As part of the Culture for All series, supported by the Communication Workers Union, we're proud to present a short film about why sport matters, by Michael Roberts.
Why Sport Matters
by Michael Roberts
Sport is one of the most popular cultural activities in the world. It is essential to our physical, emotional and mental health, and to developing our individual talents, abilities and social skills like friendly competition, co-operation, solidarity and collective, co-ordinated effort. The recent attempt to form a ‘super league’ of top European clubs was a serious threat to these underlying values, a classic example of the way capitalism corrupts and undermines cultural activities that matter so much to us.
But the collapse of the ‘Super League’ project by the billionaire owners of the big clubs is only an interrupted chapter in the story of the commodification of sport into profitable capitalist enterprises, owned and controlled by capital. It is no accident that JP Morgan was the fund manager for the Super League plan – as the bank epitomises the role of global capital in controlling modern sport. And it is no accident that the main drivers for the new league were Real Madrid, a football club dominated in the past by the corrupt Spanish monarchy and Francoism, the fascist wing of Spanish capital.Sport is one of the most popular cultural activities in the world. It is essential to our physical, emotional and mental health, and to developing our individual talents, abilities and social skills like friendly competition, co-operation, solidarity and collective, co-ordinated effort. The recent attempt to form a ‘super league’ of top European clubs was a serious threat to these underlying values, a classic example of the way capitalism corrupts and undermines cultural activities that matter so much to us.
The Super League was going to be a cartel, designed to create a monopoly for the larger football clubs in Europe at the expense of the smaller clubs, and eventually at the expense of the ‘fans’ or followers of these clubs who would soon be paying big subscriptions to watch matches on TV or face high prices to see matches in the stadiums. But then, as I’m sure you know, that was already happening.
So ending this cartel (for now) does not change the reality of the commodification of sport. Sport became a business as early as the development of industrial capitalism in the mid-19th century. Take football. There are about 600 premier league professional players in England, around 4000 professional footballers in England and around 65,000 professional players in the world. Of course, from the bottom to the top, the inequalities of income or wages for footballers are huge: from one player that earns $1.5m a week to one that cannot live on football wages and needs a second job (the latter of course are the overwhelming majority). And then there are people who just play for fun, apparently about 250 million association football players in the world.
The inequalities in wages are just the same in other major sports around the world: baseball and American football, cricket and tennis. But the thing about football (soccer) and American baseball is that they are supposed to be the people’s sports. But at some important levels, they have never been ‘people’s sports’. The first is that women have been broadly excluded from playing, until fairly recently. Football was not a people's sport’, but a men's game, played by men and mainly watched by men. Women did not 'do sport' and certainly not football. Women's football has only just got into the wider world in recent decades: women were supposed to stay at home and prepare the meal when the men got back from playing or watching. In the case of cricket, women were expected to make the tea and prepare the sandwiches while their men played on the field.
Also racism was a powerful force in modernised sport. If you were black or Asian, you were excluded from professional sport. For example, it was not until 1947 that American professional baseball teams included a black player. Baseball until then was not just a man’s sport but a white man's sport, particularly where money was involved.
Cricket
Cricket originated in the medieval villages of England and France and was mostly played by rural labourers. But it soon became a 'toff’s sport'. At an organised level it became dominated by the upper class and aristocrats (and still is in England). In England, the professional game was divided between those who were ‘players’ and got paid for playing and those who were ‘gentlemen’, who were so rich that they did not need to be paid.
Of course, modern capitalism got rid of most of this when money talked. Now cricket has become a global capitalist enterprise, run by Indian billionaires employing cricket mercenaries from around the world in their lucrative competitions. The Super League football cartel already operates in cricket in India, while the old amateur leagues founder in the face of billionaire capital. In England cricket is hardly played any more in state schools and professional players are almost completely drawn from private schools or from cricket ‘families’. The working-class players of Yorkshire and Lancashire's industrial areas have mostly disappeared. And although there are many Asian players at amateur club level, there are few in the professional game.
Tennis
Tennis was never a people’s sport. It was invented by medieval aristocrats and played in the palaces of kings and nobles as a pastime. Tennis maintained its amateur status right into the late 20th century because it was an upper-class activity. Working-class English tennis hero, Fred Perry, son of a cotton spinner from Lancashire, three times Wimbledon champion and winner of eight ‘grand slams’, was never recognised by the authorities because he turned professional to make a living. Professionalism in tennis eventually triumphed when capitalism saw the profits that could be made in the sport. Now tennis is yet another globalised operation run by billionaire sponsors, based on an intense global rat race for players to get their rankings and earnings.
Cycling
Cycling might be considered a people's sport, as multi-millions cycle every day. But while millions cycle every weekend for pleasure, professional sport has become yet another commercial product controlled by billionaire sponsors and riddled with drug use, corruption and race-fixing, as we have learned from the story of Lance Armstrong.
Rugby
Rugby was a toffs’ sport, on the whole, although in the mining valleys of Wales it gained adherence from local communities as a people’s sport – for men only. Otherwise, it was the main sport of farmers in the richer areas of England, France and the colonial countries of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – and in the private schools and clubs of the upper classes. Rugby League was a development in the working-class areas in the north of England and was formed professionally so that working-class players could be paid – something frowned upon by the Rugby Union authorities. The irony is that capital eventually made rugby union go professional and that is where the money is now, and rugby league is the poor relative.
Baseball
The people’s game of baseball in America was brought to the new continent by immigrants playing older bat and ball games in England. But it too has been totally commercialised in 'super league franchises'. American football was never really a working-class sport, but came from the Ivy League colleges of the rich, like rugby in the UK. Now working-class kids with sporting talent desperately try to get scholarships in football, tennis and basketball as a stepping-stone to riches of the professional leagues – and of course, only a tiny minority ever make it, despite huge sacrifices by everyone.
Football
Football was a truly working-class sport in Europe. It was first played by rural labourers in villages and then workers in industrial cities. It was mostly played for little or no money, and it was followed by working-class men (and some women). For many working-class people with talent it was a way out of poverty, just as boxing had been also. But capital took it over in the last 150 years or so. Now football is a business run by billionaires for their enjoyment and funded increasingly by global capital. Football clubs now have shareholders and are quoted on the stock exchanges.
So the Super League saga is only the latest chapter in the commodification by capitalism of sport. What the story of football and other sports tells us is that football cannot become a people's sport again under capitalism. To achieve that requires that stadiums and clubs should be in public ownership and that clubs should have members who can democratically decide their activities. Sport should not be funded by capital. Players should be employed on reasonable wages, like any other job. Private capital investment in sport and running it for profit must be replaced by a real people's sport, run by the people for the people. Sport matters too much to us to be ruined by capitalism.
The implementation of this kind of approach, this kind of cultural democracy, would of course be difficult to achieve on its own. It could only happen as part of a wider programme of public ownership and democratic control of the other cultural activities in this series of films, and as part of a wider democratisation of ownership and control of the economy and society in general.
Gwrthryfel / Uprising takes us on a journey to the heart of Cymru. Edited by Merthyr writer Mike Jenkins, co-editor of ‘Red Poets’ magazine, with artwork by Gus Payne, this ambitious anthology of radical poetry explores Cymru’s history, hardships, rebellions and resistances. The book is sponsored by Merthyr Trades Council, the GMB union, and Left Unity Cymru.
It opens with three poems directly about the 1831 Rising, ‘an extremely significant working-class revolt” according to Professor Gwyn A. Williams. A range of historical and current themes are covered in the anthology, by eighty poets including Kitty Jay, Phil Howells, Malcolm Llywelyn, Rebecca Lowe, Alun Rees, Laura Wainwright, John Williams, and many others. There are also a number of poems in Welsh by renowned poets such as Ifor ap Glyn and Menna Elfyn.
It is an anthology of and for our troubled times.
Here, rebellious poets draw from that common history, common culture, and common desire to speak truth to the world, showing that we, the people of Wales, y werin Gymreig, have the fire of dragons in our words. Through these words the reader is taken from coal mines to political discourse, from coronavirus to historic heroes, from mountains to valleys, through towns, villages and cities. Words dug from mines, hewn from quarries, herded from hillsides and forged from furnaces—here be dragons.
Here are 21st century bards using the ancient magic of poetry to bring home the fight—the fight against imperialism, against injustice, against discrimination. Not just in Cymru, but the world over.
Why? Because an injury to one is an injury to all / un yn dioddef, pawb yn dioddef.
— from the Foreword by Peter Jones
Gwrthryfel / Uprising, An anthology of radical poetry from contemporary Wales, edited by Mike Jenkins, £12 inc. p. and p., 180pps., 4 colour illustrations,ISBN 978-1-912710-48-5.
Gwrthryfel / Uprising takes us on a journey to the heart of Cymru. Edited by Merthyr writer Mike Jenkins, co-editor of ‘Red Poets’ magazine, with artwork by Gus Payne, this ambitious anthology of radical poetry explores Cymru’s history, hardships, rebellions and resistances. The book is sponsored by Merthyr Trades Council, the GMB union, and Left Unity Cymru.
It opens with three poems directly about the 1831 Rising, ‘an extremely significant working-class revolt” according to Professor Gwyn A. Williams. A range of historical and current themes are covered in the anthology, by eighty poets including Kitty Jay, Phil Howells, Malcolm Llywelyn, Rebecca Lowe, Alun Rees, Laura Wainwright, John Williams, and many others. There are also a number of poems in Welsh by renowned poets such as Ifor ap Glyn and Menna Elfyn.
It is an anthology of and for our troubled times.
Here, rebellious poets draw from that common history, common culture, and common desire to speak truth to the world, showing that we, the people of Wales, y werin Gymreig, have the fire of dragons in our words. Through these words the reader is taken from coal mines to political discourse, from coronavirus to historic heroes, from mountains to valleys, through towns, villages and cities. Words dug from mines, hewn from quarries, herded from hillsides and forged from furnaces—here be dragons.
Here are 21st century bards using the ancient magic of poetry to bring home the fight—the fight against imperialism, against injustice, against discrimination. Not just in Cymru, but the world over.
Why? Because an injury to one is an injury to all / un yn dioddef, pawb yn dioddef.
— from the Foreword by Peter Jones
Gwrthryfel / Uprising: An anthology of radical poetry from contemporary Wales, edited by Mike Jenkins, £12 inc. p. and p., 180pps., 4 colour illustrations,ISBN 978-1-912710-48-5.
As part of the Culture for All series, supported by the Communication Workers Union, we're proud to present a short film about why theatre matters, by Ed Edwards.
Why Theatre Matters
by Ed Edwards
Like every sector of society over the 30 years since the disastrous rise of Thatcherism and the economic devastation it has brought to Britain, culture has taken a big hit. Ideas that years ago seemed insanely right wing are now considered normal, such as cutting social security to the point where tens of thousands are losing their shelter and people with serious diseases are walking miles to food banks on a daily basis. While the richest increase their income and pay no tax, the rest of us face insecurity and misery.
And while this disaster unfolds the means of communication are getting further and further out of reach of the ordinary people. Lies and deceit are everywhere. The free press, which should probably be called “the very expensive press” based on what they pay Fleet Street hacks, seems more like a pack of attack dogs chewing up truth, while the few sane voices are drowned in the sea of disinformation. It seems to me, after many years working as a professional script writer that our culture has been as badly deformed by the dictates of The Big Dollar as socialist art and culture was under Stalinism. Instead of asking how do we please the censor, a modern TV producer has to ask: how to we make money out of this?
Yet in the middle of all this, British theatre – before lockdown of course – and hopefully again after lock down – has remained something of an oasis in the cultural desert. Rather than sanitised, or frankly stupid entertainment, or glittery distortions and fantasies, theatre has remained a place where audiences can often see work that tells the truth, or explores alternative views and sometimes sticks two fingers up at the system. I’m not talking about the array of musicals here, which have sprung up these last couple of decades, some of which are undoubtedly very entertaining, but which usually aspire to no more than to become billion dollar shows. I’m talking about struggling local theatres and travelling theatre companies, often run by people who are struggling economically and will probably one day have to leave the industry to earn money somehow, somewhere else, but are still for now clinging to the dream of a better life and a better society.
Most of these theatre groups and buildings are funded out of public money. They somehow manage to cling to the notion that our cultural life matters for reasons other than profit making, that truthful words can change the world and that the airing of radical and different views is a vital part of our lives. And yes, you need money to make a show that can enter this realm of debate and feeling – and even ecstasy – but you need a hell of a lot less than you do to make a Netflix show, or a movie, or a billion dollar musical. So somehow, the tradition lives on. Yes theatre struggles to publicise itself, yes a lot of it happens in London, yes some of it is “up itself”, but there’s a lot of amazing theatre out there still all over the country and if you look for it you will find it. Theatre can still turn your world upside down. It can change the life of the young, as it did mine.
I’ve seen fantastically entertaining and moving plays in recent years about child abuse, zero hours contracts and casualisation. About racism, domestic violence, prisons, crime, foreign policy disasters, corruption, immigration, pollution and war. I myself wrote a play called The Political History of Smack and Crack that made the link between the advent of Thatcherism, the 1981 inner city riots that see their fortieth anniversary this year and the massive heroin epidemic that followed in its wake. Sounds heavy, yes? Actually it was a wild comedy that still made people cry at the end.
Make no mistake about it. The pandemic will give the current government a great big excuse to continue their ravenous eternal austerity drive. They have every intention of cutting deeper and deeper into the money they currently pay to every sector and will use every device to divide us against one another. Every penny they cut will go to pay off the billionaires who will use the disaster to continue their takeover of everything. They will say, “How can you expect us to pay for grassroots football, or TV licences for the elderly, or theatre when we’re having to make “tough decisions” like cutting disabled benefits and closing hospitals.
The real truth is there is more than enough out there to go around. They don’t need to cut a thing. All the debts can be paid by collecting due taxes off the corporations that are talking over everything and especially the means of communications – plus a little more on income tax. It’s actually very simple. But the people who control the airwaves would have you believe there isn’t. We have to stand together to protect every inch of ground against those that would tear it out from under our feet.
We have to fight to keep theatre relevant. To let people in who are currently shut out. We have to fight to make work that challenges an increasingly - and I don't know what else to call it - fascistic system.
As part of the Culture for All series, supported by the Communication Workers Union, we're proud to present a short film about visual art, written by John Molyneux. Image above: Käthe Kollwitz, Tower of Mothers, 1937/1938.
As part of the Culture for All series, supported by the Communication Workers Union, we're proud to present a short film about religion, written by James Crossley.
Why Religion Matters
by James Crossley
Religious ideas have been central to human culture and society for thousands of years. They have been the inspiration behind art, architecture, and epic literature from the Bible to the Qur’an, from Homer’s Odyssey to Icelandic sagas.
Whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we agree with them or not, religious ideas have influenced systems of morality and our very understandings of life and death.
Traditional expressions of religion are still with us. Today, people will experience religious buildings and ceremonies at weddings and funerals—or even when visiting a historic town. But even in twenty-first-century Britain where church attendance is in years long decline, religious-related ideas remain widespread, such as in beliefs in the afterlife, guardian angels, horoscopes, or alternative spiritualities. Many popular sayings in English are from the Bible. Think of ‘eye for an eye’, ‘love thy neighbour’, Good Samaritan, ‘the blind leading the blind’, ‘cast the first stone’, ‘eat drink and be merry’, ‘writing on the wall’, and many more.
We all know that religion has justified acts of bigotry and even extreme brutality. Even to this day, we only need think of groups like ISIS, American presidents going to war with the enthusiastic backing of Christian fundamentalists, or far right attacks on Muslims on the basis of their religion supposedly being incompatible with the values of a supposedly Christian country.
In this country, the medieval church justified the social hierarchy, class relations, and oppression with reference to God, theology, and the Bible. This has even been updated to be relevant for today’s ruling class—the austerity measures under David Cameron’s governments were justified with reference to a Thatcherite reading of the Bible in favour of charity rather than a strong welfare state.
Liberatiuon Theology and revolutionary change
But religion has also inspired reactions against the ruling class. Liberation Theology in Latin America emerged in opposition to American imperialism where religion and the interests of workers and peasants has gone hand-in-hand and where priests have even been murdered for taking a stand.
Radical traditions can be found arguably in any religious tradition, particularly when attacking landowners and the wealthy, demanding care for the poorest in society, and providing a community as protection for the individual. These common ideas across religious traditions can be taken not only in reformist directions but used to justify more revolutionary change. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism (and no doubt many more) have long traditions noting the connections between their teachings and Marxism or socialism—sometimes to the point that they are seen as one and the same thing.
And while religious capitalists preach a gospel of wealth being as a result of hard work and a sign of being blessed by God, religion has simultaneously provided opposition to this fantasy by also being used on the side of the workers. The rise of the labour movement in Britain owed much to Christian and Jewish socialists with their traditions of combatting poverty, homelessness, and deprivation and a hope for a transformed world sometimes labelled a New Jerusalem.
And that religion has been part of the labour movement should be no surprise given our national history where religion has been integral to any number of revolutionary movements. Think, for instance, of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 inspired by ideas from the Bible about social equality and a time when all things would be shared in common. Or think of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and the advancements made in democratic thought and visionary ideas of a better future by religious figures from outside the established church.
Religion isn’t automatically good or bad, pro- or anti-worker, revolutionary or reactionary, any more than film or literature are. But it can be all these things because it is an integral part of human culture and society, a shared language.
'Religion is the opium of the people'
Karl Marx got religion right, though maybe not in the way many people think. Marx famously claimed that religion is ‘the opium of the people’. This is popularly understood as an outright attack on religion as manipulation. But if we read the fuller version of the saying we see that Marx knew how complicated religion could be: ‘The wretchedness of religion,’ he stressed, ‘is at once an expression of and protest against real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’
This is why even some atheists have embraced the more revolutionary parts of religion as a way of understanding what a better world would look like and how to achieve it. People like William Morris—who had long given up his faith by the time he was active in politics—saw the values of solidarity, community, and pride in work emerging from our shared religious heritage, ideas which should not be lost and could now challenge and help overthrow the uncaring individualism of capitalism. We should not underestimate the appeal of these values in an era when loneliness has thrived as a consequence of contemporary capitalism.
In everyday practices we see the connections made between non-religious and religious people—campaigning on housing, welfare, and poverty regularly involves people from churches and mosques working alongside agnostics and atheists. No matter how their values are personally justified, the reason why such people can work together is that they clearly do have shared beliefs, goals, and concerns about the devastation caused by a class-ridden society.
People from whatever tradition who interpret their religion in such ways—whether committed members of a radical religious community or casual believer—are potentially part of any response to a heartless world as much as agnostics and atheists who likewise want to overturn class oppression. This should not mean accepting any views—reactionary views must be challenged, religious or otherwise. And the labour movement cannot promote this or that religion and will remain central in opposing ongoing imperialist and capitalist versions of religion. But the trade unions and the labour movement are now the main custodians of those inherited and shared values of solidarity and community which will one day transform the world.
As part of the Culture for All series, supported by the Communication Workers Union, we're proud to present a short film about jazz written by Chris Searle, with voiceover provided by Mike Quille.
Why Jazz Matters
by Chris Searle
I grew up in the skiffle and trad era of the 1950s, when the songs and sounds of Southern black Americans and white radicals like Woody Guthrie became almost mainstream. One of my favourites was the Ken Colyer band. Colyer was a merchant seaman who had jumped ship in New Orleans and played his trumpet there, with its finest musicians. His experiences of virtual apartheid in the city and the racist barriers facing his beloved musicians increased his radicalism, and he and his band marched to Aldermaston on giant demonstrations, protesting against nuclear weapons.
Such experiences taught me that jazz and the blues was the music of black working people, and there was no separation between music and ordinary working life. Songs like King Oliver's 'Working Man's Blues', Freddie Keppard's 'Stockyards Strut', Louis Armstrong's 'Coal Cart Blues', Duke Ellington's 'Stevedore Stomp', Bessie Smith's 'Washwoman's Blues' and Clara Smith's 'Strugglin' Woman's Blues' encompassed a world of work, hardship and struggle. The depth of their poetry of sound and word made me realise that this music was about the real world, and the musicians' powerful quest to humanise and improve it.
I listened to the early records of Ellington, and his radicalism and condemnation of Jim Crow racism in works like 'Jump for Joy' or 'Across the Track Blues'. There were also performances like his trumpeter Rex Stewart playing his tune 'Menelik', a compelling protest against the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini's Italian fascists.
I also followed the big band genius Count Basie and heard his expose of Southern racism in his 'It's the Same Old South', or his union with Paul Robeson singing 'King Joe', a 1941 praisesong to another great black boxer, Joe Louis. A parallel consciousness was revealed in the performance of Billie Holiday, who had sung with the Basie Orchestra. When I heard her singing the seethingly angry anti-lynching protest song 'Strange Fruit', accompanied by the trumpeter and Marxist Frankie Newton, it became even clearer that jazz was at the very centre of black people’s political protests.
This continued with musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and the great drummer Max Roach, whose records embraced Civil Rights protest and the cry for racial justice. His 1960 album 'We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite', with the sleeve photograph of a group of black activists desegregating a Southern diner, was emblematic of Roach's proud music.
During the 1960s and 1970s the Civil Rights Movement cut a path right through jazz, as dozens of tunes and albums supported and evoked the relentless campaigning. They included
- Dolphy's excruciating solo on Kurt Weill's 'Alabama Song' on the 1964 Sextet of Orchestra U.S.A. album;
- trumpeter Blue Mitchell's 'March on Selma' on his 'Down With It!' album of 1965;
- bassist Charles Mingus’ burlesque 'Fables of Faubus', which lampooned Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas, who, with members of the National Guard had blocked the entry of nine black children to Central High School, Little Rock;
- John Coltrane's 'Alabama', from his quartet album 'Live at Birdland', mourned the racist murder of four schoolgirls, blown up in their Birmingham church as they prepared for Sunday School.
Mingus' contemporary, saxophonist Archie Shepp, is another dedicated musical revolutionary. Albums like 'Fire Music', 'On this Night' and 'Attica Blues' of 1972 which included his epochal 'Blues for Brother George Jackson' fused insurgent jazz aspirations and political struggle, often with incendiary vocals:
Rise up you starved and toiling masses My brothers, sisters all. We cannot fail, justice is our avenging angel, All hail the bird of truth. Come soon that day When slaves break their chains, And the worker's voice resounds. Give back the valleys, steppes and plains, They are mine! They are mine!
Shepp's internationalism was echoed in the music of Carla Bley and bassist Charlie Haden, who jointly formed the Liberation Music Orchestra in 1969. They fused Civil Rights anthems with songs from the Spanish Civil War, a praise-tune to Che Guevara, and Ornette Coleman's lament for the children of Vietnam, 'War Orphans'.
Their track 'Circus '68 '69' satirised the Democratic Party congress of 1968, and its support for the war in Vietnam. Successive L.M.O. albums spread out to support for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua with Haden's tune 'Sandino', their championing of South Africa's liberation from apartheid with their version of 'Nkosi Sikelel'i Afrika', their solidarity with the Portuguese Revolution in 1974 with 'Grandola Vila Morena' and the people of El Salvador in 'The Ballad of the Fallen'.
In the sixties many tunes of protest against the war were recorded by jazz musicians. The great trumpeter Freddie Hubbard recorded an entire album memorialising the fallen of the massacred Vietnamese village of My Lai in the astonishing sounds of his suite 'Sing Me a Song Of Songmy'.
While this musical militancy was at the centre of U.S. jazz, in South Africa the music had taken root with new forms and folk genres in the townships. Outstanding musicians like altoist Kippie Moeketsi, trumpeter Hugh Masekela and pianist Abdullah Ibrahim developed a powerfully African version of the music, while apartheid forced many conscious and brilliant artistes to become musical refugees.
Now, as I listen to the new generations of jazz musicians, transformed by the ever-growing participation of superb women virtuosi, I hear new human power, democratic intent and revolutionary configurations of sound. In their performances they embrace the issues and struggles of all of us living in the real world, and their music seeks to find creative, radical and humane answers.
I leave it to the words of great music-maker Charlie Haden, writing in the sleeve notes of the first Liberation Music Orchestra album of 1969:
This music is dedicated to creating a better world; a world without war and killing; without poverty and exploitation. We hope to see a new society of enlightenment and wisdom where creative thought becomes the most dominant force in all people's lives.
Jazz is real music about real life: that’s why jazz matters.
Next up in our series of short films about culture and cultural democracy is a film by Martin Cloake on football, followed by the text of his talk
Football is the great passion for so many of us. Going to the match is an escape, a chance to be a part of a community, a connection with memories and traditions and people we value. And, despite the efforts of some, it’s still a game where the outcome isn’t known in advance. It’s the hope that gets you, as we always say.
We need to value it more, this thing of ours. Because it is still ours, however much the modern game seems bent out of shape. We worry that it’s a business, but it became a business largely to make sure it was accessible to ordinary people. If players weren’t paid, the only people who could play when the game was first being established were those who could afford not to be paid. Gentleman amateurs not paid professionals.
Football and Progressive Politics
I’ve always thought football illustrates one of the key challenges for progressive politics. We worry about the making of money when we should worry more about what is done with the money we make. It’s the fans who save clubs when business interests give up on them, because fans realise the true value of the business. The disconnect comes when the business becomes just about making money, rather than about making money to make a better business.
But why do we talk so much about feeling a lack of connection? It’s because we still value the game, our clubs, the feelings the activity of going to the match generates. It’s a spectator sport, but one of the things we value most is the physical participation in the spectacle. Being there is important. And people being there is important to the ‘product’ that is sold on TV. The crowd plays a bigger part in football than any other sport.
Football without fans is nothing has become a bit of a cliché. But we’ve recently seen that games played in front of empty stands don’t provide the same quality of product. Fans count. We play our part. We need to assert ourselves more.
The clubs we built can be bought and sold by anyone who claims to have the money. And once they have bought in, club owners are under no obligation to retain the colours, the badge, the name or even the club’s location. They take business decisions designed to get rich quick, and then blame the fans for wanting success too fast when it goes wrong. And when it goes wrong, it’s the fans who are left to sort it out.
The worst thing we can do is accept that football is just another product. The fact that the culture we created is used so often to sell the game we made back to us shows that those doing the selling recognise the power we have.
Our game is too important to be left to business interests to buy and sell like a product on a shelf. It’s too important to be left unregulated and unprotected. We need to preserve the integrity of competition in the face of business interests that want to guarantee success. We need to recognise that clubs are the products of communities and what community means today. We need to cherish and defend the health of the collective game, to recognise that while our clubs compete there is a common interest in every club thriving. We need to harness the power of the game to bring people together and achieve good things.
Cultural democracy in football
Above all, we need to see ourselves as active participants. Get involved in your club supporters' group. Believe you have a right to question and hold accountable the people who make decisions. Make good football governance an issue that our Members of Parliament take seriously. Believe you have the right and the ability to influence the way the game we created is run.
You can trace a social, economic and political history of our country by reading the names of its football clubs. That’s part of the reason the game is so embedded. It’s part of what we are. And it gives us a chance to express our identity and our ingenuity.
Football was once described as the most important of the unimportant things. And it is. It’s easy not to love much of what the game has become, but the fact that you’re still watching this five minutes after I said the word football says something. Our game means something to us, because it’s still the people’s game.
Culture Matters publishes a lot of great poetry. Here's Jenny Mitchell talking about why poetry matters; and the image above is from her recent award-winning book, Map of a Plantation (Indigo Dreams, 2021).
