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Pitch Invasion

Read of the Day: Studies on Hysteria

You could go to World Cup 2010 and write about xenophobia, corruption, poverty and theft…and still think the tournament was a triumph for South Africa, lose your mind when Landon Donovan scored. ”The beauty and torture of soccer fandom, I came to appreciate during South Africa 2010, is the way the game simultaneously titillates very different parts of the mind. [W]hile Freud was not right about many things, he was right that the human mind is fundamentally conflicted…while it may not have across in my posts, I loved every single day of my trip to South Africa. Loved it.” (Andrew Guest/Pitch Invasion)

(Image credit: Axel Bührmann/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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Brazil 2014: Let Them Eat Bolo

If Brazil 2014 is already in trouble — and it’s already “amazingly” behind schedule — it’s because Brazil’s old “semi-feudal” cadre is in charge. Tim Vickery at The Independent adds that crumbling stadia, inadequate travel infrastructure, and wildly varying weather could spell catastrophe; Pitch Invasion’s Tom Dunmore casts a wary eye at Ricardo Teixeria, the new World Cup’s reflexively corrupt overlord.

Well Struck: Deceptive Correlations, Card Waving and a Ball Tom Friedman Would Love

Did England’s early World Cup exit boost English tourism? Did the Jabulani make shots less accurate? Can a soccer ball boost business productivity? Click the headline for some great…click-throughs.

Reads of the Day: Mythbusters

How many more historical narratives can this World Cup overturn? The Dutch and the Germans have switched shirts, says David Winner at Fair Play — “Germans are teaching the Dutch to win, the Dutch [like Van Gaal and van Marwijk] are teaching the Germans to play spatially-sophisticated attacking football.” Maybe the narratives of all four semifinalists were never true to being with, argues Tom Dunmore at Pitch Invasion. But beware the voodoo death, warns Minus the Shooting — the physiology of belief, “belief instantiated in the autonomic nervous system,” that underpins why opponents collapse when a German midfielder simply appears organized.

Read of the Day: England, Written on the Wind

Is “England” anything more than its football team? The question isn’t automatically a cynical one: The team’s symbol, the St. George’s Cross, a flag “long tied to nastier currents of racism, nationalism and violence” (especially the right-wing English Defense League), is being appropriated by both marketers and activists toward a new, multicultural English patriotism. “The vast whiteness present on the flag of St George now ever-present at England games is perhaps, then, a space in which English identity is being partially written: one anything but simply white, whatever it exactly is.” (Tom Dunmore/Pitch Invasion)

FIFA. Ethics. Matter. Antimatter.

Australia’s 2022 World Cup bid team gave tens of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry to wives of FIFA executives…along with boomerangs, Drizabone jackets, Australian wines, scarves, beanies, RMWilliams belts, wallets, Paspaley cufflinks and pendants to the executives themselves. It should surprise no one that such gifts — as expressions of the prospective host’s national culture — are OK within FIFA’s code of ethics. Wait — FIFA has a code of ethics? (Tom Dunmore/Pitch Invasion)

South Africa: Where’s the Game?

Don’t hold your breath for the World Cup to hugely benefit South Africa’s soccer culture and infrastructure — in fact, it’s hard even now to find a game of ragball in greater Johannesburg. In Soweto, there are games, but also many broken promises of community football improvements from FIFA and the South African Football Federation. “The real choice seems to have involved shifting spending to the stadiums from spending on promised local initiatives (such as arts programs and community football).” (Andrew Guest/Pitch Invasion)

The Narcissism of Rivalrous Differences

Brighton/Crystal Palace. Bitterest of rivalries — makes Yankees/Red Sox or Packers/Bears look like a shared bottle of unoaked chard in the hot tub. So why would a Seagull fan want Crystal Palace to avoid liquidation? Because “[t]he survival of a football club is more important than petty squabbles. Especially if you value those squabbles.” (Richie Morris/FourFourTwo; HT Pitch Invasion)

Political Football Without Apology

To get away from clichés about African football, maybe you need stop sending sportswriters. Case in point: Political journalist Steve Bloomfield’s new book Africa United: Soccer, Passion, Politics and the First World Cup in Africa, which is only glancingly about actual matches and much more about “what these matches tell us about how Africa works and how Africa is changing” — from the disintegration of Somalia through the eyes of its national team to a mineral magnate trying to recreate Chelsea in the DR Congo. Read it with Ian Hawkey’s Feet of the Chameleon to get a near-perfect portrait of African football. (Alex Usher/Pitch Invasion)

USMNT: It Tastes Like Fondue

The knock on U.S. soccer is by now beyond cliché: too white, too upper-middle-class, too burnished by minivan regimentation and helicopter parenting to draw on more than a fraction of the country’s potential talent. Look at the USMNT, though, and you see a group that includes all social classes. But does that mean progress — or is it just an index of soccer’s marginalization in U.S. culture and a “random pattern of access” fed by colleges and children of immigrants? In the end, “we still don’t have enough players like Clint Dempsey. Whatever that means.” (Andrew Guest/Pitch Invasion)

Toward a New Idea of Soccer Journalism

North of the Rio Grande, we all pine for more soccer journalism — but do we really want our own Buster Olneys or Peter Kings? More Steves, Iveses or Grants? The names standing a decade hence aren’t going to be imitators of dead-tree sportswriting — they’ll be “writers willing to step outside the stadium with eyes wide open, observant to what’s happening outside the field of play.” And the model that supports them will have to follow that ethos. (Richard Whittall/Pitch Invasion) (Full disclosure: The post has nice words for Must Read Soccer.)

Read of the Day: The Invention of Love

What’s the metanarrative of a great player? A Beautiful Game, a new book interviewing 41 top players about their development, offers clues through oral history: More playing for fun than academies; more diversity of interests than grinding single-mindedness; as much luck and social capital as physical gifts. Oh, and being able to invent an adult version of love for the game after your childhood infatuation inevitably vanishes. (Andrew Guest/Pitch Invasion)

Reads of the Day: 3 Out of 5 Pundits Recommend People

Supporters’ trusts: Will there be a right- and left-wing backlash? Tom Dunmore of Pitch Invasion says recent pieces in the British press show typical ideological caricaturing — trusts as dangerous populism vs. football as a pop culture distraction. Meanwhile, Rob Marrs at Left Back in the Changing Room says clubs are — despite the Disneyfication of the higher reaches of the sport — more important to communities than ever…and he’s not sure that’s a good thing.

NASL, South African Division

NASL provided Euro-shunned South African stars such as Kaizer Motaung and Jomo Sono a chance to play; and they returned the compliment by becoming pioneering entrepreneurs of contemporary South African soccer…with some resultant bizarre hybridizations (like the Kaizer Chiefs team logo, which copies the old Atlanta Chiefs politically incorrect American symbol of a Native American in headdress) becoming “amongst the most visible images of African entrepreneurism.” (Andrew Guest/Pitch Invasion)

80 Percent of Success is Just Showing Up

How can professional soccer succeed in America? Several theories have been advanced — buy European talent, market to Hispanics, build soccer-specific stadia, cultivate supporters groups. But what about just sticking around? After all, MLS is only 14 years old, and Man Utd, Liverpool and Real Madrid each took about 50 years to become popular. (Richard Whittall/Pitch Invasion)

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out: Would making British TV show matches locally instead of nationally restore balance to British football? Gabrielle Marcotti of The Times makes the case; Tom Dunmore of Pitch Invasion has his doubts.

Why Women in Africa Do(n’t) Play Football

Norms of beauty. Malnutrition. A preference for basketball. A lack of tampons. The things that prevent women from playing football in Africa are so legion, it’s a wonder they ever play the game. And yet they do… (Andrew Guest/Pitch Invasion)

Beyond the Vuvuzela

Beyond the Vuvuzela: Two new academic books on Africa soccer make at least this clear: that World Cup 2010 is much more than either (a) FIFA’s Disneyfied dream of a smiling, frictionless continent, or (b) South Africa as mere set design for a multinational capitalist circle jerk. (Andrew Guest/Pitch Invasion)