Football Considered as One of the Fine Arts

The World Cup is nearly upon us, and armchair pundits across the globe who have shown little or no interest in football in the previous four years are in intensive training, preparing to opine. I myself have absolutely no interest in the game, World Cup or no, so there's no need for any snarky schadenfreude about Southampton's recent "spying" scandal: I genuinely don't care, and find the whole affair hilarious. Unlike my neighbours.

I have never been a spectator at a professional game of anything in my entire life, and cannot see the attraction. I used to play in football teams at primary school and in the Cubs, but never really understood the game and certainly never felt obliged to choose a famous club to follow. In fact, AFAIR the rules and strategies of football were never actually explained to us: it seems to have been presumed that boys were either born with a footballing gene, or would already have absorbed them by osmosis from society at large. As a left footer I played in the position known as "left wing", and dutifully ran up and down the leftmost touchline, occasionally hoofing the ball into the middle of the pitch to someone who clearly cared rather more desperately than me to have it at his feet. In fact, my fondest memories are of the orange segments doled out from an enamel plate at half time or, in the coldest weather, hot mugs of OXO beef stock.

However, as seems to have happened at many state grammar schools, in the 1950s my secondary school had banished football in favour of rugby and hockey, partly in an effort to make gentlemen out of us New Town oiks, but mainly, I suspect, to avoid all that unmanly celebratory hugging that had broken out on the professional football pitch. [1] I didn't really understand either of those games, either, but luckily my role as goalkeeper of the school's hockey First XI required little strategic understanding beyond stopping that hard little ball going past me into the goal; something for which I had an unsuspected talent, mainly driven by a fear of the bloody thing hitting me in the face. It always amuses me when I pass hockey matches on our local sports ground and see the goalies togged up like samurai warriors in helmets, face guards, table-sized leg pads, and what appear to be a pair of oversized foam-rubber glove-puppets. I wore nothing but a tracksuit, some batsman's pads with a pair of precariously buckled-on canvas "kickers", plus a pink plastic cricket box shoved inside my underwear.

Anyway, to return to football... The imminent World Cup reminded me of an ancient post from 2010, and I thought it might be timely to share my thoughts on football's future again. The title, obviously, alludes to Thomas De Quincey's essay Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts, but not in any constructive, useful, or even amusing way. So here it is again, as usual lightly edited:

Football Considered as One of the Fine Arts

My rant back in November about "project proposals" (it's OK, thanks, I'm feeling better now) made me wonder about the widespread uneasiness with "elitism" and "craft" in the fine arts and, by contrast, their complete acceptance in the realm of sports. How odd, ironic even, that the over-educated middle classes should agonize about the unfairness of unevenly-distributed talent in the aesthetic realm, while the mass audience for, say, football is completely untroubled by it. Such is ideology.

However, it is clear that the arts are ahead of the game here, so to speak, and some useful changes could be made to sport that echo some of the progressive moves made in the arts in recent decades. Here is the text of a speech I propose to make to the Football Association at the earliest opportunity.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Football needs to change. Here's how:

1. The top teams are unashamedly elitist, drawing team members from a very narrowly-defined segment of the population, and this needs to be challenged. There is no justifiable reason to restrict a career in football to fit young men and women with an affinity for sport. Footballing talent is quite likely evenly spread across the population: we'll never know unless we look. I suggest it be made mandatory that teams are assembled using a process similar to jury service. Eleven people must be easier to find than twelve, after all.

2. Community involvement is traditionally strong in many football clubs, but over time some teams have indulged the appeal and financial rewards of a rootless cosmopolitanism (yes, we're looking at you, Man Utd.). I suggest all teams, players and fans are henceforth strictly "localized", i.e. drawn from local electoral rolls. Serious consideration should also be given to compulsory local spectator attendance at matches, to foster community spirit.

3. It is unarguable that the Premier League has wrecked the wider game, financially. I suggest we adapt the model current in the arts, i.e. reverse the cash-flow by making players pay to play. Gate money could be distributed to players, in part, as compensation, perhaps allocated on the basis of a spectator ballot or satisfaction survey ("On a scale of 1 to 10...", etc.). As in the arts, professional aspiration should be restricted to in-house "residencies", retained primarily for community outreach purposes, usually on a two-year non-renewable contract.

4. There is an unhelpful and vulgar emphasis on success through playing and winning games. I think we need look no further than events like the Booker or the Turner prizes to see that pre-selection of a shortlist of teams from which celebrity pundits can select a "winner" is a far more efficient way of deciding "success". This would also free up much valuable broadcasting time.

5. Football is radically under-theorized. Noting that even the driving test now has a theory component – a progressive move we can only applaud – I suggest that no match should be played without a properly-qualified theorist on-site to evaluate, challenge and generally deconstruct the referee's decisions. The theorist's decision will be final (if rather protracted).

6. I worry about the expression, "the beautiful game". Beauty is a contested category, and there are significant and under-represented sections of the community for whom football is far from "beautiful". However, once these proposed measures are in place, I think we will find ourselves naturally referring simply to "the game".

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

1. Famously, football is "a gentleman's game played by hooligans" and rugby "a hooligan's game played by gentlemen". Not sure about hockey... In our case, a game played by hooligans who'd rather be playing football? There was always a moment of class-conscious weirdness at the end of inter-school matches, made especially strange when the match had been an ill-tempered and occasionally violent affair. The captain was obliged to shout, "Three cheers for Scumbag Academy! Hip hip!", and the team was meant to respond with three hearty shouts of "Hooray!", although this was usually rendered as a reluctant and diminishing group grunt, along the lines of "Rerh... Rerh... Rerh..." . I recall the appallingly fractious annual grudge-match against a south London school, William Penn (a.k.a. "Billy Biro"), which was endlessly interrupted by penalties, injuries, and what can only be described as racist incidents. One year our team captain, Terry, simply refused to call for the obligatory three cheers, drawing down on himself the spluttering outrage of the teacher acting as our referee-cum-coach, who TBH was lucky that Terry didn't deck him.

A Mug's Game

I was visiting a friend the other day, when the conversation somehow turned from music to money matters, and in particular the pitiful returns on savings accounts. For years the banks have been offering interest rates at around 1.5% p.a. or less, for example, but are now boasting of rates of 4.5%. In other words, and in case you're as bad at mental arithmetic as me, what used to be a risible £1.50 of interest on every £100 invested is now a whole £4.50! Before any tax, that is... It barely seems worth the effort of setting up an account for a pittance like that, does it?

So I mentioned that, in effect, the best annual return I get has actually been from my Premium Bonds, originally bought for me as a child, and which I top up periodically whenever I'm feeling lucky. I don't think I'm very unusual in winning a small prize most years that rivals or exceeds that much-vaunted 4.5%. Indeed, my friend revealed that he had actually won a prize of £10,000 in February, which really is quite some return on the investment. For non-British readers I should explain that Premium Bonds are a venerable, government-backed savings scheme which (a) pays no interest, but (b) guarantees that your money is 100% safe, and (c) enters your bond numbers into a monthly draw, with tax-free prizes ranging from £25 to £1 million. The winners are drawn by a random-number generator, affectionately known as ERNIE. Since 1956, the chance of "winning something on ERNIE" has added a little risk-free fun to millions of mainly working-class lives.

 Doubtless, real financial risk can be even more fun, provided you can afford to spare the cash, and accept the risk of losing it, too. As the usurers banks are obliged to say, "your investment may go down as well as up, and you may get back less than the amount you invested". Then, of course, for those addicted to the buzz of really risky risk there is gambling, pure and simple; not so very different from finance in principle, but a more-or-less guaranteed money loser. Having been brought up in a Baptist household, I have a reflex aversion to gambling in all its forms, not to mention a bone-deep, atavistic fear of "tempting fate" by placing a bet on the outcome of any real-life event. All theological arguments aside, I suppose the core moral objection to gambling is that the real price of your hypothetical jackpot win is paid in the misery and ruin of all the other habitual and guaranteed losers. An addiction to gambling is the same as any other addiction that involves throwing money after short-term thrills. Fine, if you're a well-heeled fool; not so much, if what you're pushing over the bookmaker's counter is this week's rent.

There is also that stiff-necked dissenting-protestant emphasis on the importance of hard work as Route A to happiness and success in life, rather than the pure luck of, say, being born into wealth or winning the lottery, both of which usually turn out to be a curse: those whom the gods wish to destroy... But all of us are subjected to a constant barrage of opportunities for those capricious gods of good fortune to smile on us, even though we know that the chances that they will are vanishingly small. Win this, win that; grab this, grab that... It's unrelenting. There's barely a product on the supermarket shelves that is not offering some sort of prize draw, and it is astonishing how many of the late-night TV adverts are for online gambling. And the hypocrisy is breath-taking: so many of these "come to online Vegas!" ads are dressed up with a pious "always gamble responsibly" message. It's as if snack adverts were to caution, "Hey, you, check out these tempting biscuits... I know! They do look delicious, don't they? But, listen, just one is plenty, Tubs!" [1]  (Oh, and buy just three packs and get a chance to win an all-in holiday in Las Vegas).

But the pervasive message that "life is best when it's a high-stakes gamble" is destructive, especially to the young. Clearly, we have a real problem with providing enough suitable job opportunities for those starting out in life – a problem which AI seems designed precisely to make worse – but this problem has a flip-side: apparently far too many young people will only apply for glamorous jobs for which they are self-evidently unqualified. As I wrote in the post Tides:

Far too much attention is paid to the exceptional: the Premier League footballer, the champion boxer, the TV show host, the popular musical act, and all the other celebrity poster-people for improbable, lottery-scale "success". It's understandable, but nothing constrains social mobility as effectively as the idea that life is an all-or-nothing gamble. The true nature of the systematic, embedded privilege of the well-established, well-placed, and well-to-do is well-hidden behind the attention-grabbing blind of these wild-card outliers. By focussing ambition on flashy careers in broadcasting, music, and sport, too many young lives are doomed to disappointment – "shallows and miseries", indeed – their eyes having been diverted from the true prize: regular places on the ferry that leads from the world of precarious wage-work to solid middle-class professional jobs, secured by pursuing those low-risk, achievable goals, defined by hard work, exam passes, and well-trodden career paths. Boring, but true.

It's a competitive world, of course. But, as I know only too well myself, the usual outcome for anybody who enters any sort of competition – in my case, attempts to get my work seen on a wall somewhere – is rejection, which in the end can begin to feel like Charlie Brown's repeated attempts to kick the ball that Lucy will pull out of the way at the last second, every time. Aaugh! I mean, why bother? I suppose you could say that at least your ego is getting the benefit of a decent work-out from the humility-inducing, hubris-squashing effects of serial rejection: feel the burn! But in the end, as the doctor said, if it hurts when you do that, the best advice is to stop doing it.

Some might also say that, where art is concerned, rejection could be taken as a sort of back-handed compliment: just some blinkered gatekeeper's timorous misjudgement of your obvious merit, a passing over that will one day be rectified by posterity. Remember the Salon des Refusés! Van Gogh didn't sell a single picture in his lifetime! People thought Blake was just a weirdo! Which rectification, in a very few exceptional cases, has indeed turned out to be forthcoming. But most artists and writers have always sunk without trace, even the ones who did get published, exhibited, and even sold well in their day: they may have been good, but they weren't good enough to progress to the final rounds of the grand ongoing art-historical competition.

In the end, that will be the inevitable fate of all of us neverwozzes and also-rans, who have spent far too much time and money playing in the art casino. So, to adapt that cautionary mantra of the banks: "your investment is more likely to go down than up, and you will surely get back less than the amount you invested". It's a mug's game, art, so remember: always make art responsibly... Or maybe think of buying some Premium Bonds instead?

1. I'm reminded of an old friend's story about his Scottish grandmother, who would proffer a plate of biscuits, and say, "Have lots! Have two..."