Engaging with football can be confusing ? like being beaten up by beautiful, smiling nuns
For a while this was shaping up as, if not quite one of football's most evil weeks, then at least a week when football could look back on its evildoing with a sense of having gone out there and really done a job. First came Lord Triesman's claims that Fifa ? an organisation that inhabits a cavernous bulletproof aircraft hanger and whose gleamingly basted president emanates at all times a personal force field of strangulation-strength phoniness ? may actually be a little corrupt.
The suggestion of murkiness was only compounded by Jack Warner's comment that, on hearing the claims against him, he laughed "like hell", as though this would somehow make him seem just really innocent and reassuring, rather than like the kind of horrifying, banshee figure who might appear in your nightmares waving a breadknife and wearing only a butcher's apron and a beard of bees.
The stakes were raised further as news emerged of another event so unusual it was hard to avoid a feeling of a gear change, a vertical take-off into clear blue evil virgin skies. I am referring to the invitation match played in Grozny on Wednesday night between an all-star "World XI" and a team captained by the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. You know: that Ramzan Kadyrov. President of a developing nation but still keeps his own zoo. Possesses a gold plated handgun. Highly unlikely to maintain a current monthly standing order to Amnesty International.
The World XI for this fixture featured Franco Baresi, Fabien Barthez, Luis Figo and, oddly enough, Steve McManaman and Robbie Fowler. According to the Guardian's report the World XI went 2-0 up before developing a habit of "melting away" whenever Kadyrov got the ball, allowing the pudgy but tenacious Great Leader to set up four goals in an amazing 5-2 fightback victory. Half-time entertainment was provided by Craig David, who famously met a girl on Monday and took her for a drink on Tuesday ? neither of which he's likely to have had much joy with in Chechnya, where women are urged to wear the veil, alcohol is pretty much banned and even "chilling on Sunday" is probably deemed worthy of a roughing up by the state militia.
Football's In Bed With Kadyrov moment pretty much put a cap on things. Taking into account existing ambient evil levels, this week is now probably up there with the most evil in the game's modern history. The time has come to talk openly about this. Football is evil now, albeit in a way that is often quite confusing. The past 20 years have left us with a paradoxical game that no longer looks evil ? and presents itself as an orphan-loving, Bono-curious, African-tribal-dude-delighting force for global schmalzification ? but is prosaically brutal and ravenous in the way of all global industries.
By contrast, in the pre-TV rights era, football really did look evil ? an endless rain-sodden baton charge inside a stadium made of asbestos and old dustbin lids ? but was quite constructive in a community-knitting, culturally resonant, elevating the working-class hero kind of way.
It isn't just about the money. Football also makes people cross enough to become frantically upset about Neil Lennon, a man who, in normal life, might be the kind of slightly testy neighbour who occasionally leaves a note on your windscreen about wheelie bin maintenance, but who, in football, is deemed a bristly ginger hard-nut super villain. Most thrillingly of all football's evil is a "performative" evil: it is seductive and moreish, a deliciously vital evil that simply demands to be heard. That Chechnya game may seem harrumphingly unsound in many ways. But Figo. Fowler. A notorious autocrat playing slide-rule passes. You know you still really want to watch it.
As yet football is in no hurry to embrace instant radical change simply because I say so. But perhaps we could compromise. The real problem with Football 2.0: The Evil Years is all the pretending, that pervasive base note of sickly corporate piety. A few years ago Sven-Goran Eriksson and Nancy Dell'Olio travelled the globe carrying "a ball of peace", which world leaders were solemnly encouraged to kick in order to bring about, you know, peace and that. Jos� Mourinho sometimes pops up in the Middle East. Only last week Joleon Lescott's Solar Powered Garden Lantern of Universal Love left Cheshire on its way to the slums of Indonesia, transported only by shoeless African children.
I may have imagined at least one of these, but this is what football gets up to now. It is also part of the affront of Fifa, pledging itself unbidden to heal the world through football, gazing out at its unearned disciples with quavering corporate puppy love, even while it is energetically emptying your pockets.
In this context engaging with football can be confusing, equivalent to being expertly beaten up by beautiful smiling Prada-wimpled nuns. And suddenly Grozny's evil kickabout starts to look a little more appealing. It is at least unsheathed in righteous weeds, nakedly a propaganda cash-grab despot friendly. If only all elite football could be similarly itself. We could perhaps even change its name to Foot-hate, or Swear-ball, or Association Greed-Snatch ? and just get on with enjoying all its naked, unrefined, horribly addictive evil grandeur.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/may/14/barney-ronay-football-chechnya
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