Source: TheGuardian
The beautiful game is beginning to reflect all that is ugly in society | David Goldblatt
Football is increasingly run by mediocre people infected by politics and commerce, yet fans still cling to it as a distraction from real lifeOn 27 June 2016, four days after the EU referendum, England were beaten 2-1 by Iceland in the knockout stages of the European football championships. It was a remarkable display of collective paralysis and the corrosive consequences of fear. Nearly two years later, the country does not appear dissimilar: less than the sum of its parts, bereft of a guiding collective philosophy, close to humiliation and going out of Europe.Fortunate as we are to have such an accurate avatar of our lives, it makes me wonder whether football’s uncanny capacity to reflect our social identities and collective moods is also a curse. Many of us, myself included, still look to football as an entertainment, a glorious illusion, a soap opera of distraction. Even though we all know that the spectacle is deformed by the worlds of commerce and politics, we still want to disappear into the zone of play, pleasure and irrelevance: at the game, on the screen, lost in our noisy Twitter feeds. But this season, reality just keeps on intruding, and I don’t want to look. Continue reading......read full article
