This summer it will be 30 years since an event that helped inspire what is still one of the most deliciously moreish football books in English.
Football Against the Enemy is a collection of excellent, energetically compiled essays by Simon Kuper. It can seem a little dated in parts now, postcards from a world still shrouded in pre-internet mist but in a week of apparently irresolvable moral confusion over Pep Guardiola, yellow ribbons and all that, it also feels like a point of illuminating contrast.
At which point the pages rustle, the screen dissolves and we are back at the 1988 European Championship. It is hard to get a sense of the unsettling emotional power of the Netherlands’ defeat of West Germany, the feelings of delighted surprise as a fine team saw off one of the more sharp-elbowed West Germanys.
Ruud Gullit ran the semi-final in Hamburg, striding about with such regal ease you half expected to look down and notice he had spent the last 90 minutes playing in tails, top hat and wing collar. Marco van Basten scored the winner at the end. People in Amsterdam threw bicycles in the air shouting “we’ve got our bikes back”, a reference to the transport-thieving crimes of the Nazi occupation during the second world war.
Kuper, then in his early twenties, notes all this with an amused but also quietly brutal note of fascination. Asked about the morality of holding this generation of West German footballers to account for the sins of the past, one Dutch celebrant notes: “Well, they had the wrong ancestors”.
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It is a little startling to read this without qualification or apology. Looking back at these tales of South American despots, African superstition and European geopolitics two things leap out.
First, that lost world of 20th-century certainties, including the largely non-nuanced role of football. Forty years on from the war it really was still OK to speak openly about fearing and secretly loathing West Germany.
Rightly or wrongly, those teams of merciless, mullet-headed, pre-unification win-bastards were strangely upsetting for many people. Rudi Völler appears on the front cover of Kuper’s paperback, a picture taken just as Frank Rijkaard is about to plant a wonderfully viscous spume of flob in the ringlets around Völler’s left ear.
Völler is a nice man. These days he would probably be playing for Liverpool or Chelsea, a popular global citizen of the Premier League. Back then, seen only in glimpses, all puffed chest and bristling moustache, he was a strangely upsetting figure, an object of lurking trans-European outrage. Apologies to those without these old dark corners. It does seem odd and is no doubt wrong to have lingered on these things so recently but these feelings did exist and at the time football seemed a pretty good means of expressing them; a way of engaging, cathartically, with the enemy.
The second thing about the book is the total collapse of this basic premise. Football Against The Enemy is a great title. It expresses the idea that football exists as a part of society’s wider cultural oppositions. It also captures something profound about the sport itself, the idea of football as a point of resistance against control and oppression, a strand of the counter-culture, with its own distinct moral authority.
Which is another example of how violently things have changed. What is the enemy exactly? Where does it live? To anyone born after Kuper’s book was published football is not a part of the counter-culture. It is the culture itself, a tool of the overclass, another adjunct of corporate life with all its compromises and vested interest.
Hence the state of gabbling confusion over Guardiola and that ribbon, a minor political stand that has become tangled in talk of compromise. Guardiola believes in freedom and self-determination. He is also employed by Abu Dhabi and has been an ambassador for Qatar, both of which are oppressive regimes with poor human rights records.
Because this is football, where someone must always win and be right, a cacophony of voices will talk with absolute certainty about this. Pep is wrong. He has the freedom to choose and is a rich man so he must be a hypocrite. Pep is right. Let’s buy yellow ribbons of our own and have our political views on a hugely complex subject decided by which team we support.
There is no easy answer. Thirty years ago, the manager of Manchester City supporting the non-detention of politicians in his homeland would have been a robust standpoint untainted by association. But everyone is compromised now, nobody is untouched by the hidden interests, the regime-cruelty at two removes, the nation-state geopolitics that have taken over much of the top end of football.
Hence the utter nonsense of declaring politics should stay out of sport. This is not a neutral system. Refusing to make any comment, consuming this managed status quo without question is a powerful political statement in itself. If we really want to take politics out we are going to have to stop calling Arsenal’s stadium the Emirates, cancel the next two World Cups and ban Paris Saint-Germain from European football.
In the middle of which, a man wearing a ribbon starts to look seductively simple or at least no more confusing and compromised than disliking Völler because of the war; or, at the very least, a personal choice with a recognisable goal in mind, a case of football, even from within the belly of the beast, taking some kind of stand against the enemy.