Socialist Sonnet No. 239: Penalties (2026)

 From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Penalties

Both captains of England beaming

Out through a betting shop window.

The trophy they hold’s just for show

To entice punters who’re dreaming

World Cup dreams. Footballing success

Against the odds: There is romance

And an outside gamble that chance

Might pay out, and so help to address

The piker’s parlous fiscal state.

Also, there’s national pride at stake,

All lost on a simple mistake;

Seeming perniciousness of fate.

Briefly, the optimism flows,

But then, the final whistle blows.

 D. A.

Action Replay: Ads and roses (2025)

The Action Replay column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In September the Red Roses won the World Cup. More fully, England won the Women’s Rugby Union World Cup. The tournament was held in England, and England were the favourites, so the result wasn’t a great surprise. Nevertheless, it did lead to a great deal of celebration and excitement at the victory, but also at what it showed about the growing interest in women’s spectator sport. The final was the most-watched rugby match on TV this year. There has been a lot of fuss about the likely ‘legacy’ of the success, with more people watching and, in particular, more women and girls playing rugby at the grassroots level.

For a variety of reasons: lacking confidence, having fewer opportunities at school, or spending more time on family responsibilities, for example, women and girls are on the whole less involved in sport and physical activity than men and boys are, hence Sport England’s This Girl Can campaign.

The most obvious example of the increased interest is football, where England’s national team, known as the Lionesses, have twice won the European Championship, and most professional clubs now have women’s teams too. London City Lionesses aren’t linked to another club, but formed as a breakaway from Millwall Lionesses.

There has, of course, long been a media interest in women’s sports, but this has been primarily in individual events such as athletics, gymnastics, swimming and tennis. For whatever reason, team sports have lagged behind, with the possible exception of hockey and netball. Only in the last couple of decades have team sports attracted more attention.

Twelve years ago no women’s national cricket team had professional contracts, and England players had to fly economy class to major tournaments. This year the fifty-over Women’s World Cup was played in India, with a total prize money of nearly $14m (which was more than that for the most recent corresponding men’s World Cup).

A specific indicator of the growing interest in women’s sport is in advertising, where many brands have begun to focus more on sports adverts that deal with products aimed at women, from perfume and jewellery to shampoo. And women athletes now appear more often in the adverts, something that sportsmen, especially athletes and footballers, have been doing for some time. Last year’s Paris Olympics was a good example of more woman-focused advertising. Nike, for instance, has increased its spending on marketing in order to compete with ‘upstart’ rivals. And it’s not just advertising, as broadcasting rights for women’s sports have become more valuable too.

It’s good to see more people, whatever their age and gender, participating actively in sport but, as so often, there are other interests at stake too.

Paul Bennett

Running Commentary: Plenty (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Plenty

Just as the news came in of yet another desperate famine in Africa, it was reported that the EEC are about to try to reduce their 1,360,000 tonne butter mountain by selling the stuff, at 3p a pound, as food for calves. EEC officials argue that this is the best way to dispose of the butter — best because it is cheaper than stockpiling it.

You did not need to be exceptionally perceptive to work out that what is being suggested is that the butter, after being kept in store for some time, be fed back to the animals who produced it in the first place.

There is nothing unreasonable or illogical about this. It fits in perfectly well with the assumptions and needs of commodity production — the turning out of wealth for sale on the market so as to yield a profit for the class who own the means of life. In this system the market — not human needs — decides when there is a shortage or a surplus. That the EEC is grappling with the problem of mountains and lakes of stuff which could feed human beings does not mean that everyone in the world is properly fed. It simply means that the market has more than it can profitably deal with, which is a very different matter.

It is by no means uncommon for food to be stockpiled or, if the market demands it, destroyed while there is an urgent human need for it. Sometimes — like the butter — it is returned where it came from. Vegetables are ploughed into the earth or fish thrown back into the sea. A neat, circular solution you might think — just what all those highly trained experts and economists are paid to think up. Until you look at the pictures of those people starving; the children only hours away from death staring out from shrunken, fly-swarming eyes, the emaciated adults squatting in their final apathy.

Then you know that something is wrong, that somewhere there is an obvious answer which is being evaded. And you are right. But think about it a bit more and ask yourself, who is doing the evading?

Cut price ignorance

Anyone who is thinking about buying a few shares in newly privatised concerns like British Gas, Jaguar and the National Freight Corporation had better brace themselves to receive a letter from Norman Tebbit. The Tory Party chairman, presumably believing that the most impoverished of workers can be kidded that owning some shares makes them a capitalist, will be trying to scare them with bogeyman stories about Labour snatching their dividends to give to lazy dole-queue scroungers.

If you think this smacks of desperation, what about the other scheme at Tory HQ. to attract new recruits by offering them a clutch of cut-price offers? Sign on the blue dotted line and you'll be eligible for a cheap subscription rate to the Countdown discount organisation; the chance to buy gift hampers; membership of a wine society; copies of Jeffrey Archer's books, personally signed by the world's greatest living writer (it is not clear whether this is intended to persuade people into the Tory Party or the Workers' Revolutionary Party).

Of course Labour supporters are having a great time poking fun at all this, on the lines that the Tory Party which was once a marriage bureau is now a mail order company. Well, nobody can argue with that but they should remember that all capitalist parties use a variety of tricks and inducements to get workers to join them.

You can join the Labour Party, for example. by simply signing a form brandished at you by some canvasser on your doorstep. A few minutes later, if you were getting a lot of attention from canvassers, you could join the Conservative Party in the same way. Your opinions need not come into it; the capitalist parties are interested in your support — your vote, your money, your membership.

It is difficult to understand, or to empathise with, workers who fall for this, who allow their intelligence to be insulted in this way and who regard so lightly their political power to transform society.

Capitalism's problems can be solved only by a social revolution. That needs mass consciousness. leading to a deliberate act by the world working class. That is fundamentally different from the sordid grubbing for votes which absorbs so much of the energy of the likes of the Labour and Tory Parties. The question is — how long will the workers allow themselves to be seduced away from their historic role by tawdry offers of cheap wine, food and political thrills? How long will they abandon their revolutionary function for a mess of Jeffrey Archer?

Kick off

Every schoolchild brought up on Henry Newbolt's foolish poem about playing the game knows that the British are great ones for courtesy and sporting behaviour. It is something to do with character building on the playing fields of Eton, and the historic mission of the British Empire to bring civilisation to the lesser breeds without the law.

The snag is that most of the people of this country did not go to Eton, or to any school like it. Their character was built in the sort of neighbourhoods and schools which Newbolt did not care much to write about. They get their living in ways which essentially deprive them of the satisfaction of a sense of affinity with what they must devote most of their waking hours to.

This alienation extends beyond the workplace. into every part of our lives. In a world which is owned and controlled by "them", what does it matter if the saplings which were planted to give a little relief to the eyes amid a wasteland of concrete are tom up? Or if the street lamps which are there to make the pavements safer to walk along are smashed? Or if the ugly slabs of building which they call home are defaced with spray- can graffiti?

It also permeates what might be called their leisure time activities, when for a brief time they may forget their lowly status in society and the aridity of their social prospects. Where better to do this than on the terraces at some football game, with its excitement, glamour and its aura of quick riches?

British followers of the game are famous, not for their sporting attitudes but for such activities as running riot (although not as wildly as the media would have it) in one of the plushest of those floating duty-free supermarkets which ply between this country and the Continent.

This sort of behaviour has now reached the status of a ritual without which no self-respecting football (and soon, perhaps, cricket) match is complete The responses, too, are ritualistic, spurred on by headline-hungry journalists. The popular assumption, for which evidence is conspicuously lacking, is that sterner punishment and more vicious judicial violence are the only measures which can be trusted to bear in on the minds of the riotous football fans.

The people who call for hooligans to be beaten into servility forget those times when worse than yobbishness against foreign workers is officially encouraged — when, for example, the habit of Ghurka soldiers in the Falklands to kill any Argentinians who surrendered to them was gloatingly reported as good, clean, military fun.

It is capitalism which alienates us all — a social system of privilege and repression which is maintained with ritualistic support from the working class: "I vote Labour because my father always did '; "My husband's a Conservative and I can't go against him. can I?"

All this viciousness and self-destruction is protected in swathes of cynicism, from the beginning of our lives until the end. That is why schoolchildren are still being encouraged to absorb patriotic ravings like Newbolt's. Play up. and play the game? Ugh.

Letter: Olympic Retrospect (2008)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Olympic Retrospect

I started watching the Olympics and at first was just taken by how well the participants excelled in their particular activities. Then an unease about the whole show leaked through. The elitism, the flag waving and the full-on nationalism made me switch off. Better the athletes, etc had competed in the name of their multinational sponsors or pharmaceutical company than this hideous exhibition of national identity. Backed up by officials and commentators winding up the patriotic fervour, even that stupid chump Adrian Chiles and other media prostitutes, screaming for “their” country. Doubtless the same was happening in all the other countries’ media. I expect the 1936 Olympics was much like this.

Stuart Gibson,

Bournemouth

Action Replay: Only funding (2025)

The Action Replay column from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Governments support capitalism and its ruling class in various ways, such as the police, courts and prisons. They fund transport superstructure and technological research. In addition, among other things, they provide financial support for sport as a way of boosting national ‘pride’ and patriotic fervour.

At the 1996 Summer Olympics, the British team fared very badly, winning a solitary gold medal. Not good enough, in terms of inspiring interest in the national team and endorsing flag-waving. The response was the establishment the following year of UK Sport, a government agency that invests money in Olympic and Paralympic sports. The funding comes from the government and the National Lottery, about £370m over the four-year cycle of the Olympics and Paralympics.

That may sound like a lot of money, but at the level of individual athletes it is a lot less generous. Recently the canoeist Kurts Adams Rozentals was suspended from competing by Paddle UK, the governing body. They have not said why, but he reckons it is because of his posts on OnlyFans, a social media site that hosts adult content.

Rozentals has earned over £100,000 from his posts there, which contrasts with the meagre £16,000 he was getting from UK Sport via Paddle UK. He simply couldn’t get by on that, and so started his OnlyFans site, saying, ‘I came to the realisation about why I started doing this last winter after years of struggle, years of living on the edge, my mum working 90 hours-a-week, having bailiffs at the door’ (BBC online, 29 May).

Some sports of course do better than others in terms of funding, such as over £20m for athletics in 2025–9, but just £700,000 for baseball, which doesn’t have anywhere near the same public appeal. The current focus is on the Los Angeles Games in 2028. According to UK Sport’s website, ‘Olympic and Paralympic sport occupies a special place in the hearts of the British public with more than 80% saying they were proud of Team GB and ParalympicsGB’s performances at Paris 2024.’

Besides individual athletes and sports, the organisation also supports particular sporting events and championships, such as this year’s Women’s Rugby Union World Cup, to be played at a variety of stadiums in England in August and September, which also has official sponsors too.

Other countries vary in how Olympic and Paralympic sports are funded. In the US it is largely private funding, including sponsors and commercial partners. Earlier this year the ‘philanthropist’ Ross Stevens made a $100m donation to the US Olympic Committee; he is the boss of an asset management company, so a wealthy capitalist. The Chinese government has a substantial sport budget, over £2bn a year, mainly for Olympic and Paralympic programmes.

Whether the money comes from the government or direct from capitalists, it is clear that funding for sport is an important part of boosting nationalism and loyalty to ‘one’s country’.

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: Faster, higher, fraternity (2024)

The Action Replay Column from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Olympics comes round every four years, and this time it was the turn of Paris. The French capital had hosted the Games twice before, in 1900 and 1924. The 1900 Games were only the second of the modern era, and they were run more by the French state than the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Quite apart from the nationalism that you might expect, there was emphasis on military applications, with the events including not just target shooting but also cannon-firing and ballooning (which had potential uses in terms of spying and so on). In 1924 forty-four nations competed, compared to just twenty-nine in 1920; Germany was banned from both these Games, because of the First World War.

Over two hundred nations were represented this year, but of course, capitalism being what it is, there is more to be said. Athletes from Russia and Belarus competed as Individual Neutral Athletes, without flags or anthems. There was also an IOC Refugee Olympic Team, consisting of athletes from various countries and reflecting the fact that there are millions of displaced people globally. ‘This unique project demonstrates the IOC’s commitment to standing with refugees and supporting them through sport at elite, but also grassroots, levels’ (olympics.com).

The city of Paris benefitted from the publicity and increased number of visitors. There were complaints that advantage was being taken of a captive audience, with increased prices for buses and the Metro, and also for attractions such as the Louvre and Eiffel Tower, plus higher tourist taxes in hotels. This was balanced, though, by a concern that some tourists might avoid Paris because of the congestion caused by the Games and increased security clampdowns. Visitor numbers did indeed drop in some cases.

Some of the ticket prices also gave rise to protests, with the most expensive tickets for finals in athletics and basketball being priced at €980. In response, it was stated that such prices helped make the lower prices for other tickets possible, with nearly half of those available priced at €50 or less, and one tenth at just €24. The cost of staging the Games was reduced by using existing venues and facilities where possible.

We should also point out that the Olympics are not just about sport, national rivalry and money-making. Over 200,000 condoms were provided in the Olympic Village. It’s probably not connected, but it may have been good to see that Head & Shoulders was adopted as the official Olympic shampoo.

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: Lions and lionesses (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

High drama last month as the England team lost in the European Championship football final, and the press agonised about ‘heartbreak’ and ‘devastation’ amid photo spreads of downcast faces and slumped shoulders. ‘Everyone was truly gutted’, said one player. Well, perhaps gutted is the wrong word. Gutted is being made redundant, or homeless, or being turned down for an operation, or having to face a Job Centre inquisition or go to a food bank three times a week. These affable young men get paid around £200,000 a week, while their manager earns £5m a year. The poor lambs will no doubt get over their melancholy.

The press were inconsolable though. How much longer does England have to wait for a Euro or World Cup title, they sobbed. It’s been 58 years!

But wait, what about when England won the European Championship in 2022? Don’t the women count? Oh dear, this is awkward. The women’s game is not the same, you see. There are even those who mutter that women don’t really play football, they play at football. Perhaps those critics don’t realise that women’s football used to be hugely popular and drawing crowds of 50,000 until it was summarily banned by the all-male FA in 1921, supposedly for being too unladylike, but really for eating into the FA’s profits. Even today there’s a built-in bias. At a UK average height of 5’3″, women have to play on the same standard pitches with the same goalmouths as average 5’9″ men, meaning that they have to work harder than men to play the same game (tinyurl.com/mrxvxyzw).

As a reminder, England’s women managed to do what its ‘young lions’ couldn’t do in two generations, beating Germany to the title in front of a mixed stadium crowd of 87,000 ecstatic, flag-waving patriotic loonies. Now there’s nothing but silence and collective amnesia. 58 years, wails the press. The women ‘lionesses’ who held up the trophy to that deafening applause must view all this in bafflement. “Er, hello… hello?”

But seriously, some women have bigger things to worry about than equality on the pitch, like getting a post-footy kicking from violent spouses. A 2013 Women’s Aid survey showed a rise of 38 percent in domestic violence incidents when England lost a major game. And, tragic but true, they’re not even safe when the match goes the other way. A 2022 report from the Warwick Business School notes a 47 percent increase in domestic violence whenever England wins a World Cup or Euro match.

The Independent quotes one woman: ‘So now I don’t follow any football, my fiancé is not into football and if I’m being honest I don’t think I ever would have got with somebody who had a big interest in football because it’s just left me scarred and for me it was just filled with fear, and fear of what mood he was going to come home in, and just walking on eggshells.’ To underline the message, Women’s Aid took the Baddiel and Skinner Three Lions song tag ‘Football’s coming home’ and turned it into the darkly sinister ‘He’s coming home’.

Women aren’t the only ones who need fear the outcome of football matches. Many sports fans, watching the England side’s successful five-out-of-five spot kicks against Switzerland in the quarter-final penalty shootout, will have remembered the sickening racism following the failure of three players (all of them black) to score in a similar shootout against Italy in 2021. The three players endured hideous online abuse that resulted in a police investigation and 11 arrests. Tory politicians including the Home Secretary Priti Patel duly weighed in with official condemnation, after having previously scoffed at the England team ‘taking the knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter, describing the action as wokism and ‘gesture politics’. Justifiably incensed, footballer Tyrone Mings scored a sizzling counter-strike on Twitter: ‘You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens’.

And indeed it did happen. A study by a number of universities showed a 30 percent rise in racial hate crimes in London in the weeks following that match. The researchers were interested to know if such ‘trigger events’ caused increased incidents generally, or in a more uneven and localised way. In fact the increases were seen most in boroughs already known for such violence: ‘This supports the assumption that trigger events do not have a homogenous effect on societies, but rather reinforce existing attitudes.’ Well no surprise there. Guns only shoot people if they’re already loaded. One scrap of positive news is that the reverse might have some effect too: ‘The Egyptian-born, Muslim striker “Mo” Salah joined Liverpool FC in 2017, which, according to a different study, led to a significant decrease in Islamophobic violence and attitudes in the city’ (tinyurl.com/y248y54t).

People who follow sport but not politics might believe the one has nothing to do with the other. But sport is political, and politics is often sport. Many stayed up late, or indeed all night, to watch the 4 July general election results come in, as the micro-dramas including the toppling of ‘big beasts’ made for compulsive viewing. Arguably Britain’s first-pass-the-post electoral system is better understood as a championship sporting event than as any serious and legitimate exercise in democracy. And just like a sport, everyone knows it makes no real difference who wins. Monday morning, it’s back to the same old slog.

And that slog is capitalism, the enslavement of the vast majority by a tiny bunch of super-rich crooks. There’s a way to beat that rigged game, but only if the world’s disempowered workers stop growling at each other, and start working as a team with a serious common goal. Let the lions and lionesses come together. Their roar would shake the world.

Paddy Shannon

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.

The World Cup of Shame? (2023)

From the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many members of the Socialist Party, including the present writer, are keen football fans. We love the skill, the beauty, the athleticism of the game.. But at the same time we have severe reservations about the way it is organised and the conditions under which it is played. It is a kind of paradigm of capitalism as a whole, the system we all live under. What this means is that human beings produce the most potentially brilliant mind-blowing inventions and innovations and exhibit the most fantastic skills and ingenuity in putting them to use, whether that be in the field of technology, education, food and drink, sport, and much else. Yet there are almost inevitably serious warps in the way these are used and express themselves. That is partly because so much of what takes place in capitalism is focused on, bent towards money and profit rather than human need, but also because, through its system of forced wage and salary work as a means of survival for the vast majority, it engenders in the individual a sense of powerlessness, of being just a tiny cog, of being able unable to fulfil one’s individual potential.

Most people cope with this by considering it somehow natural quite simply because they have never known or imagined anything else, but also because, as one writer has put it, ‘distraction technologies and the entertainment industry sell us meaningless thrills to patch over the pain’.

Which takes us back to football and the spectacle the world is now emerging from, that of teams of highly talented footballers pitted against one another to win a coveted competition, the World Cup. One might have thought that the awful treatment – lethal in some cases – of those workers who built the structures and the infrastructures for the staging of the spectacle and the retrograde mentality of the rulers of Qatar (and apparently most of the inhabitants) would have led many of those with a degree of fellow feeling for other human beings to consider boycotting what one writer called ‘the World Cup of shame’. But few, it appears, went down that road, the vast majority being swept up in patriotic (or nationalistic or jingoistic – choose the word) hero worship of their own team and its players, individuals whose wealth dwarfed anything their normal daily grind could allow them to even dream of.The pictures on the television screen often showed nothing short of mass hysteria as teams scored goals or won matches, a true bread and circuses for modern times.

Yet at the end what was left was anti-climax, even for the supporters of the team that won the competition as they returned to their normal everyday lives as wage slaves and the powerlessness inherent in that role. Perhaps the spectacle they had experienced was an example of what the writer Charles Eisenstein, in his book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, calls ‘a substitute for the expression of one’s own greatness’.

When the "Lions" Roar (1998)

'Propah Nawty'

TV Review from the July 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the last couple of weeks it has been difficult to miss the World Cup, even if it has been possible to miss the football aspect of it. This is because most of the news and current affairs coverage has had nothing intrinsically to do with the game of soccer at all; rather it has been about some of the people who watch it-the England soccer hooligans.

Wednesday Night Live, an ITV series of debates hosted by Nicky Campbell and Mary Nightingale, led the field. What made it interesting was that, as is usual with these sort of sensationalist “debate” shows, a potentially combustible mix had been cobbled together by way of a studio audience. In this instance the audience included both former and still practising hooligans, including some recently returned from the Battle of Marseilles.

Chief among the former (or should it be “retired”?) hooligans was a character called Dougie Brimson, a former Watford-supporting thug who has co-authored a series of books about soccer violence with his equally bizarre brother, Eddy. When Mary Nightingale asked Brimson whether he had any regrets about his hooligan activities he professed none, arguing that “it just happened”.While adding that he wasn’t particularly proud of what he had done either, he obviously had in the back of his mind all the money he had been able to make out of it. Indeed, the Brimson brothers have been nothing if not prolific, with the pen as much as the boot. In the last two years they have had no less than four books published, each one selling tens of thousands of copies. No wonder they have no regrets.

The Brimsons epitomise the way the popular media approaches problems like soccer violence, and it was entirely fitting that one of them should have been on this programme. Their forte has been to claim to abhor soccer violence, and to have the solution to it, while at the same time making money from recounting all its glorious and gory details. Their books are replete with descriptions of major “offs” and battles between Britain’s rival soccer gangs (known, interestingly, as “firms”), they explain how the soccer gangs are organised and how they operate, and one even contains a list of the most fearsome and prolific gangs, from the likes of West Ham’s notorious Inter-City Firm (ICF) to Bolton’s prosaically named Mongoose Cuckoo Boys and Bradford’s equally bizarre The Ointment.

Murder, she wrote

The approach of the Brimsons, replicated in this debate to an extent, has now become dominant. No longer confined to those authors who profess repugnance at death and murder while making millions out of retelling all the details, it has now well and truly infected the news media at all levels. Both BBC and ITV news programmes showed the violence perpetrated by English soccer fans in France at length. On Wednesday Night Live it was left to Michael Knighton, football “entrepreneur”, to make the point that much of the film shown on British TV had been carefully edited to create a certain story, portray the desired image and reinforce the chosen moral of the day all at one stroke in a style the tabloids can barely hope to keep up with.

For make no mistake about it, while pious TV journalists get all sanctimonious about the Sun and the Star, television is where most people now get their information, and this was a story the news networks were determined to ram down everybody’s throat.

This is not to say that such scenes of violence should be censored, of course—just that the popular news media makes no serious attempt to understand this problem, what causes it and why it is likely to occur time after time as it has in the past. The television approach is essentially no different to that of the tabloids —“tut, tut, isn’t it a disgrace? Look-here’s another picture, with lots of blood this time too.”

Given the ruling morality in the capitalist world it is difficult to know how many people can have a serious difficulty with soccer violence anyhow, and it is surely a subconscious recognition of this which is the basis for so much of the media coverage. How can people who support murder and mayhem in the Gulf or the Falklands seriously take exception to the antics of England’s other “invaders”, the organised soccer firms? Certainly not if they were only “defending themselves”, they can’t, as so many—including Tory MP Alan Clark—claimed they were in France.

Wednesday Night Live had a handful of Paras in the audience who said they were disgusted by the soccer thugs, who made them ashamed to be “British”. They were so convinced of the dichotomy between state-sponsored violence and soccer violence that they suggested that “national service” actually represented the cure for the entire problem. Unfortunately, Dougie Brimson intervened to point out that several of those arrested in “the first wave” at Marseilles were in the forces and that he himself had been in the RAF for years, serving in both the Falklands and the Gulf.

The real problem was only fleetingly referred to, once by a psychologist and once by Mary Nightingale, who made the startling point that in the end it all seemed to boil down to nationalism of one form or another. And that, of course, is the undoubted truth. Next time the news media cares to laud “our boys” as they come back from a glorious victory over devious and untrustworthy foreigners they may care to spare a thought for the poor old English soccer hooligan who they purport to despise in the cynical ratings war. The regiments and the “firms”, after all, believe in the very same nationalism, have the self-same conceptions of honour, brotherhood and loyalty, and, in more than a few instances, are actually made up of one and the same people.

Dave Perrin

Billion-dollar Games (1984)

From the September 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the biggest media and commercial binges in the last four years got under way at the end of July. We refer of course to the Los Angeles Olympics, rumoured by some simple souls to be a sporting festival but in fact an excuse for making money and reinforcing nationalist prejudices.

These were clearly the most commercialised Games ever held. The stages of carrying the Olympic torch across the United States were auctioned for three thousand dollars a kilometre and prominent alongside each runner was someone in a T-shirt advertising the telephone company, AT & T. Each sporting facility had its own sponsor; McDonalds, for instance, built the swimming pool, and Southlands Corporation the cycling velodrome. Fearing a repetition of the Montreal fiasco of 1976 (where the Games will not be paid for until the next century), Los Angeles only agreed to accept the Games if it could be guaranteed that the city would not lose money on them. This was assured when a consortium of businessmen accepted responsibility and set out to make as much money from the Games as they could.

The modern top-class sportsperson can hardly be other than a full-time athlete. Long gone are the days when it was possible to stay at the top by means of a couple of light training sessions a week. Training nowadays is highly scientific, with different emphases for different events, and a daily commitment is required. This is partly why Olympic eligibility is determined not by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) but by the international governing body of each sport. So runners are allowed to make a living from the sport, while swimmers are not. In 1988, when tennis is part of the Games, professionals will be openly allowed to compete — provided they are under twenty!

The American athlete Carl Lewis has openly stated that "the Olympics are about money and not much else”. And he should know: he calculated that every gold medal he won in the Games (and he won four) would be worth one and a half million pounds to him. There would be endorsements for sports products, of course, but also for clothes, deodorants, and the like. Coca-Cola are discussing an extra contract with Lewis worth over four million pounds. Even this will just keep him in the style to which he is accustomed. He maintains his “amateur” status by having his income paid into a trust from which he can draw generous “expenses”. Not surprisingly, he sees little point in formally turning professional.

It may be worth recalling that the original Olympics of Ancient Greece were not based on amateur ideals either. In addition to victory garlands, sizeable prize money was paid, and athletes eventually organised their own professional associations to negotiate with the promoters of games. It is probably not too far-fetched to discern a professional circuit of games which provided an income for highly-trained full-time athletes. There was no pretence that taking part was more important than winning: victory in competition was what mattered, and there were no records or personal bests.

According to the accepted mythology, the Olympics were revived in 1896 because of the heroic vision and single-minded energy of Baron de Coubertin. In fact, there had been plenty of earlier attempts to do so. In 1612, Robert Dover founded the Cotswold Olympics, which won royal approval from James I (they endured in some form till 1852, when they were discontinued because of “debauchery”). In 1862, some “Olympics” were held in Liverpool, but nothing further came of them. Basically, these were sports gatherings for ordinary people — it took an aristocratic movement to get the Olympics truly going again.

De Coubertin was much influenced by the ethos of the English public schools and sport’s role in them. Thus his list of proposed sports for the first Games included rowing and cricket. The early Games were very much for the rich — ordinary workers could not afford the cost of attending, and sporting organisations were too primitive to arrange and finance large teams. In fact it was not until 1908 that entries were made nationally rather than individually, a change which presaged the later jingoism and national rivalries. Many of the early competitors — especially those from the United States and Great Britain — were university athletes, as these institutions provided some of the best facilities for training and competition.

Ironically it was in 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics, that de Coubertin died. The Olympics had been assigned to Berlin in 1931, before the Nazi takeover, and no had forseen what would happen. No expense was spared in providing superb stadia and other facilities, or in ensuring that the German squad was trained as well as was possible. In 1933 the American Amateur Athletic Union had voted to boycott the Games if German Jewish athletes were discriminated against: but in December 1935 the American Olympic Committee decided narrowly against a boycott. It is often said that the 1936 Games were the first overtly political ones, but a better candidate for this title is the 1920 Games, which were awarded to Antwerp (as an emotional consolation to Belgium after the war) and from which those countries defeated in the war were excluded.

The organisation of events so as to fit in with convenient television timings is a fairly recent innovation but their manipulation for non-sporting reasons is not. For instance, the marathon distance of 26 miles 385 yards has no connection with Ancient Greek battles. The distance was fixed at the London Games of 1908. The race was run from Windsor to the White City, which turned out to be precisely 26 miles. But an extra 385 yards was added so that the finish could take place in front of the Royal Box.

Talking of royalty, the Games are fated to occur in the same years as American Presidential elections. But for this, there would hardly have been an American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games. This year President Reagan has noted the potential for exploiting the Games as part of his re-election campaign. Having been thwarted by Olympic officials in his attempt to secure a more than purely formal role in the opening ceremony, he made the most of every American success. As far as the tame American media were concerned, there was certainly only one country competing.

Which brings us to the boycott on the part of Russia and other East European countries. This was ostensibly because of lack of guaranteed security in Los Angeles but is more likely to be at bottom another move in the lofty and lowly world of power politics. In view of the strength of some of the withdrawing countries, it inevitably means that the achievement of the winners will be devalued, thus reducing the capital that Reagan can make out of American medals. One side-effect of the boycott was the decision of the IOC to pay all the expenses of the Rumanian team, as a way of ensuring some East European presence.

With these the third Games in succession to suffer from a boycott, the IOC executive committee has proposed that attendance at future Games be made compulsory. Of course, the only way to punish infringements of such a rule would be suspension from the Olympic movement. Like truancy from school being punished by expulsion. It clearly takes an Olympic committee to dream up something like this.

The Olympics, then, were not a sporting festival designed to promote international peace and harmony, but a further example of the way capitalist rivalries and priorities pollute and distort every aspect of life under the present social system.

Paul Bennett

Editorial: They call it sport, m’lud (2006)

Editorial from the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Prepare yourself for the big business and sporting festival (we put them in this order for a reason) that is the World Cup. From the first game in Munich on 9 June to the final in Berlin one month later, there will be sixty-four matches, each one keenly contested by players, media and supporters alike.

Like all big international sporting occasions these days, sponsorship and advertising are very much the name and motivation of the game. The tournament’s ‘partners’, such as McDonald’s, Budweiser and Mastercard, are paying vast sums of money to get their brands and logos in prominent positions both during and between matches. Moreover, one ticket in eight (nearly half a million in all) will go to sponsors, enabling their bosses and other VIPs to enjoy the games while genuine fans are excluded. In many of the grounds, seating capacity has been reduced in order to increase the number and size of advertising hoardings and hence the income for the organisers, FIFA. The ‘rights’ to TV coverage will of course add millions more to their coffers.

No doubt the media will stoke up nationalist sentiments, especially the rivalry between England and Germany. ‘Two World Wars, One World Cup’ will be the refrain, particularly if the two countries play each other, as they may well do in the second round. Sadly, many of the supporters will echo the jingoistic nonsense of the press, fighting the wrong battles and misdirecting their energy and enthusiasm. How many St George’s flags will be flying from cars, houses and pubs while the tournament is on? Those supporters actually in Germany will additionally be paying the rip-off prices for tickets and accommodation, and trying to steer clear of the attention of police and hooligans.

Of course English nationalism is not the only kind which will be on display, for each of the thirty-two countries competing will bring its own brand of patriotic myth to the proceedings. The invented and historically-accidental entities known as countries have become the focus of so many workers’ loyalties, as if it really matters which bit of the earth people were born in or ‘belong’ to. It would be nice to think that meeting supporters from elsewhere will show that ordinary people, whatever language they speak or whatever passport they carry, have far more in common with each other than with their bosses and rulers.

So, if you like football, enjoy watching the World Cup if you can. But behind all the endless televised replays and the post-match inquests into fouls and offsides, remember that it’s all part of the greater game of dividing workers from each other. A socialist world would have no countries and no national teams. And there would be no sectional interests for some group of people at the expense of other members of the global community. In the meantime, the crying need is for workers to realise that nationalism is a diversion along the road — not to Wembley or Cardiff or Berlin — but to a sensible society.

Inside the sports industry (2001)

Botile and Ingle

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the night of Saturday 16 December 2000 the crowd at the Sheffield Arena must have been stunned when Paul Ingle’s corner forced him back to the centre of the ring to be savagely crushed by his opponent Mbulelo Botile of South Africa. Even one of the commentators remarked that the decision of Ingle’s managers was shockingly unreasonable. Not unexpectedly, Ingle was carried unconscious to hospital with brain injuries. At the end of round 11 everybody, more especially Ingle’s corner, knew he had lost the bout.

The question on the lips of many was why the towel was not thrown in. But how could they do that when they were playing according to the rules of today’s international sports—the cash and fame first before the contender. In fact Ingle’s corner callously hoped that their man could miraculously pull a knock-out.

Gone are the days when games were organised with a view to merely entertaining the audience. In our day the motive behind any activity sports included, is profit. If, in the process of any sporting activity people get entertained, it is an unintended outcome of a purely business-oriented venture. In reality sport is now a multi-billion dollar industry masquerading as an entertainment agency. It has become an industry dominated and controlled by corporate bodies.

Sporting activities are organised mainly by IOC, FIFA, CAF, JBF, WBC, etc. The funds with which these bodies organise games are provided, in the main, by big business. Since business concerns will only spend money if they will make a profit, one can easily understand why they provide the funds—they are financially interesting.

Advertising is an essential ingredient in all profit-oriented activity. Getting people to become aware of one’s products is a vital competitive move. Corporate groups sponsor IOC and Co in exchange ttr the right to advertise their products on radio, TV jerseys, shinguards, gloves, and soon that is why you can never see World Socialist Movement or World Of Free Access or SPGB printed in bold characters and lined up around playing fields on stadiums. What you see is Coca Cola, Amstel, Visa, MasterCard, Western Union Money Transfer, Motorola, Ericsson, etc.

In the same vein other businesses deeply involved in the promotion of commercialised sports are the media houses. TV magnates are able to pay and have a stranglehold monopoly of coverage. They reap huge profits when they “sell” their “product” to other media groups.

Since today’s sports is a matter of business due to its profit-oriented nature, it is always spiced with the not uncommon shady deals. Business is nothing but legalised stealing. Its main rule is “grab-as-much-as-you-can”. International sports is therefore plagued with such inevitable phenomena as bribery, corruption, match-fixing, gambling, betting, pools, etc. In fact most many sports ministers, members of IOC, FIFA (the chief organisers of international sporting activities) siphon away huge sums of money in the process of organising games. A typical example can be seen in the famous Salt Lake City scandal which not only exposed but also shattered the credibility of the IOC and blew apart its five interlocking rings. Again, quite recently some German sportswriters have alleged that the German government and some corporate groups bribed Thailand, South Korea and Saudi Arabia to vote for Germany to host the 2006 World Cup. The multinational corporations mentioned were Daimler Chrysler, Bayer, BASF and Siemens (Gambia Daily Observer 21 November 2000).

Wealth (goods and services) is created by labour. In the sports industry the creators of service (entertainment) are the sportsmen and women. These (mostly) youth are by no means different from workers in the factory; clerks in the bank; teachers in the classroom, etc. Sportsmen and women sell their labour power (i.e. their ability to run, jump, kick, swim, etc) to the owners of the means of production and distribution of the services produced. In sports the means of producing and distributing entertainment include the stadiums, the factories the assorted sporting gear, the media houses, etc. These are owned by corporate bodies, states, local councils and the like. The youth use these facilities to entertain society, who pay money that goes to the owners of these means. The sportsmen and women arc then paid wages by the owners (the employers).

It is a common business practice to fire workers who are considered to be not too productive. In the same way sportsmen and women who do not move mountains to prove, maintain and improve upon their competitiveness risk being booted out of employment. Even the language used by employers, especially owners of football clubs, clearly smacks of the business element in sports. Football clubs who hire the services of footballers are often heard talking of “buying”, “selling”, or “giving out on loan” such-and-such a player. Indeed one sometimes gets the impression that the players are not just wage-earners but real commodities! In one report by Reuters carried in the 6 November Daily Observer (Gambia), entitled “Pele attacks ‘slave trade’ in young players”, the Brazilian Sports Minister decries the almost slave-like ownership of young footballers from Africa, Brazil and Argentina in particular. A very recent example is the case of Kanu Nwanko whose masters, Arsenal, refused to release him (from their bondage) to go to play for his “national” team during the just-ended Sydney Olympics.

Consequences

Having been considered as “commodities” whose price is influenced by market forces, sportsmen and women are constantly engaged in fierce competition with each other. Competition is an unhealthy phenomenon but in sports it is even worse. The use of drugs to enhance performance is a direct result of the unwholesome profit-oriented practices. In the final analysis these people who use the drugs suffer and get disgraced when they test positive. By contrast the organisers and drug dealers, sitting behind their dark sunglasses at the VIP stands get away with their dirty profits.

But perhaps the most serious effect of this dubious U-turn in sports from entertainment-oriented to profit-oriented can be seen in the growing number of serious and in some cases fatal incidents involving sportsmen and women. The story of the British boxer Paul Ingle has already been mentioned. No-one is unaware of the world-famous pugilist, Mohammed Ali. There is also the tragic fate of Michael Watson, another British boxer. A Colombian defender, Escobar, was gunned down in Bogota when he inadvertently scored an own goal during the 1994 World Cup. He met this unfortunate death not because Colombia could not go ahead to win the cup but because, as it was generally believed, some big business people had lost huge sums which they staked in a betting game.

Sports and politics

Another interesting aspect of sports is that it is very much encouraged by governments especially in poor countries. The main reason for this support is the mind-numbing power of sports. A lot of money is spent to get people hooked to and addicted to sports. In fact sports plays the same role as religion, alcohol and the like. Commentators, sportswriters and the like are trained to be able to present the dullest of events or matches to appear to be the most interesting ones to listeners and readers. Sporting activities, as such, are organised constantly and at short intervals—from community through national to international levels. As people’s interest in games soars so is their attention diverted from the mismanagement of social wealth that goes on in the corridors of power. In fact the revolutionary consciousness of people addicted to sports is usually completely blunted.

On this same political front, one notes the narrow-mindedness of so-called sports analysts when they opine that sports encourages togetherness and even has the magic of bringing peace to rival nations. This view dates back to the days of the “Cold War”. These analysts considered the participation in international games by the “West” and the “East” as a positive step towards defusing tension in their world. But a deeper insight into the role of sports in the relations between nations or countries reveals the exact opposite of the claims of these sports experts. Modern capitalist sports is organised with a view to realising profit. Profit-making thrives best when people are kept divided. There is no way then that sports as it is organised today can bring peoples of the world together as one. In reality sports entrenches petty, myopic nationalism and chauvinism. Witness for instance the violence of the famous “English hooligans” during football matches in Europe. There are always running battIe in the streets of towns and cities all over the world during games especially football. Each country sees the other as an enemy. People competing under national flags only helps in keeping them disunited. But we need a single world without boundaries.

Yet sports, at all levels, can be made to achieve its original objective—to entertain both participants and spectators. This however can only materialize when it is freely organised by all persons interested in it—and not only by those who have money. But this possibility is itself dependent on the level of consciousness of humanity When the majority of people come to understand that a society that undertakes every venture with a view to making profit is bound to he plagued with shortcomings. “Money is the root of evil”, as the saying goes. So it is only when the stadia and the factories producing sports-ware are commonly owned by all people, and when the present artificial boundaries dividing them and nations are dismantled that the present violence-prone, drug-infested activity called sport coupled with the slave status of most sportsmen and women can be eliminated. Then sports and games in general can play their unalloyed role of entertaining humankind free of charge.

Suhuyini

A Study in Hypocrisy (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Don't mix politics and sport", say the supporters of the cricket tour. "It was the South African government that first brought politics into cricket”, reply the tour’s opponents.

Certainly, sport ought to be played for fun and, certainly, the South African government applied their racist policy to cricket when they barred D'Oliveira. But we must say that this discussion has revealed great hypocrisy on both sides.

Take those who say you should not mix politics and sport. Where have they been living all these years? They cannot really think that international, competitive sport is played for fun. Quite apart from the fact that profession football clubs are commercial institutions employing wage workers to provide entertainment for sale, they must have noticed that every time England plays some “foreign” team is the occasion for patriotic outbursts in the sports pages and on the sports programmes.

The sports pages are perhaps the most dangerously political part of a newspaper. They churn out the crudest patriotic nonsense helping to sustain the illusion that Britain is a community all of whose members share a common interest. In identifying ourselves with “our” national team we are supposed to forget that we live in a class divided society. Oh yes, national sports teams have long had a very important political role to play. It is sports-page patriotism that paves the way for politicians to dupe us into fighting wars or accepting wage restraint in the bogus “national interest” (in reality the interests of our ruling class).

Those who want to stop the cricket tour because they, quite rightly, object to apartheid are no less hypocritical. The Right Reverend David Sheppard, former Test cricketer and the current Bishop of Woolwich, writing in The Times on 25 April on “The Cricket Tour and Christian Conscience” tried to explain why “the churches should speak out against a South African team, but not, for example, against the visit of a Russian football team”.

South Africa, he said, was specially relevant to Christians as apartheid was said to be “a defence of western Christian civilization”. This may explain why he would not demonstrate against a Russian football team but not why he would not protest at the visit of a Portuguese or Spanish or Greek team, all of whose governments justify their dictatorial rule as Christian (we are not inclined to quarrel with them on this in view of Christianity’s record).

The Bishop also argued:

There would only be a parallel if, say, Jews were rigorously excluded from selection for the Russian football team.

Now, as everyone knows, modern Russia like its Tsarist predecessor is the prison house of nationalities. If it is national oppression that the protestors are worried about they should be demanding that no Russian sportsman gets anywhere near Britain.

Luckily America does not play much cricket or football because its imperialist policies should make its sporting teams obvious targets for protest. Come to think of it, in view of Britain’s immigration colour bar our protestors ought to be ashamed that British teams go to India and the West Indies. They should be demanding that they stay at home.

Enough of this trivial nonsense. We have better things to do than get involved in arguments about whether the cricket tour should go ahead or not. We have enough to do working for the establishment of a frontierless world community which would liberate all mankind.

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'.

Action Replay: The Beautiful Game (2012)

The Action Replay Column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Much was made of the political symbolism of the European Football Championships. Germany overwhelmed Greece and was then themselves taken apart by Italy (this is in football, not the eurozone economy). But Spain won, earning claims that they are the greatest team ever.

Back home in Spain, though, all is not well, with the recession hitting even harder than in Britain. Perhaps a quarter of the workforce is unemployed, while the figure rises to a scarcely-credible one-half of those under twenty-five.

Yet for one night, on 1 July after victory in the final, Spanish people were celebrating. ‘We’ll forget all the bad things that are happening. Even if it’s just for one day,’ said a nurse who had just finished her first day’s work in eleven months (BBC News website, 2 July).

Being on the dole gives you plenty of time to celebrate but, of course, less money to enjoy yourself. No doubt there were plenty of hangovers on the morning of 2 July, though there was no change in the unemployment situation. It would be silly to claim that it’s just a matter of bread and circuses, that sporting success helps reconcile workers to their downtrodden position. But it is certainly very handy for the rulers.

However many Spaniards do not need to worry about getting paid or scraping by on benefits. There are a number of billionaires, but by far the richest person in the country is Amancio Ortega, owner of the chain of Zara clothes shops, and worth a cool $37bn. Spain may have ‘taken football to a new level’ but some of the population occupy their very own level of wealth and exploitation,

Action Replay: All Above Board (2013)

The Action Replay Column from the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let’s not argue about whether chess is a sport: it certainly contains plenty of rivalry, financial shenanigans and back-biting. It’s probably lost some of its public profile since the days of Bobby Fischer and the rivalry between American and Russian players that echoed the Cold War.

But the world championship has long been ensnared in rows about money. Players, usually with the help of private backers, used to provide a purse on a winner-take-all basis. Then Emanuel Lasker, who won the championship in 1894, demanded that the challenger provide the whole of the stake, which had the effect, if not the intention, of reducing the number of championship matches. There followed lots of controversies about how to organise the championships and how to handle the money.

It was only in 1946 that the World Chess Federation (FIDE) set up an official series of eliminators and standard formats for the final champion vs challenger play-off. In 1999, FIDE was recognised by the International Olympic Committee, and Olympic-style anti-drug rules were adopted (so it must be a sport, then).

Last year, FIDE awarded the commercial rights to the world championship to Andrew Paulson, an American capitalist with his finger in several Russian pies, who has grand ideas for the game. The elimination rounds will be played in glamorous venues in big cities, with lots of media coverage. TV viewers will see the players’ pulse rates and so on. ‘Spectators will be able to see with the eyes of a grandmaster and feel with the heart of a player’, claimed Paulson (Financial Times, 21 September 2012). Sponsors, it is envisaged, will cover the costs and the sizeable prize money.

The latest Candidates tournament was held in London in March. The Norwegian Magnus Carlsen won and will challenge current world champion Viswanathan Anand in November. Carlsen, who is only 22, is sponsored by the Oslo-based investment bank Arctic Securities, for whom he works as some kind of ambassador. As Carlsen says on the company’s blog, for both chess players and banks, ‘precision is of the essence and mistakes can be fatal.’ Mind you, chess players generally play no part in global financial meltdowns.

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: Team Spirit (2014)

The Action Replay Column from the August 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Germany vs Ghana at the football World Cup in Brazil. Jérôme Boateng and his half-brother Kevin-Prince Boateng are playing, but on opposite sides (as they did four years earlier in South Africa). Jérôme plays for Germany: his mother is German, his father a Ghanaian immigrant to Germany. Kevin-Prince has the same father but a different mother (also German); he plays for Ghana. Both were born in Berlin. Kevin-Prince played for the German Football Association’s junior teams but a few years ago decided to play for Ghana. Jérôme says he never thought of playing for Ghana, where he’s never been.

The US team in Brazil also has a sizeable German influence, and not just because their coach is Jürgen Klinsmann. Four of the squad have German mothers, with their fathers being American servicemen who lived in Germany. Some have never lived in the US, but chose to play for them since they had little chance of playing at international level for Germany.

One thing all this shows is how relatively open the world is these days, with plenty of people migrating for work and other reasons (including military ones, sadly). Other World Cup squads were also a mix of players of various backgrounds. Thus, Josip Drmić played for Switzerland, where he was born, though his parents are Croatian.

It also raises questions about eligibility for a particular national side which varies between different sports. For football it is a matter of birthplace of the player or their parents or grandparents, having a passport for the country in question, or living there for five years after the age of eighteen. In rugby union, birthplaces matter but passports don’t, and the period of residence must be three years preceding a specific match. Back in 2000, rugby saw a controversy about players who played for Wales, despite being qualified instead for New Zealand: it was dubbed Grannygate.

So nationality is a pretty fluid concept as far as sport is concerned. However, this seems to be ignored by supporters who cheer on ‘their’ teams, irrespective of the actual backgrounds of the players. Capitalism really does undermine the importance of countries and borders, in sport as in so many other areas.

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: Pass the Port (2012)

The Action Replay column from the January 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then international sport can be a form of politics too. National sports teams are often used to increase a country’s prestige and influence or to make some political point.

Probably the most notorious example was the ‘cricket test’ proposed by Norman Tebbit in 1990, and supposedly failed by many British people of Asian descent. So someone whose family was from Pakistan might support Pakistan against England (even if they supported England when they played, say, Australia). It was never quite clear what this was meant to show, apart from Tebbit’s own nastiness.

In fact, a closer look at the concept of a national team can tell us quite a bit about the notions of nationalism and patriotism. Bahrain, for instance, has acquired a set of Olympic-class athletes by granting citizenship (and plenty of money too, no doubt) to established stars from elsewhere (such as Morocco and Ethiopia). Switching national allegiance for sporting reasons is not exactly rare, and even the current England cricket team (strictly, England and Wales) contains a number of players who started out as South Africans.

Even when the country was split between East and West, a combined German team competed at some Olympic Games. Ireland is represented on a thirty-two county basis in hockey and rugby union, but Northern Ireland and the Republic go their separate ways in other sports. The North competes alongside England, Scotland and Wales in football, for instance, and at the Commonwealth Games, but not at the Olympics, where a combined Great Britain team takes part.  

So the concept of ‘nation’ in international sport is pretty fluid. Not that any of this stops nationalists claiming that sporting success for ‘their’ country shows how superior its people are.

Paul Bennett

Critical Research (2017)

Book Review from the December 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'What is Critical Social Research, Vol II'. By Babak Fozooni. (Fastprint publishing, £8.99)

The blurb on the back says that Babak Fozooni 'writes from a working class perspective' and he does indeed write from a position of wanting to see capitalism replaced by a system without production for sale and without wage-labour. He defines 'critical social research' as social research that goes beyond surface appearances to bring in capitalism as the underlying factor.

The book is a collection of articles on various subjects ranging from the psychology of sex to football in Iran and cricket in Afghanistan. The one on 'Guy Aldred and proletarian atheism' is of interest as Aldred moved in the same milieu as us and at one time considered himself an 'impossibilist'. He is more widely promoted and known as an 'anti-parliamentary communist' though he stood for parliament on a number of occasions. The view attributed to him – that the sort of atheism promoted by Richard Dawkins is inadequate – was also expressed in our 1910 pamphlet Socialism and Religion which criticised the atheist/Freethinker approach to religion of trying to refute it by reason without taking into consideration the social conditions that gave rise to it, giving the impression that capitalism without religion would be acceptable.

In the article on football in Iran, Fozooni makes the point that football was promoted by the government as a means of 'nation-building' to rally people round the Iranian state. Football internationals perform the same role of course in 'nations' that have already long been built.

Adam Buick