Football's Modern Moment
'Why have I started experiencing football as a lack?' asks Jon Mackenzie...
In this article, Jon Mackenzie explores the experience of football fandom from the midst of football’s Modern moment…
When it comes to the study of history, it is a cruel irony that the period that is most difficult for us to assess is the one we find ourselves in. Caught in the middle of things, as we are, we aren’t afforded the sort of critical distance that allows us to observe earlier eras more equitably. Things are too close to us. It becomes hard to disentangle the various threads. More often than not, we are left floundering; offering wild prognoses or making banal observations.
This is nowhere more the case than within the world of football. Across the last few seasons, in particular, I have been left with a profound sense that I am wallowing about, searching out a meaning which, in the end, escapes my grasp. The sense I have about this or that aspect of modern football that seems at one minute so tangible and obvious, the next seems to have melted away like a mirage.
All this plays itself out against a background of such dogmatic certainty that an already bewildering experience is augmented to an almost unbearable level. In a world where plurality has all too often been reduced to binary, you have to commit to one camp or the other. And if you won’t commit yourself, you’ll be placed there by someone else, keen to compartmentalise you within the orthodox categories. As a result, I constantly feel shoehorned into paradigms I don’t accept; not comfortable at either end of the binary but considered anathema by the people who perceive me to be at the opposite pole to themselves.
I give you two examples: the first is the Video Assistant Referee. My position on VAR has been consistent ever since I began writing about it back before it had ever been introduced into English football. That position was this: that I did not consider refereeing to be in need of ‘fixing’; but that I wasn’t against the use of VAR in games as a point of principle; and that I was worried that there had been no consideration of the long-term ramifications that would result from the introduction of technology into refereeing. Is that pro-VAR or anti-VAR? It doesn’t seem to be either. It’s not even a ‘both sides’-ism because I don’t really think there are positives to be taken from both sides that can be somehow melded into a via media. Even now, I find myself caught between the realisation that we can’t go back to the way it was before and the numbing sense that there is no future redemption heading our way. The whole phenomenon is experienced by me as loss.
The second example is the emergence of data analysis. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I have largely been positive about the use of data analysis in football. I have an instinctive sense that football should be played in such a way that maximises a team’s chances of scoring and minimises their chances of conceding. Already this implies that there might be a way of quantifying football beyond gut feeling; a means of representing these states of ‘maximising scoring’ and ‘minimising conceding’ numerically. But this approach to quantifying the universe does carry with it a sinister undertone. For the concept of ‘maximising utility’ is absolutely fundamental to the capitalisation of modern football which has evacuated the game of many of the old meanings that it used to bestow and made it yet another vehicle for the generation of economic value. However you may want to distinguish them, you cannot avoid the implicit insinuation: there is a curious association between quantification and capital. This puts me in the same confusion. Am I pro-data or anti-data? Yes and no. But not in any best-of-both-worlds kind of way. Once again, I find myself caught in the middle: unable to enjoy the old football with its analytic lack but also unable to enjoy the present-day chrysalis that is modern football, the shell that remains once the meaning has been extracted. As before, I find myself experiencing football through a sense of loss.
Initially, these sentiments struck me as incomprehension on my part; an incapacity to articulate the way I was really feeling. At some point, I supposed, I would come to a place where I would find some resolution and could take up a position. As time has gone by, though, and as I have been able to distance myself from the initial perplexity, I am increasingly convinced that there is no way out from here. I am unable to resolve these conundrums because there is no solution. In the rest of this article, I am going to explain this feeling as a symptom of a condition that I want to call football’s Modern moment.
In 1529, Phillip of Hesse, one of the most important early Protestant rulers, arranged for a disputation to take place in the ducal castle at Marburg. Sensing an impending rift within the reform movement, Phillip brought together the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, and the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli to settle once and for all the Protestant position on the metaphysics of the eucharist. At the heart of this debate was the question: when the bread and wine are administered by the priest, where is Christ? Is he, as Zwingli would maintain, at the right hand of God in heaven and so only present symbolically? Or is he, in Luther’s preferred position, really present in the bread and wine?
To our contemporary ears, this might sound like the most arcane debate imaginable. And yet it really was threatening to pull apart the various factions of the Reformation. Zwingli could not believe that Martin Luther—who had challenged the authority of the Pope, who had called out the embezzlement at the heart of the practice of indulgence, who had questioned the superstitious practices of the church—could really believe that Jesus Christ—God incarnate—could be physically present in the bread and the wine at every service of eucharist. Luther, on the other hand, refused to back down: cultured men like Zwingli might laugh at him but nothing would shake him from the belief in the mystery of the eucharist. This is not some memorial meal but a means by which people around the world could actually partake in the sacrifice of Christ.
What has any of this got to do with football in the present day? Well, it offers us some sort of insight into that condition that I labelled ‘Modernism’ earlier on. In his book, The Disinherited Mind, Erich Heller fleshes out the context within which the Marburg Colloquy took place. He writes:
“[A]t the end of a period that we rather vaguely call the Middle Ages there occurred a radical change in man's idea of reality, in that complex fabric of unconsciously held convictions about what is real and what is not. This was a revolution comparable to that earlier one which Nietzsche called the victory of the Socratic mind over the spirit of Dionysian tragedy. And indeed both victories saddled us with the unending bother of aesthetic philosophy.”
Gabriel Josipovici takes this thought in his book What Ever Happened to Modernism? and continues it:
‘The Marburg debate brings out the fact that the Protestant revolution was not one thing which in a single moment changed the face of European politics, religion and thought. The world did not become disenchanted overnight. It was, rather, the coming out into the open of doubts and confusions that had not, until then, found a clear voice. As Luther's stance at Marburg suggests, the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern’ were to coexist for a long while yet.’
For Martin Luther, the Reformation was precisely that—a re-formation of the traditions of Christianity. But what it had become for people like Ulrich Zwingli was something entirely new—a movement beyond the old superstitions. Luther found himself caught in between two worlds: the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern’. What had resulted from his attempts to reform the church had, in fact, alienated him from both. At the heart of this shift from ‘medieval’ to ‘modern’ was that disenchantment of the world that Zwingli was ready to embrace but Luther wasn’t. For the Swiss reformer, Luther wasn’t willing to go far enough. He had disenchanted the Church to a certain point but baulked at the idea of demythologising the eucharist.
Josipovici’s interest in the Marburg debate stems from an interest in trying to qualify ‘Modernism’ as an art form. At the outset of his book, he settles on the following definition: ‘Modernism, I would suggest, becomes a response by artists to that “disenchantment of the world” to which cultural historians have long been drawing our attention.’ The Modernist is the artist who finds themselves caught between two worlds—‘a previous watertight world of myth and ritual, agreed-on hierarchies, implicit understandings, embodied places, and so on,’ as Josipovici describes it, and the world vacated of these meanings. They are unhappy to have lost that earlier world but know that they cannot avoid treading into the new.
‘Football is not the same thing as art, and attempts to suggest it is invariably become patronising,’ writes Joe Kennedy in his book Game Without Frontiers. But despite this circumspection, Kennedy tries to codify something like a notion of ‘Football Modernism’ which asks, ‘Is it possible that, like modernist art, literature and music, football is (at least in part) an outcome of industrial capital’s assertion of hegemonic control in the middle of the 19th century which exists in a necessarily contradictory relationship with it?’
Already in that quote you can hear the echoes of those tensions that emerged in Marburg in the 16th Century: there is the suspicion of a shift between two worlds here, although for Kennedy, this is a shift impelled by ‘industrial capital’s assertion of hegemonic control’. With the emergence of industrialism, ‘Gone are the regulated certainties of pre-industrial life, replaced by the immutable fact that experience is a constant slithering away of the meaningful.’ We are caught, once again, in the ‘between’: this time of a naturally-ordered world which is gradually being replaced by an arbitrary rationalism that serves an industrial age.
This arbitrary rationalism comes at a cost. Where time was previously experienced as an immanent correlate of divine temporality through the cycles of the natural world and the religious calendar, it has become flattened out in the post-industrial world through the ascendency of shift patterns and the working week. Within this mechanised time, there was little space for eternity at all. In fact, Kennedy argues, Modernism came to see the eternal as revealing itself within immanent time as ‘lack’ or ‘loss’.
From this starting point, Kennedy argues for an experience of time intrinsic to football fandom which is equally intrinsic to Modernism itself: the eternal experienced as loss. Here, he appeals to Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire which is contained in the dictum ‘love–not at first sight, but at last sight.’ As football fans, Kennedy suggests, we experience victory not as a positive moment but as a lack: ‘the moment at which [victory] begins to recede into the past, to become memory; indeed, it is something which is memorialised in the very instance of its happening, or even before it occurs.’ In this sense, football fandom is ineluctably a form of Modernism.
There is a lot to recommend Joe Kennedy’s reading of football fandom. But where he focuses on the general conditions that furnished the possibility of Modernism within football, I want to approach things from the opposite direction: rather than approaching football through a Modern lens, approaching Modernism through the lens of football itself. For Kennedy, the shift from pre- to post-industrialism provided the context in which the eternal was experienced as lack. What I want to suggest is that football is going through its own Modern moment: a disenchantment which gives rise to a new mode through which to experience football as loss.
In many respects, football’s Modern moment emerges from out of the same material conditions that Kennedy identifies: ‘capital’s assertion of hegemonic control’. This time, though, it is a very specific ‘assertion’--capital’s drip-feeding into the world of football. Of course, we can all date those shifts: the formation of the Premier League, the various television revenue tranches, the brandification of the ‘big’ teams. But where the material shift occurred around the fin de siècle, its psychological effects were a little less hurried. To appropriate Josipovici’s words: ‘the… revolution was not one thing which in a single moment changed the face of European… thought. The world did not become disenchanted overnight.’ What I am calling ‘football’s Modern moment,’ then, is the result of a slow change in ‘that complex fabric of unconsciously held convictions about what is real and what is not.’
No doubt this appeal to ‘unconsciously held convictions about what is real and what is not’ sounds like an exercise in convolution. But that is what is at stake in the current debates over VAR (and data too for that matter): what is it that football is going to be? Is football going to be something that is viewed principally as something that ‘belongs to the fans’ or, conversely, as something that is freely available to capital? It goes without saying, of course, that, in reality, these lines are blurred. Capital has co-opted football because it captures the imagination of the fans. But a shift has taken place. What was once ‘merely’ a spectacle for fans has become a vehicle for capital.
At this point, I want to stress that this shift needn’t be expressed pejoratively: the shift that has taken place within football since the birth of the Premier League could equally be viewed as an ‘enlightenment’: the shift from a period where a lot of wrong thinking about the sport was slowly replaced by a more analytic frame of mind. You could even argue that this shift would have taken place without the acceleration that came from the rapid injection of capital into the sport at the end of the 20th century. I wouldn’t agree with you. But you could certainly make the argument.
For myself, I prefer to talk of this shift as a ‘disenchantment’. With the introduction of technology into television presentation, it was only a matter of time that the game would come to be viewed differently, hastening the need for perceived ‘better’ means of refereeing. Where once there had been a mystery about the refereeing decision, now there were numerous angles in slow-motion. On-field calls had now been laid bare.
The same shift can be seen through the pervasiveness of data analysis in football. With the influx of money into the sport, the sport has to be demythologised. You cannot allow clubs to be run by instinct or assumption. You must get to the heart of things as best you can. Shots aren’t good enough. We need something that expresses chance quality. We talk about football more correctly albeit more dispassionately.
And so here you find me: in football’s Modern moment--caught between a longing for the past and the awareness that there is no going back. I cannot go back to a time where I watch games without an eye to tactics, underlying numbers or the current wisdoms of ‘how the game should be played’. But I’m not able to step into the glorious light of a new world. Instead, I am filled with a sense of loss, thinking back to a time where things seemed more meaningful. Moving forward, looking backwards. Here I stand, I can do no other.
I began this essay bemoaning the experience of following football in the present day. These days, there is a tendency to fit people into neat-and-tidy categories. If you are critical of VAR, you are a certain type of person. If you are positive about the use of data in football, you are another type of person. Everything is laid out in such a way as to ramp up an almighty culture war which will have no resolution. It’s the enlightened vs yer das. It’s the smug hipsters vs the true fans.
I have no interest in exploding this dichotomy. Like many dichotomies, it exists as a foregone conclusion: to generate the very distinction it proposes. What I do hope is that, by spelling out football’s Modern moment, there will be a greater clarity about what is at stake in the by now hackneyed debates about VAR or tactics or statistics or whatever cipher you choose to frame the arguments in. This is not a simple state of affairs in which the battle-lines are drawn and you have to pick the banner under which you will fight and to hell with it. For many people, this is a cultural moment in which there can be no resolution.
So spare a thought for us. Uneasy about the future but unable to fall back into comfortable nostalgia. Experiencing football fandom as loss. Never such innocence again.
You can follow Jon Mackenzie on Twitter @Jon_Mackenzie.
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