In the prologue to this heavyweight rebuke of the international football scene, David Goldblatt takes us back to the night of Sunday, July 13th, 2014, when Germany met Argentina in the World Cup final in Rio. One billion people watched the game; 3.2 billion watched some part of the tournament. He uses an omniscient eye to portray the efforts people made that evening – British scientists in Antarctica huddled around a shortwave radio; a satellite dish grabbing a signal for refugees in Syria; football fans gathered under a bridge in bombed-out Yemen – to watch the big match. The fascination is universal.
“No shared moment will come closer to who we are demographically,” Goldblatt writes. He reserves a more caustic eye for events in the Maracanã stadium, where heads of state and sports and celebrities have gathered – Ashton Kutcher, Placido Domingo and LeBron James are among the great and the good. “That tiresome old war horse of self-promotion, Mick Jagger, has become an ever-present at these occasions, and young pretenders like David Beckham are equally available for the paparazzi,” Goldblatt tells us in a tone that promises fun. “But both will be eclipsed today by Rihanna, who will be live-tweeting the whole match from the stands.”
The final may feature Argentina and Germany but the key battle is between Nike and Adidas. The companies made a combined profit of $5.5 billion in 2014. Goldblatt devotes two pages to shredding the ethical principles of both companies and imagines the panic when Germany’s Mario Götze scores the goal that decides the game. “Somewhere in the Adidas supply chain, they ponder how many additional Götze shirts they will now need to make, whether they have enough umlauts in stock and, if not, how they can get more made at short notice.”
From that single game, Goldblatt swivels away and directs his attention not so much to the state of the game across the globe but rather to guiding his reader through football’s constant presence in the background of social, economic and political life in both steadfastly democratic and rigidly autocratic countries. In a sense, this is a companion piece to Goldblatt’s acclaimed football history, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football (2006). He sets himself a hugely ambitious task here and includes 60 pages of footnotes to support his accounts, drawn mostly from a shedload of journalism.
Imaginative presentation
Fears of being deluged with facts and information are offset by the structure of the book: eight separate sectors covering distinct regions and continents, opening with a chapter called The Living and the Dead: Afro Football Fever, and closing with Back in the USSR: Football in Putin’s Russia. The layout makes what could be a forbidding text manageable and attractive, and Goldblatt is imaginative in his presentation.
His chapter on Fifa’s internal corruption is portrayed through the movie United Passions, a $30 million project funded by Fifa and starring Sam Neil and Tim Roth and summarised by the New York Times as “one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory”. The project was an absolute train wreck, with director Frederic Aubertin begging forgiveness in Hollywood Reporter and pleading: “Don’t remember me as the guy making propaganda moves for corrupt guys.”
Jérôme Valcke, Fifa’s general secretary, issued a DVD copy to all 209 member associations, promising a film that was “open, self-critical and enjoyable to all”. Here, Goldblatt slides the knife in. “At best, the attached note indicated that he had failed to watch the film; at worst, it underlined his reputation for combining the oleaginous with the mendacious.” He has fun throughout the chapter making a bonfire of the vanities of Sepp Blatter and his cronies while substantiating his argument that the economic and cultural rise of football mirrored the sinister expansion in financial wealth and influence of the game’s governing body.
The book’s central theme is that everyone wants to play football, irrespective of circumstance, creed or difficulty. In the chapter Regime vs Street vs Mosque, Goldblatt traces a series of fascinating stories: Osama bin Laden’s rumoured weakness for Arsenal; the efforts of Khalida Popla, captain of the first Afghan women’s team, and her team-mates to play through “public opprobrium and attacks”; the fate of Murtaza Ahmadi, a six-year-old boy who was photographed wearing a blue-and-white-striped plastic bag on which his older brother had written “Messi” and “10”. Predictably the image went viral, tugging at the heart-strings of the social media masses for several seconds. Messi himself sent the boy a shirt and arranged to meet him a game in Qatar. The publicity also attracted the beady eye of the Taliban. Death threats were issued to the Ahmadi family: they had to flee their country.
Human stories
The Age of Football is dense with these kind of human stories, which makes it both a delight and sometimes a frustration that the author hasn’t time to dwell longer or dive deeper. Just 12 pages later, for instance, we are in Libya and Benghazi and gripped by the savage retribution taken by Saadi Gaddafi, the football-mad – and plain mad – son of Muammar who reserved a livid dislike of the Al-Ahly Benghazi football club. When that old staple the dubious penalty was awarded against them in the final game of the season, consigning them to defeat and relegation, local fans stormed the pitch and later set fire to the local headquarters of the football federation and, more dangerously, to images of the Gaddafi boys. The response came in the form of 80 arrests, 30 long jail terms, three death sentences and the arrival of an army battalion with three bulldozers to level the football stadium “and every trace of its records, trophies and infrastructure except the rusty, broken stumps of the floodlight pylons”.
You can almost hear the FAI board members crying out here: See, things aren’t so bad!
Sadly not. Even the FAI can’t escape Goldblatt’s spotlight, in the sweeping chapter This Storm Is What We Called Progress, chronicling the fluctuating fortunes of football in postwar Europe. Ireland’s two pages are a tidy summation of the struggle of football for survival in the de Valeran period through to the opening of Croke Park – and the perpetual struggles of the League of Ireland. “Even allowing for the incompetence of the FAI,” Goldblatt declares, “Irish football really never had a chance. The explosive global growth and magnetic appeal of its giant and very accessible English neighbour was unstoppable and irresistible.” There is no reference to the FAI’s current travails but given that those require updating, that is forgivable.
In all, this is a fascinatingly detailed account of the way football is used and abused by political interests even as technology has made it a global entertainment.
The book closes with the 2018 World Cup final presentation to France in Moscow, which took place during a freakish summer downpour. There was a shortage of umbrellas: only Vladimir Putin was sheltered at first for the presentation. “At a distance the participants appear like scurrying ants, the stage’s dimensions are Lilliputian,” Goldblatt notes from the stands. “The podium is awash in a landscape that is flooded. Facing the cameras, the players’ backs are turned to most of the crowd in the stadium; one can only connect with their euphoria by the media of the big screens. At the same time, high above the stadium, the storm we have made is raging and indifferent to us all.”
