A Load of Balls

TV news bulletins give all those who choose to watch a true insight into the world’s priorities.   A little strip at the bottom of the screen may run brief, incidental comments like “....asteroid the size of France heading for France....”, but the bulk of the screen is given over to stuff about football. Whatever else may be happening, the talking heads are invariably droning on about the “beautiful game”, keeping us up to date with the minutiae – who’s hiring who, how much everyone’s earning and, most importantly of all, whether a sprained little pinkie will be mended in time for the clash between Tierra del Fuego and Boko Haram. 

At the risk of being disowned by those who know me, and pelted with empty beer bottles by those who don’t, I must confess that my interest in football waned long, long ago; around the time George Best hung up his boots and took up full-time boozing instead.  The prospect of the This or That Cup enveloping the planet with slow motion re-runs always fills me with dread. 

Football has been raised from a game to the status of quasi world religion thanks, in large part, to slick advertising and decades of media hype.  A video clip from a match is seldom shown these days without a musical accompaniment from the London Philharmonic at its energetic best, the same sort of tunes that you hear in cathedrals.  Nobody described the game’s mystic status better than Bill Shankley, the legendary Liverpool FC manager: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more important than that.” He wasn’t joking.

And then there’s the money. Super stadiums represent a sizeable chunk of any local economy, just like medieval cathedrals did in their heyday – and they are also empty for most of the week.  Both types of edifices easily equate to the cost, if not the value, of many hundreds, nay thousands of modest dwellings; you could probably even throw in a couple of hospitals and half a dozen primary schools and still have change.  Unlike cathedrals, and housing apparently, super stadiums can be built in the blink of an eye, each one a breathtaking architectural wonder.   Spectators can feel proud, even if a match ticket cost them a fortnight’s groceries. At night, over a meal of boiled cabbage, they can argue about whether a particular player is worth more than the measly US$4 million a week his club are paying him.

The high priests of FIFA would naturally scream that I’m missing the point, but I’m sure they’d be hard pressed to tell me what that point is.  Despite the hype, it doesn’t seem to be about unifying humanity in perfect peace and harmony.  A long list of governments have been toppled, following riots in the streets, because their country’s national team lost a match.  In Europe local authorities fire up the engines of their main battle tanks when they learn that someone else’s football supporters are coming to visit. 

What is it about men and balls?  Football may be the most dominant example, but most other male recreational pursuits also involve playing with a ball of some description.  Consider golf, assuming you’ve got plenty of money and four or five hours to spare.  What’s that all about?  Golf courses now cover many of the scenic bits of the earth’s surface, having spread out from Scotland like a weird planetary rash.  I suspect archaeologists of the distant future (if there is a distant future) will puzzle long and hard over the immense number of these strange undulating earthworks.  If one of them comes up with the theory that the structures were to enable people to hit little white balls from one end to the other, he will probably be laughed at by his peers.  Even unearthing Tiger Wood’s gold encrusted mummy or the rusty chassis of a golf cart would do little to lessen the mystery.

Ball games are nothing new of course.  Archaeologists of the present day are still trying to figure out what exactly the Aztecs were up to on their ball courts.  With their terrifying obsession with the end of the world, they were a very intense bunch, a bit like Glasgow Rangers supporters. Their ball game was a religion, a weird mix of tennis, basketball, rugby and lacrosse, with maybe a bit of ping-pong thrown in.  If a player wanted to keep his head, literally, it was vital to be on the winning team. That’s exactly the kind of motivation that would have suited old Bill Shankley. He would have been right at home as manager of Aztec Decapitators.

At the end of the day though, who am I to sneer. It’s probably no coincidence that the earth and all the other planets are spherical.  It’s probably no random thing that they pointlessly circle around a gigantic ball of burning gas.  Likewise, there is simply no way to escape football commentators on TV, nor the fact that the universe, for all its size and grandeur, is just a load of balls.