What We Think About When We Think About Soccer by Simon Critchley

Author:Simon Critchley
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

The second feature is the experience of talking with supporters of other teams, perhaps teams that we publicly despise because they are the enemy, like Manchester United. Surprising as it may seem to me, even Manchester United fans have their reasons for supporting them. Even they have their preciously held traditions, histories and folklore. After all, the last time Liverpool won the English league was in 1990 and United have won it no less than thirteen times since that date. Lucky for some. The pain that I feel in response to that fact is tempered with respect, and there are good reasons why it happened. It is not chance. The point is that we can listen to the fan of an enemy team, hear their arguments, listen to their reasons and even change our mind. In my humble opinion, football talk can even be a paradigm for moral behaviour and discussion. If only other areas of life were at once so reasonable and yet so subtended by deep, abiding passion and belief.

Of course, we might wonder why this is the case. Why is it that conversations about football should simultaneously possess the usually mutually exclusive properties of rationality and faith? Why is it that, in relation to football, I can exhibit both a powerful, tribal, visceral loyalty to my team at the same time as showing respect for the enemy, and where the force of the better argument can permit both parties to change their minds? Is it the admission of the basic presupposition of playfulness which permits the seriousness of debate? Is it easier for us to discuss seriously when we know that we are only talking about a game?

I must admit that I don’t know the answers to these questions. But it is striking when discussions about football and maybe about sports in general, are compared to discussions in philosophy and politics. In politics, clinging to our deeply held prejudices in the face of counter-arguments is perhaps not so surprising. But I remember Bernard Williams saying that, during his long and distinguished academic career, he had only witnessed a philosopher changing their mind on one occasion, which was during a British government inquiry into the nature and effects of child abuse, when the appalling evidence of paedophile pornography had led a moral philosopher to revise their opinion about the need for new parliamentary legislation. I have spent my entire academic career listening to people give papers, thousands of them. On no occasion that I can recall did the response to a speaker take the following form: ‘Dr Smith, thank you for your completely convincing talk. You were right. I was wrong’. It never happens. Yet, in relation to the unserious stupidity of football, it happens a lot. Peculiar, no?

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