A European language

As the Champions League rolls round once again, Uefa's man in Brussels argues that football can help nourish a European sense of identity
February 29, 2008

Football has always offered a microcosm of society. As supporters and citizens, we watch our frustrations and hopes play out in the stadium. As the sport becomes ever more lucrative, we witness the same political and economic dynamics that have always driven our communities. In football too, the riches of a few contrast with the more modest resources of the many, and yet the various protagonists manage to live side by side, unequal but ultimately part of the same family. As for the players and fans, citizens of the football state, their occasional confrontation with bigotry and violence merely reflects the broader ills in our society.

As the British parliament scrutinises the new EU reform treaty, it is tempting to ask whether football also offers a microcosm of European integration. How does European football reflect—or perhaps even shape—our evolving European identity? Through our most popular and passionate sport, do we feel in any way "more European"? Or does football tend rather to nourish a more local sense of belonging?

The Champions League, Europe's main competition for professional football clubs, is an intriguing laboratory where millions of citizens express their identity in a very public manner. The players, too, with their own sense of belonging but increasingly uprooted, are also under the microscope. What can this great sporting experiment tell us? We might allow ourselves three simple observations.

First, most of the players competing in the Champions League demonstrate a degree of professional mobility rarely seen elsewhere in European society. The liberalisation of the player market, triggered by the European court of justice's 1995 Bosman ruling, has encouraged players to switch club and country in search of the best deal, while the richest clubs have inevitably lured the top talent. Most commentators would argue that such mobility has more to do with the hard-nosed economics of globalisation than the famed ability of sport to break through social barriers. Yet it seems reasonable to believe that, over time, the growing internationalisation of our club teams may influence how we—or at least the millions of European football supporters—perceive each other, ourselves and perhaps even Europe.

Second, we might be witnessing the gradual emergence of a European "public space." An elusive holy grail for believers in a post-national, political identity for our continent, a European public space involves the idea that citizens who share concerns can communicate directly across national boundaries. It would be absurd to suggest that the Champions League is succeeding where the European parliament has often failed, but the fact that millions of Europeans now watch the same games at the same time must surely count for something. According to Anthony King, author of The European Ritual—Football in the New Europe, the "symbols of the Champions League may be among the first European symbols to emerge."

Third, the dramatic events that take place on the pitch occupy thousands of conversations in offices, pubs and cafés across Europe. Football fans constitute an opinionated, vocal community, and every one has his or her view—and not only about the merits of the referee's decision to refuse that last-minute penalty, but also about the future of the sport and how it should be run. The emerging tensions between on the one hand, a liberal free-market Premier League that can countenance the staging of its games anywhere on the planet and on the other, its more rooted (and regulated) continental counterparts already suggest the new contours of a European debate on the governance of sport. If ever we do see the emergence of a European public space, the football community will make its own unique contribution to its conversation.

Sceptics may argue that all of this amounts to little more than another conquest for consumerism: more opportunities for the modern European shopper rather than the emergence of a more cosmopolitan citizen. But a more interesting response would be to argue that football comforts our sense of local belonging, as it always has, while simultaneously placing us in an enlarging European, and increasingly global, framework. If the first football clubs, born in the second half of the 19th century, gave the new urban workers of the industrial revolution a sense of identity—their home team—we have every reason to believe that football continues to play the same role. The social fragmentation of today's world is no less dramatic than the uprooting of our rural communities more than a hundred years ago. We still want and need our home team, even if its players increasingly come from abroad.

As the next stage of the Champions League kicks off, with fans arguing the toss on national quotas, the lure of foreign ownership and the prospects of England's new Italian manager, we begin yet another chapter in the history of Europe's most popular sport. The game has undergone dramatic change over the last ten years; it is hard to say how it will change over the next ten. We can be sure, however, that even as we idolise an ever-changing line-up of exotic talent, we will still be cheering for the home team.