One fact that caught my attention in the opening session of the World Cup in Qatar is that ten of the eleven players in the host team were not of Qatari origin. The regime could build seven ultra-modern stadiums, spend two hundred billion dollars, buy FIFA from more than ten years ago with petrodollars, or try to launder a regime as Russia, China, or Videla's Argentina have previously done.
But they had no players and they also bought them by offering them nationalization. The stadiums will remain, the struggle of the participants to play a dignified role, a final champion and the discovery of new stars that will be parading through the desert heat-proof stadiums.
Modern sport is largely England's gift to the world. To the historian A.J.P. I heard Taylor say on the BBC one day that when England's influence has evaporated, the legacy that will remain will be the invention of football and the parliamentary monarchy. The first has been a great success and the second has had a much more fragile and limited following.
One day in 1863, a group of athletes who had studied at different colleges in Oxford and Cambridge met in a London pub to codify a game of eleven men against eleven others, establishing a series of confusing and complex rules. That meeting had as much historical relevance as the Battle of Waterloo, the Anglican Reformation or the birth of the industrial revolution that Marx witnessed in Lancashire and reflected in his extensive work written on a second floor in the London neighborhood of Soho.
The Marxist writer Eric Hobsbawm recounts in his essay War and Peace in the 21st Century that the spread of cricket and baseball was an imperial phenomenon, since it is only played where British soldiers or US Marines were once stationed. But that doesn't explain the triumph of global sports like soccer, tennis or golf among executives. All of them were British innovations during the 19th century, like practically all sports played internationally. Football, invented in the 19th century by some English gentlemen, has become, thanks to transnational television, an industrial complex on a global scale in which identity emotions are deposited in hymns, flags, the movement of players who become millionaires if they are in the suitable country and an economically powerful club.
Since the 1995 Bosman ruling of the European Court of Justice, the players' movement has launched its networks throughout the wide world to the point that, in many cases, the national teams are a gathering of millionaires who wear the patriotic jersey few times a year and in international competitions in countries such as the world championships. The largest fishing ground is Africa, where at the moment it is estimated that more than three thousand Africans play in the European leagues in their different divisions alone. For the big stars, the clubs are more important than the national teams of their own country, although no player gives up on them.
But the national identity of the states or peoples that aspire to be so is stronger than the economic component of soccer geniuses. Messi, for example, will not crown his career as the best player in history if he fails to win a World Cup, which Maradona did.
Qatar is a mock national team, as could be seen in the match that opened the competition against a very solid and cohesive Ecuador.
The transnational business logic, points out the historian Hobsbawm, has undermined the genuine sporting value of soccer, which has become big business and a catalyst for feelings that can be bought by states that navigate on petrodollars and that have penetrated various European national competitions with unaffordable capital for historic clubs with more modest resources.
National football, according to Pierre Brochard, is the last refuge of the old world and the transnational, the springboard of the ultraliberalism of the new world. Qatar should be framed in the context that almost everything can be achieved with money, but in an ephemeral and superficial way without the human factor counting for much.
