Lessons on ‘working-class ballet’
Philosopher Simon Critchley explores fans’ love affair with soccer and what it says about the world
Soccer, according to Simon Critchley’s new book, “What We Think About When We Think About Soccer,” is “working-class ballet.” Likewise, Critchley is what one might call a “working-class philosopher,” by which I mean he sees philosophy as a proletarian concern rather than an elite activity to be practiced in ivory towers.
“To be clear,” Critchley explains, “I am not here attempting to write a ‘philosophy of football.’ ” (Football, of course, is what the rest of the world calls soccer.) Instead, he writes what I would describe as a “football of philosophy,” in which he discovers “that much of what I believe to be true philosophically — about matters as general as space, time, passion, reason, aesthetics, morals and politics — turns out to be most true of football.”
I spoke to Critchley when he visited Los Angeles recently. Our conversation has been edited. You’ve explored a wide range of topics — David Bowie, “Hamlet,” Wallace Stevens — what made you decide to write a book on soccer?
Soccer may be the most elemental passion I have. It’s the one that goes back the furthest and deepest. I have a deep elemental passion for David Bowie as well, but soccer is somehow deeper because it’s bound up with place — fantasies of place. The only thing my family felt it had going for it was that we were from Liverpool. The main proof of the existence of the place we were from was our team. My dad was a fanatical Liverpool Football Club fan and a kind of connoisseur of the game. It’s the main thing we talked about. You’re enamored with soccer fans. How does the culture relate to, as you write, the socialism of the game?
In a country like Britain, which was arguably a socialist or social democratic country in the decades following the Second World War before being swiftly demolished by Margaret Thatcher and what came after, soccer is perhaps the last vestige of that socialist ideal. It’s a game that values community, being together as equals, where everyone has a right to say something. There’s a socialism of the game itself — association football — and a socialism of the culture surrounding the game. Soccer is a repository for a kind of fellow feeling, a sense that we’re all in this together. Players may come and go, but the fans are there for an awful long time, and they have a memory. They’re the archive, the library. You write about a team’s “history of moments” that fans carry with them. Can a person be a true fan if he isn’t associated with a particular team?
Sure. People can watch in whatever way they choose. You’ve got the occasional fan who maybe likes the festive aspect of the four-year tournament, whereas serious fan culture is more about this powerful lived sense of continuity with a team, with a place, with a history. By definition not every team can win. Most teams are going to lose. So to be a fan of a team and to be a scholar of the history of that team is also to be schooled in failure and disappointment. Disappointment is constitutive, but there’s a phenomenon of hope — a hope beyond reason, a hope against hope.
So maybe what differentiates the occasional fan from the serious fan is the realism of the serious fan. They realize that this is probably going to end badly, and they’re not going to win anything, and the club’s going to be mismanaged, but they will persist with it because that’s who they are. What’s amazing about fan culture is the way in which it is transmissible down the generations. Perhaps the most shocking thing to me about the book is that you admit to liking — and perhaps preferring — the name “soccer.” of the “association” that’s at the heart of the game. In many ways, “soccer” is more accurate. Not only because it gets at the association — the socialism — that I’m interested in, but because soccer is a game played with the whole body, not just the feet. What’s one thing the U.S. could do to increase its presence and success in international soccer?
There are a number of answers to this question, but one is that the popularity of the game in the Latino population needs to be brought into the soccer mainstream. That would be something with a profound political effect. When I think about my team, I know our best player is Brazilian and our second best player is Egyptian. If the team that you love and you watch every week is dominated by foreigners, it gives you a different view of the world. There are some English players in there too, but you get a much more international feel. Are you saying the game in some way makes it harder to be xenophobic?
It’s a tremendous corrective to xenophobia. The game itself — or at least the idea of a game where you kick a ball with your feet — goes back to the Mayans and ancient China. A game like this was played in Italy in the Middle Ages. Then it was codified in Britain in the late 19th century. Thus, we think it’s our game, but it isn’t. It’s a game played better by just about everyone else. What could philosophy learn from soccer?
Soccer is a great place for reasoned debate. In many ways, it is what philosophy should be: reasoned dialogue based on strongly held emotions where you’re able to change people’s minds through the force of argument. Sadly, in philosophy that rarely happens, but in conversations about soccer, it does happen. I’ll offer a certain opinion about a player or a match, and someone will say, “no, you’re completely wrong, it’s like this .... ” I’ll listen to what they’re saying and maybe come up with a few objections, but often I’ll change my mind. So there’s something truly philosophical about soccer. It’s a place where people feel comfortable and relaxed in their opinions, as well as comfortable and relaxed in conversation. Yet one thing you’re fascinated with is the disgust inherent in soccer as well — through capitalism, corruption, etc. Would soccer be better if you could get rid of those disgusting aspects? Or is that disgust an essential part of what makes soccer what it is?
It is a part of what makes it what it is. What I’m trying to do in the preface of the book is to say that if you want an image of our age in all of its twisted awfulness then there’s no better place to look than soccer. All of the horrors are there: the horrors of neo-liberal capitalism, the horrors of authoritarianism and dictatorship, and so on. What’s important for me is that as much as I love the game and love the fans who love the game, I don’t think you can ever feel good about soccer. Soccer is something which is always compromised. The interesting thing about looking at a team like Barcelona is how the beauty and integrity of a certain Catalonian identity mixes with the fact that they’re getting their money from the Qatar Foundation. What I want people to see when they see a game are both things: this beautiful display of how highly trained individuals working together for a common effort can produce an extraordinary result, and at the same time how that whole thing is made possible by the movement of money, the transfer of capital. The two things are profoundly wedded. Soccer is an image of our world at its best and its worst simultaneously.