Men and women whose jobs make no intellectual demands can display astonishing erudition when recalling the game's history or dissecting individual skills. Learned disputes worthy of the ancient Greek forum fill the stands and pubs. Like Bertolt Brecht 's theatre, the game turns ordinary people into experts. This vivid sense of tradition contrasts with the historical amnesia of postmodern culture, for which everything that happened up to 10 minutes ago is to be junked as antique.
There is even a judicious spot of gender-bending, as players combine the power of a wrestler with the grace of a ballet dancer. Football offers its followers beauty, drama, conflict, liturgy, carnival and the odd spot of tragedy, not to mention a chance to travel to Africa and back while permanently legless.
Like some austere religious faith, the game determines what you wear, whom you associate with, what anthems you sing and what shrine of transcendent truth you worship at.
Along with television, it is the supreme solution to that age-old dilemma of our political masters: what should we do with them when they're not working? Over the centuries, popular carnival throughout Europe, while providing the common people with a safety valve for subversive feelings — defiling religious images and mocking their lords and masters — could be a genuinely anarchic affair, a foretaste of a classless society.
With football, by contrast, there can be outbreaks of angry populism, as supporters revolt against the corporate fat cats who muscle in on their clubs; but for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine.
Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. For many people, the hours spent as a youngster playing, kicking, throwing and catching a ball will probably furnish them with better memories and life skills than those spent watching Love Island.
As an adult, playing a game of five-a-side or badminton with mates after work, going for a swim, playing in the back garden or down the local park with the kids after school, or going on a run by yourself, all offer physical and mental stimulations that contribute to a better quality of life.
Sport is contradictory, neither inherently good nor bad. Celebrating sport, while also cognisant of its structure and context, Zirin has been critical of the lack of engagement among socialists with sport and has consistently argued for the possibilities sport offers to the political left. Watching Harry Kane skip past an opponent and blast the ball into the net, Serena Williams launch a powerful backhand down the line, or Virat Kohli hit the ball out of the cricket ground can be moments of pure pleasure.
Trying to describe the precise feelings these actions engender is akin to trying to describe how a piece of music, painting or theatre performance makes one feel. I fully accept that none of these the emotions will solve the problems created by capitalism. Yet, given capitalism offers us so few opportunities to feel good about, and within, ourselves, we should take those opportunities to have fun when we can.
To dismiss sport and those who support England as nationalist, right-wing racists will not get us very far. Yes it can. Pretend you care. This is not one of those articles in which someone disses the hoi polloi from Olympian heights.
For I am a football fan too. Like millions of England supporters, I stood with my back to the telly clenching my fists during the Colombia penalty shootout. Later, I celebrated victory over Sweden in patriotic delirium by chucking out all the Ikea Allen keys I could find. I fell for the lie that 52 years of hurt was coming to a glorious end as England dreamed. Gossip reaches me that glamorous French footballing icon Thierry Henry, fresh from his World Cup coaching role with Belgium, might be lured to Birmingham to replace broken-nosed, glamour-free zone Steve Bruce as manager.
Maybe Henry might sprinkle magic dust on a slumbering giant, transforming it into the Belgium of the Championship? The sociologist Max Weber wrote of the iron cage of capitalism that subdued humans during working hours. Later, the Frankfurt School argued, capitalism got more sophisticated, deploying the culture industry Hollywood, popular music, spectator sports, fashion to control our leisure time, co-opting us to unconsciously facilitate the smooth running of a system that oppressed us.
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