Euro 2016 feels too ‘sanitised' and this reflects a larger trend in football

Lens is a little, sleepy town, almost a hamlet. There is next to nothing, but a branch of the Louvre, an outpost of fancy Parisian art. The houses are small and workman-like. The town is steeped in mining history, but today Lens reflects the industry’s demise, plagued by a high unemployment rate. The Stade Bollaert-Delelis, together with two monumental slag heaps, towers above the skyline, akin to a large space vessel stranded in a no-man’s-land. The stadium has four large stands with a steep rake and a white roof. Ahead of Euro 2016 the stadium was given a face-lift to conform with UEFA norms and welcome fans from across Europe, but, as is the case with all stadiums at the European Championship, it feels too ‘sanitised’. Sanitisation is a larger trend in the game, not just in stadiums. [caption id=“attachment_2856586” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Croatia fans during the Round of 16 match versus Portugal at the Stade Bollaert-Delelis, Lens, France. Reuters[/caption] Of the ten venues at Euro 2016, four have been newly built with only Bollaert-Delelis, the Stade the Parc de Princes, the Stade Geoffrey-Guichard and the Stade Velodrome boasting a rich footballing history. The venues are no longer old grounds, with beer-sodden standing terraces and expletives-laden chants, but rather nice and neat corporate palaces, where tickets must be paid with the right credit card and drinks can only purchased from the right top tier sponsor. You can’t bring a bottle of water into the stadium. In the corporate mindset of UEFA, fans are often cattle, to be milked for profit. They slog their way across France, a feeling too familiar to media and officials reliant on public transport, often in the wee hours of the night, and stay at shabby, overpriced hotels. Fans happily fork out money to attend the European Championship. Today, UEFA considers supporters as ‘fan customers.’ That corporatism, a worldview of football in the neoliberal age, envisages a different fandom – a middle class of lawyers, doctors and architects and their families, who go to the ground to enjoy a day out, but who are, in general, not emotionally invested in the game. For them, football is not a serious life, but merely a game to be ‘consumed’ with crisps and a soda at the weekend, at best, an expression of 90-minute patriotism to then return to the grind of every day life, as notes Alexander Shea in renowned football quarterly The Blizzard. A true fan is different: football matters and triggers deep emotions, asymmetrical to the daily routine of getting up for work and switching on the TV after hours. He seeks a community, in a post-modern society a rare commodity, because when do French, Portuguese or Swedes have a communal experience? The political scientist Benedict Anderson argues that, in a large society one will never meet the vast majority of those who claim to have the same identity as us – an Englishmen from Brighton cannot meet all his fellow Frenchmen – and thus a sense of community is produced not by face-to-face interaction, but in the collective imagination. Football is the perfect lubricant, on TV or in the stadium. Everyone has a plural identity today – I am an Arsenal supporter, a journalist and a middle-class boy with a working-class upbringing – and football offers that one platform of shared emotions, at the same time, at the same place, all revolving around 22 grown men kicking a ball back and forth. During the first round of Euro 2016, TV ratings have gone through the roof again – 14.4 million French watched the opening game on TF1, 14 million Brits watched England’s last group game on ITV – and the attendance rate in stadiums is about 95 percent. Football is always, also politics – at Albania versus Switzerland game in Lens, the main talking point was not the 90 minutes, but the Xhaka brothers playing for different sides, questioning the varying degrees of ‘Swissness’ in today’s diverse Switzerland. The Croatian fans, at least a radical hard-core unit, ran riot in Paris to protest the wheelings and dealings of their corrupt FA, with the explicit aim of getting their country expelled of the tournament. They didn’t repeat their actions against Portugal, presumably groggy after 117 minutes of atrocious football. UEFA, the European football governing body, wants its tournament to be de-politicised. Fans must come, but without a context. Global branding requires hollowness. Top clubs Barcelona, Manchester United, Real Madrid, PSG and Bayern Munich excel at commodifying their brands. They sanitise their identity in a vulgar, compulsive pursuit of profit, excluding any possible narrative to the club. Stadiums become soulless corporate cathedrals and fans conformism the norm. Apart from the rambunctious support of fans of smaller nations, Euro 2016 is another fine case in point.