THIS
BOOK IS A monster: a 978-page, gloriously fat, thorough-going account
of the history of association football, the world game. Beginning
with the deep prehistory of football, David Goldblatt takes us on
his 320,000-word journey through the developmental stages of the
game as its tentacles spread relentlessly around the globe.
Football, in this account,
is a product of industrialisation, global commerce and professionalism.
It is the game of modernity. As regions and nations around the globe
enter periods of modernisation, football seems most often to be
the game that comes knocking, usually without competition from other
sports.
For Goldblatt, the game's
many imperial successes result from a potent brew. Its origins lie
in the "rationalising thrust of Victorian society" that
intensifies the desire of the English and Scottish middle classes
to create a codified form of football out of a rowdy and disruptive
pre-modern form of folk culture.
The game spreads outward
via patterns of "industrial globalisation" that take the
game to parts of the world that adopt football with ease and make
it their own. Once transported, football is able to generate such
immediate and near universal interest because of its simple adaptability
and its inclusive emphasis on grace and fluidity over exclusive
brawn and brutality.
The final key to the
game's success is that no other "game embraces both the chaos
and uncertainty and the spontaneity and reactivity of play like
football". Goldblatt adds grimly, "at no moment in our
history has humanity faced a world so threatened by the former and
been so in need of the latter". Football, the beautiful and
joyous game of risk, injustice and tragedy, is the game of and for
our epoch.
These many histories
of football are presented by Goldblatt with the aid of a sociological
mirror. The waning of English and Scottish influence in Latin American
football reflects the decline of the "de facto" British
economic empire. The history of Spanish football is utterly embedded
in Spanish politics; or is it the other way around? When France
wins the World Cup in 1998 it's also a victory for French multiculturalism;
its miserable run in the early 2000s parallels the rise of Jean-Marie
Le Pen and the racist right. It is never quite clear whether Goldblatt
sees political, social and economic change as harbinger or product
of events in the football world. He probably sees the relationships
as dialectical, given his subtle but not infrequent Marxist reference
points.
He shows that for all
the economic hype around the game it's still a relatively small
player in the global economy. Economic decisions in football are
never really earth-shattering. Where football leads and directs
history is at the levels of collective emotion and spirit, though
Goldblatt might baulk at these terms.
Goldblatt's narrative
is one that in hindsight seems so inevitable. He tracks the conquests
as one might observe falling dominoes. Rather tantalising, then,
is the suggestion that football's hegemony in Britain was determined
by its better handling of the pressures of encroaching professionalism
than rugby (which split into amateur and professional codes, thereby
losing its unity and influence). Had rugby taken the same path as
football the domino tracks of global sport today would make a very
different pattern. Of course, some of the dominoes failed to fall,
especially in the English-speaking world - though history has not
had its final word on this.
The reasons association
football fails to take hold fully in Ireland, the United States,
Australia and New Zealand revolve around such matters as: the formation
of colonial national identity as a rejection of the imperial centre
and its cultural practices; association football's unavailability
in codified form when the need or desire for regulated sporting
competition is emerging in the colonies; and sheer serendipity.
For example, the All
Blacks' 1905 successes against British rugby teams were vital in
bolstering that code's already rising fortunes in New Zealand. By
comparison, the New Zealand and Australian association football
teams had to wait until the mid-1920s before they had the honour
of being pummelled by a visiting English team. For all the much-vaunted
Aussie and Kiwi fighting spirit we nonetheless turn our backs on
our failures as readily as anyone else. It's a matter of record
that association football has struggled to gain a strong foothold
in Australia until very recently. Yet I write this review after
having recently been a part of a crowd of 50,000 at Telstra Dome
watching a domestic Australian match and having spent a year boggling
at the unprecedented feats of the Socceroos.
For anyone trying to
understand this phenomenon, The Ball is Round is an ideal place
to start, even though it is wafer thin on Australian football history.
As a global history it is ultimately a collection of stories about
locality. Through his grand temporal and geographic sweep, Goldblatt
builds story upon story, mapping patterns of growth, decay and regrowth
that pulse to the beat of the history of modernity, adding local
variations to the rhythm as he finds them. It's a framework that
invites and accommodates further local comparisons.
The key to Australia's
recent football history lies in Goldblatt's notion that the game
enters a new era as the globalised economy heats up. Post-industrial
football, with its global television deals, mega-rich players, corporate
branding, architecturally sculptured all-seater stadiums and cashed-up
"theatregoing" audiences, has fundamentally rewritten
the guidelines for success.
The old modern industrial
football was always a joint enterprise between the working-class
masses who supported the game and the businessmen who obtained power,
influence and cachet (but rarely capital) by owning and running
football clubs. The loyalties of the majority of the Australian
working class, having been captured by Australian rules or rugby
league, were largely lost to association football in this country.
However, post-industrial
football doesn't need the working-class masses, it needs customers.
It doesn't need grassroots, it needs cable connections (apologies
to Ken Wark) and the apparatuses of the post-industrial corporation.
One beauty of The Ball is Round is that it gives the reader models
for understanding the reasons association football can suddenly
seem to bloom in Australia without ever broaching the topic directly.
Goldblatt also enables
us to understand what football fans in Australia might be losing
even as our game slides into the mainstream because he feels deeply
the ebbs and flows of the global game.
But this is a book with
many attractions. In the end it is simply magnificent; an exhaustive
and exhausting, well-written and beautifully packaged story of the
most popular game in the world, written by a man whose knowledge
and research is encyclopedic if not maniacally obsessive. It is
an absolute must for fan and aficionado alike.
Reviewed by
Ian Syson
ISSN
1834-9277 (Print)