In issue 135 we published an article entitled "The Making of a Terrorist" by Shiv Malik. A letter by Martin Gilbertson commenting on certain aspects of this article was published under the title "My brother the bomber 2" in Issue 136.Both the article and the letter made reference to Hanif Malik, a prominent community leader in Beeston and the former director of the Hamara Healthy Living Centre. The article and the letter made a number of serious allegations about Mr Malik. These included allegations in both publications that he promoted the spread of radical Islamist ideas and in the letter that he allocated public funding in a discriminatory way, controlled a gang of Muslim youths known as the "Mullah Boys" and had dishonestly concealed the closeness of his relationship with the 7/7 bombers.
We accept that there is no truth whatever in any of the allegations made. Mr Malik is a respected community leader who has repeatedly expressed his shock at the 7/7 bombings and has been prominent in a number of local multi-faith initiatives. He has never been a supporter of radical Islamism. We are happy to take this opportunity to put the record straight and to apologise unreservedly to Mr Malik for the upset and distress which was caused. We have agreed to pay him substantial damages for libel along with his legal costs. The article and the letter have been removed from our website.
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In the dark wood and glass cases of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, visitors encounter dense clusters of strange totems, shrunken heads and votive offerings—objects that once must have carried intense and complex meanings, but which are now largely unintelligible. I wonder if, millennia from now, someone might stare into a case containing the World Cup, a faded yellow jersey and a bunch of golden charms embossed with five interconnected rings, hung on frayed ribbon, and feel similarly bemused. Our future observer would, if equipped with a modicum of historical knowledge, know that sport took up an immense amount of time, money and interest across the world in the years around the start of the third millennium. But from the surviving written record, he would have little idea as to why.
Were our historian to search among the surviving discs and texts for our era's understanding of itself, he would find few clear or coherent voices. Some of those voices would sound bemused, claiming that despite the immensity of its reach, sport is an ephemeral pastime. Others would cast sport as a religion without a god, its rituals a late modern liturgy, its champions touched by divinity. The most curmudgeonly would be heard condemning sport as an organised circus of political distraction. And would any other human practice as popular as sport attract such a meagre intellectual haul? For example, in his four-volume global history, Eric Hobsbawm finds just half a page in over 2,000 for sport, pausing only to reflect on the anomaly that the 20th century was the American century in almost every respect other than sport, its preferred games remaining primarily domestic affairs. Donald Sassoon's similarly vast The Culture of the Europeans, which purports to tell us what the continent has been doing to "while away the hours" over the last 200 years, fails to register the many hours that have been spent watching, playing and following sport.
Whatever else it might be, sport is first and foremost a form of organised play. The dual use of the word "player" as both sporting participant and actor is not accidental. When we play, we step out of our conventional state. We create our own stage, take on new roles and identities, make and tell ourselves fantastical stories. Sport is also a form of improvised popular theatre; its apparatus of challenges, contests, competitions, unknown outcomes and final results is like a vast polymorphous machine for generating improvised and compressed stories.
Sport generates meanings and pleasures in a multitude of other ways. The movement and choreographies of some sports evoke the same pleasures as dance. And in many sports, the crowd is unquestionably the chorus, not only supplying ambience, commentary and income, but actively shaping the tone and the course of the game. The opportunity that this provides for the collective dramatisation of identities and social relationships, both spontaneous and organised, is without parallel in the field of global popular culture. Indeed, Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, has claimed that "sport is global culture." The football World Cup finals remain the greatest collective experience in history: more than 3bn people tuned into some of the matches last year. The Olympics, for all their faults, remain the most significant global celebration of internationalism. No language or religion reaches as far, geographically or socially, as participation in and consumption of the world's leading sports. More than 150 nations watch live Premier League football. A television audience of 100m Chinese follow the fortunes of Yao Ming in the NBA. Even the revival of English identity has been played out, initially, through public identification with the national sports teams.
Yet taking sport seriously seems a contradiction in terms. All sport, however much it has been commodified, regularised and organised, is in the end just a complex form of play. Calculated by the stern and quantifiable metrics of utility, efficiency and safety, sports are a nonsense. Using metal sticks to whack a tiny ball across half a kilometre of sculpted landscape into a tiny hole is serious? Ski-jumping and the luge? Even as ideas they are preposterous. Sport demands of its participants and spectators a leap of faith, a suspension of reason, an abandonment of many conventional values and judgements, as a precondition of accepting that these games do matter. The leap of faith takes us into a world freed from instrumental reason, where the pressures of modern society have no rightful place. That such a space can exist in a world that can appear deformed by the reach of money and power is a serious prospect indeed.
Organised sport is made possible by, and in turn illuminates, two key features of the modern world. First, the meaning and length of childhood has been transformed. We spend longer in the realm of play than we once did, and longer too in formal education, where playful energies are often directed towards sport. Many of us, rightly, do not wish to abandon this realm entirely in adulthood. It is no wonder that so much sports writing is in the key of nostalgia, played out through cross-generational journeys.
Second, organised sport illustrates one of the central insights of classical social theory, from Tönnie's distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gescellschaft to Weber's theory of rationalisation: that the modern world is founded on an institutional separation of the realms of instrumental reason and value-driven action. The separation of state and civil society, of work and home, the public and the private, organised religion from ethics and art, are all examples of this. The realms of love, solidarity and beauty have acquired their own separate value systems whose integrity is premised on their disengagement from the realms of money and power. Can love be bought? Can solidarity be enforced? Can beauty be priced or decreed? When they are, they turn to dust.
It can be argued that sport, even free from conventional forms of instrumentality, possesses its own, even more powerful version of the same pathologies, the same relentless and obsessive focus on the narrowest and meanest of goals. Vince Lombardi, a fantastically successful American football coach of the 1950s, once quipped: "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." But this is a fiction that we all maintain, another leap of faith that keeps professional sportspeople motivated. Play that is entirely orientated toward outcomes is no longer play. If winning a game of football really is the only thing, then we are no longer really playing. Most sport, most of the time, is about losing or drawing. Only one team can win the championship each year. We continue to take our pleasures from defeat, near misses, occasional success and gloomy mediocrity.
Yet serious organised play cannot be purely spontaneous. If we wish to watch the spectacular, to participate in its grand narratives, we need rules and rule-making institutions; we need facilities, stadiums and professional athletes. Spectaculars require backers; the circus must be paid for. Sport needs, attracts, and must deal with money and power, and the backers will always be looking to buy or take their share of glory. How are we to police the line between the realms of power and play, economic space and social space? The production and consumption of modern sport clearly is political, albeit with a small "p."
Sport as politics, sport as culture: in Britain, for much of the 20th century, neither of these propositions was taken seriously. As in so many other ways, we remained in thrall to our Victorian inheritance. The sports culture left by the insouciant amateur gentlemen and their raucous public schools was determinedly anti-intellectual. The muscular Christianity that provided the backbone of Victorian sport was about building character, not intellect. The Sudanese section of the imperial civil service chose its Oxbridge recruits on the basis of sporting rather than academic performance. As one foreign office wag noted: "Sudan was the land of blacks ruled by Blues." Simultaneously, sporting culture was overwhelmingly masculine—silently homoerotic and publicly homophobic, allowing only the narrowest range of masculinities. The arrival of the working class in football and rugby league, and the middle class in rugby union, tennis and golf, changed the demographics, but not the tenor of the conversation. Sport was sport and culture was for the eggheads.
The demarcation between sport and politics was policed equally rigidly, a stance that sprung from a social formation that was uniquely British. Victorian civil society was developed and autonomous enough that sports could be invented, organised and run by organisations that were part of neither state nor market: the FA, the MCC, the All England Croquet Club, the Royal and Ancient. By contrast, American sports, when they emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were organised and governed by the market (baseball and ice hockey) or through the higher education system and then the market (American football and basketball). In continental Europe, Latin America, and later in postcolonial Africa and Asia, the state was invariably involved in the early establishment and promotion of all kinds of sport. In all these cases, the engagement of sport with money and power was obvious and inevitable. One might not like the economics and politics on offer, but their presence was undeniable.
The result was that in these other cultures, to a greater or lesser extent, sport was deemed a subject suitable for intellectual engagement, political debate and artistic practice and reflection. By contrast, Britain's artistic elites and cultural commentators kept their distance from sport throughout the 20th century. The Reith lectures, for example, now over 50 years old and diverse in their subject matter, have yet to touch on sport. When the elites did engage, it was often with some distaste. Orwell spoke for many when he decried the intimate and crude relationships between sport and politics fashioned by modern ultra-nationalisms of both left and right.
One consequence of this division in our culture is that from a century of sport's publishing, there is a mere handful of writers and books whose prose and analysis is anything more than an interesting documentary relic. Cricket, although notionally the thinking person's game, yielded little of real weight from its elite heartlands. It was only in the hands of outsiders, the Trinidadian Marxist CLR James and the Guardian's self-taught music and cricket correspondent Neville Cardus, that a lasting contribution was made. More recently, the impeccably English Derek Birley has offered us the first serious and comprehensive history of the domestic game. Yet for real political spark one must read an American expatriate: Mike Marqusee's Anyone but England is a rich polemic on class and ethnicity in modern cricket. In football, the old order gave us Brian Glanville's cosmopolitanism, Arthur Hopcraft's half-hidden sociological eye and the compressed epic of Hugh McIlvanney's prose, but precious little else.
Set against the scope, sophistication and sheer quality of 20th-century American sport writing, this is a poor harvest indeed, as Glanville himself pointed out in the very first issue of Prospect ("Still looking for an idiom," October 1995). Unbound by a rigid demarcation between high and popular culture, America has given us Mark Twain, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Damon Runyon, George Will and Roger Angell; Ken Dryden and Peter Gzowski's work on ice hockey are the Canadian equivalents. There is nothing in the English literary canon that can begin to compare with Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association or Don DeLillo's use of the game in the opening chapter of Underworld.
There has been some improvement. Over the last 15 years, British writers have started to engage with the complex social context and meanings of our games. Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch—a diary of youth and young adulthood told through an obsessive relationship with Arsenal—was the defining football book of the 1990s. Simon Kuper's Football Against the Enemy (1994), a journey through global football, established an idiom in which the hitherto unexamined connections between societies and their football cultures could be explored. British sports historians have also been quietly working away producing new accounts of horse racing, boxing and local sporting histories. Economists and sociologists have offered their take on the origins and consequences of sports, globalisation and commercialisation, and the impact of new technologies. The laconic, self-reflexive grassroots voice developed in the football fanzine culture of the 1980s can now be found on the radio and in parts of the press as well. A few rare sportswriters, such as Simon Barnes at the Times, have broadened their horizons, geographically and contextually, and looked for something more than the same old narratives and vocabulary.
By the same token, politics has slowly and grudgingly begun to appear around the edges of the broadsheet sports press: the 2012 Olympics is being closely tracked; the worst excesses of the current Fifa regime have been exposed. Over the last few months, the foreign takeover of the Premier League has become a big story, as has doping in cycling. However, it is still no more than a handful of journalists who are investigating, reporting and writing on issues of money and power, ownership and regulation, impropriety and corruption. Television and radio's coverage of sport, although hugely improved in technical quality, and available through innumerable outlets, has for the most part merely shifted from anodyne and clumsy to anodyne and slick.
What would a healthier sporting culture look like? It would start from two ideas. First, sport should be treated with the same seriousness that is accorded to the performing arts. Second, it should be judged by the same standards of transparency, sustainability and democracy that we expect elsewhere in public life. Many things follow from this, but let us consider just four.
First, let's get our histories right. All modern sports revel in their own histories and use them to manufacture contemporary meanings and pleasures. The keeping of systematic records, which distinguishes the modern era from the games of the past, provides a constant set of comparisons between teams and individuals across the generations. Narratives of clubs, tournaments and traditions of styles of play provide a rich seam of interest in sporting competition. However, in both official and popular idioms, it has been mainly ersatz history that we have been offered: deracinated, concocted myth, hermetically sealed from the wider economic social and political context in which it has occurred. The results are at best drearily sentimental, and at worst scurrilous cover-ups of past injustices and misdemeanours. We must insist on better.
Among the many unwritten histories of sport, I long to read a good social history of golf. For if in the 20th century football was the game of the industrial working class, then in the 21st century golf is the game of the post-industrial middle class. Golf possesses the same combination of qualities—workaholism, perfectionism, networking disguised as socialising—that characterises the economic realm inhabited by its players. It would be fascinating to compare golf, say, with the grassroots participant culture of surfing and skateboarding—but these, too, have yet to receive much attention.
Second, can we improve the conversation? While there is nothing wrong with sporting professionals becoming media commentators, there is also no reason to think that they possess a monopoly of wisdom on sporting matters, nor that past sporting glory can make up for any amount of present-day guff. At the very least, let's have other voices. Sports reporting will always be full of cliché, repetition, hurried speech and slackly organised thought: the frenetic nature of the modern sporting calendar guarantees this. But the room for improvement is still vast. Media outlets should do fewer interviews with fewer people. When they do, they should not ask closed questions, or request impossible forms of quantification—"Just how important was that win to the club?" Perhaps then they could prize more sports stars out of their shells of circular vacuity. Commentators, especially on television, should not feel that it is their duty to fill every passing second with comment. As the red button option on the BBC during the last World Cup proved, there is a big appetite for just the sounds of the games themselves.
Third, writers and reporters, politicians and publics, participants, spectators and their various representatives need to address themselves to the now epidemic problems of unregulated power and money in sport. Global sport is awash with accusations and evidence of cheating, deception, fraud and corruption. In football alone, the last three years have seen police investigations in England, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Finland, Austria, Germany, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Vietnam, China, South Africa, Trinidad and Brazil. Accusations of corruption in volleyball have proved so damaging that there has been a split in the international board. Swimming and athletics are riddled with drugs. After this year's Tour de France, from which the leading riders and teams were expelled, it is hard to see cycling as much more than a pharmaceutical contest. Simply put, the standards of governance and openness that are the norm in global sport would not past muster in the most primitive of democratic polities and legal systems.
In sport, as in so many other areas, we seem to have accepted the triumph of private capital and global markets as irreversible. The private ownership of British football clubs, often by foreign billionaires, may appear to be a fait accompli, but it remains a flawed model. After all, what is a club? Stadiums, players, coaches and directors can and do change, and yet Arsenal is still Arsenal. What gives Arsenal continuity is the accumulated social capital amassed by generations who have attached significance to the narratives generated by the team's performances. This network of memories, meanings, identities and rituals constitute a precious form of value which cannot be owned by anyone and should not have its fortunes exclusively linked to the vagaries of private capital—just ask people in Brooklyn how they feel about the Dodgers' flight to Los Angeles in 1958.
At least in the US, private ownership of franchises is coupled with the regulatory mechanisms of the major leagues—salary caps, revenue-sharing agreements and a player draft system that favours the weak. British football has fewer of these safeguards and, as a result, both the English and Scottish premier leagues are among the most unequal and therefore predictable in the world; the same small group of teams that can afford to pay the ever-rising wage bill win every year. (The Premier League does redistribute about £128m a year to the lower divisions, but this is a tiny proportion of its £2.2bn television deal.) Meanwhile, ticket prices soar—an average Premier League ticket costs around £30—and many ordinary fans are priced out; witness the empty seats at clubs like Bolton and Middlesbrough. Even the US supreme court, hardly a bastion of social democracy, has recognised that sport cannot be regulated as a normal economic sector.
Michel Platini's Uefa and the EU have sought to address some of these problems with proposals for salary restrictions, limits on foreign players, spreading Champions League money more evenly and enshrining sport's distinct status in EU legalisation. But we also need to re-examine the whole question of ownership in sport. We should consider placing stricter limits on private investment in clubs (as in France and Germany) or making it easier to experiment with other forms of ownership, such as the fan-owned model in Spain, where senior club officials are elected. Terrified of appearing too influenced by a European initiative, the British government has been dismissive of the Platini plan, yet it shares many of the same concerns. It has, for example, been promoting supporters' trusts to give the ordinary fan a voice in the boardroom of clubs both big and small. It has also been backing innovative study centres at professional football clubs, with the clubs providing the space and glamour—but not the teaching—to help engage the hardest to reach children.
We need to balance private capital's opportunity to make profits from football with its duties of care. The argument begins with the link between professional sport and the wider sporting culture of society—pub teams, school sports, youth leagues, participating, watching, following and talking. Without this sub-stratum, sport at the highest level would be impossible. All professional sports organisations should bear considerable responsibility for their bases. Horse racing's betting levy is one example of a transfer of private income back into a sport's infrastructure; others should be considered.
Finally, at a time when no aspect of social or political life can absent itself from the debate on climate change, sport needs to take a lead. The prevalence and low cost of air transport has been a key factor in the geographical expansion of sporting competition. Major League Baseball only moved to California when there were regular flights from coast to coast. The Champions League is similarly predicated on the availability of a dense network of European flights. The World Cup, the Olympics and all the other regional and global competitions generate a vast carbon footprint as a result of gathering so many people in so many places. Governments generally should be making more effort to hold the aviation industry to account, but surely a slice of the €500m income that the Champions League generates, or the billions that flow to Fifa, should be spent on some kind of offset. Meanwhile, all sports that have a direct environmental impact—especially skiing, motor racing and golf—have some serious thinking to do. Understandably, however, there is among the sporting public a distaste for the intrusion of these kinds of political considerations into their play. I recently heard David James, Portsmouth's politically aware goalkeeper, ask a football punter whether he thought environmental issues should be a priority for his club. In reply, he received a groan of irritation.
Of course, one of the strongest arguments against taking sport seriously is the dismal record of those ideologies that have sought to do so in the past: muscular Christianity in the service of imperialism; varieties of social Darwinism and ultra-nationalism bent on hardening the nation for war; the ludicrous bread and circuses of fascism, Latin American populist authoritarianism and European communism; the haughty and hypocritical internationalism of the Olympic movement. But abandoning politics or pretending it doesn't matter is not an effective response.
One alternative, which tries to cut the political in sport down to its proper size, is to imagine it as a democratic carnival of play. The world of sport is one in which most of us at different times and in different ways are participants, spectators or commentators; it is a world in which we can delight in contradiction, a social space that is dependent on the state and the market but knows how to hold them both at arm's length. This space, after all, is not merely where we play—it is where the good life must be lived.
Starting with the next issue, Prospect will be publishing a monthly column on the world of sport
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