Is the age of sportsmanship over in football?
Footballers want to win at all costs. Has sportsmanship lost its edge?
This week’s newsletter was originally going to ask a question I think about more than I should. If you keep reading you’ll find out what that question was and why I’ve gone down another road instead.
The matters of sportsmanship and fair play aren’t exactly adjacent to it but they’re not unrelated. So my altered focus this fine summer’s morning is on that instead. Before I begin I’d like to address a word I’ve already used in the title and indeed this paragraph, and will use a lot in the main article below.
‘Sportsmanship’ is, to me, a concept without sex or gender. The Laws of the Game now refer to unsporting behaviour in place of ungentlemanly conduct. That makes sense and I’m all for it. But neither sporting behaviour nor sporting conduct nor the even more unwieldy ‘sportspersonship’ really capture what I mean by sportsmanship.
I understand that it’s a gendered term where none should be. But you’ll just have to trust that my intentions are good.
Anyway…
Is the age of sportsmanship over in football?
Somewhere in the sociohistorical development of English football there was a change that had implications that reached right into the cardiac chambers of the sport.
Football as we know it was originally a construct of Victorian England, an era in which the Industrial Revolution, an increase in leisure time and the establishment of public schools collided to shape the sporting spirit into which organised football was born.
As the game evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century, amateurism and gentlemanliness were more than incidental to football. They were values; football was a game and games were to be played.
The Victorian gentleman might have been competitive but he also considered himself refined and dignified. Fair play was paramount and even the idea of professionalism was contemptible. Playing to win was one thing. Paying to win was quite another. Chicanery, while not absent, was beyond the pale.
These values, early English football’s corinthian spirit, became so thoroughly baked into the social understanding of the game that they withstood the dawn of professionalism and football’s significant shift up the country and down the social classes. Even today, the very notion of sport is coloured by their residue.
It’s easy to imagine the early days of organised football in grainy sepia, respectful teams of well-to-do gentlemen in stockings and heavy jerseys steadfastly observing the rules they were still in the process of engineering. The first couple of decades of FA Cup finals alone were full of tales of sportsmanship even as the centre of power moved northward. But there was vexation aplenty too.
Nevertheless, there’s no denying that football’s essence has changed in the last century and a half. Darwen, one of the north-western clubs to make a significant impact on the FA Cup in what can be considered its second act, were probably the first in England to pay a player. Football is a highly professionalised business nowadays – lucrative, too, and therein lies the likely root of the matter.
A hundred years of money-making either through or with competitive young men inevitably brought us to where we are today and, honestly, the game is better for it. There’s no need for rose-tinted spectacles, here: football in the commercial age has been a cultural creation par excellence.
But have we pushed it too far? Even in the Premier League area we’ve seen the elite footballer’s unwavering and indeed admirable thirst for victory go into overdrive. That intensity is necessary for the preservation of the modern game’s vitality but it’s also the core of a lot of its criticism.
The ever shrinking vocabulary of football’s online hard-of-thinking absorbs, misappropriates and destroys cultural language from outside itself. Everyone’s a ‘starboy’, now. ‘GOAT’ has outgrown its immediately tedious Twitter phase and leaked into television advertising for dad-dancing brands apparently content to be ripped off by their creative agencies from the inside of the arsehole out.
But ‘shithousery’ is irritating and reductive guff all of football’s own making. Overused though it is, the phenomenon it describes is very real and almost completely accepted. We are in the age of win-at-all-costs cheating. That sounds like a complaint; it’s not. The extreme competition, purified professionalism and global commercialism of football makes it unavoidable.
It’s a simple fact that cheating is everywhere in top-level football. Diving is much more prevalent than it was (I was actually told there was academic research that backed this up but, after a cursory search, I couldn’t find it) and time-wasting has been one of football’s most popular talking points since the most recent World Cup.
The same mentality – along with financial ambition and other, more nefarious goals – is also behind the boardroom developments of the last twenty years. The game is awash with dirty money and the machinations and manipulations of ownership groups, state or not, are worthy of note too.
That we allow clubs to be adopted as the inferior sibling in international stables is extraordinary, when you think about it. It’s not cheating but it’s definitely up at the snide end of the spectrum. There’s nothing corinthian about Red Bull.
In my experience all of this is broadly seen as acceptable by the majority of supporters. After all, not everybody is a middle-aged man offering his old-fashioned opinions on the internet. The divers and the state-owned clubs are just playing the game, aren’t they?
I’d love to know why football collectively shrugs its shoulders on this matter, as if its commercial imperative necessarily erodes its sporting origins. I don’t have anything approaching an answer to that. I just find it interesting, and in the part of my brain where that happens is a frustrated sociologist more inclined to turn his gaze to the fans.
It’s important to distinguish between normal, functioning human beings who like football and the maniacs who spoil it online for the rest of us.
There are big problems in the real world. The behaviour of men in crowds has deteriorated. Lockdown, drugs and hardship are all anecdotally linked to increases in violence and antisocial offences at football.
But an extreme anti-sporting attitude – the cultish zealotry with which football fanatics on social media defend and advocate for everything their clubs say and do – is a problem that starts online and, really, mostly stays there.
Battle lines are drawn in blood. Not an inch of ground is to be conceded. No matter is to be considered closed. This is toxic digital extremism in our football culture, the farthest possible point from amateurs admitting to handball and congratulating one another on a game well played.
It doesn’t necessarily ooze out into the stands but it has reached the click-hungry media and tainted the overall football discourse. It’s a vicious cycle and it’s erected a barbed wire fence around each of our clubs. It’s not so much a case of us versus them, but us versus them and them and them and them and everyone else too. No wonder we approve of a bit of diving.
Sportsmanship is dominated in modern football by the will to win, its eternal foe. But it’s still out there, on the pitch, in the form of camaraderie and even outright examples of fair play. It still exists, still matters, and even though we generally accept that there’s a game within the game, sportsmanship is worth preserving.
Football rightly has no desire to return to amateurism or corinthian principles but fair play, respect, integrity and collective supporter action should be valued. Without them, football really will fall into the hands of those who deserve it least.
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“It’s not just that multiple ownership makes manifest the grotesque financial stratification of the modern game, it’s that it’s impossible to be truly Strasbourg if you’re part of Greater Chelsea or truly Palermo if you’re part of the City Football Group.”
This week’s newsletter was so nearly entitled “What is a football club?” until Jonathan Wilson did it differently but both (a) first and (b) better.
Salty beef extracts
Why I Gave Up My Newcastle United Season Ticket (Football Paradise)
Premier League given Government warning over ‘fairer distribution of money’ down football pyramid (i)
James Maddison is the antidote to Tottenham’s anti-football – they’ve needed him for years (i)
The Long Read: Quite a lot of reading about Reading (Unexpected Delirium)
‘Like a prison’: teenage security guards stuck in Qatar after World Cup (The Guardian)
Craig Brown was revered throughout a game he knew better than most (The Guardian)
Craig Brown: 'The affable & gregarious charmer who never got due appreciation' (BBC Sport)
Dessert
I think the new Manchester United home shirt is Quite Nice Actually.
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