BOOK REVIEW
The Age of Football: The Global Game In The 21st Century by David Goldblatt (Sportsbookofthemonth.com price: £17.99, saving £7.01 on rrp)
When it comes to examining, researching and discussing football’s bigger picture, David Goldblatt has serious form.
He wrote The Game of our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football . He’s written a history of Brazilian football and, for good measure, also delivered a history of the Olympic Games, but the Age of Football is his magnum opus, a thumping, door-stopping 688 pages long which poses as many questions as it answers.
The author recognises that football instinctively nurtures polarity, a trait capable of turning fans into jaundiced, one-eyed, tribal followers, but he also acknowledges that supporters can prevent the continued “intrusion…and importance of economic and political power.”
In particular, he praises Germany’s model where football is governed by the 50+1 rule. This means that fans hold a majority of voting rights. Under German Football League rules, clubs are not allowed to play in the Bundesliga if commercial investors have more than a 49 percent stake. The result? Dodgy billionaires and gangsters cannot take over clubs and prioritise profit over the wishes of supporters.
Sadly, German football is a rare example of how the game could – or should – be run, for as Goldblatt shows by devoting a chapter to each continent, across the globe, the sport is exploited by politicians wishing to associate themselves with its successes; infiltrated by hoodlums attracted by the huge sums of money swilling around the game and disrupted by corrupt officials. It’s a wonder we still watch in awe.
The Age of Football confirms facts about which we had an inkling: in the 2014 World Cup, for example, not one Uruguayan played football in Uruguay, while only one Ghanaian and a single Ivorian competed in their domestic leagues. Football, then, personifies global rootlessness, a trend Goldblatt describes as a process of colonisation in which the game has been “shaped and used by the forces of economic and political power.”
Yet football has acted as a beacon for hope in countries such as Zimbabwe and Colombia. It still offers talented youngsters an exit route from hardship and commands worldwide television audiences that outstrip anything else. If that exposure could be harnessed for the greater good, football will have earned the ‘beautiful game’ epitaph.
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