ORLD CUP

WORLD CUP 90

Football's biggestinternational extrava-ganza kicks off in Romeon June 7. The Final willattract the largestaudience of any previoussporting event in worldhistory. In the 13 WorldCups since 1930, theworld's best playershave gathered in anever-expanding displayof skill and enthusiasmfor the game. Lookingahead to 1994, however,Stan Hey sees the WorldCup at a turning point.Tensions within inter-national football couldmean that the four-teenth World Cupwill be the lastof its kind

Also in our World CupSpecial:

Your essential A-Zguide to the FinalsItaly's champions ofstyleThe football fanphenomenonTen ways to avoidthe World Cup

Plus: The MarxismToday World Cupcompetition

40 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1990

WORLD CUP

With 24 teams compet-ing in 52 matches

staged over more than fourweeks, this year's World Cupcompetition in Italy will bethe largest and longest sincethe tournament began in1930. Superficially, this is asign of the continued buoyantgrowth and adaptability offootball as the world's mostpopular sport. There's cer-tainly more money beingspent on the Italian football-ing infrastructure - stadia,spectator facilities, local tra-vel networks - than ever be-fore and, although the salesfigures have been distortedby dumping tickets on thedomestic market, these couldnevertheless be the best-attended World Cup Finalsin history.But the predicted economic

success of this year's compe-tition may not be sufficientto hide or hold back thepotentially destructive ten-sions that the growth of foot-ball throughout the world hascreated. And these tensionswill be amplified when the1994 tournament is staged inthe United States of America.The developments which

threaten the World Cup aswe have come to know it arean increased concentrationof the economic wealth offootball in a handful of coun-tries, the more intrusive roleof television and its hand-maiden, advertising, and theblurring of national ident-ities created by the politicalupheavals around the world.Soon, for example, there willbe a united footballing Ger-many, with the already for-midable West absorbing thebest players of the East tocreate a soccer superpower.And nobody knows whatmay happen to Soviet players,torn between their newwork opportunities abroadand the emotional pull of

their increasingly independ-ent-minded republics. Thesetrends are bringing worldfootball to a new stage in itsinternationalisation, whichcould lead to the corruptionof the game.Since school-yard games

brought instant history less-ons from the PE teacher, allsmall boys have known thatwe, the British, 'gave' foot-ball to the world and have aduty to uphold this heritage.Even after stripping out thejingoism that tends to im-pose itself on British atti-tudes towards the game, thefact remains that it was ahost of late-Victorian engin-eers, merchants and military'men who took the rudimentsof football abroad with them,almost as missionaries.The fact that the game was

received so enthusiasticallyin such places as Argentina,Uruguay and Brazil, coun-tries which had had southEuropean rather than Britishcultures thrust upon them,testifies to the wide popularappeal of football. It was thefirst 'peasant' sport, an ac-tivity which required littleexpense and even less un-derstanding, yet still boastedappreciable aesthetics.You need only contrast it

with cricket, a complex gameover-burdened by social atti-tudes and codes, and depen-dent upon specific items ofequipment to make it work,to understand how accessiblefootball must have seemed.At this stage in the game's

development, Britain was,however, unable to offerthe sport international lea-dership. This was the resultof the ideological feud be-tween the 'professional' Foot-ball League and the public-school, amateur ethos of theFootball Association (FA).When Fifa, the internationalfederation of football assoc-

iations, began to enthusias-tically embrace professio-nalism, blissfully unaware ofthe social coding that En-gland sought to apply to thegame, the FA leaders re-treated behind their en-trenched ideas of what foot-ball represented. It certainlydidn't appeal to them in itsnew form, as an inter-national, populist sport. Andthere was a certain xenopho-bia informing the officialEnglish view of what hadrapidly become a world game.England withdrew from

Fifa in 1928, as discussionsbegan for the organisation ofthe first World Cup competi-tion, and remained disdain-fully on the sidelines until1950, when England's 'supe-riority' complex was quicklydissipated by a 1-0 defeat in apool match against the UnitedStates. But the arrogancebred of years of insularitywasn't truly dissipated untilthe shattering 6-3 Hungarianvictory at Wembley in 1953.It is surely more than justcoincidence that Alf Ram-sey, later to lead England toWorld Cup victory in 1966,played in both of these eye-opening defeats.England was finally forced

to look at what the rest of theworld had been doing withthe game. For in each coun-try where the game hadtaken hold, the essentialEnglish principles had beenretained, but the game hadbeen redefined, building uptraditions and skills as sub-stantial as anything withinthe English game. It was aninherent part of this 'foreign'mentality to experiment withand refine the idiom and totest their new model in worldcompetition.By the time the 1958 World

Cup was held in Sweden,the international game hadreached what could be des-

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WORLD CMP

cribed as the first floweringof maturity. There werethriving professional lea-gues in most of the countriestaking part, continental cupcompetitions were being bornin both Europe and SouthAmerica and the improve-ments in travel were creat-ing opportunities for profes-sional players to move beyondtheir national boundaries.Most of this migration took

place along colonial lines -Argentinians such as Alf-redo Di Stefano playing forReal Madrid in Spain, Euse-bio of Mozambique playingin Portugal for Benfica. Butthere were economic as wellas cultural imperatives. Weal-thy clubs like Real Madridwere able to buy such play-ers as the brilliant Hunga-rian forward Ferenc Puskas,while the Italian league wasbeginning to trawl not justSouth America, but also En-gland (Jimmy Greaves, JoeBaker, Denis Law, GerryHitchens, John Charles) fortalent.A new internationalism had

been born in football. Ideasabout tactics and style ofplay could be exchanged andthere was an acknowledg-ment that football was now amulti-faceted rather than amonolithic concept. Those ofus lucky enough to see thewonderful 1960 EuropeanCup Final between Real Ma-drid and Eintracht Frankfurtcan truthfully say that itchanged our attitude to foot-ball. To see Di Stefano, Pus-kas and Gento caress andflick the ball, to see theirback-heel passes and drag-backs and overhead kicks,was to realise that ourschool-yard coaches had itwrong when they'd hectoredus into a kick-and-run, 'fixedbayonets' type of football.Similarly in 1966, watching

the World Cup on tv in Liver-pool brought home the exoticskills of Portugal's Eusebio,Garrincha of Brazil, Albertand Farkas of Hungary. Wewere patriotic enough tocheer the goals of Charlton,Hurst and Hunt, but knew inour hearts that there mightbe a better way to play.But the victory of Ramsey's

England reinstated an Anglo-centric view of the game,which also involved the rein-

forcement of certainnational stereotypes. TheItalians lost to North Korea,showing us what negative,cowardly football they exemp-lified; the Germans lookedarrogant but weren't strongenough to stop themselvesbeing beaten by England'again' (as in two world wars);while Argentina misbehavedtemperamentally at the 'homeof football', Wembley.By 1970, however, compre-

hensive television coveragein colour from Mexico finallyneutralised prejudice andtruly internationalised thegame. It helped that therewere some fantastic games,and exceptional teams, eachof which reached the apogeeof their national styles. Itwas virtually a cultural sym-posium as England, WestGermany, Italy and Brazil -the best four teams in thecompetition - fought forsupremacy.Each distilled their football

to pure essence - Englandbrave, dogged, hard-tack-ling, hard-running; West Ger-many all of this, but with amore cerebral approach and atechnical proficiency to theirskills; Italy were graceful,inventive, passionate, defen-sively-minded but fleckedwith great individual skill;and then there was Brazil -inspired by Pele, Tostao, Jar-zinho, Gerson and Rivelino,they saw football as a meansto creating beauty, and scor-ing goals as a form ofexistential ecstasy.Their 4-1 victory over Italy

in the final was almost cer-tainly the high point of inter-national football. Perhaps itwas inevitable that after thishigh, the World Cup shouldbegin to lose its way. The1974 and 1978 competitionswere both won by chauvin-istically driven sides playingbefore their home crowd,with Argentina's success,especially, being milked bythe military junta runningthe country.The competition had been

hijacked in other ways too. Anew Fifa president, JoaoHavelange, had been electedafter campaigning vigorouslyamong the less powerfulcountries, promising theman expanded tournament tomeet their increased ambi-

tions. Since then the tourna-ment has inevitably becomebloated - too many teams,too few really competitivematches - and has occa-sionally been cynically ex-ploited because of a struc-ture that can require teamsto produce only strategic,drawn games rather thandaring wins. The moderntournament is now won by aside carefully garnering itsresources for two or threevital games - witness Italy'in 1982 - rather than by go-ing all out for emphatic vic-tories in each match.Perhaps the most dispirit-

ing aspect of the contempor-ary World Cup is the highlevel of homogeneity whichnow applies to most of thetop teams. National styleshave been blurred by the dia-spora of players in search ofmoney - most of this sum-mer's Brazilian squad, forexample, earn their living inthe Italian league, and as aresult the national team hasinherited a less flamboyant,more pragmatic Europeanstyle of play.Tactical ideas and forma-

tions, set-piece plays, teamweaknesses are all exposedto the globe beforehandthanks to satellite televisionand video cassettes, leavinglittle room for surprises.Most of the big teams in thisyear's tournament willalready 'know their enemy'and will have plannedaccordingly.This now places the highest

premium on the individualplayer as the element mostlikely to win the tournament.It is now possible to haveeight or nine merely averageinternational players func-tioning as a support unit forthe one or two stars who willbe expected to win the gameswith a decisive intervention.Holland has Gullit and VanBasten, England have Bar-nes and Lineker, Argentinawill rely almost exclusivelyon Maradona to give them acutting edge.It is grimly appropriate that

as individualism supplantscollectivism as the dominantfootball ethos, the next com-petition will be staged in theUSA. This was purely a busi-ness decision by Fifa. TheUSA has no professional out-

England's Gary Lineker

door league nor any convinc-ing culture to justify itsnomination as host country.What it does have is the abil-

ity to market and organisesports events, and extract ahigh price from advertisersand sponsors. Already Have-lange has talked of turninggames into four 25-minuteperiods so that televisioncommercials can be accom-modated. Teams will be stra-tegically placed in areas gua-ranteed to provide ethnicsupport; South Americans insouthern California and Texas,for example, or Italians inNew York. Then they will beexpected to turn out in theafternoon heat to suit thepeak viewing times of Euro-pean television viewers.The World Cup will inevi-

tably become not a sportingevent, but a completely com-mercial package - no longerthe peasant game, but sani-tised, trussed up and pricedfor corporate consumption.The global success of foot-ball has almost certainlysown the seeds for the ga-me's corruption. There isnow a momentum whichseems to be beyond control.Those of us who have re-tained an optimism for foot-ball's capacity for survivaland ability to re-invent itselfare already checking ourwatches. It's starting to feellike we're in injury time.#

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