The Empire of Football

Taking the Football World Cup as an object of reflection is not without difficulty. It is, at least, to be faced with a double obstacle.

Passionate first: because the World Cup, from fanatical enthusiasm to disgust pronounced in the face of a spectacle from which it is difficult to escape, rarely leaves indifferent. Surinvesti, arousing the most intense collective emotions, football escapes any measure.

Then rational: the World Cup seems to resist the frozen categories that are applied to it in order to account for it. To see, thus, only a caricature of the society of the spectacle, is it not risking to be mistaken about the nature of the sport itself, which, even skillfully staged, is never written d ‘advance and thwart any attempted scenario ? Seeing as only a gigantic market, where economic investments promise unequaled financial benefits, in the same way to reduce the scope of a game whose issues are not enough to disturb what left it lightness ? But, overthrowing the perspective, seeing only a universal symbolic competition, is it not falling into a dreamy irrenism which would refuse to note that the world remains divided between nations ? To see only the spectacle, grandiose, of a global democratic equality, where all the nations, subject to the same rule, would be distinguished only by effort and merit, is it not falling into the Illusion, perhaps skillfully maintained, that the deep division which separates the North and the South does not exist-that democratic fiction is democracy, that the representation of reality is reality ?

An overly radical perspective, to which the excess of the most publicized spectacle is excessive, necessarily leaves in dissatisfaction. It is the Empire of football that we perhaps refrain from understanding: the fascination he exerts, the universality he builds, the tensions that cross him. It is to try to understand what organizes this empire that this file is devoted. He offers six axes of reflection:

• Football is a show of a particular genre, which has imposed itself as such in recent history. Purely local event originally, it has gradually deterritorialized, thus reinventing the memberships of supporters beyond simple geographic proximity, reconstructing affiliations all the more intense as they are chosen (see the test by Marion Fontaine).

• Football is a object whose complexity has too often been reduced by the studies which have sought to understand its springs, but whose analysis in the social sciences seems today to experience an undeniable renewal (see the article by Igor Martinache).

• Football is a occupation to which we are formed from an early age in specialized institutions, which organize selection and often create intense disappointments (see Julien Bertrand’s test).

• Football is a passion whose radicality frightens but whose social reality supposes an extensive analysis of the mechanisms which produce it and the ends which organize it (see the test of Nicolas Hourcade Available soon).

• Football is a modern sportentirely turned to the search for surpassing oneself. This is a structural feature of our contemporary societies, and we can think that football is both the consequence and the most extreme image (see interview with Isabelle Queval).

• Football is a globalized competitionboth because it organizes the symbolic rivalry of the nations and because it is a reflection of the imperial history of the northern states (see the reviews of the books of Laurent Dubois, SOCCER EMPIRE by Pap Ndiaye and Pierre Singaravoulou and Julien Sorez, The Sports Empire. A history of cultural globalization by Patrick Clastres, Available soon).