The following article by Raymond O'Connell was first published in Unity, the weekly paper of the Irish Communist Party.
WAS Marx wrong after all or is it that the focus of our obsessive interest has merely shifted to a new religion. Over the past six weeks everything seems to have had to adjust to fit in with the Football World Cup schedule. Even many years ago a guy I taught with fitted out his garage as a TV studio for him and friends to watch a World Cup AND he gave his wife a schedule for organizing meals etc. I often wondered what the score was in his own match.
Perhaps Infantino was right after all when he said: "This is not just the greatest World Cup of all time, it is the greatest human, social and cultural event that mankind has ever witnessed" – or put slightly differently, the biggest Jingo fest of all time. It has also changed the so-called 'People's Game', perhaps forever. The old cliché will be replaced by 'a game of four quarters' though it could take a while to get used to it. You might say 'US Imperialism rules' rather than FIFA's.
Carl von Clausewitz unwittingly provided a metaphor for sport in his (unfinished) treatise 'On War' when he said 'war is the continuation of politics by other means'. Since then 'sport' of various kinds has taken the place of politics (war minus the shooting?). One of the first to describe it thus was Orwell writing about their unbeaten 4 match visit to Britain by Dynamo Moscow in 1945, affording him scope for his anti-Sovietism. This visit is still referred to and has become apocryphal – in contradictory ways in keeping with the theme.
Modern football coaches might do well to study Clausewitz. He suggested that imponderables always undermined carefully planned strategy. Tolstoy also sang from this hymn sheet in War and Peace re Napoleon's strategy at Borodino – c. f. Thomas Tuchel?
Just how much of this chauvinism is fired up by the commentators and pundits is a moot point. They are giving the punters what they (think?) we want, although clearly quite a few are also true believers. This was sent up many years ago in a satirical sketch by the comedian Marty Feldman. He was the quintessential English commentator on an England v Uruguay game during which the initially neutral Swiss referee turns into a German Nazi owing to his clearly biased decisions. The Uruguayans fare no better. You can watch it on You Tube. I have often thought it should be shown to all sports commentators as part of their training.
We only get to be exasperated by British and Irish commentators across this sporting life but the occasional glimpse from other countries in various languages tells us enough to know the disease is more evenly spread across the sporting world.