Ken Early: Football may be many things to many people, but it’s not escapism

I don’t know how many Simon Jordan videos I’ve watched on YouTube. I don’t have to seek them out – the algorithm brings them to me. Ten-minute clips of the former Crystal Palace owner being fluently opinionated on a range of issues on his Talksport show with Jim White. The clip titles are usually spiced with CAPITAL LETTERS... Simon Jordan GOES IN on Chris Wilder... Simon Jordan BLASTS Gary Neville... YOU’RE A HYPOCRITE! Simon Jordan and Graeme Souness CLASH, and so on. Maybe it’s Jordan’s confrontational manner, maybe it’s the way he projects the same bulletproof air of confidence and authority on every subject. All I know is, he keeps spewing out the content, and I keep eating it up.

Jordan went super-viral this week with a PASSIONATE complaint about the politicisation of football. On Twitter the video was titled “Stop pushing activism and agenda on football fans”. “What was sport created for? It was created for the ultimate escapism,” Jordan says. “Football should be in its finest form about people being able to forget things” and not have to think about “their electricity bill, and inflation, unable to pay their mortgage, or the climate crisis, or the racial division in the country”.

“What I suggest is football, and sport, was designed to be about escapism. We’re not missing these messages, they aren’t things that are secret, we’re hearing it every day, dawn ‘til dusk on every single media outlet. There is a place and a space for someone to just go to sport and just be what it was there for... Football is about sport. Ninety-nine per cent of the people who go to football stadiums are going there to come out of their grey lives, me included, plop themselves into for 90 minutes of escapism, and forget the fact that there’s an awful world out there that they’re gonna face the moment they walk out of the stadium.”

More than 3.5 million people had viewed the video on Twitter at time of writing, which suggests Jordan had hit on something, but then again, I know from years of watching YouTube that you can get a lot of views and still be talking a lot of nonsense.

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The first thing to say is that football has never been about escapism. The organised game began in the mid-19th century as a way of occupying the Saturday afternoons of the urban working class. Football clubs usually sprang from already-existing social institutions: church, school, factory, army. Manchester City, for example, was set up by the members of St Mark’s Church of England in West Gorton. Celtic was founded in St Mary’s Church in Glasgow by a Marist brother who wanted to raise money for his children’s charity. This was the heyday of muscular Christianity and the new sports clubs were never intended to be some escapist distraction. They were instruments of positive social engineering: teaching discipline and sportsmanship, warding off alcoholism, improving public health, stiffening the moral fibre. For the Rev Edward Thring, headmaster of Uppingham School, football was the ideal antidote to “solipsism”, by which he meant masturbation, which may be a more deserving candidate than football for the title of “the ultimate escapism”.

The social engineering agenda of organised sport was, if anything, even more explicit in this country. In Rocky Road to Dublin, the superb 1968 documentary looking at Ireland a half-century after its revolution, film-maker Peter Lennon pays visits to the Horse Show at the RDS, and to a sparsely-attended hurling match at Croke Park. The then assistant secretary of the GAA tells Lennon: “The GAA is of course much wider than a sports organisation. It was founded for the purpose of utilising sport to inject manhood and nationalism into Irish manhood at a period when the spirit of the Irish people was very low and very weak, after famine and centuries of persecution. All of the movements which have led to the establishment of the state which we have, have drawn their members – be they fighting members or active political members – from the ranks of the GAA, and as such it has been the reservoir of Irish manhood who have played their part in the evolution of the State.”

[ Kevin Kilbane: Football, protests and geo-politics flow downstream together in Doha ]

Many people mistakenly think of football as a form of entertainment, when actually what it offers is a sense of tribal belonging and identity, the experience of sharing a common cause and living through common victories and defeats. The world’s most popular mass cultural pursuit does not exist in a vacuum, and never has. It has always been shaped by and responsive to the “real world” inhabited by everyone who plays and watches it. The most intensely felt football rivalries are those with the strongest political undercurrents: Ireland-England, England-Germany, Celtic-Rangers, Madrid-Barcelona.

Football attracts more eyeballs than anything else, so it’s natural that political groups from the Royal British Legion to Black Lives Matter seek to use the game to project their message. Jordan on Talksport: “What people that have agendas want is to leverage sport for their agenda. And what it creates is, it creates division. It creates argument, it creates debate.”

[ Kathy Sheridan: The notion that football transcends politics is well and truly dead ]

Except it doesn’t create division – it reflects divisions that already exist. Jordan is not alone in feeling exhausted by a sense of increasing political polarisation, but that hasn’t been caused by football and it’s hard to see how football can somehow remain separate from it.

Venting at the ideological “indoctrination” football is supposedly inflicting on us, Jordan ignores the real problem of politicisation in the sport. It’s not about the encroachment of gesture politics, it’s not the poppies or the knee-taking, or the week every season when some players wear rainbow laces. The real problem is that outcomes on the field are being decided by political decisions that take place far above the game.

Abu Dhabi’s Manchester City are about to win their fifth title in six years despite being accused by the league of breaking financial rules; Saudi Arabia’s Newcastle have soared into the Champions League places. The Saudi takeover was urged through, against the objections of many Premier League clubs, by a British government eager to ensure the Saudis proceeded with other planned investments in the UK. Keep politics out of football? At this point, they’re practically the same thing.