A retraction of the initial blog piece on EPL Talk’s main point (when it became clear the author had misheard “Come on the U” (or something similar) for “Fuck You”) didn’t stop 283 comments discussing the principle of the use of bad language at games by supporters on both sides of the Atlantic. Many pointed out that worrying about offending an English team with foul language at a game of Association Football made little comparative sense, given the reputation of English fans to come up with a vast array of offensive chants.

But how true is it, as the implication of some of the commentary had it, that English football culture is one that tolerates or even welcomes bad language at games?

I’ve been digging through the Football League’s recent fan survey (polling 36,000 supporters) this week for unrelated reasons (there’ll be more to post from it), but in this context, I thought the following chart on “Attitude towards bad language at football matches” might be of some interest (click on the chart to view it full-size):

What we see is this: about half of all fans don’t mind bad language “as part and parcel of going to football matches”. A good third or so say “it doesn’t stop me going to games but it is something I’d prefer eradicated from the game.” Perhaps not surprisingly, 15% of those on the terraces say “it adds to the matchday experience”, while only 6% of those in Family areas agree with that (some might be surprised at how low that 15% is, actually).  7% of fans are either deterred themselves from going to more matches or deterred from taking their children because of bad language. Digging deeper into the survey, 18% of supporters with children under six say they are deterred from taking their children to games.

Interesting numbers: a large number of fans at Football League games shrug off bad language, a substantial minority would like to see it eradicated, and small numbers both love it so much it adds to their matchday experience or are so concerned about it they don’t take their children to games. A complicated picture of the experience of bad language thus emerges in English football culture (at least from this statistical sample), one that depends a lot on whether a fan is there for a family experience or not in general.

One could question the wording of the survey, of course, as the phrasing of it as the use of bad language being “part and parcel” of going to games, and not really defining what is meant by bad language (I don’t think I have to specify how far this range goes), makes for very malleable interpretations. Overall, it’s perhaps surprising that such a large chunk of fans would actually like bad language eradicated, rising to 45% of supporters in Family areas.

Now, this is only in the Football League, the level below Manchester United in the Premier League, if we’re still relating this to our initial prompt. That league’s own fan survey (the most recent one I could find online came from 2008) phrases the issue differently. Instead of asking those broader questions about whether fans would like bad language eradicated from games, or asking how it impacts their decision to bring children to games, it simply looks at how offensive fans find chanting:

The survey also notes, unsurprisingly, that older fans are much more likely to hear something they define as “offensive language/chanting”, 47% of those over 65 years old. On a sidenote, it’s rather alarming to see that the trends on “abuse about sexuality” and “abuse about gender” are going the wrong way, though the latter is partly explained by the changed phrasing explained in the footnote above.

The Premier League says that “Once supporters are at a Premier League match, have they witnessed any examples of poor fan behaviour? Encouragingly, in the vast majority of cases they haven’t”, but it would be far more useful to have the more detailed analysis of the Football League’s survey on this issue.

As for how this all relates to the American side of the pond: I couldn’t find any surveys of Major League Soccer fanbases, but it sure would be interesting to have some statistical comparison rather than just anecdotes.

Those protests saw a million-strong crowd show reaffirming the desire of the Catalan people for greater regional autonomy within Spain for Catalonia, and protesting a recent Spanish high court ruling that threatens to end its right to call itself a nation.

El Punt – Barcelona Edition, published in Barcelona, Spain. 11 July 2010.

La Vanguardia, published in Barcelona, Spain. 11 July 2010.

These front page images in a soccer-mad region on the day Spain plays in its first-ever World Cup final tell a different story to that of a Spain united by football. Spain’s success at the World Cup, it is being said, has brought unprecedented displays of Spanish national pride to Catalonia or the Basque Country, as this Guardian article today argued:

Catalans and the Basques have been flying the flag for the Reds

They call it “the red effect”. It has spread down Spanish streets on the torsos of hundreds of thousands of fans wearing the shirt of the national soccer team, La Roja or “The Red”, and threatens to over-run even the most obdurately separatist corners of the country. On nights when the team notches up another World Cup victory it turns into a musical chant: “I am Spanish! Spanish! Spanish!” they shout joyfully. “I am Spanish! Spanish! Spanish!” [ . . ]

Such an outpouring of national pride also raises challenging questions about Spain’s vision of itself. This is a “nation of nations” according to some, who see Catalonia and the Basque country as unrecognised nations which, like Scotland, deserve their own football teams. Spain oppresses other nations, according to separatists, including to the Basque terror group Eta – which exacts its revenge in blood. The country’s constitutional court disagrees. “Our constitution recognises no nation but Spain,” it affirmed on Friday in a stern rebuke to Catalans who hoped a new autonomy statute might formally allow them to be known as a nation within Spain.

Thousands of Catalans marched through Barcelona’s streets denouncing the court’s decision to strike out parts of the statute. The march was led by the socialist head of the regional government, José Montilla, and his two predecessors. A massive flag bearing the red and yellow stripes of Catalonia, supposedly originally drawn on by the bloodied fingers of a warring Catalan count, preceded the procession.

But the march could not have been worse timed, according to Josep-Lluis Carod-Rovira, deputy leader of the Catalan regional government and a leader of the separatist Catalan Republican Left party. “This is ridiculous,” he complained. “We will end up with more Spanish flags being waved for the Spain-Holland match on Sunday than Catalan flags on the Saturday demonstration.”

Barcelona did not experience the same wild celebrations that provoked gridlock in parts of Madrid after the semi-final win against Germany on Wednesday, but Carod-Rovira is right that growing support for La Roja overshadows attempts to assert Catalonia’s “different” identity.

The pictures above on the covers of El Punt and La Vanguardia from Saturday’s demonstration suggest the importance of Spain’s World Cup success is being overplayed in that account, as we see waves of Catalan flags and nary a Spanish one, despite Carod-Rovira’s concern that “We will end up with more Spanish flags being waved for the Spain-Holland match on Sunday than Catalan flags on the Saturday demonstration.”  It appears politics surpassed the World Cup.

Despite this, a Málaga daily portrays Spain as playing today “for an entire country”. Perhaps for 90 minutes. . .

Málaga Hoy, published in Málaga, Spain. 11 July 2010.

Images courtesy newseum.org. Any better translations from native speakers gratefully accepted!

The question, though, is whether that vision of the England national football team as representative of multicultural patriotic English identity is anything more than a very effective piece of marketing by England’s sponsor, Umbro. For what is England, aside from a football team?

The problem with England, of course, is it doesn’t really exist: now, we might say that about most nation-states (invented traditions, imagined communities), but England’s problem is more acute than that shared by its fellow constituent parts of Great Britain. Scotland and Wales at least boast a national parliament and a national assembly respectively since devolution in the 1990s. England lacks even these devolved powers, let alone the status of a sovereign state, even if the ultimate authority for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland lies in London.

Britishness and Englishness are overlapping cultural identities that don’t make sense either together or apart; Englishness is bordered by Welsh and Scottish identities more clearly separated from Britishness; England is tied ever closer to continental Europe and the world, yet is still in a post-imperial haze struggling to process the mass migration patterns it’s necessarily a part of; what England is remains unclear, as is who the English are.

Perhaps, though, the national English football team is part of solving that riddle. In the past fifteen years, England’s football team has come to be overwhelmingly represented by the St George’s Cross, the flag of England, rather than the Union Jack, the flag of the United Kingdom. It, of course, makes more literal sense for England fans to fly the St George’s flag, as it represents England alone. But it also speaks to a new meaning that has been attached to supporting England and to the St George’s Cross as a symbol of Englishness, one that just might be providing a more inclusiveness meaning to the identity of England than we might ever have expected from the England football team, one long tied to nastier currents of racism, nationalism and violence.

In many ways, this starts with the commercialisation of English identity that comes from football, itself now almost entirely commercialised: Team England is Brand England, as this Carlsberg ad shows:

11 Englishmen against the rest of the world . . . Men of England . . . If Carlsberg did team talks.

As Laurie Penny recently wrote, this branding of English identity to the England football team is a convenient money-maker from a marketing standpoint.

Britain itself is a shuffling, gloriously dissipated nation that also includes many people from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. By contrast, the kitsch, horn-honking vision of English identity associated with World Cup-England^TM is too easily co-opted by big business in an effort to get us to spend money on booze, branded sportswear and chocolate bars emblazoned with the England flag. B&Q, which expects to make a loss over the season, has even released a range of garden gnomes wearing the England strip, which rather sums up the twee consumer desperation of World Cup season.

Figures aren’t in yet for the 2010 World Cup, but we are talking seriously big business here: according to this Guardian article by David Conn shortly after the 2006 World Cup, “27% of adults bought a flag in June, equating to 10.5m crosses of St George flying at the high point of expectation.”

But does this commercialised Brand England run close to the nastier side of nationalism, as Penny goes on to say?

Marketing strategists clearly envision the people of England drinking and shopping the summer away, safe in the knowledge that national pride is being guarded by a regiment of xenophobic pottery goblins. This cheery commoditised nationalism runs unnervingly close to the uglier face of engineered “English pride”.

That idea of “English pride” has certainly long had seriously ugly overtones tied closely to the flag of St George. In that 2006 Guardian piece from Conn mentioned above, there’s a pertinent explanation of the ambiguity that still surrounds the concept of multicultural patriotism and the uniquitious flag of St George around the England team:

That ubiquity might appear to seal the process of reclaiming the flag from where it was before Euro ’96: tied round the wrist of the British National Party or borne by England football followers looking for trouble. “The flag of St George has lost all racist connotations,” concludes Kevin Miles, the Football Supporters’ Federation’s international coordinator. “It is now seen as the England flag.”

There are, though, reasons still to be cautious about what vision of England flies with the flag. Angela Foster, a journalist with New Nation, wrote in this newspaper about being racially abused when she went to support England at the Greenwich big screening of the group match against Trinidad & Tobago. She feels she had become complacent, seduced by the idea that supporting England now embraces everybody in our rainbow nation.

She is at pains not to generalise; support for England did attract black and Asian fans and, clearly, more women and girls than ever before. In New Nation’s poll before the World Cup only 50% of the paper’s black readers said they would be supporting England, but this was mostly because they were backing T&T or an African team representing their country of origin rather than because they felt excluded from supporting England.

About the flag, though, Foster and the poll tell a different story. Most black people interviewed said they felt alienated by the flag of St George and still associated it with the BNP. “It doesn’t really show unity, does it?” said one respondent, a woman aged 17. “It’s a bit white.”

This association of the flag with whiteness hasn’t entirely gone away. The violent, racist far right English Defense League, founded in 2009, notably uses the St George’s cross at the centre of its identity.

Yet one could argue that the commercialisation of the flag, its very mass-market status, makes it increasingly useless as an identifying symbol of the far right with each passing major tournament. The St George’s flag is now indelibly linked with the England team; no longer is it associated in the mass media’s eye with hooliganism and the far right; the more the flag is flown, the more it is juxtaposed to a more positive reality.

A brilliant essay from a few weeks ago by Gary Younge at the New Statesman illustrates this change on a personal level. Growing up black in 1970s England, an antipathy to the country’s national team came naturally toYounge:

When I was growing up in Stevenage in Hertfordshire during the 1970s, the question of who to support in the World Cup never posed much of a dilemma for my family. We backed Brazil. Nearby Hitchin may have been where I was born and, with the exception of a six-week family trip to Barbados to see relatives, England may have been the only country I knew. But when it came to my footballing allegiance, I got my kicks from a country I knew nothing about and with which I had absolutely no connection. At the time, this seemed entirely logical.

First of all, Brazil were an exciting team to watch. They played with flair and an elegant conviction. They were also brilliant. At the time of the first World Cup that I can vaguely remember, in 1974 – my mother bought our first colour TV for the occasion – Brazil had won three of the previous four tournaments. England, on the other hand, did not qualify in 1974 and would not qualify again until 1982. My elder brother, a talented footballer, was nicknamed Pelé. The notion that he might be imagined as a great English footballer never occurred to anyone, and that included us.

In those early and not so early years, this relationship to English football was not merely ambivalent, it was antagonistic. It wasn’t just that I did not support the national team, I actively wanted it to lose. And not just in football either. In everything from It’s a Knockout to the Eurovision Song Contest, England’s loss perversely became my gain.

This propensity to apostasy in sporting matters had much more to do with what was going on off the field than on it. It was about flags, anthems, war, migration, race, racism, colonialism, patriotism, nationalism, fascism and family – to name but a few things. But the nature in which these different forces interact is in constant flux. I am not the person I was in the 1970s and Britain is not the country it was, either.

Younge explains the changes to Britain, to football and to himself since then that has allowed him to cheer for England.

Most importantly, to begin with, has been the eradication of the pervasive racism on the terraces he found in the 1970s:

The racial exclusion I experienced as a child found its most complete expression on the English football terraces, which hosted some of the most nihilistic violence in the country. That was where the National Front would recruit. So if you were looking to try on your English identity, a bit like trying on a suit gifted to you by an elderly relative, a football stadium would not be the fitting room of choice.

In the past thirty years, though, these terraces changed, just as England changed that eventually found benign reflection in Fat Les’s Vindaloo.

The fault lines of our national identity shifted from colour to culture – from race to religion, language and ethnicity. For anyone under the age of 30, it is impossible to imagine Britain as an exclusively white country.

The English relationship to football became more playful and inclusive rather than desperate and melancholic. For me, this was summed up in Fat Les’s “Vindaloo” song and video for the 1998 World Cup in France. Marching through London in fancy dress and chanting with, among others, a black pearly king and queen in tow, singing: “Me and me mum and me dad and me gran/We’re off to Waterloo/ Me and me mum and me dad and me gran/And a bucket of vindaloo.” It’s difficult to think of another country that could celebrate its hybridity like that. The French had to win the World Cup in 1998 before they would acknowledge, let alone embrace, the diversity of their squad.

This transformation in the connotations of supporting England, and of flying the St George’s Cross, first became evident en masse at the 1996 European Championship held in England. Drawn with Scotland in the group stage, and with “Britain” no longer as interchangeable with “England” in a post-imperial era that saw the other constitutive parts of the country closing in on devolution, Wembley Stadium was suddenly flooded by the flag of St George during the tournament.

By the 2002 World Cup, the Guardian (like many newspapers, but more tongue-in-cheek) handily provided a” cut-out-and-keep new improved flag of St. George with no ugly connotations.”

As noted in an excellent academic article on the flag’s newfound pervasiveness, the Guardian’s Jonathan Glancey rooted the repositioning of the meaning attached to the St George’s Cross with a new inclusiveness that fits Younge’s schema:

Every country has its crosses to bear and England’s is St. George’s. Never in the field of English history, or at least not since the Crusades or Agincourt, have so many red-crossed flags been waved by so many for so many. The revival of the English Cross of St. George might have something to do with devolution, the English taking a leaf from the book of patriotism as practised by an increasingly proud and defiant Celtic fringe. It might simply be a striking and memorable pattern or logo that, unlike the union flag, even an idiot can paint across their face. . . . This red-cross flag of In-ger-land has, by happy accident, been saved from being tarred with a blunt nationalist brush this summer because, almost unimaginably, it has become an emblem that embraces fans of every class, creed and colour.

The England football team and the identity now attached to it through the St George’s Cross is perhaps such a mass-market success simply because it has become the one arena that defines Englishness so sharply, as opposed to Britishness, yet one that has become attached to inclusiveness — unlike the uglier rise of the exclusivist and violent far-right embodied by the English Defense League. It is England against the world, but it is not an England tied to racism and violence as the country’s football support was in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, England’s travelling support is channeled in more positive fashions for English identity.

In 2004, Amelia Hill wrote a long, thoughtful essay on what Englishness meant, one of the dozens of such efforts in recent years. Again, the England team appeared as a rare cultural marker of a positive development in defining English identity. She talked to Mark Perryman, head of an England fan’s gorup, in Portugal for Euro 2004:

Today in Portugal, Mark Perryman is doing his best to create his own definition of Englishness by handing out postcards to local people of the St George’s flag with words ‘Friendly Fans’ translated into Portuguese written across it. ‘We want to reclaim the flag and the associations of Englishness; make them into symbols and bywords for friendliness,’ he says.

Such an act is, according to Julian Baggini, editor of the Philosophers’ Magazine, a sign that the English might finally be ready to stand on their own: ‘The craving for certainty in any part of life is childish and misguided. We have to get over that need if we are to mature as an English nation, comfortable with its own uncertainty and ambiguity’

Handing out postcards in Portugal, Perryman believes the English are in a position of unique power and opportunity. ‘There is a great deal of clear space on the flag of St George. It’s all bare for us to write our identity on it as we stand today and wish to stand in the future.’

The vast whiteness present on the flag of St George now ever-present at England games is perhaps, then, a space in which English identity is being partially written: one anything but simply white, whatever it exactly is.

Photo credits: markhassize11feet, Stephen Iliffe and evissa via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

The British press have done their best to roll out the tired old rhetoric, but in reality the match described as a “Klassiker” in Germany is not based on hatred. The truth is, both England and Germany know their histories are so intertwined that we’re part of the same narrative. It’s too much to hate each other, when as much of what makes us who we are today is as a result of what we’ve done in the past together.

Put simply: Holland are Germany’s nuisance neighbours. England, however, are Germany’s distant cousin that they actually really rather like, but family history means they have to put on a show of disliking each other. Both cousins are considered successful: Germany has the better car, England earns more money. England works in a more prestigious company, Germany has more qualifications. Every few years the cousins meet up again and start comparing lives to work out who is doing better. Inevitably the discussions become heated, insults exchanged, and afterwards they both make up over a stunningly better beer Germany brought with him. They end up forgetting what they were even fighting about in the first place.

Abstract metaphors aside, English and German football cultures are so similar that they have come full circle. German fan culture fell in love with all the trimmings of the English game during the 80s: the songs, the violence, the unfaltering support. Fanzines and magazines such as When Saturday Comes inspired similar German upstarts to the point where today 11Freunde is better than anything offered in England. Then Premiership (as was) and Sky TV came along in the 90s and everything got a bit more serious.

Fast forward to today, and you’ll see English football fans wondering why it is they can’t replicate the Bundesliga. Beer on the terraces, safe standing and cheap ticket prices. English fans take trips to Dortmund or St Pauli’s Millerntor for a taste of terrace culture. A game at Munich’s Allianz Arena is more procession that sport. English fans marvel watching FC Bayern prance to victory whilst drinking Weissbier and an oversized pretzel, standing all the while. Dipping back into the family metaphor, it’s as if Germany has turned up to the party with England’s ex-girlfriend in tow, only she’s gone and got prettier.

And so to Sunday. If the Germany-Holland rivalry is based on hatred, and England-Argentina is all about revenge, then England-Germany is mutual, begrudging admiration. The fact that so many column inches on both sides of the Channel have been dedicated to penalties shows that the so-called rivalry is a close-run thing. When I first read Marina Hyde’s article on the Guardian website suggesting the rivalry was one-sided, I wasn’t willing to believe it. Living in Munich, there is absolutely an excitement at playing the English. Like any other occasion the two play each other, it’s a barometer of how well we’re all doing. That 60,000 people are expected in Munich’s Olympiastadion and the Berlin Fan Mile will empty the streets of the capital, shows that this isn’t just any second round game. It could never be.

This was supposed to be an article about how in fact Germany does indeed bear a grudge towards England, but there wasn’t a compelling argument to be made. Instead, it’s excitement for a spectacle, for the next chapter in this swaying history. England and Germany get excited about playing each other in a way that no other fixture can match,

It’s all the bad blood, bleak times and good humour bundled into 90 minutes. Probably followed by penalties.

Joe Westhead is an occasional Pitch Invasion contributor. Read his World Cup blog at joewesthead.com/worldcup

And quite rightly. The new look was cartoonish, with unnecessary bonus wings. It supposedly paid homage to the club’s on-and-off history stretching back to 1974, but in reality did it a disservice with such poor treatment. The failure of the front office to get enough fan input before the unveiling was a real disappointment when they have consistently used the club’s history in their marketing of the club. Here’s a reminder of the new logo’s look:

The Timbers Army, or rather the 107ist, took a sensible approach to dealing with what threatened to turn very ugly (after an initial awkward public encounter between owner Merritt Paulson and hardcore Timbers Army fans following the public unveiling). They met with the front office, and came up with modified designs that better matched the traditional look. As another reminder, here is Portland’s current crest:

To their credit, Portland’s front office and ownership listened. Here’s the club’s release on the changes:

“The MLS stable of marks holds true to our root elements while evolving to communicate our historic elevation to MLS,” said Merritt Paulson, president of the Timbers. “We welcomed fan input in the process and feel the final result appropriately honors our traditions and represents the magnitude of the organization’s step to the highest level of soccer in North America.”

Elements of the identity system included both direct fan design and input. The ligature was selected from several submissions from talented local designers who are members of the team’s supporters group – the Timbers Army. The secondary crest is a direct take-down of the primary crest, which has been altered slightly to reduce shading in the axe.

And here are the new logos and the “ligature” (yeah, I had to Google that one).

The changes don’t look radical at first glance. But it is notable that the primary and secondary logos have also been adjusted, with the shading from the axe removed to make it less cartoonish. Let’s compare:

I still think some of the elements of the new primary crest are overdone, but while subtle, the Timbers organisation has clearly seriously listened to fan input: it would be easy to make fun of merely removing the shading on the axe, but it matters they have in terms of it better representing the club’s past identity. And the secondary logo is close to being a classic. I’m not really sure what the “ligature” is all about — but it’s nice they took a fan submission and made it part of their look.

Credit to the Timbers and the 107ist for getting together sensibly and getting this done. It’s an important demonstration of how fans and front offices can work together, compromise and come up with something better for the club as a whole.

Comparison images courtesy of Calimero JackAcid on the TA messageboard.

More importantly, however, the vague idea of celebrating ‘Africa’s Humanity’ seems to create a depersonalized other that is simply not there.  What is the difference between ‘Africa’s Humanity’ and humanity?  And is this World Cup really celebrating Africa as a whole?  The many African immigrants I’ve talked to in South Africa—Malawians, Zibabweans, Nigerians, Mozabicans, etc.—seem to feel otherwise.

In the conversations I’ve had during my two weeks in South Africa it has been more common to hear about Africa’s differences than its similarities.  There are the shocking differences between glitzy suburbs such as Sandton, full of gleaming shopping malls and Lamborghini dealerships, and sections of tin shantys in townships such as Alexandra—a mere few blocks down the street.  But there are also the perceived differences between Africans of different nationalities.

These perceptions are often negative.  As the Malawian fellow who works at the bed and breakfast where I’m staying told me, “Have you heard about this thing the xenophobia.  Here there is this big problem.”  He went on to explain that Malawians generally have a good reputation in South Africa for being honest and hard working, “But the Zimbabweans—ah, those ones can’t be trusted.”

Then there was the (white) South African who warned me sternly to be careful walking by a nearby apartment block: “Nigerians live there.”  Or the (black) South African who told me that in his village “there are too many problems with the Mozambicans; they are always just stealing.”

Whatever the stereotypes or national origins, many of the African immigrants I’ve talked to are nervous for the World Cup to end.  My Malawian friend claimed that in his Johannesburg township the threats are explicit: “They tell us, wait till the World Cup ends.  We’re going to kick your ass.”  Whether or not that is meant literally, there is a perception that right now many poor, urban South Africans are on their best behavior—but that may mean they are bottling up ‘the xenophobia.’

Why so much fear of African immigrants in the face of so much social marketing promoting African unity?  The core dynamic seems remarkably familiar to the contemporary relationship between the United States and Central America.  There is massive income inequality; poorly educated migrants are willing to work long, hard hours for low pay; unemployed and poorly educated locals find a scapegoat.

The World Cup, of course, offers a great backdrop for scapegoating.  In fact, the one thing locals, immigrants, and tourists seem to regularly agree upon is that the most dangerous group here is the dark overlord known as FIFA.  South Africa’s Mail & Guardian last week told of a Cape Town man who had stumbled into a brisk trade selling “FICK FUFA” t-shirts.

Even the US fans got in on the action the other night against Algeria: when Clint Dempsey’s goal was called back for being offside, the US fan section erupted into a three beat chant “F**k you FIFA…F**k you FIFA.”  It was fascinating to me that rather than blame the referee or the linesman as individuals, the fans choose to blame an entire abstract entity (though I do get that much of it has to do with FIFA’s handling of the mystery no-goal in the Slovenia game during which an individual was scapegoated).

Ultimately, then, the question on the streets in South Africa seems to be less who will win the World Cup and more who to blame.  Who to blame for losses, who to blame for inequality, who to blame for crime.  I’d emphasize, however, that the blame is often focused entirely on abstractions: FIFA rather than Sepp Blatter, Zimbabweans rather than the kind women selling her handcrafts in the public market.

Civility before US v Algeria

In fact, one of the great things about the atmosphere around this World Cup is how positively disposed everyone is to basic, friendly human interaction.  Before the US game the Algerians were beating their drums and waving Palestinian flags, but afterwards the Algerian men I talked to were pure diplomacy: “Ah, it was a good game.  Both teams had chances—the US just wanted it a bit more at the end.”

So on an individual level everyone I’ve talked to here—Algerian, South African, Zimbabwean, Kenyan, Mozambican, Slovenian, Australian, Mexican, Dutch, Nigerian, and even English (!)—has been decent, engaging, human.  But still, my Malawian friend assures me, “What you don’t see is  that here in the locations [townships] things are getting tense.  I’m telling you, after 11^th July when you are up there [back in the US]—well, just watch the news.”

In 1990, ahead of the World Cup in Italy, the Guardian wrote that “Britain is the only country which sends a government minister around telling other countries how dreadful his fellow citizens are.”

England fans — even if always a minority — were trouble, and reports of hooliganism sold newspapers in England. Lots of them. That’s why British tabloid newspaper journalists went around trying to foment trouble, as Pete Davies tells it in his brilliant account of Italia ’90, All Played Out: “There was a story going round in Monterrey, there was a man from The Sun going round with a brick tied up in a note that said the brick was from England. And he’d go into bars offering fans a couple of hundred quids’ worth of pesos to put it through a shop window.”

True or not, I doubt Sun journalists are bothering to try anything like that in South Africa. Hooliganism is off the front pages.  South Africa has so far not had a single reported incident involving an English football hooligan as far as I can tell. As the Guardian reported yesterday:

Kevin Miles, head of international relations at the Football Supporters’ Federation and organiser of the fan embassies in every city hosting England, said there had been no reports of any problems at any of England’s games so far.

The Independent explains this by painting a picture of England fans in South Africa as a class above your usual fare, in a rather snobbish take on English travelling support from last week entitled Smarmy Army:

Something has happened at the World Cup and it goes beyond goalkeeping errors. The England fan – that much-feared smirking lout best kept the opposite side of a riot shield – has been transformed. In South Africa, he is a gent and though he still orders pints, he is likely to be seen with a plate of tapas on the side.

Hedge fund trader Mark Thomson, 33, was delicately tucking into a light lunch at Cape Town’s Wafu restaurant yesterday, watching the sun sparkle on the Atlantic in the posh Mouille Point area. “England fans? I haven’t seen many. There was a bit of chanting at the Waterfront shopping centre earlier. But generally everyone is very quiet and well-behaved,” he said.

Thomson has come from London with a friend to see three matches in nine days, including tonight’s England clash with Algeria. It will also be attended by Princes William and Harry, the cast of a new BBC drama Outcasts being filmed in Cape Town and Boris Johnson, the London mayor.

The Independent explains this transformation in England’s travelling support by focusing on the distance to South Africa and the cost involved in getting there, resulting in a different class of fan going to the World Cup this time.

But the article fails to mention a key fact that counters that as a primary explanation for the good behaviour so far: the previous World Cup was held in Germany, a close hop from England, well before the recession, and with plenty of beer to be had. Yet incidents involving English fans were also few and far between, despite having the best attended games by travelling support, with over 100,000 England fans present in Germany. Deutsche-Welle reported on the change at the time:

“The FA (English Football Association) has done a lot but most of the hard work has been put in by the fans,” said Jack Walker, a fan from Manchester who’ll be in Germany for the duration of the World Cup with his 14 year-old son Ben. “We were just sick of the nutters who were giving us a bad name. We now make the effort to respect people and places more, make it more of a family event. I’m not worried to take my boy to see England these days. Five years ago, I would have thought twice about going on my own.”

After England’s exit from the 2006 World Cup, the Washington Post reported that:

England fans who carried a bad reputation based on past hooliganism are being seen in a new light not just by Germans, but by the world, said Kevin Miles, the international coordinator of the Football Supporters’ Federation.

“It’s been an extraordinarily positive contribution made to the tournament as a whole by English supporters,” he said.

In fact, it’s now been a decade since England fans have been involved in a major incident of hooliganism. So what has happened to England’s hooligans?

There are many reasons for this sea-change in the perception and behaviour of England fans abroad. One obvious one is the focus of policing on prevention: 3,143 known hooligans were required to hand in their passports in May to the police in England. The fact is, there weren’t that many hardcore hooligans to begin with, at least as a proportion of England’s massive support. Stopping many of the few making it out of the country sure helps, and means many who kicked off trouble before aren’t there, either because they’re banned or they’ve simply grown too old to be doing hooliganism any longer.

But more than a clampdown by the authorities, football fans have organised themselves to stamp out hooliganism, and route English support in positive manners. Supporters like Kevin Miles of the Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF), mentioned above, spent many months preparing for the World Cup, including a trip out there earlier this year in preparation. They work to ensure fans feel welcomed as guests, rather than arriving as presumed criminals: curiously enough, this appears to have the effect of making fans behave more like guests and less like criminals. For example, Football Supporters Europe has set-up “Fans Embassies” in host nations to provide support and advice for travelling fans:

The German and English Fans’ Embassy teams, both members of Football Supporters Europe (FSE), will provide comprehensive advice, information and support service to England and German fans at the upcoming World Cup in South Africa. Fans’ Embassies are important tools to reduce feelings of exclusion and insecurity among travelling football supporters. The English and German Fans’ Embassy teams can look back at 20-years of experience: The English Fans’ Embassy, run by the independent Football Supporters Federation (FSF), and the German Fans’ Embassy team, organised by the Coordinating office of German Fan Projects (KOS), offer their services for the ninth time at major tournaments.

The English Fans’ Embassy will be run by a team of ten volunteer FSF members travelling to South Africa and providing assistance to their fans. The English Fans’ Embassy will operate a 24-hour telephone helpline service and produce and distribute the free fanzine “Free Lions” for each game, containing guide material and up-to-date information on tournament arrangements, to complete the 150 page full colour fans’ guide book already available and distributed for free among all England supporters. Working in close collaboration with staff from the British High Commission, the Fans’ Embassy team will use the latest technology and social networking communications, including Twitter feeds, Facebook updates and a free SMS text message service to provide the most up-to-date info on the tournament for the English fans.

The concept of Fans’ Embassies has been established and continuously further developed by several Fans’ Embassy initiatives and FSE members in the past 20 years. The main idea is to openly and warmly welcome football supporters at major tournaments and to treat them respectfully as guests rather than a problem, and offer a wide range of interesting activities. The Fans’ Embassy service includes a quick and unbureaucratic help in the case of emergency ranging from support in case of the loss of passports to legal advice with the side effect to prevent further problems and tensions. Fans’ Embassies have been backed by UEFA, FIFA and the EU. In South Africa both, the English and the German Fans’ Embassies will play their crucial role to date, helping supporters overcome cultural differences and providing safety advice, all in cooperation with local and national, and international football bodies and authorities.

On Sunday, of course, England play Germany, a game that in the past would have the host nation in a panic. South Africa have identified it as a high-profile game, but the change in expectations that has come from the hard work by fans and the authorities in England means fear does not follow the country everywhere any longer:

“Those are high-priority teams for us,” South Africa Police Service spokeswoman Brigadier Sally de Beer told The Associated Press on Thursday. “As with the (England)-U.S.A. game where we beefed up security … We will deploy additional forces and resources.”

Police had no information about any specific threats to the match, de Beer said, nor did they have particular concerns about the match featuring two of European football’s traditional rivals.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be any trouble between German and English fans on Sunday; but the odds that there will be anything serious are much higher than they would have been a decade ago.

Photo credit: & YasSseR & on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

There are many examples of this, but I’ll give you a timely one from Gabrielle Marcotti today on the English belief about the robotic German style of play, one ever undermined by how numerous German players actually play:

Many have noted the fact that Germany has a truly multi-cultural side at this World Cup, one which draws its heritage from a dozen or so nations as diverse as Turkey, Poland, Ghana and Brazil. That part is great, if perhaps not an absolute first: indeed, in that sense, it’s a lot like France in 1998. But whoever suggests that Germany’s mulit-culturalism is what helps the side produce creative, free-flowing football is either another lazy stereotype merchant or is not too familiar with the team’s history.

It’s not as if, before the wave of recent immigrants were integrated in the team, Germany were a bunch of giant, muscle-bound Robocops (or Stefan Effenbergs, if you prefer). This is the side that produced Pierre Littbarski in the 1980s and Tomas Haessler and Andy Moller in the 1990s. Players who were uber-German and uber-talented, blessed with flair and creativity, as well as sterling technique. Come to think of it, so is Thomas Mueller and he’s as Teutonic as they come.

The fact of the matter is that German football has a long history of producing flair players: it’s just that we tend not to see them as such for the mere fact that they’re… well… German.

So that said, what is an “American” style of play?  It should be remembered that outside the rather small bubble that is CONCACAF, American soccer is not well known to the world. America’s fleeting moments at the 1930 and 1950 World Cups were followed by a deafening silence for forty years, America gone from the world’s stage until after the fall of the Berlin wall. Since 1990, though, the United States has appeared at every World Cup, one of a handful of teams to do so — so certain ideas about how the team plays have surely developed around the world, right?

I’ve lived in America too long now to offer a genuinely outsider perspective on the US, to give you a simple stereotype of their style: once you’ve lived and breathed inside a country’s soccer bubble, it’s hard to step outside it. But the English media seemed to offer a fairly consistent view of the American style of play ahead of the England game last week: the Americans were respected as hard-working, physical, doughty. However, there seemed to be a certain unease about commentators reaching for those conclusions, perhaps because some of the best-known Americans abroad have been wildly distinctive in their personas and styles: Alexi Lalas to Brian McBride to Landon Donovan is one hell of a stream of different styles to be the best known international representatives of your country. Not to mention Freddy Adu, or goalkeepers (if anything, American soccer is simply known as the home of Good Goalkeeping: many English observers assume Tim Howard is better known in the U.S. than any other soccer player).

So that’s all a little confusing. Which is perhaps why Jesse Pennington at the New York Times’ Goal blog has a grander vision for the American style of play’s future than as a nation emulating David Batty:

When Landon Donovan rifled a shot right at and over the Slovenian keeper — in the soccer equivalent of chicken — I couldn’t help thinking as I played the goal over and over that, well, it seemed like such an American thing to do.

A striker, or winger, operates as a kind of maverick on the field and certainly has the option to attack the keeper directly. But the law of angles dictates that this path yields the least fruit. With such proximity, the keeper cuts off the angle almost entirely, reducing the scoring opportunity to something out of the N.H.L., where the window for a goal is minuscule and shrinking. That is why a striker, if he has the ball at the edge of the field to the right or left of the goal, will typically pass the ball into the box, dumping it off like a Jason Kidd alley-oop in the hope that a member of his squadron is there to pummel it home on a wider target. Countless soccer drills embed this impulse until it becomes rote. Players use a shake, a wiggle to buy a fraction of time, and then pass into the middle. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred this is what the Spanish, the English, or the Dutch will do. Furthermore, a forward is also taught to shoot low. Donovan ignored that too.That’s why it seemed like such a quintessentially American moment. The orthodoxy of the game was shredded, in one blissful and bold moment, in favor of cowboy logic. A kind of American impatience with custom and formality brought forth a different sensibility, a bit more roguish one. Think Indiana Jones blatantly disregarding politesse by scoffing at (and then shooting) the scimitar-wielding thug in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Think Han Solo blasting down Greedo in the “Star Wars” canteen before the green dude knows what hit him.

This was probably a bad World Cup to make the argument that Landon’s shot from an angle was something only an American would do, that otherwise “Players use a shake, a wiggle to buy a fraction of time, and then pass into the middle.” Maicon from a silly angle (yeah, OK, we can argue that one), Luis Fabiano. Still, I suppose it’s conceivable that the kinda rough idea that Americans play a powerful, physical game could morph into a cowboy-motif if they shoot straight often enough.

Most likely, a stereotype about the American style of play will develop internationally, as the United States keeps appearing at World Cups and probably, soon enough, goes far enough in the tournament that the world pays attention to it for long enough to make a judgment: exiting at the group stage, second round or even quarter-finals doesn’t provide enough focus on any team for enough casual observations, resentments or jealousies to generate casual, common viewpoints around the world. Whatever the American style of play is, the world has yet to tell the United States about it.

Though nobody knows exactly when the game began, there are written accounts of it from as early as 1610. In the original game, a live duck was sewn into a leather skin, making a ball, but with its head left hanging out. The way the leather was sewn, handles were left to tug on, and the game began with two of the strongest players tugging on the handles, until one gained control of the ball.

A Wall Street Journal article a couple of days looked in some detail at the challenge to pato’s status as the national sport in Argentina, one that seems to have stemmed from marketing impetus rather than any actual popular interest in what sport is officially anything:

Now, all at once, pato’s privileged place in Argentina’s athletic hierarchy is under siege by soccer-loving corporate and political interests posing the question, “Why a duck?” (Argentina’s soccer team beat South Korea 4-1 Thursday in World Cup play.)

In April, a sportswear company called Topper held a splashy event featuring TV stars and models to launch a petition drive calling for futbol‘s designation as a national sport on a par with pato. Already, more than 140,000 people have signed on. Shortly after the kickoff of the petition, Sen. Emilio Alberto Rached opened up a political front, introducing a bill in Congress seeking national sport status for soccer and relegating pato to the rank of “national traditional sport.”

Soccer advocates argue that tens of millions of Argentines are fans, with goal posts sprouting up on seemingly every vacant lot and kids booting around bottles or bundled-up-rags if they can’t afford a ball. In contrast, they say, pato enthusiasts number in the thousands, and are relatively affluent and confined to pockets of the countryside. Soccer is “working class [and] inclusive,” while pato is “exclusive and costly,” the Rached bill asserts. In an interview, Sen. Rached adds: “It’s clear that more than 90% of Argentines have never seen a game of pato.”

Pato’s defenders point out that pato is a game that has developed over centuries of play in Argentina, and not an import from the informal empire of the English, as soccer of course was in the late nineteenth century.

The main defense of pato enthusiasts is that their sport is 100% Argentine—a claim that can’t be made for soccer. Modern-day soccer is considered to have started with the founding of the English Football Association in 1863.

“What sense does it make for Argentina to have a national sport that came from England?” asks Gustavo Jure, a pato player who is now a referee. “We’ve had some differences with the English, you know.” Nearly three decades after Britain defeated Argentina in a brief war for control of the Falkland Islands, anti-English resentment is still prevalent.

What the Wall Street Journal doesn’t mention is perhaps the most important fact about the development of soccer into Argentina’s most popular game: as Simon Kuper explained in the Guardian a few years ago, the whole point of how it became the people’s game in Argentina was the transformation in the sport’s style and a takeover of it from the English elite who had introduced it to the country:

Argentina in the Victorian age was part of Britain’s “informal empire”. Second sons and black sheep shipped out from Southampton to make their fortunes in cattle and wheat. They built railways and introduced football, a game they played in a muscular, disciplined style. But in the early 1900s, men with Italian or Spanish surnames began playing with more individuality and skill. Their style – known as criollo – came to be seen as typically Latin, or Argentine, the opposite of the British game.

Many among the Argentine poor resented the wealthy British. Juan Peron, who first became president in 1946, exploited these feelings in both rhetoric and economic policy. When Argentina first beat England at football, in 1953, a politician exclaimed: “We nationalised the railways, and now we have nationalised football!”

Since then, of course, Argentina has had a few more opportunities to show the success of that reimagination of the game to England, usually to the latter’s disadvantage. The game as invented in England has become the global game partly because of histories like this.

The piece details the club’s players’ struggle to deal with touch choices over how to deal with the persistence of homophobic attitudes and chanting in the sport: to opt-out, and play in a league that’s overtly gay-friendly, or persist in trying to change the sport from within its usual channels?  The answers are honest and interesting:

Support, however, is by no means unanimous within the gay community. “There is a lot of opposition to gay football” says Ian Kehoe, the club’s captain and chairman. “Our sponsors, FitLads the dating website, have forums on there. Often you’ll see someone who is obviously gay posting ‘why the hell are you lot separating yourself from the wider football community? Why do you have to have an exclusively gay team?’ I’d say one of these posts is started every day just on the topic of gay football.” The justification, as Ian argues, is that of positive discrimination. “You’re taking an unprincipled step back in order to take two forward. Maybe gay football is a step back. But it’s getting a lot of gay people who wouldn’t otherwise play to step into the game. From there they might then filter out into regular teams”.

Talking to the players about their personal experiences outside of the Falcons, it’s hard to deny the legitimacy of Ian’s rationale. Homophobic abuse, says one goalkeeper, is too often the norm. “For one team I played for in the past, coming out would be absolutely out of the question. The team talk would be ‘you’re playing like a bunch of fucking queers’. If I’d come out they’d have told me to fuck off”. Having joined the Falcons recently, the keeper continues to play for a semi-professional club, a club at which he was recently ‘outed’. “It’s shit”, he states, “it’s just not what you do. On the first day of everyone knowing I was gay a couple of people gave a bit of banter, but some others were like ‘nah’. I was on the bench and one of our strikers got taken off – he was one of my better friends there. When someone jokingly asked if I fancied him he went ‘don’t even fucking answer that, I hate this gay business’”. In the face of such hostility, he has since decided to leave.