"Working Class Ballet," by Simon Critchley on roadsandkingdoms.com via aldaily:
Let me try and explain why football is so important to me, and why it becomes more rather than less important to me as I get older. My family is from Liverpool in the northwest of England and my father used to train at Liverpool Football Club’s training ground in the early 1950s until an ankle injury curtailed his career.
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Football is all about the experience of failure and righteous injustice. It is about hoping to win and learning to accept defeat. But most importantly, it is about some experience of the fragility of belonging: the enigma of place, memory and history.
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My nuclear unit of a family moved from Liverpool to the south of England, which is where I grew up. We were economic migrants in a part of the country that we didn’t recognize and which didn’t recognize us. Liverpool Football Club came to represent whatever ‘home’ meant to me and was a huge element in whatever sense of identity we had as a family.
Let me try and explain why football is so important to me, and why it becomes more rather than less important to me as I get older. My family is from Liverpool in the northwest of England and my father used to train at Liverpool Football Club’s training ground in the early 1950s until an ankle injury curtailed his career.
...
Football is all about the experience of failure and righteous injustice. It is about hoping to win and learning to accept defeat. But most importantly, it is about some experience of the fragility of belonging: the enigma of place, memory and history.
...
My nuclear unit of a family moved from Liverpool to the south of England, which is where I grew up. We were economic migrants in a part of the country that we didn’t recognize and which didn’t recognize us. Liverpool Football Club came to represent whatever ‘home’ meant to me and was a huge element in whatever sense of identity we had as a family.
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...football was considered too working-class.
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In the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool were so good that, [Manager Bill] Shankly joked, they’d have to bring a team from Mars to beat them. He also said, and I love the arrogance of this quotation,
‘My idea was to build Liverpool into a bastion of invincibility. Napoleon had that idea. He wanted to conquer the bloody world. I wanted Liverpool to be untouchable. My idea was to build Liverpool up and up until eventually everyone would have to submit and give in.’
Despite the allusion to Napoleon, Shankly was a lifelong socialist and it should never be forgotten that the true name of soccer, which goes back to the formal organization of the game in England in the 1860s, is association football. Football is an experience of association, an idea that might not be too whimsically linked to Marx’s talk of ‘an association of free human beings’ in Capital, Volume 1. The way Shankly understood socialism was very simple,
“The socialism I believe in is not really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day.”
In 2006, Liverpool Football Club was bought by two American sports capitalists: Tom Hicks and George Gillett. A few short years later, in the 2009-10 season, with hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, Liverpool enjoyed its worst season in 11 years.
The next season (2010-2011) was even worse, a disaster, and the club was taken into receivership and then eventually bought, like a hooker on a streetcorner, by New England Sports Ventures, owners of the Boston Red Sox. That said, Kenny Dalglish, my boyhood hero, to whom I wanted to dedicate my PhD Thesis (until I was strongly discouraged from doing so by senior faculty at my university), was appointed coach in late December 2010.
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Sometimes think I should have let my son support some other team, like Arsenal or Manchester United (God forbid!). But maybe there’s something of a parable in Liverpool’s demise: football is all about an experience of disappointment in the present that is linked to some doubtless illusory memory of greatness and heroic virtue. The odd thing is that it isn’t the disappointment that is so difficult to bear; it’s the endlessly renewed hope with which each new season begins. This has a classical allusion, of course, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, in an exchange between the chorus and the god Prometheus, chained to a rock in the Caucasus. In addition to fire and technology, the chorus asks what else Prometheus gave humans,
Prometheus: ‘Yes, I stopped mortals from foreseeing doom.’
Chorus: ‘What cure did you discover for that sickness?’
Prometheus: ‘I sowed in them blind hopes’.
