An Idea Whose Time Has Come

By | April 12, 2011

It’s one of funnest and most satisfying sports within the sport of football: complaining about the tedious, predictable, if not nauseating commentary foisted on us by the networks. With barely disguised pleasure, we chat or tweet our criticisms of the uninvited guests who join our football watching party. We wonder: Have these guys ever watched a soccer game? Where do they come up with the stream of absurd statistics? Who is the person next to them finding the most obscure pieces of information to pepper the commentary with? (“The last time a man with a Polish name scored a goal against a goalie from Egypt, it was 1922. The match was ended prematurely when a flock of chickens entered the field.”)

There are obviously exceptions, with some people and some matches better than others. But sometimes, I can’t believe that I’m watching the most interesting thing on earth while listening to what might be the most boring people on earth. I know it’s not entirely their fault: there are limits to what can be said, borders around what constitutes acceptably neutral sports discourse. But it largely excludes a flood of potentially interesting stuff to comment on during a match: commentary on hairstyles, rants and screeds about the referees, commentary on weird fan behavior, skewering of FIFA or some other guilty institution, polemical discussion of club, national or international politics. Maybe we have friends that we like to watch matches with who can give us this, but we can’t always watch with them in our scattered alienated late capitalist existence.

Do we really have to stay in this prison? That, my friend, is what I have been wondering ever since, during the U.S.-Argentina friendly match a few weeks back, the always astute and thought-provoking Jennifer Doyle tweeted an explosive suggestion: “We need pirate match broadcasting.”

She set me a-dreamin’.

The technology is all in place: many of us watch matches online anyway, and it’s easy enough to set up a streaming audio link on a blog or webpage. So here is what we’ll do: we turn on the network, gleefully press “mute,” and tune into one of our friends — Jennifer Doyle for international women’s football, Grant Wahl on the MLS, Liz Hottel for the pained philosophizing that is the only way to survive Arsenal matches. Once the door is opened, who knows who we will discover? It will be a free-wheeling wild west, with a cacophony of voices narrating the twists and turns of the most fascinating theater on earth. There will be no limits, nothing off-limits: they can curse, make fun of people, be mean, go on crazy tangents. If they need to call up meaningless statistics, google and wikipedia will provide as much — if not more — than what they scare up on TV. Any language, multiple languages — singing, chanting, gurgling, shouting with glee or despair.

It will be the beginning of a beautiful, revolutionary world. A football spring of sorts, a technology driven freeing of the mind from the containment of commentary as we know it.

The time has come. Are we ready?

Category: Soccer Business United States

About Laurent Dubois

I am Professor of Romance Studies and History and the Director of the Forum for Scholars & Publics at Duke University. I founded the Soccer Politics blog in 2009 as part of a course on "World Cup and World Politics" taught at Duke University. I'm currently teaching the course under the title "Soccer Politics" here at Duke. My books include Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (University of California Press, 2010) and The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer (Basic Books, 2018)

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