Thieving for Greatness?

This week’s Thursday post is brief, since I wrote a long one for Fifa’s birthday yesterday.

Two FA Cup medals were stolen during a celebration last week from a hotel where this year’s winners Portsmouth FC were staying. The FA Cup is an annual knockout tournament in England that runs concurrently with the regular leagues, culminating in May. It’s the oldest soccer competition in the world and one of the most coveted medals.

I’d like to think the thieves were troubled children who now feel like heroes. In Günter Grass’s Katz und Maus, an outsider named Mahlke is unable to resist the temptation of stealing the Knight’s Cross, which a visiting military captain to the school has left unattended in the changing room. The audacious theft gives him a profound, momentary sense of contentment and earns him the nickname, Mahlke the Great. The medal, or “coveted lozenge,” acts as an exact counterweight to his enormous, freakish, restless Adam’s apple, perfectly concealing his otherness for the first time. There’s much more to read about the troublesome pupils in Katz und Maus. I won’t spoil it for you.

Fast Approaching 95 Theses

This vehement, anti-Fifa editorial has been distilling for years. (F-I-F-A is from the title in French for soccer's world governing body.) Fifa has done some bad, foul, egregious, and completely fucking unacceptable things.

Bad: One of Africa’s best national teams, the “Lions” from Cameroon, were absent from the 2006 World Cup. Why? Fifa deducted Cameroon nine vital qualification points, the equivalent of three wins, for wearing sleeveless kits (jerseys) at a 2002 exhibition match. Cameroon fans liked the kits because they resembled native outfits. Fifa banned them.

Foul: Last week the Iraqi government disbanded the national soccer committee because it was run by too many wealthy Iraqis living abroad. In response Fifa vowed to cancel the national team’s upcoming World Cup qualifier against Australia. That drastic punishment will mean Iraq has no chance at the 2010 World Cup. Keep in mind Iraq is on a roll; they won the 2007 Asian Cup, which was the only cheerful thing to happen to the country since the invasion/occupation.

Egregious: In 2007 Fifa ruled that no international matches could be played above 2500 meters. That means Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia will no longer host games between national teams in their capital cities. Bolivian president Evo Morales has been awesome in fighting this ban, calling it “an aggression, a provocation, and an intimidation from the FIFA president [Sepp Blatter] against our country and against South America.”

Completely fucking unacceptable: In 2005 Maribel Dominguez was signed to a Mexican club in the minor leagues, FC Celaya. The Mexican national soccer authority announced it had no problem with a woman playing for the team. Fifa did. In a curt statement, Fifa halted her career and ended mixed teams forever. Dominguez was even banned from playing in exhibitions. Then Fifa stopped plans by Italian club Perugia to sign two stars who happen to be women, Birgit Prinz and Hannah Ljungberg. Yep, Fifa, based in Zurich, is more chauvinistic than pro sports teams based in Italy and Mexico. That says a lot.

In German literature there are plenty of examples of injustice owing to absolutism, most poignantly in dramas from the Enlightenment and Sturm-und-Drang. But I need to find a real world example that interrelates my problems with Fifa. Weirdly enough, a tract from 1530 by Martin Luther called Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, on the art of translation, does the trick. Luther wasn’t the first to translate the Bible into a modern language, there were plenty of translations of the Bible before his. So why does almost everyone know about the Luther Bible? Because of the idiomatic prose style. He interpreted the meaning, direct and apt, not the lexical vocabulary. Luther’s translations marked the beginning of a new age in the history of printed language.

In Sendbrief Luther explains,

“One shouldn’t look at the letters in Latin and ponder how to say them in German, like an ass would, one should ask the mother at home, the kids in the alley, and the commoner in the market how they’d say it, and interpret according to that.”

Soccer’s world governing body is out of touch, dictating the beautiful game to the world instead of interpreting it with the affections its players and fans feel. Fifa’s ban on mixed play is a case in point. It’s counterproductive. In the United States especially, soccer has a mixed makeup (our word for that is “coed”). The standard proportion in urban, recreational adult leagues is eighty percent men and twenty percent women.

It’s no surprise to most fans if an awesome player, man or woman, seeks out better paying contracts in professional leagues. But to the old, laddish, stubborn douchebageoisie who have never done anything coed in their lives (that’s you, Fifa), it must be verboten. The likes of Sepp Blatter (pictured), Franz Beckenbauer, and 23 other men who sit on Fifa’s executive committee reign from Zurich like Rome in Luther’s time. Today Fifa observes its 104th anniversary. They are a tax-sheltered institution with plans to govern for centuries. Here’s hoping for a Reformation.


Postscript. Instead of me grumbling on, fortunately you can read about two other Fifa issues from better sources. Der Spiegel explains the patronizing way Fifa is behaving in South Africa, even demanding new stadiums be built next to perfectly adequate ones because of steepness - a requirement that some stadiums in Germany’s 2006 World Cup didn’t meet. Lastly, The Economist explains how Fifa’s idiotic response to English league dominance is to limit foreign players and lower standards, rather than fairly distribute windfalls or limit foreign investment.

Foreboding on Neutral Grounds

Canada’s national team has announced fixtures for two upcoming international friendlies. I know, that really isn’t the most exciting news item. But the locations for the matches are noteworthy. Canada will “host” Brazil in Seattle on May 31. Then they “host” Panama in Ft. Lauderdale in June. The match against Panama is, for whatever reason, closed to the public. I can’t find any articles explaining why they're playing their "home games" abroad; North American soccer rarely piques anyone’s interest. Nevertheless CONCACAF, a FIFA-demarcated region for World Cup qualification, is getting more competitive. Baseball countries like Panama and the United States are improving in soccer, while soccer countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica have restless fans with rising expectations. Only three countries from North America, Central America, and the Caribbean (there are 40 countries in CONCACAF) can qualify for the World Cup. Canada hasn’t fared well. The national team didn’t qualify for the 2006 World Cup, though Canadian athletes are active in competitive leagues abroad. Providence could grant the team good results when they host their friendlies in a neutral country, however some examples in literature suggest trouble on the horizon. Festivities on neutral grounds are usually the high point before a heartbreaking denouement.

In Theodor Fontane’s 1887 social novel Irrungen, Wirrungen, two people of different classes, the humble Lene and the Baron Botho, fall in love. The highlight of their courtship is a party at Hankels Ablage, a waterside locale outside Berlin that serves as a neutral setting. After that their relationship sours. Botho realizes from the party that he can’t be normal with her in front of the other aristocrats. Lene realizes she’s better off with the factory owner Gideon, who is in any case less pathetic than the Baron.

Another pair of young lovers is Sali and Vrenchen from Gottfried Keller’s 1856 novella Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe. Entrenched enmity between their fathers means the two Swiss farmers’ kids can see no future together. They decide to spend one day happy together, enjoy a meal at an inn, and dance at the neutral grounds of the Paradiesgärtchen. They spend their bridal night on a barge and at dawn slip into the water to drown.

Yodeling in Denglisch

I’ve found the forerunner to the modern sitcom: A cycle of seven one-act plays from 1893 by Arthur Schnitzler titled Anatol. In the act “Episode,” we see our philandering hero Anatol bitterly disillusioned when Bianca, a circus-girl with whom he has once had an affair, fails to recognize him on her return to Vienna. In the act “Abschiedssouper,” he gives what he intends to be a farewell supper for the ballerina Annie, whom he’s tired of, only to find, to his unjustified indignation, that she has come with a similar intention.

The English have always wanted to break up with the rest of the contintent. At the upcoming Euro 2008 tournament, England and Europe are officially over. But who dumped whom?

In June, Schnitzler’s country Austria co-hosts with Switzerland the Eurocup of soccer, which has a higher worldwide following than the Olympics, second only to the World Cup in the gathering of humans for any peacetime reason. One national team with intermittent success and constant participation in the Eurocup is England. During qualification England drew an easy group and took their chances for granted. After all, they had countless superstars on their men’s national team. However, like Anatol, their performance wasn’t memorable and they failed to impress. In a last-ditch effort with home field advantage at Wembley against lowly Croatia, England fully intended to serve their opponents a farewell supper but instead saw themselves dumped in an embarrassing 2-3 loss last November. This year’s Eurocup tournament events will have the dubious distinction of being conducted largely in Continental English for the masses of tourists, but lacking any national team from the English speaking countries of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, or Malta, all who failed to qualify.

The Parvenus versus the Old Guard

On May 21 European soccer reaches its finale after 13 acts in the UEFA Champions League, a tournament featuring the top teams in every league from Portugal to Israel. The finalists this year happen to be both from England’s Premiership league: Manchester United and Chelsea London. I despise Chelsea. They are owned by an oil oligarch who is always televised sitting next to a different supermodel each gameday in his shadowy executive box. He's Roman Abramovich, a billionaire from Russia who bought the team five years ago and infused it with cash for star players explicitly to buy trophies, the highest of all trophies being the Champions League. The fact that a billionaire’s money can in only five years subvert other factors like team morale, long-term stability, community support, and entertaining play – and still lead to success – excites such vitriol in me that I should change the subject.

In the 1784 tragedy “Egmont”, Goethe thematizes the occupation of the Low Countries by Catholic Spain. The Dutch governor Egmont spends five acts ignoring everyone’s suspicions that the Spanish king will execute him for being too kind to protesting Flemings. In the final act his lover Clärchen takes to the streets trying to arouse the citizenry in Egmont’s defense. When this fails, she takes poison. Egmont finds out about Clärchen’s death, sleeps well in his jail cell, has an epiphany that Holland will be free from Spanish rule, and is later executed.

The political issue in “Egmont” is one of the local nobles’ inherited rights versus a new power, the strong centralized government in Madrid. It’s not really about an underdog. It’s often pointed out that the uprising in the Netherlands was conservative in character. Liberation was its aim, but it was essentially concerned with restoring ancient privileges and freedoms.

I intended to cheer for Manchester United on May 21, or actually, hope for Chelsea to lose. I wish it was as simple as cheering for the underdog. United have won far more trophies throughout their history than Chelsea. United even have a corrupt owner of their own, a fat Floridian named Malcolm Glazer who has sent the team into debt. Chelsea is an upstart. They were recently a small club in a big town losing to plenty of other London teams. Then they got bought up and started winning, whereas United have always been rich and have always been winning. Maybe in following this tragedy I was originally pulling for Egmont and his revolution, but who would want to pull for aristocrats and their inherited rights? One outcome no longer feels better than the other. Soccer fans will pay tribute to either champion on May 21 and accept their fate with reluctance, then serenity. And Goethe wouldn’t have it any other way. The wheels of the gods grind slowly but exceedingly fine.