Sallimichegani
Albert Camus once famously said that everything he knew about morality and the obligations of men, he owed to football. On one occasion, he was reportedly asked by his friend, Charles Poncet, which came first, football or the theatre, to which he replied, football. Camus, who once played in goal for the university team while studying philosophy at Algiers University, may have been slightly self-indulgent in putting football at the center (or is it corner?) of existence, but he was certainly on the money in affirming its didacticism. So what can football possibly teach us about life in this age of ceaseless mobility and transnationalism, an age in which the sum total of human achievement (cultural, technological, social) has been more than matched by a profound sense of incommensurability and alienation?
Today seems a particularly good day to pose this question. This evening, at the Olympico Stadium in Rome, two of the most successful, and certainly the wealthiest, football teams in the entire world, Manchester United of England and Barcelona FC of Spain, will do battle for arguably the most important prize in modern day football, the European Champions League trophy. On paper at least, it will be a mouthwatering clash of two teams who privilege aesthetics over muscle, and who, in Cristiano Ronaldo (Manchester United) and Lionel Messi (Barcelona) respectively, possess arguably the most outrageously gifted footballers the world has seen since the retirement of France’s Zinedine Zidane. Ronaldo, the preening United winger, is the current FIFA World Footballer of the Year. An estimated 1 billion people are expected to watch the game live, including millions of Nigerian youths who, instructively, know more about, and identify with players from the two teams, than they will ever know about the professional league, and professional league players in Nigeria.
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In fairness, many of the issues implicated in this unfortunate situation transcend the Nigerian social space. As Franklin Foer has argued in his thought-provoking and splendidly written book on the insertion of football into the ever expanding transnational capitalist economy, How Soccer Explains the World an Unlikely Theory of Globalization, part of what needs to be apprehended is the still unfolding process though which, particularly since early 1980s, Europe’s leading football leagues have been repackaged as commodities for a global audience. In this new commercial ball game, championed literally by the leading European teams, an aggressive quest to expand the global fan base- and club profit- has led to some of the most innovative attempts ever made to create a new visual culture that has made modern football such a compelling spectacle.
An important cog in the wheel of this emergent visual economy is the array of stars and super stars that every successful team now finds it necessary to parade. These players, poached, literally, from different parts of the world as if to underscore the unavoidable cosmopolitanism of what, until very recently, were local teams with regional ambitions, ensure that every local European game is now a transnational event. As a result, many of the teams are, increasingly, English, French, Spanish or Italian in denomination only, majority of their leading players (Arsenal FC is a good example) coming from different parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. When Rio Ferdinand, the Manchester United defender, visited Lagos in June last year at the invitation of Governor Babatunde Fashola (and what could be more important?), he was treated to the kind of reception that is normally reserved for a visiting head of state. Such is the status of the modern day football star.
Such, too, is the intensity of popular identification with these stars and the teams that they play for. For many young people, football, football teams, and football spectatorship have become a means of escape from the dull tragedy of quotidian life. In the absence of local role models, the modern football star has metastasized into the avuncular alternate, an object of worshipful geniality for the young male, and lazy eroticization for the young female; which explains why the Facebook pages of the leading stars are filled with the names of millions of friends’ with whom they are never likely to establish any form of physical contact. Furthermore, for many young people, especially in Africa, football has become a strategy of exit (religion being another); a dual mode of evacuating the austerity of existence and becoming somebody. It is one of the remaining avenues to recuperate a sense of individuality for those marooned by the maelstrom of postcolonial maladministration. Fantasy football (another creation of the modern order) may be a piece of amusement in which the average fan indulges in the benign hallucination of building their own team from scratch; yet, we are compelled to seek a deeper meaning in the modern individual’s quest for glory, renown, accomplishment, order, and, of course, self-hood.
That is why, whenever something unforeseen or unbearable happens to this imagined universe (and football always has a way of surprising us), the consequences can be particularly tragic. When Arsenal lost to 3-1 to a clearly superior Manchester United side in the second leg of the European Champions League semi-final earlier this month, Suleiman Alphonso Omondi, a 29-year-old resident of Nairobi thought his world had collapsed. Unable to bear the agony of Arsenal’s loss, he took is own life, symbolically, in an Arsenal strip. Such example of unrequited martyrdom has become par for the course in the emotional cauldron that subtends modern football, while other instances of wanton violence, self-flagellation, extreme anger, and all manner of dissociative behaviour have continued to expose and define the frail psychological profile of the modern day football fan.
These are the issues to ponder as we are riveted this evening by what, not too long ago, in a different Nigeria, would surely have been the final of the Nigerian FA Cup, with Sutin on one side, and Bedel on the other. May the best side win- as long as the best side is Manchester United.
