Football, by far the world’s most popular sport, is the mirror of our society. Its Americanisation is visible as much as it is audible, as expressed by the autumnal voice of visitor Miguel Ángel Gil Marín, CEO of Atlético de Madrid, on 7 October at the IE Tower Auditorium. Atlético or Los Colchoneros – “The Mattress Makers” – have historically been the proletariat team of Madrid, representing a spirit different enough to today’s to be opposed to it. Despite the sport being called “fútbol” in Spanish, the mother tongue of the CEO, who is not at ease with the English language, he instinctively called it the American way “soccer”, revealing the global Wind of Change that has long occurred.
Football is further than ever from its secret utility rooted in the Roman principle of panem et circenses – “bread and circuses/games”. The notion is simple: If your people have enough to survive, survival metaphorically and quite literally embodied by the bread, and are distracted by the game, they will avoid causing significant trouble. Naturally, there cannot be survival without bread. But beware, for in the long run, survival will also be at risk if the bread is abundant and the game is not on par. The latest brand of capitalism has added more bread to our already stacked tables, whilst football is not as entertaining as it was, having reduced itself to fake aesthetics and the revenue accompanying it. Known as “The Beautiful Game”, football is more of a sickening game these days.
The game is necessary because, without survival anxieties, our evolutionary mind is destined to wander into rotten places. According to panem et circenses, the decadence of football deprives the crowd of a regulated preoccupation, preventing individuals from venting stress in an epoch when default daily life is way too foreign from the omnipotent Nature to which man belongs. Furthermore, football enables us Homo sapiens to manifest inescapable aspects of our identity, say nationalism, safely in a pacific war. But the concept of the stadium is now a mere memory, on the stands and field alike. Where are the gladiators in the arena nowadays?
Our democracies will probably never go to war in the first place, and even if we were to, it is unlikely to be against other democracies, and we would fight the undemocratic enemy less aggressively than they would fight us – yet no doubt our victory is written in the stars for eternity. Et voilà, these are the hypotheses composing the Democratic Peace Theory that we are shepherded to believe, but almost subtly so, in the lack of a 1984-esque literal repetition of the rules of the game.
Delivering a speech at the Mausoleum of Augustus in 1921, Benito Mussolini clamoured that “we do not exalt war for the sake of war, just like we do not exalt peace for the sake of peace”. Regardless that Fascism entailed war for the sake of war, peace for the sake of peace is indeed foolish, too. Peace as an end is unsustainable. Especially if you are seeking peace, you should by no means look at it directly in the eyes but with a shield acting as a mirror, like Medusa. Si vis pacem, para bellum – “if you want peace, prepare for war” – is wiser. What would the Greeks think of current democracy? That an ancient, inherited equilibrium is being shamelessly disrespected in the hedonic, naive search for eternal serenity, for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
At the conference, Gil Marín insulted rival club Real Madrid President Florentino Pérez Rodríguez for his fantasies regarding the “Super League”, a proposed competition that would see the most internationally opulent clubs detached from their national leagues to form an exclusive league of their own. However, when fellow Stork colleague Toby Tilley courageously asked if the Spanish league “La Liga” plans to break footballing tradition and have some of its matches abroad, Gil Marín seconded the idea, generally seeming all but upset about such excessive commercialisation of the game. This week, it was rumoured that the first fixture of the sort will be the very Atlético against Barcelona in Miami three days before Christmas. How will this circus end? We shall wait. Perhaps we will live to see.
Featured image by Marcello Pagani.
