for the love of football

World Cup mon amour.

“The discourse of “the beautiful game” romances the idea that in poverty one’s pleasures have a certain nobility. It is one of the most cynical features of the mega event: a neo-liberal fantasy about the joy of the poor functions as an alibi for an inhuman economy in which stadiums are built not as homes for a team and its fans, but as sets for a handful of televised events; in which clubs are mortgaged into abstraction; in which the obscenity of one player’s income is dwarfed by the cosmic scale of the team-owner’s wealth. The identification of the game with keywords like “universal,” “global” and “beautiful” papers over the exclusion of women from this world. It celebrates the provincialism which assumes that there is no place on earth indifferent to this sport. It turns the scholar of the sport’s globalism into expert testimony justifying development schemes. The larger and the more inclusive these events become, the more media space they take up, the more public resources they use up – and the worse things gets. Resources are not redistributed around the World Cup; they are concentrated and absorbed by a ministry of corruption.”

from the Sport Spectacle, 13.06.2014.

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