Ever wondered why the word ‘United’ is the most treasured suffix for football clubs? The language of football is indeed the language of socialism
Liverpool FC was languishing in Second Division when William Shankly took over as manager, and having born and raised in a grimy, derelict coal mining village in Scotland, where hunger was a “prevailing condition” and the wages in the pits encouraged thievery, the ‘reddest’ city in England seemed his divinely natural, if not pre-ordained, destination. In 1959 Anfield was in a shambles as much as the team was, with no money to water the grass or the budding talent, a decaying training ground, and an intractable management. But Shankly bonded with the fans, who were ‘his kind of people’, and by the time he retired fifteen years later, Liverpool had become not only a powerhouse in European football but also the cradle of an utopian socialism that stands today as the most eminent and proudly cherished part of its identity.
“The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, it’s the way I see life” remarked Shankly, implying an inseparable bond between football and socialism while stating his own political orientation; a belief echoed in the manifesto of Britain’s Labour Party: “… by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few”. A card carrying Red is almost indistinguishable from a card carrying socialist, fighting separate battles but for essentially the same cause.
Football in Europe is a by-product of the Industrial Revolution; the oppressive air and ravaged earth that burgeoned the communism of Karl Marx sprouted the modern version of the game in which rootless migrants found, in times of unceasing melancholy, a long-lost feeling of community, the spirit of freedom and a sense of belonging. It’s no coincidence that football’s biggest clubs reside not in the glitzy cities of Paris or London, but in the grotty ones of Newcastle and Manchester; Dortmund and Dresden; Turin and Milan. It’s no accident that many of them were products of dispiritingly dreary factories, like Philips (PSV Eindhoven), Bayer (Leverkusen) and Royal Arsenal (Arsenal). Or sooty railway depots like L&YR (Manchester United) or Sao Paolo Railway (Nacional).
Football was reared by the blood, nourished by the sweat, and fostered by the tears of the working class to make it the mass game it’s today. But football didn’t become socialist; it was born socialist. Solidarity, team work, collective leadership, shared goals; all are themes that work equally well on factory floors and football fields; terms like ‘co-operative’, ‘mutualist’ and ‘associationist’ by which Bakunin and Proudhon articulated socialism does apply to football as well. The vocabulary is interchangeable; the concepts, compatible. Ever wondered why the word ‘United’ is the most treasured suffix for football clubs? The language of football is indeed the language of socialism.
And the more socialist, the better the team. Famed midfielder John Barnes who once said England will never win the World Cup unless they understand football is a socialist sport, credits the consistent success of Die Mannschaft to its profound and enduring socialist character. There are no superstars in German football, individual genius is subservient to team interests, all eleven players play for each other with common purpose, functioning collectively like an impersonal but formidable ‘machine’-- an epithet unsuitable for any other team. This ruthless efficiency is what prompted Gary Lineker to describe football thus: “twenty two men chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the Germans win.”
“Football is for everybody” said Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, former player and chairman of Bayern Munich, reflecting football’s socialistic nature, protected by law in Germany. The Bundesliga -- the biggest league in the world by attendance -- prohibits clubs in the league unless they are owned by their supporters in the majority, and keeps tickets cheap; In Spain, big clubs like Barcelona, Real Madrid and Osasuna along with 99% of clubs below Third Division are fan owned; so are all clubs in Argentina, Sweden, Turkey and elsewhere, asserting that football is ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’.
Greats like Bill Shankly, or Brian Clough -- the man who took Derby County to their first English championship, and often gave away tickets to needy fans -- understood that deep down, despite all its attendant glamour and wealth, football is a poor man’s game, and belongs to the common people, and they are the ones who keep it alive both in the swanky stadiums of big cities and the mucky fields of remote hamlets. They know football. They know its soul.
So in April 2016, when Borussia Dortmund met Liverpool in the quarterfinals of the Europa League at Anfield, in an emphatic affirmation of the humanity that football embodies, Borussia fans joined Liverpool fans and sang the Liverpool anthem in unison “You’ll never walk alone”.
That’s socialism. Home and away.
