Let’s ease up on Thierry Henry’s hand! And take a look at the strange world of football with both detachment and attention. What do we observe? Far from being limited “territorially” to just the stadium space or confined “psychically” to mere sports competition, football, if we dare say, overflows in touches and plays extra time in all directions outside the field and in daily life. Through a survival instinct – the global constraints of profitability – or ambitions – sometimes excessive ones of its various players – it has managed to break free from the narrow domain of sport. To eventually be imbued with functions and symbols that go beyond the stakes of a modest round ball. Obsessively followed by television cameras, to the point of contributing to the stardom of players at the expense of the team’s collective advancement, this sacralized object – kissed, dedicated, revered after being dragged through the mud – reflects back to us our hopes and frustrations. And, ultimately, our violence that it so precisely exacerbates.
From Cairo to Algiers via Khartoum, Dublin, Paris, or Marseille, the political and social dimension of football explodes before us. It aims to be sometimes calming, sometimes mobilizing. Depending on which side of the goalposts one stands. Usually so quick to react, comment, or even propose a law, French political leaders, left and right, have kept an astonishingly low profile after the France-Ireland match, which was on the front pages of all the world’s news broadcasts. One must not wake the slumbering popular hydra. Only a few rare “outspoken” figures, less constrained by their responsibilities, have managed to inject a bit of common sense into the “Thierry Henry affair”: for once, we’ll acknowledge the French economy minister Christine Lagarde, possibly inspired by her pure Anglo-Saxon “fair play.” Across the Channel as well as on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, the State has seized the “affairs of football” as politically useful: punctuated by public protests, the Irish demand for a rematch strikes a chord in rallying a largely divided public opinion. And frustrated after the second vote on the Lisbon Treaty, organized under the dual pressure of European institutions and the imperative financial necessities.
The question doesn’t even arise for Algeria and Egypt: occurring before and after the matches, outside the field and game time, it must be reminded, the scuffles didn’t only happen in the Egyptian and Sudanese capitals. The acting out, the manifestation of discomfort outside the required framework, also took place in Paris and Marseille, cities about which no explanations were offered as to why they might be concerned by the results. The unprecedented violence among fans almost took the two Mediterranean states by surprise, subtly leading them to stand up for their threatened nationals. An attitude, for both, intended to obscure the serious democratic shortcomings of institutions, the appalling economic conditions, the explosion of youth unemployment. A ball inflated to the max! States exchange invective, summon ambassadors, ride the nationalist wave. To remind everyone who holds the legitimate monopoly on violence. For a moment, the sound of boots could replace that of cleats.
Football no longer belongs to football players, also due to economic goals. The publication of salaries, those of coaches and players, upon World Cup qualification torpedoes in minds the playful connotation to substitute it with, especially among the youth, an envious identification: psychologically beneficial, the first thankfully still exists in other sports like rugby or martial arts. Taboo and sidelined by morale, a pretext abused by our unequal societies to avoid mentioning them, the financial stakes involving sponsors and media, clubs and federations have sunk football into the “dark side” of force. It is no longer enough to win in ninety minutes. Goals must also yield returns at all times of day and night: as demonstrated by the football betting affair in Germany, the “biggest scandal there has ever been in European football,” according to UEFA. And the German police complete the picture: two hundred matches involving nine European countries rigged, players, coaches, and referees “bought” to manipulate match outcomes. The Champions League and the Europa League would not be spared either.
As with all human activity, is football also ultimately condemned to suffer the effects of the death drive, to move from organic to inorganic, to experience, after the pinnacle of glory, the spiral of decline? Even if the allocation of an electronic bracelet for each player to verify their position on the field has not yet taken place, the debate over the introduction of video as the ultimate judge of matches already sounds like a warning: in response to Zinedine Zidane – “we cannot continue like this” – and the letter addressed in this sense by UMP spokesman Frédéric Lefebvre to UEFA President Michel Platini, this possibility was rejected. Such a measure risks, according to him, “killing the game.” Admitting that the remedy proves worse than the disease is tantamount to saying it’s already too late.
