A book about politics and football. Maybe not a promising tag-line in itself, but add Karl Marx and William Morris into the mix and curiosity is aroused. This little book, Beyond the Final Whistle: Football for a Better World sees football as an inspiration, even a catalyst for change in society at large, rather than the other way round.
Author Vasilis Kostakis views football as a cultural expression of society, and as an art form, even a kind of dance. Most people in the world have played football at some level. It provides the player with the means of creative self-expression — and this is the important bit — but only as part of a collective.
Players often think they are the only really important individuals of a football team, and that the team is defined by its superstars, but this is looking at the froth at the top only. In the words of the book: “They couldn’t produce art without the team. The team would have no reason to exist without the opposing team. Teams would not exist without the sport. None of it would exist without society. Everything is created in common.”
The team is the product of a co-operative process, facilitated by the community. Even the boy who prepares the kit for the players is a part of the team.
Kostakis recognises the corruption and financial mismanagement that plagues the sport at present under capitalism, as it moves further away from the fans and the community into the hands of the oligarchs and billionaires, where winning at all costs is the one and only consideration. But he also sees in football, as a spirit of resistance to this process — and he cites numerous instances of it.
He calls out his heroes, sportspeople who have embraced the values of democracy and fairness. At the top of the list is Socrates, from Brazil, the captain of the best team “that never won the World Cup” and whose “beautiful football was defeated by the opportunistic football of the Italian team” in 1982.
He played for the Corinthians, and with others, he turned the club into a focus of resistance to the military dictatorship. They introduced grassroots democracy and a practice of self-management, into the functioning of the club, and held public debates on politics, philosophy and art. The Corinthian Republic, as the club and the movement around it, was known, became influential throughout the country.
Also on the list are Eric Cantona, Lewis Hamilton, the German club St Pauli, and many others inside and outside sport including Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Morris and Karl Marx. Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe, however, plus a few others are singled out for embracing capitalist values: where showmanship, money, victory as an end in itself, and where the scorer of the goals is the most important player, and where a carefree and ignorant attitude to the world outside the sport, rule.
Marx features large in the book. A whole chapter is given over to his ideas. With the constant race to increase profitability, resulting in mass poverty and the trashing of the environment, a link is made between the crises facing humanity as a whole and football. It is the ideas and ethics of capitalism that are distorting the world of football. Resistance and change often begin in art, and it is in the world of football, a global game, where art is created, that this transformation could first take hold.
So, how can this be achieved, the author asks? He sees a return to the values and practices of the commons, of togetherness and sharing, not just in regard to land, but in education, health, communication, science, research and knowledge, and sport.
With the internet and computer networks, he sees a new economy and a new way of organising societies. He cites Wikipedia, where a world-wide community of people volunteer content. This free encyclopaedia has pushed similar for-profit projects backed by giant private companies out of business. And the free GNU/Linux software and other open-source programmes have become the most popular software on the web server market, the author writes. “Designs, software and knowledge are produced collaboratively and shared globally, as commons.”
Kostakis writes: “The transformative potential extends far beyond the pitch. Football, as a microcosm of society, offers fertile ground to nurture critical thinking about broader social issues”. He looks to training sessions that not only hone skills, but also cultivate “mindful, socially conscious athletes”.
The book is a joy to read, with some marvellous anecdotes from the history of football, of observations about why people play the game, and of ideas of how to transform it, jointly with society as a whole. One has to ask whether this is more than just another beguiling Utopian tract, whether the seed for transforming society can really emerge from the world of football.
Why not? It has to emerge from somewhere. Anyone on a cold winter`s night who has walked past a stadium with 60,000 fans inside, with the lights spilling out into the sky, and who has heard the roar- or maybe it`s a growl – of 60,000 fans, will be aware of the power and potential of the football world for change.
Beyond the Final Whistle; Football for a Better World by Vasilis Kostakis. Pluto Press. £12-£14.