Settling into tepid beers and a winter’s warm dusk, it only took twenty minutes for South Africa to score.  The fan park erupted.  It was mass paroxysms of joy: leaping, dancing, hugging, and vuvuzelas of all shapes and sizes.  Then, with the game beginning again, our new friends turned to us and screamed in exclamation: “CAN YOU FEEL IT!  IT IS HERE!”

“Feel it!  It is here!”  With each word carefully enunciated, that catch-phrase was everywhere around South Africa 2010.  It was on TV, on the radio, in advertisements, on street banners, incorporated with concerts and stage shows.  It was, as far as I know, a marketing slogan promoted by either the South African Broadcasting Corporation or Brand South Africa to generate enthusiasm for the tournament—so my initial response was to think there was something inauthentic to its parroting.  At least that’s what I thought rationally, intellectually.  Then South Africa scored a second goal on an inchoate France team, and that Hammanskraal fan park erupted anew.  I suddenly realized that despite my intellectual resistance to uncritical branding—yes: I could feel it.

The beauty and the torture of soccer fandom, I came to appreciate during South Africa 2010, is the way the game simultaneously titillates very different parts of the mind.  The rational and the irrational.  The cognitive and the affective.  The intellectual and the emotional.  I loved this World Cup because it allowed me to try and think hard about globalization, culture, urbanity, inequality, nationalism, identity, sports in society, and many other incarnate ideas that have fascinated me at least since I first travelled through South Africa nearly 15 years ago on my way to two years in Peace Corps Malawi.  But I also loved this World Cup because it allowed me to scream from the bellows of my soul when a ball crossed a line in the grass.

This not-particularly-profound realization has been banging at me in this post-World Cup lull as I reflect back on my all too brief trip to South Africa for the group stage.  Two memories stand out.

One was a day touring Johannesburg with a kind stranger who had stumbled upon one of my pre-World Cup posts and was provoked by my surprise “at how little interest there seems to be in the real soccer experiences, and ‘normal’ daily experiences, of 47 million South Africans who somehow manage—as most of us do—to muddle through.”  The idea of us all ‘muddling through’ struck him as funny, and he offered to show me what he could: I rode three mini-bus taxis to make my way from Pretoria to Sandton, where he picked me up at the mall in his Land Rover (he’d never tried the mini-bus taxis himself, and found it quite amusing that I’d figured the route out).

A many generation South African of Indian descent, an engineer / IT professional who used his vacation time to go off-roading, he was about my age—apartheid ended when he was in secondary school, and he became one of the first students to integrate a prestigious (white) public school in Durban.  But he was more interested in talking about soccer, music, economics, cars, his skateboarding phase complete with dyed blue hair, and his daughter.

At the risk of sounding like a stereotype, she was a vivid emblem of the “new South Africa”—her mother of Afrikaner descent, her father a Muslim, herself an angelic four year old with impeccable manners and grace.  As the father, the daughter, and I toured around downtown Johannesburg—partially just to prove that we could—he talked about the pleasure and pride of having attended South Africa’s opening World Cup game (his wife had never before been to a soccer game, and was a bit surprised to learn that unlike rugby it was legal to make a forward pass), about having experienced more racism on trips to the US than when living in South Africa, and about the ubiquitous question for professional-class South Africans: should he consider looking for greener pastures abroad?  For me the very idea of the day, the confluence of stories, questions, meanings, histories, and identities within a coincidental meeting spurred by a soccer tournament, engaged all the intellectual faculties I ever try to exercise.

Several days later it was my emotion’s turn, sitting in the stands at Loftus Versfeld waiting out an increasingly tense 90 minutes between the US and Algeria.  I had bought the tickets through the US Supporters Club, and found myself amidst the American hard-cores: fans in red, white, and blue body suits and Uncle Sam tuxedos.  I’ve never been a particular fan of Landon Donovan, thinking he got too much too easily in his career, but when he stroked that ball into that net 50 yards from my seat I felt a moment of sheer, irrational ecstasy.  Shrieking.  Fist-pumping.  Shaking.  There would be time later to reflect on whether I was swept up in jingoism, whether my subjectivity had fallen victim to corporate sponsored bread and circus, whether I was experiencing reaction-formation to the anomie I feel in most of my life.  At that moment I found myself trembling with unknown joy under a giant American flag unfurling over my head, watching through blurry eyes while strangers hugged as if meeting family members they thought they’d never see again.  It was, as the kids say, raw.

I’m not sure whether I should be proud of these reactions.  My fascination with the lives of others sometimes feels voyeuristic, my joy at watching a ball cross a line often feels misplaced.  But I do know these things are why I am a soccer fan—for me the game is a perfect place for my intellect and my emotions to reach a symbiosis.

It all reminds me that while Freud was not right about many things, he was right that the human mind is fundamentally conflicted.  We are conflicted between intellect and emotion, between prudence and pleasure, between id impulses and superego strictures.  The challenge is not to eliminate those conflicts, but to find ways of negotiating between them in reasonably healthy ways.  Following soccer mostly works for me.

In that sense South Africa 2010 was a personal fandom apotheosis.  It may not have produced the most entertaining soccer, it may not have been the most prudent use of funds for a country facing daunting inequalities, African teams may not have availed themselves of anything like a home continent advantage, South Africa may still be balancing deep internal divisions, but such limitations are only ledger marks in the fascinating and ongoing negotiations of sports and society.  They are counterbalanced by other marks such as the elegance and symbolism in the performances of teams such as Ghana and Germany, the architectural inspirations of stadiums including Soccer City and Moses Mabhida, the clarity with which this World Cup sent the message that Africa can manage the most lofty of challenges, and the fact that South Africa is a country of nearly infinite vibrancy, talent, and potential.

Feeling comfortable with such potentially conflicting marks was subtly endorsed and illuminated for me by a variety of local commentators I read while in South Africa.  Several journalists noted that the nature of life in South Africa, the legacies of apartheid and the reality of inequality, promotes a degree of comfort with paradox and contradiction (explaining, for example, why many South Africans felt no hypocrisy in supporting both Bafana Bafana and Ghana, or Germany, or Brazil, or whoever).  South African author Mark Gevisser went one step further in a recent Guardian essay: “Indeed, there is a manic-depressive streak to the South African psyche; an after-effect, perhaps, of having once been so favoured after the “Mandela Miracle” transition to democracy. If we are not “the Rainbow Nation” – or the successful hosts of the first African mega-event – then we are another African failed state; Zimbabwe-in-waiting.”  But Gevisser himself is cautiously optimistic: “the power of a grand national pageant [such as the World Cup] is its myth-making potential: whether we were in cars on the way down to Bloemfontein or dancing on the side of the highway, we will tell our children and grandchildren about it and it will become the measure, for years to come, of the Rainbow Nation we imagined we were bringing into being in 1994.”

In fact, in defining fandom as born of psychological contradiction and conflict I find it interesting to look back at my own patterns of writing here on Pitch Invasion around South Africa 2010.  After offering tongue-in-cheek predictions about who would advance from each group ‘if there were any justice in the world’ (a method that resulted in me correctly picking 8 of the 16 teams that would advance—exactly what you’d predict on random chance, furthering my suggestion that there is rarely any justice in the world.), the last post I wrote before I left was full of sentimental defensiveness.  I was bothered by the fear and pessimism surrounding much pre-World Cup media, and offered alternative media sources that I hoped might be more sophisticated and real.  Then while in South Africa, in an effort to find a niche, I wrote about topics such as my unease with the security apparatus around the stadiums, about xenophobia, about the under-development of grass-roots soccer, about what Franz Fanon might think of Soccer City.  In other words, I mostly wrote things that were intellectually critical.

I tried to focus any criticisms on global forces victimizing South Africa, but it just became much easier to offer pseudo-intellectual deconstructions rather than emotional effusions.  The irony is that while it may not have come across in my posts, I loved every single day of my trip to South Africa.  Loved it.

So while some of what I wrote was about xenophobia and inequality and misunderstandings, I want to go on record stating that in my mind South Africa 2010 was a grand success.  It was a tournament that allowed us to intellectually engage with South Africa as a place that matters in global society, and it was a tournament that allowed us to emotionally immerse ourselves in a beautiful game.  It was a tournament that allowed me, ever so briefly, to love Landon Donovan with all my heart.  It was a tournament that made me happy to parrot a marketing slogan for the sake of a brand: FEEL IT!

12 June

The Roanoke Times, published in Roanoke, Virginia

New York Post, published in New York, New York

16 June

The Press, published in Christchurch, New Zealand

June 17

JoongAng Ilbo, published in Seoul, South Korea

19 June

Politiken, published in Copenhagen, Denmark

20 June

Lance! – Rio de Janeiro, published in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

21 June

Aujourd’hui, published in Paris, France

22 June

The New Zealand Herald, published in Auckland, New Zealand

23 June

Irish Examiner, published in Cork, Ireland

24 June

Correio*, published in Salvador, Brazil

25 June

The New Zealand Herald, published in Auckland, New Zealand

26 June

Neue Westfälische, published in Bielefeld, Germany

28 June

The Times, published in London, UK

29 June

Diario do Comercio, published in Sao Paulo, Brazil

30 June

Asahi Shimbun, published in Tokyo, Japan

1 July

NEXT, published in Lagos, Nigeria

2 July

AD, published in Rotterdam, Netherlands

4 July

La Nacion, published in Buenos Aires, Argentina

5 July

El Territorio, published in Posadas, Argentina

6 July

El Pais, published in Montevideo, Uruguay

7 July

Der Tagesspiegel, published in Berlin, Germany

8 July

La Vanguardia, published in Barcelona, Spain

10 July

Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, published in Potsdam, Germany

12 July

El Punt – Barcelona Edition, published in Barcelona, Spain

El Pais, published in Madrid, Spain. 12 July 2010.

And fairly enough, with much of the team also coming from Barcelona and the Spanish team playing a similar style, the Catalan-language daily El Punt proclaims that Barcelona’s style won the world, and notes that six Catalans played in the final.

El Punt – Barcelona Edition, published in Barcelona, Spain. 12 July 2010.

El Pais, published in Madrid, Spain. 12 July 2010.

Courtesy newseum.org

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!

Example: It took the bizarre appearance of Viola — who I still believe never actually existed, and was holographically beamed in by João Havelange onto our television screens to dance in pointless circles around exhausted Italians for the amusement of 94,000 Americans present — to liven up the execrable 1994 World Cup final for 14 minutes, but it wasn’t as if you could ever take your eyes off it anyway. It was still the World Cup final, and it ended with a Divine Ponytail in tears.

And after tomorrow, there won’t be another one for four years. In baseball, Chicago Cubs fans appear to keep filling Wrigley Field and cheerily chugging on based on the vague belief that There’s Always Next Year, even though their team hasn’t won the World Series since 1908 — there’s even a book about this peculiar concept of fan happiness.  But really, it’s not all that peculiar; it’s the mundane existence of following a club team, with next season always around the corner promising to cheer us up a bit. The World Series happens every year and so does the Champions League, etc.

The World Cup doesn’t happen every year, of course. We see the tears of players who know they will never return to this stage again, even at the youthful age of 30, and we weep for them. We weep for our country, knowing another of the relatively few World Cups we might ever witness has passed by again without glory being brought upon us. I was born 13 years after England won the World Cup; statistically, I probably missed my chance to ever see that happen. England is but one of perhaps 30 countries that have a somewhat realistic chance of winning a World Cup in the next 50 years, if I live that long, and there will only be 12 World Cups for them to share. And of course, only seven countries (eight after tomorrow!) have won any of the 18 World Cups played so far: in reality, I’m lucky to come from one of those in World Cup national glory terms. 203 nations entered this World Cup.

But it’s not merely a matter of time and of waiting; the European Championship only happens every four years, too. The latter is fun, sometimes even fantastic, but it’s not the World Cup.

The World Cup is the World Cup because we have made it so (not FIFA, not Nike, not Ronaldo). Because we feverishly anticipate it, dwell on it, and then devour it in one monstrous, global orgy every four years: Twitter has fairly well illustrated the epic scale of this in the past four weeks, the servers themselves succumbing to our obsession, the greatest reality TV show in the history of mankind.

I say all this as a preamble to someone who says it all much better:

If a football match is, in part, a metaphor for a battle, then defeat is a metaphor for dying, and victory is a metaphor for … not dying. I trust that at some stage of your existence hitherto, you have discovered that you are one day going to join the majority. (If not, it’s time to have a word with your folks as to the precise nature of this “puppy circus” they told you Snuggles had run off to join.) We are the only animal equipped with this awareness, and it bothers us. We are programmed to fight our own mortality — by, say, making babies, or taking pictures of each other. It’s a form of madness: a madness that makes us human. But we cheat death in an altogether more basic way: we stay alive. The universe will kill us if we stand still. It wants us to sate its entropic appetite; it wants us to fulfill our fate and return to the chaos whence we came. We inevitably will, of course — that’s what fate means. All organisms may possess a mechanism for self-preservation, but our foreknowledge gives our fear of death a unique profundity. Merely to hold our destiny off for another day, to postpone it until some indefinite point after now, is a triumph and a matter for celebration. If this appears meagre to you; if it appears doleful; defeatist, even … well, you lead an existence either most lucky or most unlucky.

Any sporting contest, especially a competition which gradually pares down its number of participants, simulates this spirit; it ritualises it. The end of the journey is always a step away; annihilation is forever on call. To see each successive phase of a tournament as a step towards its ultimate resolution would not be to miss the point, exactly, but it would be to give it a glancing blow at best. Each stage is more than just an increment. Such is the sense of foreboding in the face of elimination, and such is the prospect of the deep joy of avoiding it, that a match becomes a universe within a universe. It takes on a meaning that, without detaching itself from the “championship” element of the tournament, is self-contained and keener than keen. Thoughts of the sweet hereafter are of limited use. There may be no future after the final whistle. For all you know, this is all you’ve got. A competition is a series of survivals and demises.

I say “a competition”, but the World Cup embodies this most of all. A unique admixture of circumstances makes it uniquely grand, uniquely mad: its globalness; its co-option of the peculiar neurosis of the national football team; its three-year duration and quadrennial period, epic spans in sporting terms (the Henry-triggered meltdown in Ireland was ludicrous in its extent, but it can be partly explained by the fact that 2014 may as well have been 3014 at that point); and so forth. Above all, it is so through the force of an extraordinary consensus; it is so because we (or as great a “we” as can be reasonably imagined) have willed it to be so. The desperate, magnificent vitality intrinsic to sport is lit up by this extrinsic investment. It is heightened beyond a point where it is simply “sport, only more so”; it is alchemically converted into something other.

The World Cup is madness, and so are we.

Photo credit: mfcorwin on Flickr, via a Creative Commons License.

Royal Bafokeng Stadium, Rustenburg. United States vs. Ghana, 26 June 2010.

Photo credit: manfrotto tripods on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

1 : the act or an instance of consoling : the state of being consoled : comfort
2 : something that consoles; specifically : a contest held for those who have lost early in a tournament

In private meetings, according to David Maraniss’ biography When Pride Still Mattered, the legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi called it the “Shit Bowl”, “a losers’ bowl for losers.” He was referring to the now-forgotten National Football League equivalent of this Saturday’s 2010 World Cup Third Place Game between Germany and Uruguay: the Playoff Bowl (official name, the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl), that ran from 1960 to 1969, and whose introduction was probably more inspired by the now-defunct third place game in the NCAA men’s college basketball championship (that ran until 1981) than its FIFA World Cup equivalent.

The playoff bowl originated in 1959 as a vehicle for the National Football League (NFL), then facing fierce competition from the American Football League (AFL) some years before the two merged, to get an extra post-season game on television: before 1959, the winners of the Eastern and Western Conferences in the NFL played for the Championship, and that was that. By pitting the runners-up from each Conference against each other to play for third place on national television the week before the championship game, the league doubled its post-season exposure.

Following the AFL and NFL merger in 1966, a new playoff structure was introduced in 1967. Four teams now advanced to the playoffs. The Playoff Bowl — the Losers’ Bowl — survived a couple more years, but it had lost importance for NFL television exposure due to the expansion of the playoffs. It disappeared into the dustbin of history; the NFL, perhaps with Lombardi’s words ringing in their ears, has struck all the Playoff Bowl games from their official competitive record, now classifying them only as exhibitions. For the record, the Detroit Lions have the most third place finishes in the NFL, winning three Playoff Bowls. Lions as Losers? Pah.

Also often forgotten is that the FA Cup featured a third place game for a short period from 1970 to 1974. The first such game saw Manchester United claim third place over Watford, in front of a crowd of just over 15,000 at Highbury, Brian Kidd scoring twice. The games appear to have been dropped four years later due to a lack of interest.

Louisiana Bulldogs, winners of the Consolation Game at the Bowling Green Tournament, 2008.

Which brings us to Saturday’s game. Is it a Losers’ Bowl, something FIFA should abolish as an anachronism, perhaps pretending it never existed in the first place, as the NFL tries to do with its Shit Bowl? Or is the World Cup Third Place Game, in fact, often the provider of entertaining games and curious moments we should cherish, as Mark at Two Hundred Percent points out:

So the World Cup third-place play-off is the most meaningless match in international football? Holders of tickets for England’s Wembley friendly against Hungary in (count ‘em) five weeks may have a view. There wasn’t a great sense of that meaninglessness when England were in the 1990 version, with Bobby Robson as animated as he ever was when exhorting England to “now go and win it” after David Platt’s late equaliser against Italy. And, more pertinently, Bulgaria’s Hristo Stoichkov wasn’t beating the ground with indifference in 1994’s game when he had to make do with a share of that tournament’s “Golden Boot” (the laces and the insole?) after hitting the post.

So it is that Miroslav Klose, if fit, Diego Forlan, Thomas Mueller and even Luis “the Cat” Suarez can find meaning in this year’s “consolation match.” Certainly nations who appear less regularly in the later stages of international tournaments seem to regard third place as something worth playing for. South Korea and Turkey certainly had a go in 2002, Croatia cared in 1998 – as many bruised and battered Dutch players could testify. Sweden’s third place in 1994 was hugely celebrated – even though they’d been finalists in 1958. Poland took justifiable pride in their third places in 1974 and 1982 (the former making England look good after Poland knocked them out in qualifying). And England themselves in 1990…

I met someone yesterday who told me he was a connoisseur of third place games; preferring them, he said, to the World Cup final (admittedly, he was about to finish a half-pint of whiskey he’d apparently all drank himself). More uncertain narratives, lower stakes, more goals (this is statistically true; check it!), an underdog game you can root for as a curiosity event in itself.

We should also note its distinction from the Playoff Bowl: The World Cup third place playoff match was not invented for television, unlike its NFL counterpart. It was first played in 1934, long before the World Cup was broadcast on television, presumably in a similar spirit as the Bronze Medal game played in Olympic Football Tournaments before 1930, then the most important global soccer competition. In the 1928 Olympic tournament, Italy destroyed Egypt 11-3 in the Bronze Medal game to claim third place. Indeed, the consolation did not stop there: an entire consolation bracket was also played out featuring teams knocked out even earlier in the tournament.

I am unsure — and would like to know why — a third place game was not played at the 1930 World Cup, the only time the World Cup has had a knockout phase that hasn’t included a playoff for third place (the United States were posthumously awarded third place by FIFA due to their overall better record than Yugoslavia at the tournament).

Yet though it wasn’t invented for television, it may indeed survive because of television: as Soccernomics points out, the Third Place Game is popular on television, providing a 4.9% boost for the tournament’s ratings as a whole, “only slightly less than the semifinal effect.” Maybe you don’t know why you watch it; but you do. It might be a Losers’ Bowl, but it’s a winner for FIFA, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

Photo: eagle102.net on Flickr, under a Creative Commons License.

You will notice there is not a defender nor a goalkeeper amongst the ten nominees. The closest we have to a defensive player is the roaming Bastian Schweinsteiger. This does mark a departure from recent Golden Ball awards: a defensive player has finished in the top three of voting in each of the past three World Cups (Favio Cannavaro of Italy in 2006, Oliver Kahn of Germany in 2002 and Lilian Thuram of France in 1998).

No individual defensive player has been hyped-up in the way Cannavaro or Kahn were in the previous two tournaments, while Thuram unusually scored a couple of goals to earn his spotlight.

Perhaps it’s just because the backlines of Spain and the Netherlands, the finalists, haven’t had an obvious outstanding performer, or at least, not one picked up one by the media. Incidentally, FIFA’s shortlist for Young Player of the Tournament is also comprised entirely of attacking players (Thomas Mueller, Giovani Dos Santos and Andre Ayew, for the record).

FIFA’s awards don’t particularly matter, though they do go into record books and have an unmatched prominence. It’d be nice if the nominees reflected some balance between attack and defense (not that Schweinsteiger or Xavi play one way, of course).

Moses Mabhida Stadium, Durban, ahead of the Spain vs. Germany 2010 World Cup semi-final.

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

2010 World Cup decorations outside Hotel Penang in Malaysia.

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