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What’s social about sport?
Sport is part of the wider social and political world of today
At the ESRC Festival of Social Science event held at the Sheffield
United Football Stadium last March, David Goldblatt, co-author of
D170 This Sporting Planet, spoke about his own experience as a
broadcaster for the BBC World Service
Thirty or forty years ago, making the case that sport is social would
have met with considerable resistance.. This was a world in which
the 1972 Olympic games continued despite a slaughter in its midst
and in which commercialization was so thin that Tom Finney ran a
plumbing business while playing football. Today the permanent and
intimate relationship between economic and political power and
sport stares us in the face, from the attack in Lahore on the Sri
Lankan cricket squad to the rebranding of the London 2012
Olympics as prudent counter to financial investment.
However, the ‘social’ remains more elusive. Sociologists have
agonised over this type of question for more than a century, and
when economic and political institutions have been factored out,
what exactly is the social? We can speak of the realm of the family,
of civil society, but sociology has always reached for something
bigger and more conceptually inclusive.
While innumerable areas of our collective lives can illuminate and
test these ideas on aspects of out sporting life, for me the most
profound is sporting crowds in general and football crowds in
particular. While much of what I say today applies football offers the
widest possible comparison between societies, for no game is as
globally diffused as football. The time scale, flow and dynamics of
football games offer an intensity of atmosphere that has proved more
catalytic than any other sport in generating both Dionysian carnival
and the entrenchment and reproduction of social cleavages and
conflicts. For the sociologist, witnessing either has its own peculiar
pleasures.
In 2003, I visited Belgrade to watch Red Star vs Partizan Belgrade.
Both clubs were founded in the immediate aftermath of the Second
World War. Partizan was the team of the Yugoslav federal army,
Red Star the team of the city’s police and communist party. Just 200
metres apart, the teams’ rivalry has been a shadow play, and
sometimes a real conflict, between Yugoslav federalists in the city
and Serbian nationalists, between military and political power.
During the Yugoslav Civil War, Red Star ultras in particular served
as looters in Bosnia and Croatia, while the fall of Milošević was
precipitated by ultras from both groups storming public buildings. In
2002, their internecine warfare peaked when a naval flare was fired
from the Partizan end into the Red Star ultras across the pitch – one
person was killed and many injured.
At the match I attended, Serbian riot police, styled by the creators of
Judge Dread, were out en masse. Partizan fans were corralled into
one end of the Red Star stadium and taunted the home fans with their
banner, reminding them of their triumph in the previous year’s
league, ‘Champions league: in your dreams’. Red Star didn’t seem
too bothered and were 3-0 up after thirty minutes. Partizan fans
responded by initially fighting amongst themselves, then fighting
with the nearest police and the stewards who retreated behind an
invisible line, demarcated by the furthest distance a plastic seat could
be hurled from the stands.
The stage was now set for Act 2. Partizan fans began to build pyres
of seats and garbage and lit them across the stand; simultaneously
the Red Star end was in full-throated song, waving banners and flags
from every Serb enclave in the former Yugoslavia as well as the
peripheral towns of Belgrade. Apart from me, perhaps the only
Englishman in the stadium, no one was batting an eyelid. The flames
were now spreading to the supporting poles of the stand.
Suddenly, from behind the Red Star goal, a set of doors opened in
the ground like a theatre trap door. This was the tunnel to the
dressing room, and out of it came two neat lines of Serbian riot
police, accompanied by large dogs. With the chorographical
precision of a Busby Berkeley movie, all 200 of them divided and
walked in file along the two touchlines. The game continued, the
Red Star fans sang and the fires burned.
The police now lined up on the same invisible line as the stewards
had earlier and faced the crowd. As the last ten minutes of the game
played out they steadily moved forward, dividing and trapping
groups of Partizan fans, pushing them out of the back of the stadium,
and dousing the worst of the fires. The game carried on, and I finally
turned to my host, Dejan, a large Serbian journalist, and asked him,
with a shrug of my shoulders, just what he made of it all. He replied,
instantly, with an old Serb proverb, ‘He who loses has the right to be
angry.’ There was no need for more explanation and he turned back
to join the celebrations on the final whistle.
The ESRC Festival of Social Science event was held at the Sheffield
United Football Stadium on 9 March 2009. Kath Woodward and
David Goldblatt presented their research for the Arts and Humanities
Research Council: Tuning In at BBC World Service project on Sport
Across Diasporas with material from D170 This Sporting Planet.