Allright, I’ve got to come out and admit it: I’m sick of a certain kind of whining about the World Cup. I know this is an odd thing to say: after all I should be sick of all the cheesy, commercialized, opportunistic advertisements, and FIFA propaganda blah-blah about global understanding and rainbows of love showering from the sky on South Africa.
But instead I’m sick of those who inform us, in ponderous and supposedly incisive tones, that, in fact, the World Cup will not abolish poverty, create world peace, or resolve the profound social issues facing South Africa.
I’m not talking about the serious calls for accountability and critiques of the management of the World Cup directed by South Africans against the current government, which are part of a larger set of political debates and challenges within the country. I’m thinking more of the somewhat easy commentary from outside where people announce: aha! We’ve discovered a dirty little secret: The poor South Africans have been duped!
South Africa, we’re told rightly, will lose money on the World Cup. The rich and powerful will profit from this event. Not only that, the rich will be more likely to see games live than the poor. At the end of the event, despite all the promises, everything will basically be the same as before, and maybe a little worse, with empty stadiums and roads no one is going to use again.
I’ll admit that part of why I don’t want to hear this is because it’s a drag, and I’m trying to have a happy month of World Cup watching.
But, as a historian, I’ve also noticed that all World Cups are preceded by anxious hand-wringing on the part of commentators. The precise content of this depends, of course, on the venue. In the case I’ve studied most carefully, that of France in 1998, the World Cup began in France largely via complaining — which admittedly is probably the most popular sport in France — and worries about: 1. English hooligans smashing up people and things, which they indeed did in Marseille and other towns; 2. Traffic; 3. Annoying foreigners everywhere; 4. The French team being terrible (always a reasonable fear — and I say that as a fan!). Several weeks later, of course, it seemed like every French person was in the streets painted red, white, and blue in an unseemly and rare gesture of patriotism, hugging random strangers of different ages and backgrounds, celebrating the dawn of new and (of course short-lived) era of cooperation and tolerance.
In Germany in 2006, some political activists protested the World Cup, worried that the nationalism it unleashed on the country would somehow resurrect Nazism. It was probably a little reasonable to be worried about lots of Germans with flags and face paint, of course. But it turned ok, right? There was a little less hugging in the end than in France in 1998, but that’s because the damned Italians scored two goals in the last few minutes of the semi-final game and crashed the German party. But the beast of German nationalism was not, it seemed, revived.
Of course the South African World Cup raises all kinds of issues about poverty and racism, about infrastructure and investment, that were not present in these earlier events. It still doesn’t rival the politically dramatic 1978 World Cup in Argentina — nicely explored in Grant Farred’s book Long Distance Love — during which a police-state that was literally in the habit of torturing people in prisons not far from stadiums, in which it had also at times incarcerated political prisoners, sought to use the tournament as an opportunity to paper over its human rights record and unify people around the nation. It kind of worked, and it kind of didn’t too.
There are perfectly good reasons to investigate and critique the way the money has been spent in South Africa, the way FIFA has made demands and put pressure on the country, not to mention seeking to monopolize the sales of goods in South Africa — though on this last point I’ll be very surprised if people actually pay attention to the rules saying that you can’t sell a hat that says “South Africa 2010” on it. And I think the economic analysis of the Soccer industry — like that offered up in the excellent Soccernomics — is crucial.
But what we know is this: Politicians are drawn to international sporting events like moths to the flame. Unless they are completely clueless (a possibility, I admit), they’ve got to know that the economic benefits of such events are largely illusory. They have to sell their bids to a broader public, of course, and touting such economic benefits makes good political sense as they do so. But what really drives the desire to host such events is their unmistakable political allure: the glow of having brought happiness, and history, to a place. Those can’t be measured, or described except in platitudes of the kind we’ve heard a lot of about South Africa. But that doesn’t make them any less real, or powerful. And in South Africa, as Simon Kuper has recently noted, they are actually quite meaningful, because the World Cup does signify “how far South Africa has come” since the days of apartheid. Indeed, laments about the dangers posed by the World Cup to South Africa can sound a bit patronizing, as if the country is the unwitting victims of a FIFA-driven conspiracy, rather than active participants and agents who have sought to do something of value and make the best of an always imperfect situation. On this, Achille Mbembe’s excellent essay about the problems and possibilities of the World Cup for South Africa is particularly valuable.
Most of all, though, critiques of the political choices surrounding the hosting of the World Cup seem to me predicated on a flawed assumption: that other realms of human activity actually are governed by reason and a commitment to equity and justice. You sometimes get the impression that the World Cup is some kind of unique case of human beings doing unreasonable things, driven by myths, rootless utopian visions, foolhardy certainties, prey to corruption of power and greed. That it’s the only place where lots of effort is expended in an illusory and ineffective quest whose results are never those promised or intended.
As I look around, though, it seems like the World Cup has plenty of company. Wall Street. The Oil Industry. Foreign Policy. The Global Economy. AID Organizations. The IMF. Hollywood.The European Union. The Space Program.
You get the point. I suppose all I’m trying to say is that, if people want to live in a world of illusion and self-deception, I’d rather them do it through football than any number of other things around which such illusions are infinitely more destructive.
This World Cup will be an unpredictable set of wonders, like those that have come before it. And, when it’s all done, everything will be the same — but not quite.
