Borges hated football. Here’s why.
“Borges’ problem was with soccer fan culture, which he linked to the kind of blind popular support that propped up the leaders of the twentieth century’s most horrifying political movements. In his lifetime, he saw elements of fascism, Peronism, and even anti-Semitism emerge in the Argentinean political sphere, so his intense suspicion of popular political movements and mass culture—the apogee of which, in Argentina, is soccer—makes a lot of sense.”
from the New Republic.
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Also from Borges (with Aldolfo Bioy Casares), a short story on Football as Spectacle à la Guy Debord: Esse est percipi
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And finally, Simon Critchley’s essay on football as Working Class Ballet.
“Football is all about the experience of failure and righteous injustice. It is about hoping to win and learning to accept defeat. But most importantly, it is about some experience of the fragility of belonging: the enigma of place, memory and history.”
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“[The World Cup] is a shiny display of teams, tribes and nations in symbolic, indeed rather atavistic, national combat adorned with multiple layers of commodification, sponsorship and the seemingly infinite commercialization — among the official FIFA sponsors are Coca Cola, Budweiser and McDonalds. The World Cup is an image of our age at its worst and most gaudy. But it is also something more, something bound up with difficult and recalcitrant questions of conflict, memory, history, place, social class, masculinity, violence, national identity, tribe and group.”
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