact lacks its purported immediacy. But in this case such an intervention is instead tautological. In other words, mediation is the very presentation of its essence: football stands as the self-presentation of total mediation.

Aside from its aesthetic or metaphysical components, football encompasses highly nuanced discursiveness, involving reason, justice and philosophical argument. Football fans feel enfranchised – they know and study the particular domain of what they’re talking about. Conversation on such topics is arguably as high-minded as a discussion on Rene Descartes. That is, the nature of Pep Guardiola’s tactics is as scholastically esoteric as any other. To the uninitiated who are not aware of the complications of team formations, new signings, past results, club history and personal rivalries, football can be seen as an entire body of knowledge specific to those who follow it. 

Furthermore, football talk is not only a tool to reactivate previous events from an immemorial past; it may serve as a paradigm for moral behaviour and discourse. The twentieth-century French philosopher Albert Camus hinted at this possibility:

“After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences, what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.”

If only other areas of life were so dialectical and yet so infused with passion. For fans, the rigorous rationality of arguments is subtended by a visceral fervour, striking the perfect balance. Idealistically, a dialogue should not solely infer a series of abstractions on the one hand, or a blindly passionate foray of feelings on the other. It should be a marriage of the two polarities. 

The contemporary world, with its myriad differences in opinion and beliefs, would be wise to emulate the discourse surrounding football. In this way, contradictory viewpoints might be more easily reconciled, as has been predominantly achieved in Eastern philosophy, if we are to adopt football’s capacity as a non-implicational forum in which discussion can occur without any ensuing negative consequences.  Through this lens, football might be of the most useful metaphors available.