Richard Whittall looks at the 2014 World Cup with a book by unlikely sports writers,
TWO UNLIKELY SPORTS REPORTERS ON WHY THE 2014 WORLD CUP IN BRAZIL ALREADY SEEMS SO FAR AWAY
Toward t he end of Home and Away, a book of correspondence exchanged between the Swedish writer Fredrik Ekelund and Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, one of Ekelund’s drinking companions in Rio de Janeiro takes a moment to mark what he believes will be global football’s zenith.
“‘ Fredrik, this is the last great party!” he proclaims. “2018, Russia, Putin. 2022, Qatar. And FIFA’s fascism will probably only worsen. This World Cup – right now! – is the last great footballing party ever. In years to come people will look back on this as a high point in the history of football. Nothing is ever going to beat this.”
Nearly three years later, it’s hard to disagree. Earlier this year FIFA announced that in 2026, the World Cup will bloat from 32 teams to 48, while Putin’s Russia has since been accused of running a state- sponsored Olympic doping scheme. Meanwhile, Qatar continues to spend lavishly – recent estimates peg construction costs at US$ 500 million a week – on a World Cup that puts the lives of its exploited migrant labourers at risk. Despite the many social and political problems that plagued preparations for Brazil 2014, soccer fans are likely to look back on that summer with fondness.
The 2014 World Cup described in Home and Away can’t help but feel like “last party” in a more global sense, too – the high water mark between the 2008 economic collapse and the vote for Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016 – as Ekelund and Knausgaard’s letters veer from the football to talk of rising xenophobia in Europe and the closing of the Western mind. Part sportsbook, part memoir and part travelogue, Home and Away works best as a kind of time capsule from our recent and comparatively naive past where, as Ekelund writes, the World Cup “acts like a drug, an anaesthetic, which makes you forget things like Putin, Ukraine, Assad, Syria and ISIS.”
The book’s premise is in the title. Ekelund, a native of Malmo, Sweden, travels to Rio for the duration of the tournament to meet other writers and play pickup soccer, while Knausgaard stays home in sunny, rural Glemmingebro, Sweden to tend to his Minecraft- obsessed kids and procrastinate on other writing assignments. The two spend the next month exchanging daily emails on everything from style versus results in football, the state of modern literature in a digital world, misogyny and the Swedish culture wars, bar hopping in Rio, visits to favelas, inadvertent family outings to Swedish nude beaches, and other ephemera of real lives lived on the margins of a major global sports event.
This eclecticism is by de- sign; Knausgaard makes clear he hopes to record “what happens , everything, big and small, important and unimportant, while it is going on – and then afterwards it will be clear how the story itself turns out.” And so, like the actual World Cup, Home and Away often moves sharply from the monumen- tal to the mundane; and is in parts thrilling, in parts rambling and dull.
Nevertheless, Knausgaard and Ekelund make an ideal pair. Ekelund is a ‘catholic,’ a political optimist, a drinker and romantic, a lover of attacking, possession football ( he supports Brazil). Knausgaard is a ‘protestant,’ agnostic about the global future, a family man who lives on habit and routine, who appreciates a solid defensive back line (he supports Argentina). With regard to their careers, in footballing terms, Ekelund is the literary underdog – while Knausgaard, whose name appears at the top of the cover, is widely known outside Scandinavia for the sprawling six-volume autobiographical work Min Kamp (My Struggle). His talent in describing his family life amid the chaos of watching and writing about football is evident throughout.
Yet in Home and Away it is Ekelund who often steals the show. His description of the World Cup as a “...big Advent calendar, you open a door to a country and the associations spill out and we stand in the cascade interpreting and putting together our sporting and ethnological jigsaw puzzles” is as brilliant as it is accurate – as is his devastating take on Lionel Messi, a player he calls “a cool, laid back Borges, a sort of football scientist who, when he has finished analysing, makes his incision in the body of the opponent.”
Neither author, however, make for stellar soccer journalists. Descriptions of the action on the pitch are slapdash and don’t always avoid cliche, though the two writers, who sometimes sleep through matches they’re supposed to be watching, are at least aware of their limitations. “We are probably two of the most reluctant reporters in this whole World Cup,” Knausgaard admits, who “both have difficulty analysing ( reading understanding) the little football they still manage to see.”
Far more compelling are their discussions on the World Cup in an era when the nation-state is, as Knausgaard argues, slowly collapsing, and where “everything can be rent asunder from one day to the next” – in which Europe must choose, in Ekelund’s words, either to “steam ahead towards a United States of Europe, or try to cling on to the status quo or else sink back down into the ancient morass of our own extremism and nationalism.”
Soccer helps keep these instincts at bay. “We love football the way we do, because deep down inside we know other, darker inclinations lurk,” Ekelund writes. Those ' inclinations’ exist in an older, alienated Swedish working class that Ekelund believes is at risk of “being sucked down into the maelstrom of rightwing extremism.”
Even so, throughout Home and Away Knausgaard and Ekelund manage to resist abusing football to make easy metaphors and pat comparisons. Football is a game, Knausgaard declares, as if to ward the reader off adding more to the sport than it can bear. “It is antiseriousness. Anti- meaning. Anti-intellectual.” The pleasure is in the unpredictability, the “sparkle” of moments like Luis Suarez’s bite, and Brazil’s incredible 7–1 loss to Germany in the semifinal. But it’s also knowing that unpredictability is consigned to the football pitch for ninety minutes ( plus extra time if needed), where, unlike our own world at the moment, it can do us little harm beyond heartache and hangovers.
PEOPLE WILL LOOK BACK ON THIS AS A HIGH POINT