Hello, and welcome to another edition of Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. Just ate an apple. It was pretty good.
Europe is freezing over
Very slowly, very carefully, football is coming to a stop. Most European leagues remain officially on hiatus, with discussions ongoing, and there will be a big UEFA meeting this later week. But here and there, leagues are simply giving up.
Belgium was the first to announce cancellation back at the beginning of April, though they were in a slightly unusual situation. Club Brugge were 15 points clear with just one game remaining in the regular season remaining. As such, if the table was finalised as it stood, the only parties inconvenienced would be Waasland-Beveren, who still had a slim chance of avoiding relegation, and any fans of Belgium’s hilariously byzantine playoff system.
UEFA responded to this announcement with much spluttering about solidarity, accompanied by threats to exclude any nations that cancelled prematurely from next season’s European competitions. You might think there’s something of a contradiction there, but it seems UEFA weren’t too troubled. And it worked: Belgium held off confirming the plan.
But that was all the way back on April 3, almost three whole weeks ago, which amounts to a couple of years in non-pandemic time. Since then Scotland has concluded its lower leagues using extrapolated points average, and reports suggest it will do the same to the Premiership later this week. This motion hasn’t passed quietly — Rangers are very peeved, indeed — but it hasn’t drawn censure from UEFA, either.
Which suggests, perhaps, a softening of their stance. With different countries taking different approaches to coronavirus lockdown, to greater or lesser success, and with social distancing measures likely to continue well into May, the idea of UEFA keeping the entire continent on pause became increasingly ridiculous. So, too, are most of the plans for imminent closed-door restarts. UEFA meets on Thursday, April 23. It’ll be interesting to see how many leagues make it to Friday.
Foundational texts: Brazil 0-3 France
It wasn’t the greatest World Cup final of all time. But few games can beat the 1998 final for pre-game intrigue, confusion and chaos. First Ronaldo wasn’t playing: Edmundo was on the teamsheet. And then, all of a sudden, he was back in! A new teamsheet appeared, with the world’s most exciting forward in his rightful place, and all was well.
Then the game happened and, while Ronaldo was definitely playing, he was also definitely not playing in any real sense. On the field, all the way off his game. He was a catatonic presence, a filled shirt. It was a sad and confusing sight, made all the sadder in comparison to the giddy vivacity with which he usually played, and for which the whole world was waiting.
He got his redemption four years later. But what was interesting about that moment, about the contradictory teamsheets and the general confusion, was the fevered rush of conspiracy that erupted afterwards. Something weird had happened, which demanded a weird explanation. Had Ronaldo had a fit? A bad reaction to an injection? Had Nike forced Brazil to pick their most marketable player over one that couldn’t move as many shirts, but could move his legs?
It was as though reality had cracked open, just a little, and we’d been permitted a glimpse at another reality, working under different rules and presumptions. One where football was determined not by silly things like “fitness” and “mobility,” but by hidden vec tors of power; where obviously wrong decisions were made for reasons we could never be permitted to understand. And The Matrix wouldn’t even come out for another nine months.
A certain paranoia is healthy, perhaps mandatory, for anybody that takes sport even a little bit seriously. Sports frequently make it seem like the universe is conspiring against you, even if nobody else is.
But the idea of more specific conspiracies under the surface of sport is a persistent one. Even the most hard-headed ultra-rationalist among us has succumbed, at some point, to the forbidden knowledge. This referee hates us. All the referees hate us. We haven’t had a penalty all season. Look at our fixture list. Look at theirs. Same as last season. Of course you know why he joined them, right?
Perhaps this is all a coping mechanism, a way of reconciling the fact of our team’s inadequacy with the unfortunate centrality of that team to our identity, our happiness, our comfortable passage through the universe. Easier to relax into the belief that a referee hates you than confront the reality that this lot, your lot, are bobbins. At the very least, it softens the blow.
Yet an inconvenient number of the conspiracies turn out to be true, or at least true-ish. If the West Germany team that beat Hungary in the 1954 World Cup were only taking vitamin C, it’s a little odd they chose to inject it. Anderlecht were playing with 12 against Nottingham Forest. And there are more, many more, some proved and some just known deep down in the gut.
The preeminent Ronaldo conspiracy — that pressure from Nike had either caused Ronaldo’s fit, or led to his selection while obviously unfit — speaks to its moment. France 98 was the company’s first tournament as Brazil’s kit manufacturer and more general partner. The advert that accompanied the tournament, Brazil’s stars goofing around in an airport, is still remembered today. The advert starts and ends with Ronaldo.
A Brazilian congressional inquiry followed the match, led by communist congressman Aldo Rebelo, who saw his fight as one of “the preservation of national identity in the face of globalisation.” He told Alex Bellos, author of Futebol, he was inspired by the sight of a protestor holding a Brazil flag — with the words ‘Order and Progress’ replaced with ‘Nike’ — being confronted by a security guard from the Brazilian football federation.
His inquiry didn’t find any evidence that Nike had been up to anything, or that Ronaldo’s dropping and un-dropping was anything other than wildly miserable management. It did, however, find evidence that Brazil’s footballing institutions were riddled with corruption, nepotism, venality, greed, fraud, embezzlement and basically anything else you can imagine. Football sits at the intersection of money and passion, and that is a fertile place for mischief and suspicion.
And the fear that lay behind the conspiracy rang true then, and still does now. After all, the allegation, in the abstract, was that football at the highest and greatest level had become corrupted in a new and exciting way. That the game was being driven by marketing and sponsorship; that these partnerships were skewed in entirely the wrong way.
Which seems almost quaint, 22 years later, as we sit in lockdown sipping our ice cold Gazprom and waiting for the television companies to bankrupt any football league that fails to complete its season. Sure, the details might have been wrong. But we nailed the bigger picture.
No comments:
Post a Comment