I used to think that the worst thing about soccer was that it taught people to hate each other. After all, I thought, how much difference can there be between someone who lives in Liverpool and someone who lives in Manchester? Milanese football fans are not so different that the “rivalry” between Milan and Inter is anything but contrived. Seattle vs Portland reads like identical groups of PNW hipsters making up a fake internecine conflict just to have something to do on the weekends. Soccer, I used to think, had a capacity to take two groups of people who were basically alike and incite them to hate one another, and in so doing canceled out some of the good it otherwise creates in the world.
I don’t believe that soccer teaches us to hate people anymore. Rather, I’ve come to the conclusion that soccer provides a platform for prejudice that’s already there. It provides a structure, amplification, competition and clear rules for how one side can “win.” You see this in any number of football rivalries around the world, from El Clásico to the Eternal Derby to the Old Firm. The hate was already there; soccer just gave it a scoreboard and a stadium.
The truth is that when you look closer, you see that many major football rivalries are rooted in very real social divides. Celtic vs Rangers is a cipher for sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants. Red Star Belgrade vs Partizan Belgrade grew out of competing anti-fascist youth movements in the post-war era. Liverpool vs Manchester United draws on the anxieties of industrial (and later post-industrial) British economy. And, of course, El Clásico is but the ritualization of violence by, and resistance to, a fascist regime that has not yet passed out of living memory.
I don’t know if any of the violence and resentments that make up El Clásico could be or will be replicated in an American soccer rivalry now that the United States has its own Caudillo in Donald J. Trump. I doubt it, because of Major League Soccer’s corporatism and sanitized respectability politics. If anything like that does develop, it’ll be as an undercurrent, something that can’t really be seen if you’re watching at home on MLS Soccer Sunday. It might even manifest in one of the rivalries that doesn’t get a lot of attention, like the Chicago Fire vs the Columbus Crew. What better expression of the Red-Blue divide in this country than a rivalry between deep-blue Chicago and deep-red central Ohio? (Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Clinton didn’t get the blowout in Cook County you’d think she should have, while Franklin County was one of the few blue patches in Ohio.) Still, if you’re looking for our country’s political and cultural divisions to play out in domestic club soccer, it might not look like what you’d expect.
This country remains bitterly divided, and the victors of this election cycle are gleefully spiking the ball by terrorizing the most vulnerable groups in our society. This election was, in most ways, a values election. Donald Trump ran on a platform of implied or explicit racism, misogyny, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and the use of violence and fear to achieve political goals. And while he did not win a plurality of the voters, he did win the election. Businesses are being defaced with swastikas and minority kids are being bullied at school and Pride flags are being burned because the bigots know that neither the government or “polite society” will stand in their way now. Between a newly-antagonistic federal government with little respect for the First Amendment and an electorate who are either all-in on white supremacy or are willing to look the other way, marginalized people in this country are in grave danger. And safety pins notwithstanding, those of us who are marginal and oppressed in this new political climate are probably on our own.
I spent a lot of time last week wondering if I can even do this job anymore. There was a lengthy moment where I couldn’t come up with an argument for why writing about soccer isn’t superfluous in a time when democratic values hang in the balance. How could I possibly write about Cristiano Ronaldo’s lifetime deal with Nike The Republic is on fire! On a personal level, I came out of this election feeling like there’s a sort of countdown clock for me. As if there will come a day when government agents arrive in the night to take me to mandatory conversion therapy where I will be electrocuted until they believe I’m no longer queer. And that’s if my fellow citizens don’t get to me first. If I indeed don’t have much time left, how can I justify writing about soccer?