The Euros – how beautiful is the game? (2024)

From the August 2024 of the Socialist Standard

Many people in England will have been disappointed that England didn’t win their final. Yet records were broken, for example the maximum number ever of TV viewers for a football match, tens of thousands of people travelling abroad not to see a match live but to be in the country where it was taking place. There was also an outpouring of patriotism, jingoism, nationalism – call it what you like – probably never before witnessed over a sports event. But that’s what the system we live under is good at – distractions from the daily grind offering momentary thrills to mitigate the condition of powerlessness that most of us experience in our daily lives. Supporting a team, especially if it’s a winning one, may manifest itself, at least momentarily, as a kind of power – even if some would label it bread and circuses.

But what is that powerlessness of our daily lives? Largely it’s the necessity we are under to sell our energies to an employer for a wage or salary day in day out whether we get satisfaction or fulfilment from that activity or not. We ignore that at the risk of dire poverty or destitution. We spend most of our lives, as one commentator has put it, ‘under conditions of duress and unfreedom’. The exhilaration we may feel in supporting a sports team and witnessing it play – and hopefully succeed – in an event such as the Euros serves as a kind of poor substitute for the lack of opportunity to express our own talents freely in our daily lives.

Not of course that most people perceive the paid work they are forced to do for a living as a form of subservience or oppression, so docile have they been made by the conditioning process of the society they have grown up in. Part of this conditioning is the stress put on the need to regard as special and superior the country they happen to have been born into – so-called patriotism. This can even mean that, in the event of a conflict between the leaders of their country and the leaders of another, many people are willing to fight and even lay down their lives for the abstraction of patriotism.

Of course supporting your ‘national’ team is far from fighting a real war or laying down your life. In fact for many it’s a genuinely enjoyable experience. But the paroxysm of ‘national pride’ that an occasion such as the European Football Championship elicits and, last month, was encouraged at all levels is also a mirror of the unthinking worship of the idea of differences and divisions between men and women living in different parts of the planet –the anti-human mentality of better and worse, of winners and losers. Nothing could be more antithetical than that to the socialist pursuit of unity between peoples and the establishment of a stateless, borderless world of free access to all goods and services. In such a world, we will all be autonomous individuals pursuing our own goals and interests but at the same time exhibiting social reciprocity in all areas. In such conditions, apart from cooperating in work and production, we may also enjoy taking part in sport or watching and appreciating the skilful sporting activities of others but we will do this in a socially healthy way. It will no longer take the current grotesque form of fanatical fandom, of the passing thrill offered by a ‘hyped-up’ form of mass entertainment billed as a life-shattering event but in reality little more than a brief distraction from the daily grind of life under the buying and selling system that is capitalism.