sla book review: global and local football

global and local football

Reviewed by David Kilpatrick, Mercy College

JANUARY 22, 2009 archive

The Global Game

Lovers of the Beautiful Game have had to clear valuable shelf space for the excellent volumes to appear of late. To mention just two released to American readers in the past year, The Ball is Round, by David Goldblatt, and The Global Game, edited by John Turnbull, Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab, are milestone works that broaden the historical and literary appreciation, respectively, of the world's most popular team sport. Readers attracted to the title of Gary Armstrong and Jon P. Mitchell's Global and Local Football might be disappointed to discover this work doesn't aim at the breadth or depth of the aforementioned titles. Indeed, the subtitle, "Politics and Europeanisation on the Fringes of the EU" fails to communicate the narrow focus of Armstrong and Mitchell's work: the soccer scene/s on the island republic of Malta. Some online booksellers (e.g., Amazon, Barnes and Noble) are (already) listing the text as "Global and Local Football in Malta" [emphasis mine], giving potential readers a much better idea of what they might be getting themselves into with this book.

What Armstrong and Mitchell provide is a view of Malta through the lens of soccer as well as a strong sense of how Maltese view (and play) soccer. They are cultural anthropologists using the "fieldwork concept" of "participant observation," and one is hard-pressed to find a more pleasurable research methodology than cheering and chatting in the stadiums and soccer pubs of the Mediterranean island. Written in the wake of Malta's vote to join the European Union, those who think of Malta merely in relation to the shipwreck of St. Paul or film's falcon learn quickly of the post-colonial challenges facing an island culture forged from Italian, British and Roman Catholic influences.

Given these influences, it is no surprise that Maltese share a passion for soccer. What is surprising is how impoverished and inferior the sport is in contrast with not just most of Europe but the rest of the woorld. On a densely populated island only seventeen miles by nine miles at its extremities, the lack of adequate playing space is just part of the reason why clubs, such as Sliema Wanderers and Hamrun Spartans, can't compete with their counterparts playing in the English Premier League or Italy's Serie A. The ten teams in the Maltese Premier League play all their games in just three stadia; the men's national team currently ranks 49 out of 53 European nations and 148 out of the 201 nations ranked by FIFA.

American soccer fans (whose men's national team is currently ranked 22nd best in the world; women ranked 1st) often argue whether or not the domestic men's top-flight, Major League Soccer, is worthy of attention. Thanks to the Internet, ESPN, Fox Soccer Channel, GolTV and Setanta Sports, "Europhiles" need never leave their couch to watch the world's best compete each weekend. MLS doesn't so much compete with the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL as with the other major soccer leagues just a click away. The domestic inferiority complex that fetishizes the foreign - where the global threatens the local - makes the state of soccer on Malta an interesting parallel to that of the US.

Arguing that Malta is essentially a "nationless state" (21), Armstrong and Mitchell are as penetrating and informative on the "postmodern fandom" (163) of clubs devoted to English and Italian teams as they are looking at the sport at the grassroots level. The fan clubs of Manchester United, Inter Milan and Juventus regularly attract crowds of 500 to watch games via satellite, not that much less than the live attendance at many Maltese Premier League matches, which aren't broadcast on television. These emerging trends in identity formation through the multimedia access to global sport are perhaps more pronounced in Malta, where allegiance to English or Italian sports teams might make as much if not more cultural sense than concern for domestic play, but they hint at the future of sport in our increasingly compressed and connected world.

Corruption colors much of the picture Armstrong and Mitchell paint of the game as played on the pitches of Malta. Cheating is institutionalized to such a horrid degree that "crowds at big matches are as concerned with identifying which players or officials have been 'bought' as with the quality of football played" (71). And the quality itself, as they describe, leaves much to be desired:

An observer can watch Premier games and note that matches are played, on occasion, at virtually walking pace, with minimal off-the-ball movement. The tempo of the match is so slow because the players' physical fitness is poor. This is a result of their part-time status as well as their social habits . . . The majority of Maltese players are technically competent but a flamboyant "Latino style" is evident in a penchant for melodrama. Players fall over after minimal contact and remain on the ground for several minutes. (96-97)

Small wonder then if the reader finds the history they give of the rising and falling fortunes of Maltese clubs as tedious as reading the genealogies of strangers. That they detail salaries, club finances, etc. with figures in Lm (Maltese lira) is all the more frustrating given the switch to the euro in 2008. The authors care about Malta and care about soccer but make it hard, at times, to care much for Maltese soccer.

Much more interesting are the portraits they provide of the "big-men" who dominate the game, such as Michael Zammit-Tabona. Although for a time he invested his energies and finances into taking Naxxar into the highest levels of the local game, the depth of his connections with Manchester United were ultimately of more interest to him, and this reader. None of the "big-men" are more influential, or more controversial, than the current President of the Maltese Football Association, Joe Mifsud, whose connections with the European and world soccer governing bodies (UEFA & FIFA) make him a significant figure on a global stage that has no shortage of shady characters, the international cast of sport administrators. While outlining numerous accusations facing Mifsud, and establishing the insider's status he enjoys among the most powerful leaders of the world's most popular entertainment industry, Armstrong and Mitchell never give their own assessment. Instead, they give their "villain" the final word, Mifsud telling them, in a quasi-philosophical dismissal of his critics: "the just man sins seven times a day - imagine the number of sins committed by those of us who are not just" (197). The authors don't bother to comment. Their epilogue, dominated by an interview with Mifsud without their own critical response, leaves readers to form their own conclusions.

Certainly not aimed at a general readership, Global and Local Football is an insightful and valuable case study in the sociology and anthropology of modern sport. Armstrong and Mitchell show the crucial role sport, especially the sport of soccer, plays in the formation of post-colonial and postmodern cultural identities. But there is more to this work in what it doesn't accomplish but seems to long for, to try to share in some way with the emergence of new modes of writing with or about sport, hinted at in brief passages. There are moments when objective academic writing breaks into personal narrative, when direct observations are rendered in italics. In these moments, the passion of the game and the authors' fascination with their subject, the sense of play that informs and inspires their project, is found.

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