Steve Bloomfield on World Football

Football Against the Enemy, by Simon Kuper.

For me that was the first book that really tried to look at football through the political lens. It was just ahead of the 1994 World Cup in the US and it tells you just as much today as it did then, and it set the template for a whole genre of using football to explain a whole country. He talks about the enmity between Holland and Germany told through football and he has a lovely chapter on Cameroon, and on Roger Milla [who scored four goals for Cameroon at the age of 38] at the World Cup in 1990.

Who is the enemy for Cameroon?

For the people, you could argue that the enemy is the government. You have an autocratic regime that has used football to boost its own popularity and as a diversion from the problems they themselves have caused.

Do you think football fans take on the enmity even when they don’t understand where it comes from? 

Yes. English fans will sing along against Germany: ‘Two world wars and one World Cup…’ and a lot of them not only weren’t alive for the wars, they weren’t even alive for the 1966 World Cup. I think these things often become part of the national psyche. Look at what happened in Egypt when they played Algeria last year. After Egypt lost there were riots in the streets – the government was very adept at turning that anger against Algeria, making it about politics not football.

The Alex Bellos book.

It’s a magical, magical book. I didn’t have much interest in Brazil as a country. I know that it’s there and I know about its football, but this book tells the story of the whole country by telling the story of its football. 

There are several fascinating stories, although my favourite is probably the tale of Brazil hosting the World Cup for the first time in 1950. They built a new stadium, the Maracan, which was the biggest in the world – for 200,000 people. We think of Brazil as the greatest ever World Cup side but back then they still hadn’t ever won it. Everyone was so confident they would win in 1950 that the newspapers anointed them champions the day before the final. They lost 2-1.

Out of the ashes of that came the Brazil that we know now. And, in fact, the famous kit that they wear now, the yellow shirt and the green top, came from a competition they held afterwards when they decided they had to change absolutely everything, including the colour of their kit. And less well-known stories about the players, like Garrincha, who was this bow-legged boy who became one of the best footballers in the world. It’s a beautiful way of telling the story of a country. I wouldn’t pick up a book about Brazilian history, but a book about Brazilian football; I would and I did and it taught me more about Brazil than anything else I’ve read. The book starts with a Brazilian footballer playing in Scotland’s Faroe Islands, showing how football had become Brazil’s main export, and how global Brazilian football had become.

Foul, Andrew Jennings.

Like a lot of sports, football has become incredibly more commercial over the past 30/40 years. This World Cup in South Africa is a world away from the World Cup in England in 1966. There were no sponsors, there were no official partners, no sponsored ball-boys, none of this. Football began to change in the 1970s and FIFA is now an incredibly rich and powerful body, but incredibly corrupt as well and, for all its talk about transparency, it’s actually one of the least transparent organisations in the world. Andrew Jennings is a top investigative journalist and has done all sorts of things that people would consider more serious, but he has really lifted the lid on how corrupt some parts of the modern-day game really are. He is the only journalist who has ever been banned from FIFA press conferences. Sepp Blatter absolutely hates him. Blatter has been the president of FIFA since 1998. Football is incredibly undemocratic. You get people who have been in power for years and years and years and they nobble their opponents so they get to carry on. 

Does it matter? Why do we care? Isn’t the game the same?

No. And it’s our game. It’s not theirs. These men are making millions and millions of pounds out of our game and, at the same time, claiming that everything’s going back into the game and that they love football. They are getting incredibly rich out of the game. It’s one thing for Ronaldo to earn a quarter of a million pounds a week, though I do have a problem with that. But you can argue that he’s one of the best footballers in the world and he’s providing something and earning that money. But the people who run the game are getting lots of money that they really shouldn’t. We don’t know how much because, for example, Sepp Blatter refuses to reveal what his salary is. It’s supposed to be the people’s game. Yes, it matters. It’s about the game’s soul and these guys have sold that soul. And they are quite happy about that. 

Is anyone apart from Andrew Jennings doing anything about it? 

Not really, no. Apart from shedding light on it, it’s very difficult to see what can be done about it. FIFA officials are elected by individual Football Association officials and they are often as corrupt as FIFA officials. The other problem is that a lot of football journalists would rather not get involved because if you start doing it you aren’t going to be able to cover the World Cup. It’s tricky, to say the least.