Why football is now broken, maybe forever
Consider this a rant, or more like a diatribe against modern-day football and the multitude of flaws that it has nowadays. It is something that I’ve held back from doing over the last few weeks and months but it seems to have reached breaking point now. So much so that I’ve now decided to pen something about the game which has concerned me for some time now.
When I started watching football and before I began writing about it, the game was everything I wanted from a sport. The manner in which it brought masses together, the way it united people from different backgrounds, provided us genuine heroes and villains in an unadulterated environment, the pure feelings of passion, love, hate and disappointment — it was a dream. It was almost like a movie being played out without a script in realism.
More than anything, it was an escape from the inescapable and unavoidable societal problems in my own country and the world in general. It was free from politics, free from outside influences, it was free from external sanitisation and for me, it was passion in the purest form possible. I, personally, could use football and sports as a means to essentially move away from the trivial issues from the world. It was this place where I (and many others) could be myself, if allowed the freedom to do so.
All in all, football was self-sustainable. It wasn’t being played out to achieve World Peace or invent a vaccine for coronavirus. It was independent in itself and nothing else mattered. Even if anything else did matter, it wasn’t evident to me at all.
I look at it now and if it isn’t corrupted, it’s perhaps ‘broken’ in many ways. It’s lost the charm of purity and with that, for me, it has lost quite a bit of ‘beauty’ too — even though I enjoy quite a bit of it. But it’s almost as if I’m essentially forced to enjoy it. In my journey of attempting to understand the ‘why’ of the game instead of the ‘what’, I’ve also talked about the reasons for why the game is ‘broken’.
A bit of the part about purity in the game comes from the way fans support their teams across the world. Sport Witness wrote a rather exceptional article about this, saying that there are different reasons why people support football teams.
Some support their clubs/teams because they want to win every game. Other support their clubs because it was an idea that was passed down to them by their parents. Or they come from the same place as the club. Amidst these dilemmas, the purpose of supporting clubs is lost. Supporting a club isn’t about winning or losing, it is about the feeling. It’s about the ride, it’s about the process, the ups and downs involved. And if a trophy win comes after the long process, it’s pure bliss indeed.
In an era where football is dominated by social media and has become a global product, this purity of a football supporter is lost. Fans support clubs purely to be addicted to the concept of winning and the feeling of three points. They don’t support clubs because they identify with it and it’s identity. They’re just addicted to winning every football game.
And when such fans don’t see their so called ‘teams’ winning games, it translates into abuse on social media. Mind you, it isn’t criticism. It is abuse. Almost like they’ve not been handed something they’re addicted to and the abuse is just a toxic reaction of it. Almost like dangerous withdrawn symptoms.
This flaws and dilutes the very idea of supporting a football club. It’s an entitled approach aimed to be highly results driven.
A lot of that depends on how one has been brought up and it can be subjective depending on that, but this is a product of the game turning global. It isn’t an area-centric exercise and the game’s owners are happy to see the game become global, as it hands them more money in the coffers.
Supporting a club has become synonymous with supporting a team which always wins and when someone supports a club which doesn’t always ‘win’, they’re mocked. If a team wins, it sells. If it sells, it becomes more global.
Perhaps, that is why we see so much abuse being directed on social media to players. There’s so much opinion (which is diverse) that crosses the limits. Since these fans come from different backgrounds and different parts of the world, their perception of the world’s pertinent issues is different. Their age groups are different, their education levels are different and varied.
As a result, a lot of end up resorting to racist abuse and that’s where things cross the line. Perhaps, racist abuse existed in the football terraces of the old too but because of social media, it becomes public and needless. All this happens in a hypocritical environment, largely because we live in an era where players take the knee regularly but the purpose of it seems to be getting defeated by the fans, some of whom are being fooled and rotten by the habit of winning matches.
In many ways, it comes back to the game being sold by owners in the wrong way even though it is good to see the game trying to bring about a global change.
This rather elitist view of the game is constantly mirrored by the capitalists’ attempts to bring about the European Super League and the concept of the Project ‘Big Picture’ that is being built by the so-called top six of the Premier League.
It is an attempt from the more dominant footballing powers to impose themselves fully and reduce the chances of potential upsets. Perhaps, they’re scared of having more Leicesters, Atalantas, Monacos and so on. They want to take away the charm of surprise from the game which perhaps thrives on it. There’s money involved in this and they want to maintain their flow of money and they’re doing so by dangling the carrot of protection to the lesser clubs in a COVID era. Almost as if they won’t protect the lesser clubs unless they don’t get the assurance of money themselves.
This has followed a curious process which has been built over time. Club became businesses and then tapped into the global reach of the game. The global broadcasts increased and fans became attuned to the idea of watching Barcelona play Bayern Munich in a game of epic proportions. These games sold and clubs got money, UEFA got revenue for themselves. The fans, fooled by these capitalist plans, would certainly want more.
The owners and organisations have now realised that if the fans never get tired of these games, why not give them these games regularly and earn more money? While it is good to give fans what they want to a certain extent, it would make more sense to give them the right things.
I remember watching Tottenham’s game against Marine in the FA Cup and seeing Marine fans watch the game while sitting in their backyard made me realise how the idea of the Super League is taking the game away from it’s roots. There’s nothing wrong with making the game global, but having these games played in Bangkok or Adelaide on a regular basis would bring about a disconnect amongst the people from the club is based.
There would be extra travel time involved for players and it’ll just take so much out of them. Just so their pockets get overfilled with money, things that would’ve been described as impossible ten years ago, are being talked about as a real possibility now.
Talking about a disconnect, there’s been a serious disconnect with players as well and that’s down to how it has become such a sanitised game. Perhaps, that began with the fact that everything is now analysed in detail on social media and by Match of the Day. This has led to a counter from the authorities to protect and sanitise the game in more ways than one — just to prevent over analysis from the outside.
As a result, personalities of footballers don’t come through as much as they used to. Because of the footballing society, they’ve essentially turned into robots than aren’t allowed to seem human. They’re projected as supermen that only play football and aren’t allowed to do anything else. This makes people forget that at the end of the day, footballers are humans and they’re not the superhumans that the media or football PR might project them to be.
I may not have watched Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff or Roy Keane in flesh. But when I read about them and hear about them, I can connect to them at another level even today. Those players lived and played in an unsanitised and unfiltered footballing universe, where the good and bad of their personality came out. Things like that help us connect with people more, as they come across as genuine human beings.
As of now, we live in an era when even if a footballer does anything which is deemed ‘evil’, it is either PR protected by the club or protected by statements from agents. Otherwise, they’ll be villanised and mocked in public by the warriors on social media and in the mainstream media.
This is why people often love interviews like the one involving James Maddison, as that’s when a personality of a footballer really comes through.
While referring to the disconnects again, there’s hypocrisy involved in many ways in the game. The Qatar World Cup of 2022 is a prime example and it is also a sign of how the game is becoming increasingly political.
The game’s multiple leagues go on about expressing their voice about how they’re against homophobia but on the other hand, the same game’s global extravaganza is taking place in a nation which is very much openly against homosexuality. On top of that, there have clearly been claims of corruption in Qatar’s bid for the World Cup and arrests have already been made because of that.
PSG’s Nasser Al-Khelaifi has been at the centre of multiple controveries involving the World Cup. A lot of his backing has been attributed to his control over affairs at BeIn Sport — a broadcasting giant and it’s influence in Qatar. Despite all the controversy, he remains part of the UEFA Executive Committee.
Due to geo-political reasons, Al-Khelaifi was keen on blocking Newcastle’s Saudi takeover and the reason about piracy involving BeIn Sport was cited for it too.
The issue around Qatar, increasing influence of the Middle East in club ownership and the World Cup is multi-faceted and a lot of those issues just define my own disgruntlement with football itself. It is impossible to go on and on about it.
There’s numerous issues that I might just skip out at the time of writing so that the reader doesn’t end up being in a downward spiral in his/her opinion about the game. There’s still a lot of things good about it and I love the game for it. But for me, connect with something I love is massively important and at the end of the day, that will matter the most to me.
If I’m losing this hearty connect with the game on many levels, many others will have the same opinion too. That just goes to show that the game is barely meant for the people anymore. It isn’t a game now anyway. It’s a product which sells and makes the money for the owners and administrators and it’s a tool of gratification for those who weren’t meant for football in the first place.
There’s only so much I can rant about here and while readers may agree, my rant will only fall on deaf ears for people who actually run the game and administer the game. At the end of the day, they barely care about what we say anymore. It’s a game reserved for them — the capitalists. Not for us.
