By The Landlord
“Football is the ballet of the masses.” – Dmitri Shostakovich
“The game of football is like a canvas, and it’s up to the players to paint the most beautiful picture.” – Diego Maradona
“I don't believe skill was or ever will be, the result of coaches. It is a result of a love affair between the child and the ball.” – Roy Keane
“Football is the only thing that can bring together an entire country, regardless of political or religious differences.” – Zinedine Zidane
“Football is a fertility festival. Eleven sperm trying to get into the egg. I feel sorry for the goalkeeper.” – Björk
“I wouldn’t say I was the top manager in the business but I would say I was in the top one.” – Brian Clough
“When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think the sardines will be thrown into the sea.” – Eric Cantona
“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.” – Bill Shankly
“Football is the most important of the less important things in the world.” – Carlo Ancelotti
“In a far recess of summer
Monks are playing soccer.” – John Ashbery, The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers
It can express everything right and wrong about human beings. A togetherness, a collective hope, instinctive collaboration, tangible goals, skill, loyalty, a sense of family, belonging and identity, wonderful drama, sometimes culminating in huge, shared, ecstatic, celebratory joy. Imagine if all that energy went elsewhere too?
And yet it can sum up everything wrong or problematic about society – absurd knee-jerk stupidity, overblown disappointment, greed, hypocrisy, pointless gossip and time-wasting, cruel twists of fate, inequality, exploitation, fickleness, injustice, corruption, partisan anger, and of course, violence.
Football can suddenly express extraordinary, poetic athleticism and spatial agility with a breathless, instant three-dimensional arcing artistry. Or it can simply become an expensive human ape fight with another gang of howling idiots in the next clump of trees. In short, many things we are designed for, good and bad.
Not everyone is interested in the so-called beautiful game of course, but what goes in the human mind when the football is on? That’s certainly an interesting way to look at it. Why do our eyes draw towards it, as a dog to a ball, as a cat's towards a small torch shone on the ground? Is it a physiological reaction, a hunter-gatherer's instant sense of geometry, something deeply embedded within our psyche, natural or nurtured?
"The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score," writes the music- and football-loving novelist and lyricist Nick Hornby in his 1992 memoir Fever Pitch, and as an Arsenal fan, no doubt he's there again right now. Football is perhaps the most illogical form of brand loyalty in all modern life.
After all, it is one of the grandest illusions of amphitheatre – a collective form of madness, a ridiculous frenzy simply about 22 people chasing a tight bag of air. Is it, as some say, as Karl Marx described religion, an opiate of the masses? But why, in the human psyche, is it so extraordinarily popular, and what of that can be captured in song in cultures from around the world?
From fan chanting and famous player's pop songs and beyond, football is often associated with pretty appalling music, but this week, at the zenith of the season, with the Premier League and others over, the FA Cup and Champions League finals to come and then more international competition, hopefully it's possible to find some of the better stuff, to dig deeper into songs from many cultures around the world, the more interesting chants, and songs not just about the greats of the game, but also the eccentrics, or the unknown, about the parent-and-child relationship in the park, about street-level culture and about its place in society, history, vivid scenes of games around the world, the constantly growing women's game, and perhaps also metaphors that help define us.
We’re largely talking about the association football and its origins, and arguably we can also branch into other forms such as Gaelic and Australian rules, but rugby or American football? Let’s see how the game goes …
A Song dynasty painting by Su Hanchen (c. 1130–1160) of Chinese children playing cuju
Ball play: Ancient Greek keepie-uppie, Piraeus, 400–375 BC
Football has been played in different forms for centuries. In the Chinese Han and even Qin dynasties more than 2,000 years ago, cuju involved teams passing the ball to each other without it touching the floor, with the goal eventually kicked through a circular hole placed in the middle of the pitch. Other variants of the game include Japan’s kemari, a form of keepie-uppie, Ancient Greece giving rise to an Ancient Roman game called harpastum with a ball stuffed with animal feathers, and all kinds of variants across Australasia and Oceania such as Maori game Kī-o-rahi, and in the North and South Americas, from the Inuits on Greenland’s ice to Native American pasuckuakohowog back into the 17th century, to similar ballgame in Mesoamerican Mexico.
Mesoamerican player of the Tepantitla murals in Teotihuacan
Officially the modern game in terms of establishing rules has its roots in Europe, with the English village football, which, appropriate was a form of riot in which two gangs chased around an inflated pig’s bladder, but something similar was going on in all communities.
Reports around 1174-1183 century by William FitzStephen in about 1174–1183, describing an annual Shrove Tuesday festival in which London youths and their ball game would attract observers: “Older citizens, fathers, and wealthy citizens came on horseback to watch their juniors competing, and to relive their own youth vicariously: you can see their inner passions aroused as they watch the action and get caught up in the fun.”
Early football was sometimes banned in parts of Britain and other nations, such as France for causing riot and injury. 1308, with a documented reference to John McCrocan, a spectator at a "football game" at Newcastle, County Down being charged with accidentally stabbing a player named William Bernard.[41] Another reference to a football game comes in 1321 at Shouldham, Norfolk, England: "[d]uring the game at ball as he kicked the ball, a lay friend of his... ran against him and wounded himself”. Sounds familiar.
Mob rules?
Extra ball play: Vinnie Jones and Paul Gascoigne (Wimbledon v Newcastle, 1988)
The first reference to the word football, came in 1314 in which Nicholas de Farndone, Lord Mayor of the City of London issued a decree banning football. He actually wrote it French, this being the language used by the English upper classes at the time. Forasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large foot balls [rageries de grosses pelotes de pee) in the fields of the public from which many evils might arise which God forbid: we command and forbid on behalf of the king, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future.”
But football bounced back of course and developed right around the world. In 1486, Dame Juliana Berners's Book of St Albans describes "a certain rounde instrument to play with ...it is an instrument for the foote and then it is calde in Latyn 'pila pedalis', a fotebal”. Henry VIII got in the act by ordering a pair of football boots in 1526, and once he was into it, then everybody was.too.
And while the women’s game has only appeared to flourish in the last few years, it is nothing new. Women playing a form of football was first described in 1580 by the poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney in one of his poems:
"[a] tyme there is for all, my mother often sayes, when she, with skirts tuckt very hy, with girles at football playes.”
As with many things, women have been repressed by male control over the centuries. The recent documentary Copa 71 focuses on a forgotten women’s World Cup tournament which attracted crowds of 100,000 people, but scandalously FIFA and other governing bodies banned women from the game.
Football is a great big bulging bag of heroes and villains, banality and brilliance. What might your songs focus on? The greats such as Pele, Maradona, Best, Charlton, Cruyff, Di Stéfano, Okocha, Ronaldino, Ronaldo, Messi? Or perhaps some of of its eccentrics, or lesser globally known, local heroes.
Are there any footballers associated with music, who weren’t also known for crimes against the genre? Perhaps there there’s more potent ground on this front before the era of media training in big clubs. Take for example, Glaswegian Pat Nevin, who had a career across many clubs, including Clyde, Chelsea, Everton and Tranmwere Rovers, but alongside his skills, was an erudite reader into Brecht, French and Russian literature, and a big music fan, deeply into Joy Division, Jesus and Mary Chain, and Cocteau Twins, a band for which he insisted on being substituted at half-time for a game so he could get to one of their gigs.
We’ve already heard from Eric Cantona, but what about the scorpion himself, the extraordinary Colombian and scontroversial friend of Pablo Escobar, who could do things like this? The one and only René Higuita, during a game against England in 1994.
Footballers often think more with their feet than their heads, and perhaps when they are under a desk, this is also apparent when it comes to commentary, which could also be rich source of song material. “Well, Clive, it’s all about the two M’s—movement and positioning,” declares Ron Atkinson. “They’re the second-best team in the world, and there’s no higher praise than that,” adds Kevin Keegan. These are all former players who became managers, but here’s professional commentator Martin Tyler: “Oh, he had an eternity to play that ball, but he took too long about it.”
Some pundits have an ability to describe the indescribable, the indefinable, and sometimes the mathematically impossible. “We must have had 99 percent of the game. It was the other three percent that cost us the match,” says Ruud Gullit. Lawrie McMenemy tops this up with: “When you are 4-0 up you should never lose 7-1.”
“Well, I don’t believe in superstitions. I just do certain things because I’m scared in case something will happen if I don’t do them,” says Michael Owen.
Some descriptions are particularly vivid: “Sandro’s holding his face. You can tell from that it’s a knee injury,” says Dion Dublin. “He's got a great right foot, and if he can get his head around that he'll be a great player,” adds Ray Wilkins, and later, “Frank Lampard still has the same legs he had five years ago.” “Well,” adds Ron Atkinson again, with this classic: “He dribbles a lot, and the opposition don’t like it—you can see it all over their faces.”
So what is the game all about, and has it all gone wrong? Here’s Ron the Manager aka Paul Whitehouse pondering on such things and times gone by – jumpers for goalposts…
But most of all of course, we like to watch great goals, don’t we? Especially those described with parallel verbal athleticism. Here’s Alan Partridge in a World Cup preview. Shit! Did you see that? Liquid football!
So then, will score or pay the penalty? This week’s match referee looking for the perfect pitch seeking your football songs from around the world is the excellent Loud Atlas. Pass them goal-wards into the comment box below for final whistle at 11pm on Monday UK time for playlists published next week. It’s all kicking off …
In a far recess of summer …
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