By Mad Man
As a sports journalist, sports fan and all-round sports everything, I’ve seen how crucial Zimbabwe’s smaller clubs are to the heartbeat of our communities.
I’ve been wondering if part of the collective experience will be remembering what it feels like, and what it means, to be part of a crowd.
Our very own Castle Premier Soccer League started a couple of weeks ago, and it resumed in a world changed irrevocably by the specter of coronavirus. Like many of us who have not been able to consume our football over the past 18 months due to lock downs et al, it seems that there will be a psychological and physical distance to travel as our supporters return to various stadia across the country.
I’ve been wondering if part of the collective experience will be remembering what it feels like, and what it means, to be part of a crowd. Whether we will only fully realise in those moments what has been missing from our lives – as we begin to feel a much broader definition of belonging in a world that has been reduced to the family unit, endless Zoom calls and countless, nameless delivery drivers.
For almost two years many if not all football fan in Zimbabwe would try to get their football fix by watching the English Premier league. I desperately wanted to feel part of the crowd and yet never truly did. I would make the 20-minute walks to a friend’s house to watch SuperSport 3 from the ‘Couch End’!
A Premier League or Champions League game always felt like a high-definition experience, watching multimillionaires shipped in from around the globe elegantly move around a perfect playing surface.
It lacked the emotional element of feeling connected to the people around us. I would often reflect, from our seats high along the halfway line, how similar it felt to watching video game characters move around a screen. It felt like a shared purchase rather than shared experience, because we knew most of the crowd would scatter widely once the game finished.
It is not that foreign football clubs are not community institutions, rather that they have a whole other life beyond their communities as global corporations. You can be an Arsenal fan from New York or Gwanda, but that relationship has a completely different weight if the club represents where your family lives. It’s why Triangle Football Club, in their community stadium, winning a game at home, felt like a compelling symbol of what could be possible.
As I have grown older, I have become personally preoccupied with the idea of place and where you are from. For all the positives that neo-liberalism has ushered in, we have undoubtedly been seduced by the mantra of competitive individualism, the prioritisation of higher education, individual mobility and the idea that rising tides will raise all boats.
In reality we crave a sense of community deep in our DNA and have been wrong to fully believe the high priests of globalisation, who dismissed people who felt a strong connection to their local community. They said there was nothing to be done about post-industrial places that became collateral damage as capital sought higher and higher returns and ignored the towns built on coal, steel, fishing. As we have seen in our football politics, people are no longer willing to be ignored.
It’s a truism to state that local clubs represent their communities in a different way to the ambitious lepers who sometimes get thrust upon us by an ignorant electorate that cares very little about what happens to the game. I think the questions of what, how and why those differences exist can and should be partly answered as part of some sort of Commission of Inquiry into local football, and also in a new initiative on the way the game is run.
Of all the points being discussed, it seems to I that the most important is the somewhat trite notion that when we talk about community in the context of football clubs, the most important one is the physical gathering of people in one place at one time to share an experience. There are countless other ways to be connected to clubs, but in an increasingly atomised world the idea of physical community isn’t something we often contemplate.
Capitalism’s original success was partly down to the localised nature of enterprise and the civic institutions that existed as a counterweight to its worst excesses. In today’s public discourse, whether through the idea of “levelling up” or place-based initiatives, there seems to be a recognition that there is truth in this idea and that we need to correct these absences as a political priority. And yet how exactly we do this, and who is pulling the levers, isn’t entirely clear yet.
One thing that is clear is that it will not be achieved by communities being passive recipients of football strategy or consumers of football services. Rather it will be a central challenge set and supported by communities anchored by the only vested interest that matters: is football being played and played well!
It seems that we are occupying a post-something space in terms of our football politics, values and sense of identity. For me, this opens up an opportunity: a shared identity despite all our differences would be a potent symbol of our football development and growth, and a chance to redefine what we want to become and how we want to be heard and represented. An opportunity for us all to redefine values that are and must not be purely economic. Like many political movements before us, it can start with belonging to a crowd and wanting to be heard.
It is clear to me that one of the few institutions that have endured and still have such potency are professional football teams. Highlanders FC has a 95-year history and a committed, if somewhat diminished, following today. The team can still engender a sense of belonging and an identity that goes beyond the performance of 11 men in black and white on a Sunday afternoon. And that sense of belonging is undoubtedly intensified through physical proximity on a matchday.
Exactly how those bonds can be further encouraged and amplified is a question we can try to answer together. @madmanofsport
