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 thought of the 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.