We commissioned this article on football to initiate discussion on the question of sport. It is far from a final analysis. What are the actual changes that have taken place in the game? What are the changes in the gates, money generated, in its mass following? Most controversial of all, the article argues that the distinctive working class nature of the game and its supporters makes it anticapitalist. There is a long tradition in Britain of regarding all working class behaviour that preserves and protects workers from the rigors of capitalism, as being, by that very fact, revolutionary. Football is a proletarian game under capitalism. Does it really follow from this that it shows us the nature of sport under socialism, or even that i presents any fundamental challenge to capitalism?
If there is one overriding passion which unites the working-class of this country, it is football. Watched, played, argued about, fought over-football is about the only subject that challenges sex as a topic amongst working-class teenagers. Yet Marxists have hardly written anything about sex. And as for football-the silence is deafening.
Football is a working-class game. The players, the trainers, the managers, the coaches-they are all working-class There is a straight, unbroken line of continuity between the tin-can that. is kicked around the back alleys of Hackney and the World Cup Final. Football belongs to working-class people, and in return many of them give it their complete loyalty. Even those players who become successful businessmen and star personalities retain their positions in the team not because of their money or their charisma, but because of their skill as footballers-and because football is literally their lives. When their usefulness is played out, most become managers and trainers. More important, compare football with that other focus of the aspirations working-class youth-pop-music. The com parison interesting both football and pop offer young workers the dream of escape from the drudgery and boredom of their lives. Both seem to be a quick route to stardom and success. But the pop world is permeated to the core by the domination of PR men, financiers and middle-class managers. Whether or not a poseian has talent be depends for success on promotion-on commercial sales machinery. Georgie Best, on the other hand, is not an Engelbert Humperdinck, the synthetic creation of a smart agent. He made it to the top because of his skill and dedication alone. And if his ability diminishes, agent, however smart, is going to stop him being dropped from the Manchester United team.
The huge numbers of working-class who gather together every Saturday to watch the game are taking part in an unconscious preservation their class identity and their class solidarity. Even the fighting between rival gangs of supporters and the desire to see our team win cannot dispel this feeling. Bingo and the working-men's clubs are more than mere gambling dens or cheap boozers. In the same way, the packed terraces of the big crowd are a response to the privatisation and dehumanisation that workers are subjected to in their work and in their council houses. It can hardly be coincidental that the biggest, most loyal crowds in football (even when the teams are not doing well) are to be found in the areas where industrial oppression, unemployment and social conditions are worst: Lancashire, the North East, the West Midlands, and Glasgow.
To dismiss this need to be together with people of the same social class as merely "herd instinct" is the kind of bourgeois contempt for ordinary people which equates "crowd" with "mob". In the security of the football-crowd, among he recognises and trusts, the individual can be freer and more "himself" than at most other times during the week. Then he can express his views and his emotions without jeopardising his job or the facade of respectability which deadens much of his home life. The exhuberant, obscene chants and the collective hand-clapping of the crowds behind the goals are a rasberry blown at a middle-class "Decency" which the worker is otherwise forced to kow-tow But football is not only an exhuberant attirmation of working-class culture. It is not only a temporary escape from bourgeois domination. There are aspects of football which actively promote those characteristics of the working-class which are in oppositon to the ve ofs these is me capitalism. One of these is the collective game. comparison with cricket is interesting. Cricket is individualistic and specialised, depending on the virtuosity of the batsman and the bowler and the effective use of the captain's authority. Football, on the other hand, is a collective enterprise; depending on constant co-operative interaction among the players.
Besides the collective nature of football, there is another aspect of the game that embodies potential working-class opposition to bourgeois values. Football crowds may be violently partisan, but at the same time, because of their peculiarly close relationship with the game, they are extremely critical of what they see. The bourgeois theatregoer, to take an example from a different culture, tends to go to the theatre for the "experience", or for the social occasion. His relationship w th what he sees is generally passive, and he seldom has the kind of critical awareness that Brecht demanded (but rarely got) from his audience The football fan, on the other hand, often knows the game inside out. He is able not only to describe it, but to analyse it in at least a rudimentary way. The strengths and weaknesses of the individual players, the manager's tactical plan, the weather, the state of the pitch: all of these are discussed and analysed in a world where nothing is sacred and nothing is inevitable. This ability to theorise, this creative, analytic approach to the game, is extremely important, even if it is only applied in a point is, it could be applied in other, more revolutionary contexts It could be argued that the aggressiveness in football is a reproduction of competive capitalist society. But it should be remembered that the aggressiveness takes place within the context of collective teamwork, with the passionate solidarity of tens of thousands of people. Perhaps, therefore, should look on this aggressiveness as a real (but displaced) form of working-class militancy. Nobby Stiles was the real folk-hero during the World Cup. Players like Bobby Charlton, with their school-captain qualities, are throwbacks to a more passive era. It is hardly surprising that the television and the newspapers should reserve their eulogies for him.
Militancy on the field is echoed by militancy off the field. The question of the skinheads, the vandalism and the fighting is one which really needs an article by itself. The anti-authoritarianism of the game has already been mentioned (though the discipline of the team under their manager-who is regarded as part of the team-is another This antiauthoritarianism spills off the field onto the terraces, and even out of the ground altogether, where it has led to groups of young people attacking the police. Naturally, this is having its effect on the game and the composition of the crowd Many of the older fans are now being frightened off by increased aggression of the crowds.
Once again, this can be regarded as a displaced form of militancy, a genuine but unproductive response to the boredom and oppression that our society subjects young workers to. It could be argued that "getting rid of frustrations" on the football field is a containment of working-class militancy that keeps the ruling-classes very happy. But clearly the collective nature of this violence, the fact that it fre quently involves a confrontation with the police, and the fact that it often leads to attacks of shop-windows and private property and above all the fact that it gives workers experience of fighting on the streets-these things make the bourgeois media and the politicians uneasy about it.
This possibility is reinforced when we remember that football has on more than one occasion played an important part in the escalation of political struggles. There was the Guatemala football match that sparked off a war with Nicuragua. There are the yearly battles between the Protestant and Catholic supporters of Glasgow Rangers and Celtic. There has been the connection between football matches and violence in Northern Ireland. There are the ice hockey matches between Russia and Czeckoslovakia. Sport, especially international sport, is closer to politics than is at first apparent. We should therefore examine the kinds of loyalties that occur in sport very closely. Is the loyality to the team a sad and ultimately futile attempt to create a sense of community, purpose and belonging that has otherwise succeeded in destroying? Or is this loyalty an important preservation of that sense of communitydoes it actually open up the possibility of this sense of community emerging from the football ground and becoming an active force in the shaping of our society? The power of football's cultural hold or local communities cannot be receptions and festivals that take place when the local team returns home from a victorious away match.
But without question the dubious values of community generated by local teams can become a vitriolic form of chauvenism in international matches. Alf Ramsey briefed the England team before the world cup final four years ago with a vivid description of the war the 'lads' did not remember, and the suffering (detailed) that their mothers would have endured under a Nazi occupation.
The bourgois media have been quick to promote this chauvenism, in a HOTC moderate form, and this has been a large factor in creating middle-class football fans. This new element is one of the many dangers that now confront football. For what is happening is that football is now under attack, not as a game, but as a preserve of working-class culture and collective action. Big business is moving into the game in a big way. It already controls the administration of the game, and although its relationship with the game is still largely parasitic there are signs that football is slowly coming under its domination. Meanwhile, the rules are being changed, advertising is playing an increasingly important role, the media are intervening with the usual trivialising effect-turning football into a fashionable cult, like pop or films or TV shows. If the working-class are forced to accept the mounting pressures of this commercialisation, football WiDE moulded into yet another form of bourgeois passivity, as safe and as insipid as the "Tom Jones Show."
The pressures will be difficult to resist Fords have just announced that next sea son they are to sponsor-to the tune of £100,000—a "brighter football" competition: plus points for goals scored. minus points for players sent off. In several places-Coventry City being the most notable-go-ahead businessmen directors have already started to turn their grim, old-fashioned stadiums into giant fun-palaces, with plush restaurants, floor shows and the rest of the paraphanalia essential to a good night out for the whole family."
In recent months there has been a fantastic upsurge in the number and circulation of football magazines aimed at the teenage fan "'Goal,' "Shoot," "Score" and others have joined the olderestablished "Charlie Buchan's Football Monthly" and "The Jimmy Hill Soccer magazine" in an attempt to reduce the game and its players to a series of rags-toriches stories and pin-up photos. This is paralleled by a general drive in the media to glamourise (and thus de-humanise) the football stars. Georgie Best is the most protagonist (or victim) of this process. Best is now a star, almost a pop star. He opens boutiques, models for clothes, has his own fan-club and—like several other football stars—is responsible for numbers of girls beginning to take a kind of interest in the game! Chelsea have issued a record to celebrate their arrival in "Ozie, a hymn ol praise to Final; the B-side is entitled "Ozzie, Peter Osgood. It probably won't be quite as successful as the hymn of praise Georgie Best that is now creeping up the charts.
On TV the attempts to cheapen the game alarmeathey the moises off during iC, are gathering momentum.
Match-of-the-Day broadcasts, has organised a national competition for the best football crowd song clean of course. Kenneth Wolstenholme, David Coleman, Brian Moore and Jimmy Hill, the big-match experts, drown what little they know in an unending stream o platitudinous superlatives and after-thegame interviews a la Simon Dee This assault on two fronts-the trend towards a Showbiz presentation, and the pressing of the game into the service of a crude nationalism, is backed by a third physical containment. The police, applauded by the liberals, have now installed crowd-watching TV cameras at Chelsea Football Ground as a "safeguard" against skinhead violence.
Football belongs to the working-class as precious little else does. It is more than just a game. It is a part of genuine working-class culture. However inarticulately, it expressed a kind of class solidarity, and a kind of opposition to other aspect of our society and our lives y bourgeois domination. But faces the penetration of capitalist values and capitalist control. That is why we must discuss it, and understand it-and
The Black Dwarf 10th May 1970 Jack Straw is a new phenomenon.
National A Special Black Dwarf Report