Press Exposure: Reporting the lies (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reporting the lies

Saturday September 30 and it’s the beginning of a really special weekend for British sport. For a start it’s the day before Eric Cantona returns to the Manchester United team. He has served—need we remind you—his term of suspension for his over-athletic response to an opposition fan’s opinions on him being sent off. Then there’s Will Carling, the captain of England's rugby union team. He’s in sparkling form for his club Harlequins even if the tabloids are in pursuit of him over his relationship with the Princess of Wales. Yes it looks like being a great weekend—for sport, for the players. for the hacks who are supposed to tell us all about the games and for the people whose lives are briefly lightened by reading about them.

But first a word or two more about Cantona and Carling. They are two very different men, with Carling seemingly unable to express himself except in mind- numbing banalities while Cantona is always liable to launch into rambling, obscure epigrams which come from nowhere and lead into nothing. Cantona is swarthy and brooding while Carling—at least until he excited the media as the latest victim of the predatory princess— was boringly clean cut and affable. Each in their way supplied an element essential to the sustenance of attention from the tabloids. Yes. you’ve guessed it—sex and violence.

Romps

Violence is never far away from how the hacks report sport. Matches are “clashes” or "battles"; strikers are “deadly"; teams "pack a real punch"; losing sides are "sunk" like the General Belgrano. Any suspicion that stars of the games have what is laughingly called a private life more interesting than the average will send the tabloids into a hysteria of pursuit, observation and, when all else fails, plain and simple fabrication. This will often involve the discovery of some alleged partner in what are called “sex romps" (celebrities never have just plain sex—they always have "romps") who is willing to tell all, for a price.

One effect of this is that anyone who reads the sports pages of the tabloids because they want to find out what happened during the games will often be disappointed. They will see a lot about those romps or the addiction problems of the players or what has been happening lately between the managers and their wives but not very much about the game. A lot of space is regularly given over to the complaints of outraged managers who are sure that their team was deprived of a well-earned victory by a blundering referee. A lot more is devoted to disputes between managers about whether their players played dirty or, as in a recent match between Tottenham and Wimbledon, over whether one team had the right to use a substitute who had arrived late. Anyone could be excused for concluding that—in the case of the popular sports like football, cricket, rugby, boxing, the actual performances are of secondary importance, except to the long-suffering hordes who have paid to watch other people kick a ball, punch each other or pretend to be injured. All of this revolves around the fact that what is called sport is really big business into some big money involved—money often supplied by a few very rich people who need to be reassured and placated and have their ego regularly inflated by the crowds and the media.

Distractions

But isn’t sport also a distraction? Well yes and very useful it can be for anyone who needs some re-organising after a week in the office or the shop or on the factory floor. And in this the tabloids, with their extravagance and selective wording, headlines and pictures, are important agents. But what do people need to be distracted from? Well for one thing there is the fact that, according to government figures, there are 50,000 homeless households in England (in 1982 there were 9,300) living in temporary accommodation. Barnados point out (as if it were needed) that parents in that situation suffer so much despair and frustration that their marriages may crumble and they may become violent towards the children they love: ". . . and the consequences can last long beyond the time . . ." but realities like that get scant attention in the tabloids and what attention they do get is overshadowed by the page-after-page devoted to sport, with heavy type headlines and hysterical language.

What this amounts to is that this social system is so harsh, so repressive and threatening that its people need distractions and fantasy because reality is too awful to face. How many of the children in those homeless families sustain themselves with dreams of running into the turf at Highbury or Twickenham while the massed fans cheer, if scoring the vital goal or try, or spraying out autographs to adoring kids, or having "red-hot sex romps” for the tabloids to rhapsodise about next week?

Debate

Whether this is preferable to the older style of treating sport as if it were war (and on other pages treating war as if it were sport) is a matter of debate. In any case the end result is the same; no-one gets near the kernel of the matter. No-one grasps the fact that sport is capitalism in essence—ruthlessly competitive sometimes disguised as caring and co-operative. The fantasies it stimulates are a usefully cynical conditioning for a life of exploitation. The tabloid sports pages make a significant contribution to this and the whole sorry, sordid mess will go on until we all blow the whistle.

Ivan

Action Replay: War in the Way (2026)

The Action Replay column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sportcity in Manchester is a venue for a number of sports facilities, most notably the Manchester City football stadium, but also the Velodrome and National Squash Centre. This idea of hosting various amenities in one area can of course be applied on a national or international level too, and the Middle East is a prime example.

The Persian Gulf in particular has seen a lot of state and private investment in sport, part of a programme aiming to attract increased tourist and leisure visitors more generally. We have previously examined the role of sportswashing in this (see Action Replay for October 2023 and December 2024). The 2022 football World Cup in Qatar was one of the first instances. Saudi Arabia then took the lead, winning the bid to stage the 2034 World Cup, as part of a Vision 2030, supposedly aiming to ‘diversify the economy and invest locally and internationally’ (pif.gov.sa). The Middle East Sports Investment Forum (mesifglobal.com) holds regular conferences to discuss future opportunities, with a meeting in London scheduled for June; a standard delegate ticket costs just £1500.

But a very big ‘but’ has materialised, the US-Israeli attack on Iran and Lebanon, and the Iranian attacks on neighbouring countries. Bombs and drones have made travel to and from the region difficult and unpredictable, and simply being there became unacceptable for some. The motor racing grands prix due to be held in April in Bahrain and Saudi were called off, as was the MotoGP grand prix in Qatar. Perhaps a hundred events of all kinds had been cancelled or postponed since the start of the war (Guardian 21 March). Sports such as football and motor racing are likely to better protected than tennis and golf, for instance.

The same source quoted a professor of Eurasian sport industry (!) as saying that the Gulf states had placed too much emphasis on events, without diversifying sufficiently. Manufacturing equipment and clothing would have been a good idea too, but it may well be too late to get into that market.

The war shows the unpredictability of capitalism as far as business ventures are concerned. Capitalists don’t take possible wars into account when planning new businesses or expanding existing ones. It remains to be seen what effect the ‘cease-fire’ in operation at the time of writing will have. But that just reinforces the uncertainty surrounding the fighting and its consequences.

‘The war has come at the wrong time,’ the professor mentioned above said, though he presumably wasn’t saying that there is a good time for wars.

Paul Bennett

Sport mimics warfare (1980)

From the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win . . . At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests and seriously believe—at any rate for short periods—that running, jumping and kicking a bill are tests of national virtue.

George Orwell

Blogger's Note: 

This short quote from Orwell really should have been tagged onto the end of Paul Bennett's article, 'The Olympics: sport as warfare', but I missed it at the time. I'm now making amends.

The quote itself is from Orwell's 1945 essay, 'The Sporting Spirit'.

The Olympics: sport as warfare (1980)

From the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

A large number of people are currently assembled in Moscow to take part in, watch, or report on, a festival of international sport which, supposedly, contributes to world peace by bringing people of different countries together in a spirit of friendly competition. The popular mythology has it that even the compilation of medal tables, so as to discover which nation has come “top”, is preferable to other ways of asserting national superiority or increasing national prestige—score, score is apparently better than war, war. In fact, those who gather in Moscow are participating in a gigantic charade—a mixture of hypocrisy, chauvinism and plain dishonesty which mirrors accurately enough the world of which it is a part.

In the first place, there is no way in which the Olympics could possibly contribute to the establishment of peace in the world. A few thousand athletes come together in this way may get to know, and understand rather better, people of differing countries and cultures (the same sort of claim has been made about the Miss World contest!), but it cannot seriously be argued that such contacts will help prevent war. Countries go to war for good (to their rulers) economic and strategic reasons, and are not going to be diverted from such designs by the fact that a few of their citizens have made friends with a few of the “enemy”. Of course, if workers refused to kill each other in defence of their masters’ interests, then wars could not take place, but such a stand implies a degree of socialist consciousness which results from something more than just taking part in the Olympics. To suggest that the Olympics can serve the cause of peace reveals a naive misunderstanding of the causes of war.

On the contrary, the Olympic Games—like international sport in general—are used as a device to inflame nationalist sentiments and to delude workers into thinking that they have some sort of interest in “their” country doing well. It won’t just be Sebastian Coe who wins a medal, it’ll be Britain—or “us”. It is national sides who compete in team sports such as hockey and football, and it is national anthems and flags that are played and raised at medal ceremonies. Jacques Julliard, in an article in Le Nouvet Observateur for December 1979, argues that the true founder of the modern Games was not Baron de Coubertin in 1896 but Adolf Hitler in 1936. It was in Berlin that the nationalist and propaganda value of the Games was first exploited fully. And it is in Hitler's footsteps that the more recent practitioners of the propaganda art are following.

As a consequence of the exploitation of a victory for nationalistic purposes, the production of sporting champions has become a major industry in a number of countries. Russia has specialist schools and institutes for the training of the talented few—and this although half of the country's schools have insufficient equipment for physical education lessons (James Riordan: Soviet Sport). It is commonplace in the West to point out that East European sportspeople, whether described as soldiers, students, or whatever, are not really amateurs but in effect full-time professional athletes. This is fair enough, but it conveniently overlooks the fact that a very similar situation obtains in the West. Athletes are employed by sports goods firms, paid to wear their running shoes, and (in America) given generous college scholarships. The modern world-class athlete, whatever their natural ability, is an expensively-produced and carefully-nurtured product, packaged in a national flag.

And usually filled up with drugs to boot! The anabolic steroids taken by shot-putters and others are the most celebrated, but there are many examples, including—most distasteful of all, perhaps—the drugs taken by girl gymnasts to arrest the advent of puberty. Sports medicine is now a highly-developed science, but nobody really knows the risks being run by the drug-takers, especially the child prodigies who are subjected to drugs from an early age. Although doping is illegal, the rules are easy enough to circumvent: stop taking your steroids a few months before you know you’ll be tested, and you can be confident you won’t be detected. Indeed, even if you are found out, you’ll probably be competing again very soon, anyway.

So the countries that win the most gold medals arc those that have the best-organised and best-financed production line for top-class athletes. Sport at international level has been taken over by the ruling classes of the various nation-states for their own ends.

Which brings us to the boycott. In protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, a number of national Olympic Committees have in response to a boycott campaign orchestrated by President Carter, decided not to send teams to Moscow. At the time of writing, eighty-five countries only had accepted the invitation to attend, out of a possible hundred and thirty or so, the non-acceptors including such successful nations as West Germany and the United States. It is as concerted an exercise in hypocrisy as could be imagined. Just look at some of the countries that are adopting a high and mighty moral stance and not attending. Military dictatorships such as Argentina and Pakistan. Israel, which is occupying parts of neighbouring countries. America, which till five years ago was waging a bloody war in Southeast Asia. China, which just eighteen months ago invaded Vietnam.

Looking back over recent Olympics, there have been few not marked by some particularly nasty illustration of the nature of capitalism. Just before the 1956 Games, Russia invaded Hungary, and Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt in the Suez Crisis. Spain (!) and the Netherlands withdrew because of the Hungarian invasion, and Lebanon and Iraq because of Suez. The Mexico City Games of 1968 were preceded by the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and by a massacre of Mexican students. Although there was a threatened boycott by African countries because of South Africa’s intended participation, nobody refused to attend Games in a country run by a government that had recently murdered some of its citizens. And in 1972 the Olympics went on despite the killing of some Israeli athletes by Palestinian guerrillas.

Even when there were no “spectacular” events of this kind, there were wars and dictatorships the whole time. It is difficult not to agree with Avery Brundage, President of the International Olympic Committee, who, in a moment of rare perception, said in 1956:

In an imperfect world, if participation in sports is to be stopped every time the politicians violate the laws of humanity, there will never be any international contests (quoted in Richard Espy: The Politics of the Olympic Games).

But of course boycotts aren’t mounted whenever there might be grounds for doing so, only when it suits those who organise them (when they are faced with a forthcoming presidential election, for instance).

It was particularly interesting to observe the humbug that surrounded the attempt by the British government to cajole the UK Olympic Committee into joining the boycott. When sports representatives pointed out that they were being expected to carry the can alone, in that the government was doing precious little else to protest about Afghanistan, Lord Carrington informed them that a trade embargo could not be considered, as it would hurt Britain more than Russia. “We are”, he said, “a trading nation.” It is then hardly surprising to learn that one British sportsman who has refused to go the the Olympics on grounds of “conscience” — is a fencer who is an army captain, in other words a man who is trained to kill (or, more likely, to order others to kill) in defence of the interests of British capitalism. His conscience won’t stop him doing that, presumably.

The deadly serious Olympic “Games”, as part of capitalism, reflect its nature and its values. The gold medals are tainted not just with the blood of Afghans, but with the essential rottenness of all class society.

Paul Bennett

Football Wars (2012)

From the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1969 rioting by fans during a World Cup match between Honduras and El Salvador appeared to trigger a four-day military conflict –the so-called football war. In fact, the Salvadoran generals merely used the rioting as a convenient occasion for launching a planned attack on Honduras. The main cause of tension was land disputes between Salvadoran migrants in Honduras and local farmers.

Nevertheless, competitive sports like football do have connections with war. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The connections are especially striking where competing teams represent different nations and the memory of past wars is still fresh –or is artificially revived by nationalist politicians and publicists.

The Euro 2012 soccer finals, co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, offer a veritable feast of national and racial hatred. When Russia played the Czech Republic in Lvov (western Ukraine) on June 8, Russian fans threw lighted fireworks and fought Ukrainian fans. When Russia played Poland in Warsaw on June 12, Russian fans clashed with Polish fans and police, leaving 15 injured. Fans from several East European countries have made black players on West European teams targets of racial abuse. And so it goes on. 

The East European media have played their part in fomenting hatred. For example, on the eve of the Russian-Polish match Polish newspapers took care to remind their readers of the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’–the victory of Polish arms in the war of 1920 with Bolshevik Russia.

When talking about ‘football hooliganism’ it is important to distinguish between spontaneous acts by excited fans and the much more serious violence orchestrated by the gangs or ‘firms’ that are attached to many football clubs. These firms are paramilitary organizations that supply commanders, provide training in armed and unarmed combat and conduct preliminary reconnaissance of unfamiliar terrain. They are often infiltrated or even controlled by ultra-nationalist political groups that recruit among fans.

On June 13, The Sun Today described a training and indoctrination camp set up on an abandoned Soviet military base near Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine by Patriot of Ukraine –the paramilitary auxiliary of the fascist Social-National Assembly (SNA). The SNA website (sna.in.ua) –under the motto ‘Strength! Order! Wellbeing!’–explains that Patriot of Ukraine is “the revolutionary avant-garde of the Ukrainian social-nationalist movement”and was established to “purge the nation”and guard the SNA.

The SNA is related to the All-Ukrainian Union ‘Freedom’ (Svoboda), which has captured control of large areas of western Ukraine, including Lvov and other cities, and is poised to enter the national parliament. Both have their origin in the old Social-National Party, but Svoboda has cultivated a more respectable image. You can find videos of their torchlight marches through Ukraine’s cities at http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/120329/ukraine-svoboda-nationalist-party-nazi-echoes-hitler-pt-2.

The ‘national identities’ inculcated through competitive sports impart a sense of meaning and importance. They offer an illusory escape from humdrum lives. For the ‘hooligans’ there is also the temporary emotional release and addictive adrenalin rush of acted-out aggression –cheaper and perhaps less risky than alternatives such as drugs. The identity and meaning are sham, because ordinary working people live much the same lives and face much the same problems everywhere. National identities have nothing to do with real life. But they do the ruling class a great service by blocking any alternative identity rooted in real life –an identity capable of uniting working people throughout the world in the fight for a life from which we will not feel the need to escape.

Stefan