A glorious distraction no more, the beautiful game is turning ugly

On 27 June 2016, four days after the EU referendum, England were beaten 2-1 by Iceland in the knockout stages of the European football championships. It was a remarkable display of collective paralysis and the corrosive consequences of fear. Nearly two years later, the country does not appear dissimilar: less than the sum of its parts, bereft of a guiding collective philosophy, close to humiliation and going out of Europe.

Fortunate as we are to have such an accurate avatar of our lives, it makes me wonder whether football’s uncanny capacity to reflect our social identities and collective moods is also a curse. Many of us, myself included, still look to football as an entertainment, a glorious illusion, a soap opera of distraction. Even though we all know that the spectacle is deformed by the worlds of commerce and politics, we still want to disappear into the zone of play, pleasure and irrelevance: at the game, on the screen, lost in our noisy Twitter feeds. But this season, reality just keeps on intruding, and I don’t want to look.

Sometimes, it’s just the parallels that strike one. The domination by Manchester City (owner: Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour) of the Premier League displays the same brazen invulnerability of the global super-rich; we keep watching, as with poverty-porn shows, to see who among the poor and vulnerable will be dispatched. More seriously, the exposure of football’s appalling record on safeguarding and the widespread incidence of sexual abuse in the game, is just one gruesome version of the same tale told across innumerable institutions. As the legal cases resulting from the Hillsborough inquiry drag on, almost 29 years since the tragedy, one wonders how the victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster must rate their chances of truth and justice.

In the last couple of weeks, the real world has been more tangibly present. Consider just these three incidents. The foreign secretary, in response to the nerve agent attacks in Salisbury, has declared a dignitary boycott of the World Cup and others have followed his lead by calling for a sporting boycott. Martin Glenn, chief executive of the FA, in a wearily familiar cycle of unreflective discriminatory statements followed by clumsy apologies, equated the swastika with the Star of David before rushing off to clarify things. The owners of West Ham United, in the middle of the team’s thrashing by Burnley, were forced to leave their seats at the Olympic stadium when faced with a very angry fan protest on and off the pitch.

One could read the foreign secretary’s seeming enthusiasm for a World Cup boycott as a welcome recognition of the intertwining of sport, politics and human rights; a backhanded apology by the Conservatives to the sporting politics of the anti-apartheid movement, which they so venomously opposed. It is, in fact, just an expression of Britain’s international weakness, an indicator of how few diplomatic and political options we have. The sporting equivalent of our schoolboy secretary of defence telling the Russian state to “shut up!” and “go away!”

It also highlights our hypocrisy. We may not be sending the House of Windsor to Russia but we will, no doubt, continue to welcome the Russian money that has come into our football (at Chelsea, Bournemouth and Arsenal for example) and that we have laundered through the City.

Glenn has been here before. Last October, he received a four-hour grilling from the digital, culture, media and sport committee reviewing his and the FA’s pathetic handling of a discrimination case against Eni Aluko, a striker for the England women’s team. The interrogation revealed deep and institutionalised forms of sexism and racism in the FA. In government and in football, as in so many areas of our lives, we continue to allocate power from this narrow stratum of the mediocre and the over-promoted, and let them degenerate into bullies.

Meanwhile, the situation at West Ham is just one of dozens of conflicts between fans and owners. However, what gives it real edge and momentum is that the move from the club’s old East End stadium – sold off for high-end housing – to the Olympic stadium (a £200m subsidy to West Ham Plc) has been an emotional and experiential disaster: soulless, fragmented, deracinated and anodyne. In the absence of any kind of real voice, and with the option of exit blocked by emotional loyalties, a part of the fan base has turned to intimidation and riot.

There are other options, but in such a rigged system as English football, there are no guarantees of success. Dulwich Hamlet, in south London, is an exemplar of a modern, rejuvenated community club – open, super-diverse and a lot of fun. Yet it has been forced from its home by developers.

Last year, Millwall almost lost its stadium to an insidious and socially destructive development plan hatched by the local Labour council. Blackpool’s organised fans have had to conduct an arduous long-term boycott of the club to remove the Oyston family who took the club to the Premier League, only to asset-strip it back down to the bottom as they enriched themselves and insulted the supporters.

Today, as they do every Sunday, Fans Supporting Foodbanks and the Wirral Deen Muslim centre will be the only people feeding the homeless on the entire Wirral peninsula. Fans Supporting Foodbanks was founded as a joint venture by the Everton and Liverpool supporters trusts. They collect donations at every home game in the city. The idea has spread to more than a dozen other clubs. Their work reminds us of the game’s amazing capacity to mobilise empathy, solidarity and love. Yet the fact that they have to be responsible for a quarter of the city’s food bank supplies is shattering.

I can accept the strange melancholy of watching the best and most exhilarating Spurs team of my life, knowing that they can’t win the league. I have processed the fact that I have paid to watch, in the freezing cold, a reliably disappointing Bristol Rovers, now the plaything of Jordanian carpetbaggers. These require illusions I can sustain. However, the idea that I have tried to hold on to, that the best of English football and the society it so closely tracks, outweigh the worst of both, is unlikely to make it to the end of the season.

David Goldblatt is the author of The Game of Our Lives, which won the William Hill sports book of the year 2015