Reza Davari Ardakani: Football Is a War Game

Dr. Reza Davari Ardakani has spoken to us about football more than anyone else among the arbiters of opinion and thought. Of course, in our time, ears receptive to hearing serious words are rare, especially since the speaker of these words has no relation to ideology and for years, whatever he writes and says is the very essence of impartiality. Nevertheless, it is enough to distance ourselves a little from the great clamor over the nothingness of the era in which we live, for the ear of our soul to hear the voice of the old man who believes:

I have read somewhere that football was designed by two young Englishmen (some have also said that football is a Brazilian creation) and it was the English who brought it to Iran. The English who were in Khuzestan played football and we learned it from them, and as you know, our first football hub was Khuzestan. Our best footballers were also from Khuzestan for a long time. This sport was very quickly embraced throughout the country, especially in Isfahan and Tehran. In my youth, some educated people and university professors like Dr. "Ekrami" and Dr. "Kani" (the vice-chancellor of the University of Tehran) were players and promoters of football (and Dr. Ali Kani played football barefoot, without shoes). Of course, even now, we have studious footballers among the players. Until recent decades, there was no talk of professional football in our country. In other parts of the world too, sport became professional and commercial after the World War. As until about fifty years ago, professional athletes had no path to the Olympics; meaning only amateur athletes could participate in the Olympic Games. It is in these last forty or fifty years that all sports, with football at the forefront, have become professional everywhere. When I say at the forefront, I do not mean that football is the supreme sport and other sports are unimportant; but we cannot deny that football has gained a prestige among people surpassing all other sports. If you examine the sports pages of the world's and the country's newspapers, you will see that they are all full of news and analyses related to football, and the news and reports of other sports are perhaps not even one-hundredth of the content about football. If we look at the "Varzesh3" website, we see it has a long column dedicated to football and a short column in which the news of all sports other than football is inserted. Television stations also do not give as much importance to broadcasting other sports competitions (and in our country, even to a sport like wrestling, which is our national sport) as they do to broadcasting football matches. So, shouldn't it be said that football is an important sport, and of course, if you ask me, I would say football is something more than a sport. Why is the attention given to football not given to any other sport, and why do people love football more than other sports, so much so that some spend their days and nights thinking about it and pay no attention to other sports? Football is the sport of the modern world and at the same time a highly profitable commerce, and this commercial nature has also contributed to its expansion, but football had the potential to become commercial; not every sport can become commercial like football. Football has qualities that distinguish it from all other sports. The first and perhaps most important quality is that, like all aspects of modernity, it is a comprehensive collection of conflicts and contradictions. Football is a war game played between friends, and it may moderate the desire for belligerence and violence in groups of people. The second quality of football is its sensationalism and the occurrence of unexpected events in it. In all sports, there is a possibility of defeat and victory for each of the opponents, but in no sport is luck and chance as involved as it is in football. In other words, predicting the results of matches in other sports is easier, and this causes the spectator not to take their eyes off the game on the field. Another distinguishing quality of football is having tactics. There are tactics in many sports, but I think in all sports (even in team sports like volleyball and basketball), technique is more important than tactics, but in football, if tactics are not more important, their importance is no less than technique. This is why football coaches do not just teach techniques but are designers of tactics, to the extent that one might say football is chess played on a large field. To put it briefly, if you ask about football's relation to modernity, I repeat that football is one of the manifestations of the new world, and in the interpretation of the people of philosophy, it can be considered one of the essential accidents of the existence of the modern world and a substitute for some rituals and ceremonies that modernity has set aside. If we accept this analogy, football, like all ceremonies and rituals, must undertake the duty of guarding the modern world. I do not know what experts in political philosophy say about this. What I can say is that the game of football was designed in England at the same time that Marx was writing the book Capital. Capital was an exposition of the crisis of the modern world, and the game of football was the rule for guarding this world. But if it is said that when football is placed against Capital, firstly, these are not of the same kind, and secondly, if that were the case, communists should have turned away from football.

In response to the first objection, I say that the emergence of football and the writing of Capital were two events in the new world, not two opposing or contradictory matters, even though each had its own particular status. Regarding the second objection, I do not believe that Marx was hostile to modernity and the new world; rather, he was intent on saving it.

*What standing does football have in other countries?

It is better to talk about football in our own country. Football is loved by people all over the world, and perhaps in Africa it is given more importance than anywhere else. In our country, about forty or fifty years ago, when those involved in football discussed the difference between Iranian football and that of other countries, they attributed the difference and superiority of football in countries like England and Spain to its professionalism, and they imagined that if football became professional, a hundred-year path would be traversed overnight. More importantly, they thought (and still think) that any problem can be solved with a directive or an administrative decision, and that football too can be brought to its possible perfection by making it professional. It was to achieve this goal that the government inevitably stepped in and began granting financial aid to prominent clubs like Persepolis (Shahin) and Esteghlal (Taj), and a new form of professionalism, suited to underdevelopment, emerged. If these clubs wanted to stand on their own feet, they could not even cover their running costs with the money they themselves generated. Just as now, the income of no club in our country covers its expenses. But in European countries, for example, a prestigious club like "Real Madrid" not only receives no money from the Spanish government but is a major commercial and financial institution, paying taxes to the government from its own income and that of its players; that is, it is conducting football business; it earns money and spends it on football. If you say they are wasteful, know that the custom of capitalism, if it was thrift and miserliness at the beginning, became profligate in its maturity. Wastefulness is the custom of capitalism. In this professional football, a club can pay its players as much as it wishes, and the justification is that it follows the law of the market. But we fund the multi-billion-toman salaries of our reputable clubs' players from the government budget or large state-owned companies, and these salaries are several times the astronomical salaries that caused so much uproar recently. Our popular football clubs do not even have their own playing fields, and their matches are held in the national stadium. Of course, sometimes forty or fifty thousand people, and perhaps more—which is rarely precedented in club matches worldwide—attend the stadium, but the money collected from these individuals for ticket prices is very insignificant compared to other countries, and perhaps the income from a well-attended match does not even cover the expenses of that same game. Whereas in professional football, clubs should normally make sufficient profit from holding matches and be able to afford the exorbitant salaries of their players; because professional football is a business, and in it, players' salaries are also determined according to the market order. But in our country, famous footballers must be paid salaries from the government budget that no high-ranking official in the country receives. I am not envious, and I know that, firstly, these individuals are the focus of people's attention and affection, and secondly, they can play for a maximum of about ten years, and it is quite possible that during these ten years their health may be damaged, or in any case, they may not be able to find a suitable job after their playing days. So the point is not that they should not receive large wages, but rather that these particular expenditures are not the government's job. We have mistaken the governmentalization of football for its professionalization, and for this reason, the title 'professional' is not appropriate for it. It is certain that we also need to move our football towards professionalization, regardless of the fact that people are interested in football; its power does not allow it to be left to its own devices. The problem that must be addressed is that although a football player has no job other than playing, in our country, his profession brings little income to the club, and the government must pay the costs. In reality, our football player is a contract employee of the government or a state-owned company. Therefore, the passionate and excited claim that if our football became professional, all its problems would be solved, was nothing more than an illusion, like all the other illusions that exist and rule in the undeveloped world, and with which problems must inevitably be solved. In my youth, footballers even provided their own shoes and clothes, and this was a problem that could have been solved by the professionalization of football, but our football was not ready to become professional. About sixty years ago, when I was teaching in one of Tehran's high schools, there were noble young Armenians who, despite their young age, played in the national team, and their entire thought and talk was football. Even when sitting in class, their hearts were with football. They spent their pocket money on football.

*The Armenian kids also had a team called "Ararat"....

Yes. Ararat no longer has a football team. Those two young men didn't play for Ararat either; they were members of the Taj team. What makes the football of that time different from today's is not only the multi-billion-toman salaries paid to some footballers, but also the fame of the players, their relationship with the spectators and the public, and their presence in virtual spaces should not be overlooked, and the important point is the disparity in the level of clubs and players' wages. The majority of players on teams receive relatively low wages compared to the forty or fifty who are more famous. In America and Europe, the gap in players' salaries is also large, but there, the minimum wage is a considerable amount; that is, second, third, and fourth division clubs also pay their footballers money with which they can comfortably secure their livelihood and well-being, but here it is not like that; only the players of a few first-league clubs receive huge salaries, and for the rest, there is no such news. These seemingly simple disparities, when combined with disharmonies and disproportions, may result in corruption. When we say our football is afflicted with corruption, it does not mean that corrupt individuals have entered the football business and brought corruption there. No, individuals do not bring or take corruption anywhere, for if that were the case, the matter would be resolved by removing the corrupt person. Corruption has a context; when there is disproportion and disharmony, and the means and the end are incompatible, the ground for corruption is prepared, and especially when the problem is solved in an irrational and unnatural way, they expand this ground. Therefore, if our sport and our football have not, as they say, remained untouched by corruption, the reason is that if things and people are not in their proper places and we do not know what we can and should do for our sport, this sport is neither the old sport nor the new sport; it is something in between; that is, neither this nor that. Expelled from the old and left behind by the new. Whatever African football may be, at least it can export footballers everywhere, especially to Europe.

*This disharmony also brings about ugliness; meaning, for instance, in your time, was football more beautiful?

That depends. The football and the enthusiasm that now exists for it did not exist at that time. Today's football has become more beautiful because it has added tactics to technique. Of course, sometimes technique is still more apparent and even overshadows tactics at times. I imagine the Brazilians and the French have paid more attention to football tactics than others. But the reason for people's attention and attachment to football is not merely its beauty or its becoming more beautiful. Football is a force that has intertwined with people's souls, and as we have experienced in recent decades, it has a power that is difficult to oppose. So one should not think that people watch football merely for amusement, recreation, and enjoyment; rather, football has become a part of people's lives, and for this reason, they cannot abandon it. Football is beautiful, but in sports like gymnastics, sepak takraw, or tennis, compared to football, beauty is more apparent, and some of the technical moves seen in them amaze the spectator. Football is beautiful, but it also has violence, and perhaps one of the aspects of football's appeal goes back to its violence. Footballers are both graceful performers and, like soldiers, must sacrifice themselves on the field. If they have a relatively high income, it can be the price of the injuries they are constantly exposed to.

*Where does our connection with football come from? Is it a kind of mystery, or does it have a specific reason?

Football has no mystery; rather, our existence is the mystery: “Your being is a riddle, Hafez / Whose investigation is sorcery and fable.” Is it not a mystery that we stake our lives on covenants and pledges, and even seek the impossible? Human life is a mystery, and where we constantly calculate and occupy ourselves with that, purchasing life’s passage at any price, the mystery fades. The mystery is the very grandeur of human existence. I do not wish to elaborate on this point that our existence is a mystery, for the discussion is about something else. You know that a human becomes human in the relation they have with the Truth; in the words of Mulla Sadra, we are the very essence of attachment, the very essence of connection; we cannot be without attachment, without regard and interest. We need to love and be loved. We cannot live so expediently that we desire nothing but profit and expediency. We are attached, and sometimes we sacrifice our lives for our attachments, but attachments have degrees, and the attachments of different eras are not of the same kind, and perhaps not all are noble and ethical. Modern man has many attachments, and one of these attachments is the attachment to football. We do not choose all our attachments through reflection and inquiry; rather, we develop affections and attachments, and sometimes we become conscious of them, and it is quite possible that we are unaware of our attachments, just as we, like all the people of the world, have attachments to the time and era of modernity of which we are unaware. In these attachments, imagination and fancy are mostly involved. Besides reason, which has become an alchemy in this age, we also possess fancy and imagination. Life cannot be entirely the temptation of reason.

Reason is expedient, consequentialist, and teleological, but man loves to be free from expediency at times. Play is also one of the destinations for escaping expediency. In play, there is no profit or expediency. Play is giving scope to fancy and imagination, or taking refuge in liberating illusion and imagination.

All beings flee from free will and their own existence / Into the intoxication of their own heads

All have known that this existence is a trap / Voluntary remembrance and thought are hell

It is true that now is the era of positivism, science, and technology, and perhaps some may say the era of fancy has passed and the time is the time of science and reason, but fancy has no era from which one can pass. Fancy has always been and will always be. Indeed, the current conceptions of science and the attachment people have to technology are a kind of fancy. This fancy, not merely because it is full of calculation and reckoning, cannot be given one’s heart to; rather, sometimes its calculations and reckonings are baseless. In any case, science and technology can be praised and celebrated. The greatest attachment throughout history has been religious attachment, and this attachment is still strong, but because our era is the era of science and technology, and this science and technology have become the pivot of the lives of the world’s people, this attachment has taken on another form, just as in this time there is more insistence on giving religion a rational form and making it compatible with the exigencies of the age. Of course, people have preserved the form of religious beliefs, but the attachments of life are the attachments of the modern world, and people are attached to things that belong to this world, to the new way of life, and generally to modernity. Football, too, is the game of the age of modernity. You might say that other sports can also be the games of modernity, but aside from polo—the martial sport of our ancient times—where hundreds of people could gather in one place to watch, we have not had another sport where tens of thousands of people go to a stadium and watch every moment of it with excitement, fear, and hope; it is in the age of modernity that such a need has arisen and the holding of football matches has become possible. That is, these conditions, contexts, and interests have converged so that people, in their leisure time from alienating labor (in Marx’s terms), take refuge in one of the possible attachments of the time, and one of these suitable refuges is football. Football is the great fancy of our time.

*Is there a reproach in this interpretation that calls football the great fancy of the time?

In the usage of the people of philosophy, “wahm” (estimative faculty) does not have a pejorative meaning; rather, it is one of the levels of perception, a level lower than the intellect and higher than sense and imagination. When I used the term “wahm,” I was thinking in the Mulla Sadrian sense. According to Mulla Sadra, the levels of perception are: sense, imagination, wahm, and intellect; thus, before the intellect, there is wahm. Wahm means something that exists in our conception but has no external referent; mathematics, which is a rigorous science and the guarantor of the correctness of other sciences, deals with things like numbers and geometric forms that do not exist in the external world.

*So how is football considered an illusory (mawhūm) matter? Football exists in the external world too!

What is football? Football is the rules of the game; it is a set of musts and must-nots that ultimately culminate in the ball crossing the goal line. Is it not an illusion (wahm) that everything leads to the ball crossing a line?! In important matches, when the ball enters the goal, hundreds of millions of people cry, and hundreds of millions of people become happy and celebrate; what change occurs in the world whether the ball crosses the football goal line or not? Hasn’t this ball crossed the lines around the pitch hundreds of times during the match? But when the ball crosses the goal line, an event occurs that some fear and others await. In reality, the crossing of the ball over the goal line is an illusory (wahmī) meaning, and vast groups of people live by this very illusion.

*Incidentally, a letter from “Forugh Farrokhzad” to “Ebrahim Golestan” was recently published, in the final parts of which Forugh speaks of her fear of the strange and terrible things in the world and recounts that yesterday, a person here—apparently the letter was written from Germany—hanged himself and died because, while watching a football match, his television broke down and he could no longer watch the rest of the match; for this reason, he first smashed his television and then hanged himself. In fact, this story of love and passion for football existed even in Forugh’s time—forty, fifty years ago—and people back then were this crazy about football. What does football possess that, from its very inception until now, has so captivated people?

If, in those days, this incident seemed strange to our poet, now the illness and sudden death of footballers and spectators, even during a match, is not a rare occurrence. Football has had die-hard fans from the beginning. Now, this passion has become broader and more intense, large organizations with enormous financial capital have emerged for it, and football has entered the system of life across the entire world.

*But isn’t it dangerous for illusion to take over our entire lives?

There must always be a balance among the faculties and domains of human existence, and if there is not, his existence is endangered. Now, the domain of faith and intellect has weakened (pay no attention to the claims), and for this reason, human life is exposed to great danger.

Allow me to clarify my meaning with another example; for instance, on a trip I took to Bandar Anzali, when I sat and listened to people talk, I saw that most of their conversation was about “Malavan” of Bandar Anzali, and they would say, without exaggeration, from the moment we wake up in the morning until night, nearly 75 to 80 percent of our talk is about Malavan, and we have no other attachment. The reason for this, they said, was that our identity and life are tied to Malavan, and basically, everyone knows us by the name Malavan, and if Malavan did not exist, we would not exist either and would have no identity.

The idea that people think their identity finds meaning through supporting a team is an illusion. But it is not a reprehensible illusion. All human beings need to have an interest and an attachment, and when that interest arises, they define themselves by it and say, I am someone who loves and supports such-and-such a thing, and I have dedicated my life to such-and-such a thing: "A desert wanderer saw Majnun one day / Sitting alone in the wilderness / His notebook the desert, his fingers the pen / Tracing a word by his own hand / He said, O crazed Majnun, what is this? / You are writing a letter, for whom is it? / He said, I am practicing Layli's name / Consoling my own heart / I have nothing but a name of hers in my hand / Thus my lowly worth found such elevation"; the fact that some people from Anzali have said they derive their identity from supporting the Malavan team, though their words are sentimental, is not entirely misguided, but this identity is not a true identity; it is an identity suited to a time when everything, even attachments, changes. In an era when one must give one's heart to new things every day, football has, as it happens, managed to maintain a relatively stable position for itself, and it is no flaw that the people of Anzali have such great affection for their football teams (women's and men's football). Whatever the case, today people can no longer live without football; perhaps seventy years ago (in Iran) one could live without football and without Malavan, but now football is no longer a free game. It is not even a sport, and as you said, it has become a form of identity. The paradox is that in the past, when football was still merely a game, players, managers, and coaches, though not very famous, enjoyed more respect and dignity. It is true that attachment to football has increased now, but that respectful gaze has disappeared. We do not look at our sport with respect at all; rather, our gaze is one of need, and our relationship with it is also based on need, not dignity and respect. A relationship of respect is a relationship of humility and submission, and this differs from the everyday need we have, for example, for eating and sleeping. Spectators are no longer submissive before football, such that if their team loses, they reproach it and sometimes curse it, and so on... Football and sport have become a part of our daily lives. At my age, I follow sports news—especially news of certain sports—every day. Sometimes I also glance at what enthusiasts and experts say and write about sports. It was mentioned that a large organization in the system of every country is now in charge of sports. Organization is necessary for managing sports, but in a world where organizations tend toward corruption, the danger of corruption infiltrating the sports organization and spreading to sport and sports also arises, and now in some places this corruption has reached critical points. Sometimes we see that some still expect sport to be the ancient athleticism of champions, and for athletes to be among the chivalrous and the brotherhood of the fityan, but the era of championship and ayyari is past. Sport has now turned into a business, a competition, an auction, and a bidding war in the arena of seeking superiority, and no place remains in it for chivalry and the fityan.

*Does this not go back to the essence of football? It seems the nature of football is such that it tends more toward lumpenism and corruption than toward chivalry and magnanimity.

Football is a modern sport. From the beginning, it differed from other sports and, like all creations of modernity, was unceremonious and without ritual. Modernity has nothing to do with chivalry (futuwwa)—not that it opposes it, but within it, chivalry is at most a thing of the past, to be regarded with a dilettante's gaze or through historical research. Modernity has an order and a system that must be observed. Of course, there are superfluous and accidental things within it, but they remain on the margins. In the core of modernity, no one can do whatever they want without observing law and order, and for this reason, betrayal is not the same as trustworthiness, nor lying the same as truthfulness, but this order and morality are not subject to the four Greek virtues or the lawful and forbidden of religions. The path of sport is not necessarily the path of chivalry; the athlete does his own work, trains, strives to be better, and by virtue of this improvement, receives more money and can have twenty cars instead of one. In truth, the paragon of the athlete in the era of modernity is not the Lion of God, Rostam Dastan, or the likes of 'Purya-ye Vali.' Consider the list of famous footballers of the last fifty years. Not one of them, even those with a good name, is a paragon of morality and knowledge for their admirers; rather, they are beloved because they were skilled footballers. Of course, a footballer may also do charitable work, but the ultimate end of football is neither religion, nor morality and beneficence, nor chivalry.

*Of course, we have also had anti-apartheid footballers or footballers with leftist, anti-capitalist leanings. Even 'Maradona' once said that FIFA still has a problem with me because I am leftist and anti-American.

Footballers, like all people, have a good inner nature and can hold specific beliefs and praiseworthy moral qualities, and sometimes some of them have even faced disregard and ostracism because of their libertarian political views. A footballer, like all people, has particular attachments, and how could it be that a footballer's attachment of heart is solely to football? When I said that sport has become separated from morality, I did not mean that athletes are, God forbid, immoral; rather, the discussion was about the dignity and ultimate end of sport and the independence of its order and organization from morality, even though its relationship with politics has become complicated, and this relationship can be considered critical. We have no shortage of footballers bound by morality and especially religious law, but the discussion here is about football, not the footballer. A footballer can prefer a moral, political, or religious act over watching football and even over playing.

*Yes, that is exactly how it is; for example, one of the national team players once said: If I were in the people's place, I would never leave the house in this cold to watch football.

Perhaps he considers himself a part of football and feels less need to watch.

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Conversation with Reza Davari Ardakani on the Football Academy website, November 2016

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