Translated from GegenStandpunkt 2-2014

“Your hate is our pride!” – Racism and discrimination in soccer

On the moral value and benefit to the state of a significant fan culture

Racism and discrimination are at home in soccer. Yelling “fag bitch” in public, throwing bananas at people with dark skin, militancy against supporters of other clubs – all this is commonplace in modern soccer stadiums. However, Western civil societies also owe it to themselves to take clear action against this nowadays: the Union of European Football Associations puts anti-racism ads on primetime television (“No to racism – Respect”); the clubs are officially held accountable in that they fund fan representatives and become educationally involved with countless fan projects (“Our stadium – no place for racism!”); and if verbal or physical assaults are recorded, penalties are charged, including for the soccer clubs themselves, which are held liable by the soccer associations for the misdeeds of their supporters.

Year in and year out, official anti-racism has its work cut out for it here. The idea that the ugly incidents, which never want to die down, could have anything to do with the whole sphere wpuld be absurd to all those who are responsible in this area. Whenever something racist happens, everyone agrees that it had nothing to do with the actually good thing of soccer. Once it was so-called “riots,” i.e. excesses by a few “crazy hooligans” or right-wing extremist band-wagoners who brought disrepute to actually harmless fan bases. Apparently, for all this tireless educational work on behalf of tolerance and against racism, there is something of value here in the national sport of soccer and the associated fan culture that democratic societies want to rescue. The question remains why this “culture,” of all things, is so prone to descending into racism. Perhaps it has something to do with the thing itself, which people always want to defend from its exaggerations...

1. The football fan and his club culture

Like other countries, Germany is a “soccer nation,” and that doesn’t just mean that there are thousands of registered clubs all over the country where soccer is played. “King soccer” has also won the public’s favor and is the number one spectator sport, and that means a lot for a sport in today’s countries: with the active participation of the public, a sports game becomes the hypertrophic sphere of a national sport. Everything about it is of interest, right down to a player’s broken syndesmosis; it is reported on day and night in a constant media downpour, and is the subject of a booming business across Europe and the world. The masses obviously want it that way; without their enthusiastic participation at home in front of the screens or on site in the stadiums, it wouldn’t mean anything. In this way, however, the sports subjects of the whole thing carry out a nice circle of success: The more successfully a club and its first team dribble their way up the hierarchical competition of around a dozen leagues, the more attractive the club becomes for soccer fans, who are mobilized materially and ideally for further sports success. At the top of this ludicrous enterprise are clubs whose membership numbers are on a par with those of medium-sized cities, and their fans in the stadium are and remain in demand as the basis and backdrop for sports and commercial success, on which the entire billion-euro business of TV rights and advertising is built.

A thrill in the competition ...

These active soccer fans, if you want to put it that paradoxically, who go to the stadium and ‘have’ their team, have decided on a kind of attachment for which the laid-back amusement – if you have nothing else better to do – of watching a ball and 22 players for 90 minutes and enjoying the more or less impressive kicking is decidedly not enough. From the stands or, if need be, via a live stream on their cell phone, they want their team to win at all costs.

This enthusiasm for an athletic contest over balls and goals is a special kind of attachment. It’s certainly not just about crossing your fingers for someone you know on the field. Self-respecting soccer fans seek their fun in active partisanship for a team. They get their fun from cheering and rooting for victory. Taking part as spectators in a battle which requires strength, skill, tactical discipline and, above all, a relentless will, where especially this last premier combat virtue is not only required but generally believed to be more crucial than anything else: this is what soccer fans want to experience in their free time and really unrestrainedly act out as not at all silent participants. As if their everyday lives were lacking in, of all things, a “life struggle”! But that’s obviously just it: the ability to assert oneself, this abstract ability of all abilities, is no less necessary in their everyday lives than on the soccer field. However, the victories that the average person is able to achieve with it are generally not only small, but rare and boring and never of a kind where effort and reward are in a recognizably rewarding relationship. Whether in the workplace or at the unemployment office: the expectation that modern humanity is given to take on its journey through life, in which hard work pays off, is regularly discredited by the fact that in reality decisions about performance requirements, wages earned, and life careers in general are made by different authorities than the well-intentioned common people and in line with interests different than their own. Competitive efforts are constantly required; the average person also demands them of themselves; but the results never really come close to the promise of success which one believes in and should never stop believing in. But what does not exist can at least be faked – that is why people have their free time and the freedom to let the calculation between effort and return, which notoriously remains open in bourgeois life, at least work out in their active imagination and at least in principle, and to collect the just reward for proven willpower, which actually remains a mere ideal. Nowadays, you don’t even have to devise anything great yourself: there are more than enough offers for the goofy pleasure of collecting competitive successes in the sphere of the trivial. The soccer fan finds himself served by a real team battle that he does not fight himself, but in which he takes part as if it were about him: about his willpower, his stamina and, as a reward, his victory. Beyond the unsatisfactory hardships of everyday life beckons the chance for a commitment that pays off in a clear victory; and to do this in a sphere beyond the rules of decency that normalize real bourgeois life, namely that decent people are obliged to put up with competitive defeats even if they consider them to be terribly unfair, and also to swallow the bitterness with which bourgeois personalities tend to acknowledge their disappointments, only to then carry on in the spirit of the same delusions. The fight for a just success is delegated to the fanaticism of taking sides with a soccer team in order to be led uninhibitedly in the imagination along the path of lively shared excitement through defeats and victories: This is how competition functions here as a leisure activity.

… in a true community

Soccer fans want to really enjoy their great passion for the true fighting spirit with like-minded people, as members of a close-knit community that sticks together through thick and thin. They don’t have to look far to find the right club. They usually find it in the club that is close to home and meets another need of ordinary mortals. At ‘Schalke’ arena, Hafenstraße or Millerntor, people with a local patriotic outlook find the vivid material where their pleasure in living out a sports struggle meets their love of their homeland. They practice this noble bourgeois virtue: they see their hometown, including the people who live there, as a genuine community of all the locals, so that the city district, town or region where they have ended up is held in moral high regard as my Gelsenkirchen, Essen or St. Pauli. Local patriots derive an important personal identity from their attachment to their familiar living and working environment.

The capitalist metropolises where the big clubs are domiciled speak a somewhat different language in their free market-based social life than that of a harmonious and idyllic joint effort. Here citizens are confronted with the conflicts of a state-organized class society that determines their material lives, which they do not want to deal with and certainly do not want to do away with. They want to come to terms with them, to succeed in them, and to do so in accordance with the legal system as it applies “to us.” In this way, people who are attached to their homeland declare the harsh aspects of the reality of their lives to be a “that’s for sure,” which is countered by a “but” of at least equal weight, namely in the form of the idea that this is their very own order which deserves their fundamentally positive attitude despite all their dreary experiences with it. This abstraction, with which citizens become at home in a competitive society, looks for clues and opportunities; people with a penchant for soccer may find what they are looking for in their club and take up its ready-made offer to breathe life into what a club values as a “homefield advantage” – a partisan backdrop of local patriots. The local derbies, notorious for their riots, are eloquent testimony to this bourgeois way of life in which partisanship for one’s own club often turns into grudges, resentment, and competitive hostility toward others right at the city’s border.

… with virtues, rights and duties

For the soccer fan, that competitive spirit colored and mobilized with local patriotism, a double dream comes true with thousands of other like-minded people in the stadium: firstly, they have the day off and have left the hardships of their everyday lives behind them, and secondly, their favorite game of soccer can now begin the way they want it to: now they are sought after as team activists who go all out for the victory of their team and practice militant partisanship. In this way, the fans enjoy the virtue that their club might even bear in its name and which they otherwise always find lacking in their fellow citizens: the harmony of its members for a common goal, which there is really no dissent about here. Obviously, this is a great pleasure for people who always have to assert their right to this virtue in daily life or experience it as a claim by others against them, as a demand for self-restraint and decent behavior and self-effacement at work or in the family. Here, at the game, the unanimity of the collective triumphs over any differences, the whole community stands behind the team as one man, and community spirit lives as a combative virtue.

Although its sole content and purpose is a pathetic partisan fanaticism for “us,” this grows into perhaps the most important part of the true club fan’s life and personality, so that in the end, his team’s schedule of games determines his happiness and unhappiness more than his shift schedule at work. Fans set up shrines to “their” players, dress up in scarves and jerseys, perhaps go to bed in their club’s colors and thus make clear that they, as individuals, want to completely disappear into, that is, merge with their allegiance to the club, which is now entirely theirs. What is enforced in the military with uniforms and taps and is a ritual of the faithful in religion is done by modern fans as a leisure activity with their not insignificant expenditures of time and resources: They stage themselves as members of a collective that they allow to dictate their behavior and appearance, their rhythm of life and their attitude to such an extent that they see themselves as a kind of separate breed of people who are fundamentally different from everyone else: “I’m no man and I’m no animal, I’m a fan of FC Schalke 04 ...”

The other side of this enjoyable association with a kind of freely chosen common destiny is the entitled attitude with which club fans demand unconditional respect and recognition for their Borussia or Eintracht. With the certainty that they have an irresistible community behind them in their club, they display a rather frightening self-confidence that the next team and its fans are then a massive obstacle to. The offensive behavior of fans before, during, and after the game is clearly based on their presumed right to victory, which is given to them by their shared “we”: the fans seriously claim a clear right to success in the athletic showdown which is somewhat complicated by the presence of the other team. Far more is at stake here than a few goals scored or missed. Victories become a triumph over the others, are celebrated as proof of the superiority of one’s own team, and the players are revered as heroes to whom the fans, in their winning mood, generously grant their million-dollar salaries.

Defeats are therefore deeply felt embarrassments that neither oneself nor the team can allow to stand, which is why the question of violence in soccer is constantly on the table, the law is taken into one’s own hands, and the competition on the field is continued with violent means both inside and outside the stadium. It is precisely in the difficult times of defeat and relegation (or the danger of it) that a great virtue of the true fan proves itself: with his loyalty to the club, he believes himself to be indispensable to its unshakeable cohesion and thus sports success. He acts like an ideal moral guardian and collectively searches for those to blame for the failure: the trading of team mercenaries who are once again “only” interested in their career and market value borders on treason; players have a moral obligation to the fans in the stands and are suspected of not having given their all and therefore not having deserved the money they earn; the call for better management of the club becomes louder.

Not a single fan community makes itself look ridiculous in practicing this virtue. In addition to being rewarded with victory – if it is won – the fans get the public recognition they are looking for: in the stadium at the end of the game, they receive applause from the players, who are trained to act like an elite from above who demonstratively confirms the idealistic union of the rank and file with their team. The club itself, nowadays often a modern public limited corporation, provides the material that is important to its supporters: it has the latest devotional items produced for the cult of personality surrounding the players and does a booming business selling them to the fans. In this way, the club not only takes possession of its members’ money as the permanent material basis of its success, but also creates what is sometimes deplored by sports idealists as the “commercialization of sports.” Yet this billion-euro sphere, which the big, powerful clubs create in cooperation with associations, sponsors and equipment suppliers, is precisely the market-based offer that serves the moral needs of the fans and allows it to mature into the important, socially recognized “fan culture of soccer.” The cult surrounding the club, the players and the members, fed and inflated according to all the rules of big business, is then, in the opinion of somewhat more educated observers, rather proletarian in its crudeness. However, nobody thinks about the political-economic status of a class that has to work for wages. The masses who enthusiastically participate in the cult don’t either – they have found their proletarian identity in the abstraction from their shared material situation: in participating in an ideal triumph in which they are always much closer to complete strangers in the stands, club managers hungry for success and millionaire players than, for example, their co-workers, especially if they belong to the wrong soccer club.

... just like a small nation within the greater one: self-righteous and racist

Soccer fans are really good: when they have free time and an interest beyond their everyday duties, they can’t think of anything better to do than to practice a ‘commonality’ in which the pace is once again set by relevant modal verbs: What may I do, what must I and especially all its other members do to ensure that ‘our’ community and its unquestionable right to success wins out? They feign voluntary subordination to a collective that provides a whole catalog of rituals, duties and obligations for the members to each other, which they enthusiastically and demonstratively commit themselves to as their destiny. In this way, they stylize their allegiance to a team into a kind of chosen community, the one true collective that they want to and must serve in battle. It is only here in the fight against others that their own community really becomes tangible, and that is what makes the game of scoring goals so appealing to fans: They see it as a self-assertion of their own community of destiny whose honor they make their own personal concern. A person’s jubilation or dejection is derived entirely from how their own community fares in competition with others.

With this beautiful pastime of a free people, the attitude that notoriously gives rise to unsightly practices that are condemned as racism by officialdom is completely fixed. Fans are firmly convinced that they belong to an honorable collective that unites the moral convictions of all its members and therefore excludes all others as a matter of principle. Fighting the officially condemned ugliness in soccer with appeals for more tolerance, with colorful TV images in which a person’s appearance and skin color changes when they swap shirts, misses the point. Modern fans in the globalized soccer business have often moved on from skin color as a sign of the sharp demarcation between “us” and the others. If a dark-skinned Austrian from the west coast of Africa joins your team, that’s fine too – if he scores or prevents goals, he really is one of “us.” As a “racial” characteristic, the club’s flag, which symbolizes membership in the right community, is enough today...

2. The higher blessing of fan culture: soccer as a living nationalism

No soccer fan needs to know that this is how a “we” takes shape which, like a nation, bears all the insignia of a moral community, or that the soccer fan relates to his club like a citizen relates to his fatherland for patriotic reasons. In their minds, the official representatives of state power are either stupid bureaucrats who ruin the whole good atmosphere in the stadium with their restrictive security plans or “pigs” who get in the way of them living out their loyalty to the club and challenge them to a battle that is just as important as that with the opposing fans.

The real or imagined public educators who strive to make fans more civilized and fight their racism already know what the state and society gain from the weekly circus. When they think of the millions of fans and point to the free-market poverty of the living conditions of many of them in Gelsenkirchen or Liverpool, this is of course not the start of a criticism of these conditions, but the discovery of a useful function in the fan mentality: “at least” people have an ‘identity’ in their club if they have nothing else, and this is positive because the people in question can supposedly endure their poverty better if they have found meaning in life in their attachment to idols and clubs, one which they certainly can’t live off but which serves the social peace in “our” societies. When talking about “bread and circuses,” democrats certainly have a critical consciousness of the connection between enthusiasm for such spectacles, mass social poverty and bourgeois docility – in other communities, to be sure. In this respect, “circuses” tend to speak against the political masters: far earlier in antiquity and today with rulers who tend to be undemocratic and who need to assure themselves of the loyalty of their masses in this somewhat shabby way...

The state power in its own way ensures that the people’s number one entertainment goes well in this sense: stadiums are converted into high-security wings in accordance with state guidelines, and once a week carefully planned police marches take place in dozens of cities to ensure that public life escapes relatively unscathed when city centers are in the grip of soccer fans. What in other cases – political demonstrations, etc. – is viewed by the police as intolerable disturbances of public order, possibly as an attack on their monopoly on the use of force, and prohibited and prevented accordingly, is expressly approved by the state as part of its internal life, and it contributes to the success of the event with considerable police and civilian resources.

And that’s not all. With 34 game days, numerous cup rounds, the Champions League and Europa League, the concern with soccer is still far from over. The countries themselves allow themselves the strange joke of competing against each other, alongside their politico-economic affairs, as soccer teams, where there is neither power nor money to be won. In contrast to the private clubs whose raison d'être is athletic competition and the business that goes with it, soccer is actually a minor matter for the political rulers – but this does not mean that the uninhibited fun of games and sports is returning; on the contrary. The states take the relevant tournaments very seriously and sometimes fork out billions for the special honor of hosting them. Countries present themselves as sports nations because they want to make an impression with the performance of their people or their sports elite. The states’ boasting about the honor of success at the European Championship or World Cup is primarily aimed at their own people and secondly at the many foreign peoples of the world. The ideological offer to appreciate one’s own nation from this higher perspective of its sports prowess has unfortunately been a big hit with all soccer nations. Among themselves, they cultivate the “nationally unifying aspect” of their sport by judging each other with envy or condescension, depending on their nation’s international ranking. Internally, at times of major international championships, the people’s interest in the fate of their own team takes on a form that looks like the order of main and secondary matters in a modern capitalist state has been reversed: the public and the people it serves jealously watch day and night to ensure that everything is done correctly to ensure that “we” win, that “we” do not have the victory stolen from us that “we” actually deserve. The nation’s real or supposed soccer experts already know exactly which place at the international table “we” deserve. The team and its coaching staff are measured by this standard, and a respectable style of play is not enough for a German audience; after 24 years without a World Cup title, winning the 2014 tournament is simply overdue.

This mendacious theater of states staging themselves as soccer nations and its strong echo from the public sphere and passionate soccer peoples has, in its current scope and significance, become outstanding material for the idealization of the state order which meets a fundamentally wrong civic need. Someone who roots for his team of eleven selected players in an international match is not getting excited about the Merkel government or the political institutions, i.e. the executive state power that on the other 364 days of the year imposes on him the conditions that cause hardships for the citizen’s entire material life all year round. That is not something to be enjoyed or frenetically cheered on; people grumble about it all year round and have their more or less negative opinions, albeit in the peculiar way that nothing ever comes of it. But all the bad experiences, all the grumbling, cannot dampen their enthusiasm for the Germany they are currently cheering for in the stadium or in front of the television, because they separate their daily dissatisfaction with the state for which they pay taxes, in which they experience unemployment or poverty in old age, from the fundamentally positive reference of their will to the same community. This is then called: my nation – the abbreviation for how the citizens of a state ignore all their difficulties getting by in life and adamantly cling to the fact that they, the people, and their state are an unbreakable unity: a union of a very fundamental kind, in need of no further justification, not to be shaken by any troubles with a social welfare office or employer.

The first address for the international matches are the soccer fans whose leisure activities are given a higher blessing here: Now they are in demand as national experts, the European Championship and the World Cup – this is their national issue, in which they can contribute the expertise they have acquired from club activities. Concern, criticism, jubilation and sadness, the whole spectrum of their unreserved devotion is now aimed at the real political power, or rather: at what’s left of it in the stadium in the fans’ imagination: “we” against the others in the fight for victory, and this “we” is the most important collective, the valid link between all of “us”: a nation of their own.

Conversely, the performances of the national team, at least when international titles are at stake, are also an offer to the whole nation. One that you don’t need to accept, even as a German, that is, as a member of a demanding soccer nation. The abstraction from the real purposes and harsh conflicts in national life, with which the citizens gain an intimate relationship to their nation as an honorable moral collective, also goes on with art, language and culture of German origin or whatever. But one thing must be said about the national sport of soccer and the fan culture surrounding it. It is enormously successful. Countless ordinary citizens, even those who otherwise cultivate their loyalty to the nation with an educated attitude, become soccer fans as Germans and experience heightened emotions when watching the national team play. And that’s what it looks like: The resourceful national business world knows what kind of people it is dealing with and stocks exactly the right goods so that everyone can live out their own personal allegiance to their nation as a uniform personality fad: Make-up, flags on the balcony, or car rear-view mirrors in black, red and gold. The state administration grants exceptions to the otherwise prescribed evening rest as well as public spaces where all the people can embrace each other, so to speak, for the athletic re-foundation of the whole nation through public viewing.

In view of how the people and the public go crazy for their country’s claim to success, the real national leaders exercise comparatively more dignified restraint. In their sober calculation of state purposes, they still know where the weal and woe of their state is really decided; and politicians such as the German Chancellor are unlikely to utter phrases about the honor of the nation at a soccer tournament. However, when it suits the current political situation, they make it very clear what sports in general and soccer in particular are good for when states have made it their cause: They incorporate it into their real political affairs as an object of their diplomacy: whether Germany and its partners still want to grant the Russian state the honor of hosting the 2018 World Cup may seriously be in doubt given the current global political dispute over Ukraine...

On the other hand, the democratic rulers – the true profiteers of the international soccer system and the national mass enthusiasm that goes with it – understandably enough, rarely miss out on this morally valuable enthusiasm of national soccer fans for their state, in which the practical obligations put on the citizens by their politicians at least seem to be a long way off. They demonstratively share their mistake of becoming intoxicated by the comforting idealistic participation in a collective endeavor. In the stands, they rub elbows with their people as soccer fans and thus live out the lie that the unity of citizens and politicians is proven beyond doubt in their private enthusiasm for the same thing, their passion for soccer. As soon as the games are over, the politicians then make use of the solidarity of the people in their own way: they enlist their citizens materially for the state program, demand obedience to the internal legal order and an always ready attitude to practically stand up for the rights of the nation vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

It is therefore no wonder that, in view of the mass enjoyment of the globally popular national sport, there must be urgent warnings against the tendency to manifest racism. It seems so likely, it is not merely challenged, but outright cultivated: the delusion that, as a member of a nation that represents something distinctive and absolutely valuable in the world and proves this by all means on the field of honor that claims everyone’s patriotic emotional life, one belongs to a very excellent race of people – the fact that belonging to a nation is no walk in the park in everyday life can only fuel the viewpoint that one has a very personal and very strong right to its greatness. And when enthusiasm for the sports success of one’s own collective is linked with the license to disregard the demands of decent behavior in everyday life and to be uninhibitedly partisan; when institutions such as public television not only cultivate the personality cult around national representatives, but also favorably convey the public’s most disgusting kinds of temperamental outbursts and thus give them moral legitimacy: then the incited national pride has every freedom to stage and act out as aggressively as the trained soccer fan expects from the team of his choice, and to seek out battlegrounds for it. Then the patriot also finds plenty of opportunities to prove with his spitefulness against inferior opponents, and especially against those who are not dutifully inferior, that modern racism is not a question of race, but the result of a petulent sense of national justice. Of course, effusive fans and the real masters and bigwigs of the sports nation have somewhat different ideas about the use of this mindset. For the latter, it is important that the commitment of national fan clubs on the field of athletic honor does not turn into disrespectful behavior toward the opponents, which damages the good image that the nation wants to project and, in extreme cases, results in people no longer wanting to play or no longer being allowed to play with them. This means that those in charge cannot avoid the contradiction of curbing the consequences of the enthusiasm that they arouse and serve and are so happy to make use of.

But as can be seen, they don’t mind the contradiction at all.