09.12.2010

Still not coming home

Harley Filben looks at the furore surrounding England's failed bid for the World Cup

Since the decision by Fifa, the governing body of world football, to award hosting duties for the 2018 World Cup to Russia, the football establishment in this country has been up in arms. Much has been written, and more has been said - but the abiding tone of spurned entitlement can be summed up by that great old cliché of sporting sour grapes: ‘We was robbed!’

Some ire has been focused on the winners of the day, Russia and Qatar (which will see the circus roll into town in 2022). Russia comes in for criticism for being (apparently) a nation of inveterate corruption, ruled by robber barons and shady ex-KGB types. This rather laughably overlooks the fact that, in the preparations for any major sporting event, the reigning principle is corruption - there can be no calendar quite so fastidiously watched by carpetbaggers and swindlers as international sport.

The material unsuitability of Qatar for hosting the World Cup has also come in for ridicule. Football thrives in countries all over the world - nevertheless, a state which sits on a great dusty plain jutting out into the Persian Gulf is not its traditional climate. Everything, bar the existing home stadium, will have to be built from scratch - and there are suggestions that the new stadia will have to be air-conditioned in order to keep the pitches in good condition, not to say the crowds in any comfort in the baking desert

Even the BBC came in for some criticism. In the run-up to the vote, it screened a Panorama documentary, which raked over corruption allegations about two of the members of the Fifa executive committee. In their desperation to blame any convenient scapegoat at all, it was rather ludicrously suggested that the BBC may have scuppered it for the English bid and should have pulled the Panorama exposé. So the shadowy governing body is so unaccountable that it will allow allegations against a couple of its members, irrespective of their accuracy, to influence its key decisions?

However, the main villain of the piece, as far as England’s wounded national pride is concerned, is Fifa itself. It would be wrong to suggest that the unmitigated hammering it has received sprang entirely out of the blue following England’s ignominious first-round exit from the bidding war. Fifa has been the butt of every red-blooded Englishman’s ire for some time. It is viewed - not inaccurately - as a self-perpetuating, unaccountable, conservative clique, utterly resistant to even modest modifications to the game (such as the introduction of goal-line technology), and headed up by the buffoonish Sepp Blatter.

Blatter emerged as Fifa president amid a storm of allegations of corruption. In 2004, he suggested that women footballers should wear more revealing strips to “to create a more female aesthetic”. His resistance to introducing new technology does not expand to the general structure of the World Cup, which Fifa tampers with at will - often to the benefit of more established national sides (but this time not England’s).

The problem with English indignation at all this is not that, on its own terms, much of it is unfair. It’s rather the rank hypocrisy. Fifa, whatever the legal niceties of the matter, is corrupt. Its budget is absurdly large - it makes enormous amounts of money out of every World Cup. It sustains itself by skimming a cut of the ludicrous sums floating around in football as a whole.

The trouble is that exactly the same is true of the English Football Association. The FA is hardly a saintly body of plucky English football enthusiasts - it has come under criticism for being utterly steamrollered by the country’s richer clubs. If Fifa can be said to be bribed by Russian robber barons, then what are we to make of the Premier League? The two most successful teams in the top flight - Chelsea and Manchester United - are owned by Roman Abramovich and Malcolm Glazer respectively. The former amassed his fortune in the great carve-up of the Soviet state’s assets in the 1990s; the latter funds United on the basis of dubious financial dealings that will look familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the current capitalist crisis. When Didier Drogba cashes his inflated pay cheque, he is drawing on the surplus labour of severely exploited workers in Abramovich’s main business operations. More indirectly, the same is true of the FA board.

As for Qatar, perhaps the greatest sin of Fifa in awarding it the 2022 World Cup is simply that it makes plain a home truth about the hosting of the competition - it is effectively an enormous vanity project for the government concerned, the most elephantine of white elephants. Qatar does not have a strong football culture, so it is more difficult to pretend that what really matters in hosting the World Cup is not the state’s ability to flush an enormous amount of money down the toilet. Qatar, with its substantial oil and gas reserves, meets this basic requirement with aplomb. The PR circus surrounding the British bid - wheeling out politicians, newly-betrothed royal scions and lovable dimwit David Beckham - was one front in the general effort to conceal this.

(In fact, one almost wishes that this basic fact were acknowledged in the selection process. Given what is really at stake in picking host nations - large sums of money - it would surely be better for all concerned if the niceties were dropped and the bidding teams openly competed simply to make the largest and most attractive bribes to Fifa officials.)

Exactly what the host-nation honour really entails is already clear to anyone in east London, as the 2012 Olympics juggernaut lurches ever onwards. The latest victim is the Wanstead Flats, an open green space a few miles from the Olympic village, which is to be despoiled by a temporary police station, forced on the local population without so much as a whiff of consultation. Residents were told that the Flats were the only potential location that met the criteria (presumably, the need to get troublemakers a suitable distance from the events and the TV cameras). The Olympics, like an unwanted party guest, will turn up, ruin the place and scarper - all in the name of sporting chauvinism.

But everything about these events is temporary. The public purse is also shelling out £308 million to build a media centre, which is to be pulled down as soon as the games are over. The much touted money for permanent projects - renovating playing fields, for example - has mysteriously disappeared into developers’ pockets in the last five years. The occasion has also been used to force an enormous Westfield shopping mall on the groaning Stratford landscape (the old mall, across the road from the new one, will disappear - god only knows what will spring up in its place, but the safe bet is against it being in any way useful).

More than corruption

Football, of course, is not simply a swindle. There is a certain tendency on the left to leave matters there - to follow the money, demonstrate the enormous corruption (easily enough done) and have done with it. Where things are taken further, it is usually to write football (and sport in general) off as a pernicious ideological distraction and an invitation to chauvinism.

Indeed, chauvinism is a matter of no small importance in sporting culture - the mistake is in imagining that chauvinism is sporting culture. Football is an immense, and immensely complex, phenomenon. Its reach is genuinely global - the World Cup is one of the few such competitions whose remit genuinely covers the world, rather than England and its ex-colonies (cricket), a handful of disparate countries (rugby), or the United States and a token Canadian contingent (baseball’s World Series).

Aside from international fixtures, there is the matter of a truly sprawling club game, with substantial leagues in tens of countries and minor leagues in hundreds more. Attached to the game itself are hundreds of millions (at least) of supporters, some following their teams with idle interest, others fanatically.

There is a fundamental contradiction between football’s status as a global mass cultural phenomenon and its integration into capitalism. It is culturally reproduced through fandom - through enlisting those hundreds of millions into utterly arbitrary, but passionate identification with their teams and football as a cultural activity. From buying the official kit, to crowding the stands, to kicking a ball around a park - football is sustained in part by worming its way into our lives. In its cultural form, central ownership of football is impossible. For every rendition of the national anthem, there are a thousand obscene terrace chants; for every accolade he receives from an over-excited commentator, Wayne Rooney is libellously insulted in a thousand pubs.

Football also has an economic role - soaking up substantial quantities of surplus capital which cannot be invested profitably. This has to be emphasised - as Terry Pratchett once wrote of opera, you put money in, and get football out. Though some clubs do turn a profit, they do so only by diverting capital from other sources, producing nothing themselves. This role is intimately linked with the sections of finance capital that have busied themselves making fictional values out of dubious derivatives in the last few decades; unsurprisingly, the football bureaucracy bears an uncanny resemblance to high finance, composed of utterly unaccountable owners, fuelled in many ways by state largesse and ‘regulated’ by poachers-turned-gamekeepers. If football as a mass cultural phenomenon cannot be owned, then the inverse is true - football as a concentrated mass of surplus capital is necessarily separated from the mass of supporters.

The crime of the World Cup is not that it distracts us all with the lure of national chauvinism. It is that it is one axis among many along which football fans are shut out from meaningful control over the game they love. Communism should not, as some have ludicrously suggested, do away with it and other competitive sports, but hand it, finally, to the masses, whose own creativity gives the game its excitement, drive and beauty.