World Cup embodies higher ideals than nationalism
During the thrilling France vs. Argentina World Cup match last week, my wife wondered aloud if Alain was watching.
I first met Alain on a tennis court. He leaped high to hit a lob, fanned it and laughed at himself. “Ouf,” he said. “I think I am Bob McAdoo.”
A visiting professor at UT-Austin, he’d spent his first afternoon in America watching NBA basketball on TV. So, yeah, if there’s a ball involved, Alain’s definitely watching.
Alain also knows how little I know about football.
My friend Lawrence on the Isle of Wight was similarly leery about England’s chances. Indeed, he claims to believe that World Cup success would be a bad thing, as it could enhance the popularity of Prime Minister Theresa May, a dreadful outcome to him. Grumble, grumble.
Nevertheless, I’m confident he’d never miss the World Cup final on Sunday, along with me, Alain and billions of fans worldwide. Here in the U.S., ratings are down because the American team is not competing, but the 2014 World Cup final reached an estimated 3.2 billion viewers.
That’s “billion,” with a “B.” The World Cup is far and away the most popular athletic event in the world. And justifiably so, in my opinion. For all the scandal and corruption dogging FIFA, professional football’s worldwide governing body, no other sport save possibly the Olympics can match the tournament’s international appeal.
Because, you see, George Orwell was badly mistaken. Back in December 1945, with World War II just ended, Europe in ruins and a brutal winter coming on, Orwell wrote a column about the controversial visit of Dynamo, a Russian professional team, to England.
Characteristically blunt, he argued that “sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.”
Orwell blamed nationalism, which he defined as “the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.”
“Serious sport,” he argued, “has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
A man of his times, Orwell had no way of imagining today’s world of fluid national identities, mixed loyalties and open borders. Of the four semi-final teams, only tiny (and recently independent) Croatia resembles the kind of ethnically unified teams Orwell wrote about.
And politics aside, how could one not cheer a country smaller than Missouri taking on Russia?
Virtually all World Cup players are professional athletes, many of whom play outside their native countries. French striker Antoine Griezmann told reporters he’d deliberately restrained himself from celebrating a crucial goal out of respect for Uruguayan players who are his teammates on Atletico Madrid — one is his son’s godfather.
Indeed, if World Cup football has an overriding political message, it’s that all racial and ethnic theories of athletic superiority are bunk. The player most often called the world’s greatest is Lionel Messi, an Argentine of Italian descent who plays for Barcelona.
I saw an article somewhere belaboring the obvious: that the strong presence of ethnic African and North African players on France’s World Cup team belies the reality that French society is not uniformly color-blind.
No, but France’s football team appears to embody the national ideal of liberte, egalitie and fraternitie (liberty, equality and brotherhood) as closely as one can imagine. So do the English and Belgian sides, an ironic residue of colonialism.
Maybe it’s an optimistic illusion, but then that’s what sports are for.