June 2010

World Cup month is the time where non-soccer fans are made to feel outcasts in many countries, but no such bigotry exists in Hong Kong with its take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Here, police busted a betting syndicate and seized HK$65 million in betting slips. It was hoped that the legalisation of soccer betting here would squeeze out the illegal bookmakers.
   In many countries not being a sports fan can get you treated like a pariah. I once spoke with an Australian woman at the time of the Olympics. When she saw that my face didn’t light up like a set of floodlights at her mentioning it, she lightly skipped over it saying ‘If that’s not your thing....’ and changed the subject. I found this respect of your disinterest of sport a rarity among westerners.
   Indifference to sport can have serious repercussions. I know someone who more or less lost his job in investment banking because he did not join the coteries and in-crowds of shoe-shiners who sycophantically hobnobbed and bandied golfing jargon with the golf club-wielding upper management. Another, who I’ll call John, told me of a grave mistake he made when a boss asked him and a group of others ‘Well, how do you fancy The Blues’ chances then?’ John didn’t know who ‘The Blues’ were and cared even less. It took him six months to live down the shame of that episode. He said he should have just bluffed his way through the situation by saying ‘It should be a good game.’ Fortunately bluffing is quite easy. Most of the time it’s only necessary to agree with the sports fan, therefore handing him an opportunity to pontificate and demonstrate his superior knowledge and judgment in the world of sport. Furthermore, to get on smoothly with everyone at his job John had to glance at the sports pages enough to fake his way though conversations about sport, and I would have to do this if I were to work at a place that contained a noteworthy number of sports fans. Nothing illustrates the invidiousness of this better than comparing it with a hypothetical situation of shunning someone because they were indifferent about beach volleyball, making jewellery or chess.
   As a volunteer worker on a kibbutz I once joined a group of men at a swimming pool who were obviously short of sports news because the first thing one of them said was ‘So how are (team’s name) doing then?’ My appearance as a white male obviously signified that interest in and knowledge of sport were inseparable aspects of my person. The question might have been well-intended gesture, meant to make me feel at home. I could have just mentioned that the city in question was having a good season. This might have got me out of the corner, or got me into a tight spot through being unable to respond to further interrogation. I found I could do nothing except lamely say I supposed that team was doing well. This had an immediate effect on the men. You could feel the distance and coldness immediately form in the warmth around the pool. They never spoke to me again. It had not been a ‘well-intended gesture.’ It had been a shibboleth tossed at me to see whether I was worthy of the most basic civility. Evidently, I wasn’t.
   So here we have a form of social intolerance where one needs to declare an allegiance to enable normal human interaction to take place. If this enthusiasm is lacking, the person is therefore unfit for any dealings with others. This is social ostracisation, or exclusion, a well-documented bullying tactic used in such eugenic situations as apartheid, the racial discrimination in America prior to the Civil Rights movement and Hitler’s anti-Semitic pogroms. Systematic social
ostracism is a potent way of applying psychological pressure and coercion on an individual. Soccer fans may not realize this, but when they direct contempt at a non-fan, or exercise a type of methodical discrimination at the workplace by making normal civil interaction impossible without declaring interest in sport, they are practising exactly this kind of discrimination. They are asserting that no one has the right not to have a passion for the sport.
   Note how different this is from everyday passion, zeal, enthusiasm. A person may have a keenness for something, like antique accordions or collecting train numbers, but would not dream of imposing his or her fervor onto another person. The only other field of human activity in which a fervour extends beyond a mere personal preference but something that you demand others to follow is religion of the fundamentalist and extremist stripe. Therefore sport assumes the qualities of a religion.
   Any definition of religion clearly shows parallels with soccer fandom. A religion may be ‘...a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs, practices which unite into one single moral community..’ That certainly fits the description of the idolatry fans with which fans can treat their team, and the antagonism directed to non-fans or even worse, supporter of an opposing team. The vocabulary of both religion and sport worship often intersect: ‘faith, devotion, worship, ritual, dedication, sacrifice, commitment, spirit, prayer, suffering, festival, and celebration.’
   The internecine bickering of rival soccer factions over their respective teams (note the entire absence of the slightest trace of sportsmanship in this squabbling) reminds one of a comment Benjamin Franklin made about religious debate: ‘Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: “It is so. It is not so. It is so. It is not so.”’
   The behaviour of the contentious fans is similar to that of opposing faiths. The fans show that they are not engaged in the amicable comparison of personal favourites, but rather the hostile challenges of conflicting belief systems. Fans wear colours, and carry icons and mascots. The face painting, hair tinting and costumes satisfy various religious aspirations, and generate strong identity with the team. They boo and jeer the other team. Devotion and hostility commingle in equal measure. The commitment and passion inspired by fans’ devotion is analogous to the transcendence that religious devotees get from their faith, thus enabling fans to escape from daily mundanity and workaday disappointments and find meaning in otherwise unsatisfying lives, just as religion provides comfort and succor to its followers.
   Karl Marx said ‘religion is the opium of the people.’ Religious attendance rates have declined sharply, mirroring an inverse meteoric rise of sport popularity. This could suggest that sport has come to replace religion. One particularly harsh critic said that sport had turned into ‘a passion, a mania, a drug far more potent than widespread than any mere chemical substance.'
   I may be risking accusations of great prejudice by asserting that violence often does not lag far behind bigotry and intolerance. We need to remind ourselves, nevertheless, that the origin of many acts of senseless violence begins with simple discrimination.
   The exclusion of non-soccer fans is a form of social intolerance.
Social intolerance does not necessarily lead to violence. Social intolerance like the excluding and despising of non-believers, adulterous women, homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally handicapped or Jews does not always lead to cruelty. Not always. The intense emotions accompanying sport, the intense disdain of non initiates, the strong undercurrent of machismo underpinning a lot of sport mean that hostility towards those not supporting the same team or even worse, not sharing a love of the game can easily lead to the threat or actual infliction of violence, particularly toward women. The presence of a woman who is not a soccer fan is indeed a threat to these soccer fans guilty of excessive exhibitions of masculinity and who betray their underlying sense of insecurity in their own manliness. They then
respond to this in the only way males suffering from this inadequacy can, in asserting their dominance over women with brutality. This led to the disgusting, sexist and misogynistic ‘Rules for Women during the World Cup’ that circulated on the net in 2010 and now occupies its own page on Facebook where certain species of brutish men make light of the humorous aspect of beating up their female partners.
   These reasons, along with the symbolic warfare, inflated nationalism and the grotesque commercialisation of the sport means I never have liked the game, do not, never will, ever. I’m just grateful for not working in an office each time the World Cup comes around.