Abramovich & Co
Written by Rabbi Howard Cooper Wednesday, 07 March 2007
Rabbi Cooper reviews and responds to:
FOOTBALLING LIVES:
AS SEEN BY CHAPLAINS IN THE BEAUTIFUL GAME
Edited by Jeffrey Heskins and Matt Baker
SCM-Canterbury Press Ltd,
Norwich, 2006, ISBN 1-85311-725-0,
pp.197, pb, £9.99
ON CUP FINAL DAY A FAN makes his way to his seat, right next to the halfway line. The seat next to him is unoccupied, so he leans across the space and asks his neighbour if someone will be sitting there. ‘No’, says the neighbour, ‘it’s empty’. ‘Incredible’, says the fan, ‘who in their right mind would have a seat like this for the Final and not use it?’. ‘Well actually’, his neighbour says, ‘the seat belongs to me. I always come here with my wife, but she passed away. This is the first Cup Final we’ve missed since we married in 1967’. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. That’s terrible. But couldn’t you find someone else, a friend or relative, or even a neighbour, to take the seat?’ The man shakes his head: ‘No. They’re all at the funeral.’
I don’t think our Jewish Burial Societies yet know that you can now buy two-tone themed coffins in the colours of one’s football club. They come complete with the club insignia etched fetchingly into the coffin lid. Apparently there are other kinds of themes available – motorbike motifs, Union Jacks, dolphins, angels, and more – but the striped football coffins outsell them all. Perhaps this is an ironic tribute to the Liverpool manager Bill Shankly’s oft-quoted remark from the 1960s: ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life or death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’ Forty years on, that off-the-cuff comment from the gruff Scot appears more and more like a Zen koan.
All the chaplains writing in Footballing Lives disagree, in one sense, with Shankly. Christians to a man – plus a solitary token, woman – they see their work with clubs large and small, from Manchester United to Rushden & Diamonds as being to help players, backroom staff, management and fans recognize that pastoral and spiritual support is available for a whole range of human experiences. These include serious illness, hospitalization, bereavements, addiction to alcohol or gambling, domestic and family troubles, violence, suicide of friends and they all transcend the dramas on the pitch. From this perspective, the dramas and vicissitudes of the human condition mock the significance we give to a mere sport.
Yet these devotees of the game also testify to ways in which, in the thirty years since the first chaplain was appointed to a club – there are now more than seventy within the ninety-two league clubs – the huge media-and-money-driven business of football has created new opportunities for attending to the emotional and spiritual needs of the ‘communities’ that congregate around clubs. By taking their faith and its values, and their commitment to the individual, outside the formal institution that pays them – chaplains are not employees of the clubs, but of a variety of church organizations – they can speak to, and work with, people where they are, not where the Church might wish them to be.
So football can be ‘more important than life and death’ in this sense – it can provide a space, a focus, where an individual can feel part of a caring, supportive community in which not only joyful events like births and marriages can be shared, but personal tragedies and problems are taken seriously, too. Within an increasingly fragmented and alienating UK social environment where ‘having a laugh’ or ‘a bit of fun’ is the nirvana of millions, the chaplain to a football club can help nurture an alternative vision of what an emotionally literate and spiritually fulfilling life can contain. With religious institutions in decline, and traditional religious faith on the wane, the local football club can become a substitute space for emotional solace and spiritual growth in the company of fellow travellers. They may only be travelling on the road to Wembley but are still soul companions on the journey through life.
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It is now a cliché that football is the new planetary religion, with a world-wide imaginative hold on countless millions of people. There are aspects of this so-called ‘beautiful game’ that meet the deepest needs we have as human beings – for a sense of belonging, community and inter-connectedness. For the experience of passion, grace, and the intensity of being within the midst of life. For an arena where triumph and disaster, victory and loss, celebration and mourning, can be experienced in symbolic form, and the inevitability of disappointment integrated into one’s life. For a forum where collective history is remembered and recounted, and a sense of purpose constructed. For a gathering place where song and ritual are enacted week by week, year by year. For a setting where one’s hopes and longings – for success, for joyful living, for happiness or potency – can be carried by iconic figures onto whom one can project one’s desires or vent one’s frustrations. And furthermore, a place where faith in the improbable and belief in the impossible – ‘We’re going to win the Cup, we’re going to win the Cup, and now you’re going to believe us…’ – are not only permissible, but are almost a requirement. The symptoms normally associated with mental illness or religion are here transferred onto the domain of football.
‘Steve McClaren’s first task – as the new England manager – is to transform England’s followers into believers…’ (A reporter for BBC 10 o’clock News, 16 August 2006)
In Newcastle, where Geordie passion for their team is a renowned force for social cohesion, you can order special football-shaped memorial stones to mark the grave of a loved one. Done up in the team colours of black-and-white, they can be suitably inscribed and contain an opening at the top in which to place one’s floral tribute. Local stone masons report that they are a best-seller.
But football is also corrupt and corrupting. On the field one sees a culture of cynical gamesmanship and cheating, outrageous diving, ill-tempered abuse of officialdom or opponents, spasmodic violence and occasional verbal racism: young men of often wondrous gifts of bodily dexterity and skill sometimes combine their craft with a wondrous oblivion, honesty and sportsmanship. Off the field there are spectators throughout Europe vicious of tongue and mean of spirit, sometimes xenophobic, racist, or homophobic. And then there is the corrupting influence of money – bribes and bungs and shady deals and, before the World Cup this year, the exposure in Italian football and beyond of a vast conspiracy to ensure that matches were fixed in favour of certain clubs, with referees and players on the payroll of the fixers. So much for ‘the beautiful game’. None of this is new, and some of it – particularly match-fixing and financial impropriety – goes back to the late nineteenth century. There have always been thugs on the pitch, and hooligans off it.
I draw a veil of silence over the Jewish dimension to this: the millions of pounds poured into the game by high-profile Jewish owners of Premiership clubs eager to buy success. Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich, with unanswered questions about the source of his wealth. The American Glazer family who own Manchester United. Portsmouth’s Israeli-born owner Alexi Gaydamek, whose father owns Beitar Jerusalem. Aston Villa’s new billionaire owner Randy Lerner. Then there is the plethora of Israeli behind-the-scenes operators and agents that are apparently so integral to European football culture now. We have enough troubles in the world without drawing attention to the extent of Jewish involvement in some of the more disquieting aspects of this great game of ours. Anti-Semites do not need yet another hook on which to impale us with their spite and envy.
Unfortunately there’s more. In 1969 a war broke out between Honduras and El Salvador, sparked by World Cup qualifying matches. And in 1994, less than a fortnight after Andrés Escobar deflected the ball into his own net in the opening stages of the World Cup Finals, meaning that Columbia lost the match 2-1 and were eliminated from the competition, he was murdered outside a bar in a Medellin suburb. The killer shouted ‘Goooooooooooool!’ – mimicking South American football commentators after a goal is scored – for each of the twelve bullets fired. And lest we think that this is an ugly, ‘foreign’ phenomenon that scars the face of the ‘beautiful game’ only in far-off lands, there is a disturbing echo of this shadow side of football in a recent police report that in the UK, incidents of domestic violence rise by about 30 per cent when England lose a match. On the other hand there is not just apocryphal evidence that there is a statistical birth spike around nine months after a winning England performance.
I do not know what our good-hearted and caring chaplains make of this dark side of their beloved game, for there is no mention in their relentlessly anecdotal book of any of this desperately sad reality.
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And yet there is something, on occasion, that helps us rise above these sordid, soul-corrupting aspects of the religion that is football. Just as those involved in conventional religions know that their religious systems and institutions and even leaders can be hypocritical, small-minded, or unjust, and that there are adherents who pervert their holy religion’s spiritual truths and lie and deceive and even murder in the name of their God. So they know, too, that in spite of this, there are dimensions of that faith that give meaning and purpose and security in an otherwise frightening world, and that personal devotion to religion can inspire and comfort, and offer hope beyond compare. Religions of all kinds can shelter hatred and distrust – but they can also be the safest of harbours for lives that might otherwise feel adrift.
And those who follow football know that beyond its malign aspects, there are those always unpredictable occurrences when moments of inspiration or creative commitment turn matches; when bodily grace or athleticism touches our spirits with a glimpse of the wondrous nature of what it is to be human; when a fingertip-save by a man flying through the air in defiance of gravity alters both the destiny of a match and the emotional well-being, for good and ill, of countless men and women around the world, watching in bars and clubs, at home or in hotels, on giant screens in city centres or huddled shoeless in shacks, all joined in the intensity of that moment in gratitude or despair. The football fan is fated to know such times: when victory is sweeter than love; and also when loss feels unbearable yet miraculously is borne and recovered from – and hope for the future is restored. What other global human activity can do this? And it is now truly a global phenomenon: there are more national football federations (207) in the football world’s governing body FIFA, than there are member states (191) of the United Nations. This is the largest faith community in the world.
It is, at its best – which is, admittedly, hardly ever – awe-inspiring. But something else too. In a world driven by conflicts involving culture, religion and race, the global game now offers us a new model of co-existence and the potential benefits of co-operation between people of hugely diverse backgrounds. In the most thoughtful chapter in the book, the chaplain of Bolton Wanderers reports on his multi-cultural and multi-faith work with the Christians, Jews, Muslims and Rastafarians amongst the players. This work includes drawing up a calendar of festivals and holy days so they can be celebrated appropriately, and creating space at the Club for spiritual reflectiveness. The holistic model at Bolton is part of an impressive wider philosophy there which pays as much attention to the human ‘spirit’ as to the players’ and other employees’ physical and material well-being. And it is clearly not Christocentric – a lesson some of the other chaplains seem not yet to have learned.
Every week those who watch football see racism being refuted. The leading UK and European clubs are often a veritable United Nations of talent – African, Asian, European and South American players working for each other and putting racists to shame. Let the sublime skills of Arsenal’s captain, Thierry Henry, or the aesthetic elegance of Real Madrid’s Zinédine Zidane, son of Algerian immigrants, stand in for all the rest. As the historian Timothy Garton Ash has written: ‘Every World Cup victory for France is a defeat for Jean-Marie le Pen’. (The Guardian, 22 June 2006).
‘All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.’ (Albert Camus, novelist, philosopher and goalkeeper)
‘I learned…that a ball never arrives from the direction you expected it. That helped me in later life…’ (ditto)
RABBI HOWARD COOPER is a psychotherapist and writer. His latest book ‘The Alphabet of Paradise: An A-Z of Spirituality for Everyday Life’ is still in print.
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