Problems with Football as a Cosmopolitan Stage
As the world prepares for what may be considered the most cosmopolitan World Cup in the tournament’s 80-year history, to be hosted by South Africa from mid-June to mid-July, no shortage of praise has been heaped upon the international game as a bellwether for better times.
The game’s political supporters are not without their strong points, and the fact that Africa will host its first ever tournament as a hopeful sign of the continent’s development may have some validity. Many of the Premiership’s stars from the league’s strongest teams, themselves powerful international brands, are African. With the Premiership providing a tight race atop the tables in the midseason, everyone is scratching their heads, wondering what will happen to the league’s most successful teams as they attempt to make do without stars such as Didier Drogba, Kolo Toure, Salomon Kalou, Emmanuel Adebayor and Alex Song as they return to Africa to represent their countries in the African Cup of Nations. Fans wait with bated breath to see if Chelsea will maintain its narrow lead in the tables without Drogba, arguably the league’s most virtuosic scorer, and how Arsenal will cope without its key African players on the back line. Indeed, with the departure of African players from the Premiership in the middle of the season, there is a departure, in part, of the Premiership itself.
Bono was quick to pick up on Africa’s growing influence in both the game and the global psyche in a recent NY Times op-ed piece, where he noted that the tournament would usher in a decade of Africa, in a symbolic gesture that, in a similar way in which with the opening of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the United States passed the torch of history to China, the opening of the Cup in Cape Town would cover over hundreds of years of colonial wounds as we all stare bravely into the global future.
And yet, these arguments overwrite the real political problems that surround the global game. Football is, no doubt, positive as a referent that allows cultures around the world to dialogue but not if it gives way to the misrepresentation of the reality of global politics.
Friday morning, 8 January, 2010, Togo’s national team was ambushed by the separatist group, Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, while traveling by bus through Angola, the Cup of Nations host country. Two team officials and the team’s bus driver were killed in the attack.
Pessimists will argue that the incident preemptively mars Africa’s first World Cup. Optimists will note that Angola and South Africa do not even share a border and have very different political infrastructures. Realists, however, will surmise that the game, even if it is the world’s best symbolic hope, does not provide enough substance to overwrite the geopolitical trauma experienced in many post-colonial spaces. While football may cause ebbs in national and regional histories, moments of unprecedented tans-cultural camaraderie and ebullience amongst its followers, it does not lead to political stability in itself.
Some argue that the investment that hosting the tournament brings is a success story before the tournament even begins. Yet, R.W. Johnson, in a piece on the politics surrounding the developmental side of the World Cup in South Africa published in the London Review of Books last month, points to the underbelly of investment: “The city had also wanted originally to locate the stadium in a black or Coloured area, both in order to encourage investment and jobs and to make it easier for the poor to attend matches. This immediately went out the window when the Fifa inspection team, headed by Franz Beckenbauer, visited Cape Town. One of the criteria they laid down was that the stadium should have ‘fine mountain views’. The team toured the poor areas, assumed the city had to be joking about choosing anywhere so obviously ugly and unsafe, and plumped for Green Point, an affluent white area with fine sea and mountain views and many good restaurants.”
Arguments can be made that in plucking a handful of players from the soccer farms in African and Latin American countries, just as Fifa plucks idyllic spaces to frame the game in its host countries, football is ascribing to a politics of underdevelopment. And apologists such as Bono grease the wheels of the symbolic machine.
I am looking forward to both the African Cup of Nations and the World Cup as much as anyone and also believe that an international game, especially one with the intricate poetics and beauty of football, is still great for the world. But let’s approach it with sobriety. Cosmopolitan entertainment should not be confused with global panacea. And theorists should be critical of arguments that say otherwise.
As Togo’s national team traveled through Angola this weekend, they took with them the borders of the global game. In no way can the interaction at that border be interpreted as an embracing inclusivity.
