Last week I was in Tanzania for this year’s Times charity appeal (of which more later in the month). I flew to Dar es Salaam, on the east coast and then drove ten hours inland, culminating at Idodi, a charming but desperately poor village on the border of the fabled Ruaha National Park, a vast area of savage and compelling beauty.
In Idodi there is no running water, no industry, no electricity. Light is obtained in the evenings using kerosene lamps. Food is provided by subsistence farming. Housing is of the stone and mud hut variety, with more than a dozen often living in only a couple of rooms. Clothing is a mix of old and new, with the Masai wearing elaborate and colourful wraps and carrying long staffs.
In short, Idodi is a place not merely separated from the West in terms of geography, but in almost every other conceivable way. Arriving in the village was not merely to land on a different continent but to inhabit a different epoch. This is a different culture, a different climate, a different modus operandi, a different set of values and traditions. A place with different perspectives and wholly different challenges.
But there is — and this is the point of this preamble — one powerful and irrepressible aspect of familiarity. Football.
Many have written eloquently about the transcendentalism of what is sometimes called “the beautiful game”. About how one can travel to any corner of this diverse planet and find a shared devotion to the sport of kicking a bladder between sticks. Football has become the universal language, the lingua franca, the one common theme in a world divided in so many ways.
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Indeed, so familiar are we with the universality of this British invention that we are no longer astounded by its scope. But we should be. When future historians look back at the age of globalisation, it is not the Americanisation of the planet’s culture that will amaze them most, nor the pervading presence of brands such as Coca-Cola and Nike. No, it is the global conquest of football.
As I walked two miles north from the village to the local secondary school, avoiding snakes and scorpions in the long grass, I reached a large clearing comprised of gravel and sand. Two schoolboy teams stood in the middle of the space kitted out in blue and red. The ball was not quite round, the goals were branches shackled together with rope and there were no lines to demarcate the areas of the pitch.
But this was football. Both teams played 4-4-2 and, although there was the familiar schoolboy tendency to chase the ball, there was also tremendous skill and athleticism and a keen defensive awareness of how to exploit the offside rule. The ebb and flow of the game, its tempo and intensity, the euphoric goal celebrations, were instantly familiar. As was the tribalism of the fans, classmates of the players, many of whom had walked up to 30km to watch the match.
Afterwards I talked to the referee, an English speaker and Arsenal fan.
I told him that I had been at the Emirates Stadium to watch Arsenal play Tottenham Hotspur the previous Saturday and he broke into a wide grin, talking of his admiration for Cesc Fàbregas and the visionary management of Arsène Wenger. “How do you watch the matches?” I asked. “Oh, there is a small generator in the village that powers a television set,” he said. “We get all the Premier League matches. It is the only thing that the whole village likes to watch.”
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We are often told that the media churns out too much football. Why is there nothing else on our television sets and on the sports pages of the newspapers? Why are we force-fed this stuff when there are so many other sports deserving of coverage?
But the more we examine the phenomenon, the more we can see the absurdity of this alleged media conspiracy. Football is not loved because the media feeds it to us; the media feeds it to us because it is loved. Editors are merely reflecting the passions of their viewers and readers; they are reflecting something deep in the game itself that draws every strand of humanity to its spectacle.
Even China, a nation that has studiously resisted other Western imports such as democracy and free speech, has been seduced by football. Last year, during the Olympic Games in Beijing, I was in conversation with the coach of the China table tennis team and, rather smugly, asked him the extent to which our sport continued to dominate the airwaves and culture. “Oh no,” he said, earnestly. “Table tennis is the No 2 sport now. Football gets many more viewers and far more money.”
But what is it about this simple team game that has captivated our planet? Why does it cut a swath through our anthropological differences and cultural idiosyncrasies? Few would dispute that boxing and athletics are more primal, gymnastics and ice dance more aesthetic, baseball and cricket more intricate. And yet all are confined to small pockets of devotion and none is able to command the assent of the nations of the world.
Many have sought to explain the popularity of football with reference to its tribalism. They seek to comprehend its appeal in the sense of community provided by fandom. But this cannot be the whole story. Partisanship is central to the meaning of most competitive enterprises: cricket, rugby, whatever. The reason that football is able to evoke more powerfully our deep yearning for shared experiences is because there are so many of us who want to watch it in the first place.
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But why? Wenger has said that football is art and it is in this sentiment that we must ultimately glimpse its transcendental appeal. Watching football, whether at the Emirates or in a gravel clearing in rural Tanzania, permits access to a set of patterns and formations, intricate threads of pass and move, a constant flow of skirmish and retreat. We are ravished not merely by football’s competitive intensity but by its kaleidoscopic geometry. It is at once more complex and more coherent than anything from the imagination of Jackson Pollock.
When I returned to Dar es Salaam, I asked the manager of my hotel if there was somewhere local to watch the afternoon matches. He recommended a pub a few minutes’ walk from the hotel. As I approached the entrance, a small group of Masai were also going inside. On the walls of the pub were paintings of African inspiration: bold, vivid and knowingly grotesque. I caught the eye of one of the Masai as I was examining the artwork and I could sense his curiosity as to whether I found it congenial. To be honest, I did not, but then, I suspect, the Masai would not be enthralled by what they would perceive as the drab realism of Constable or Turner.
Then, after a few minutes, the match between Manchester City and Burnley kicked off. Burnley attacked, City defended, and then the roles were thrillingly reversed. We, each of us, cheered at the same moments, were enraged by the same controversies, were mesmerised by the same detonations of skill and gasped with the very same breath as Burnley equalised in the dying moments. For 90 minutes, we were united in a deep and shared appreciation.
As the final whistle blew I looked at them, they looked at me and we exchanged broad and knowing smiles. And, as we did so, I was hit by the vivid realisation that a football pitch is less an arena than a canvass. On which is painted — in glorious and unpredictable colours — the universal art of humankind.