Football has evolved historically and its place in society is no longer the same. But what exactly are the current functions carried by the most popular sport in history? Mahdi Amri’s response on Mizane.info.
I have never been against football. This precision matters to me, not for the sake of justification, but out of loyalty to myself and my own journey. In recent weeks, while rereading some of my columns, I understood how a quick, superficial reading could lead one to believe that I harbored hostility towards this game. But that would be a personal untruth.
What I criticize, what I distance, is not football as a human practice, but its progressive slide towards a form of ideological and political instrumentalization which has ended up making it carry a weight that is not its own. Football, in my personal history, is first and foremost a childhood memory, a modest, imperfect, but sincere space, where we played without geopolitical awareness, without slogans, without national stories to defend. I was that kid who had neither the flamboyant talent nor the consistency of future good players. I rarely played, once a week at most, sometimes less.
The discreet joy of not being in the center
Too little to progress, too little to prevail. I was the slightly out of step child, too studious, too cerebral, sometimes overweight, often observant. Football, at that time, was neither a dream of success nor a substitute for identity. It was a clumsy attempt to blend into the group, to share a common moment without having to explain what I thought about the world.
He taught me something essential: you could belong without being excellent, participate without dominating, exist without performance. Much later, I would understand that this silent, almost innocuous lesson had been more formative than many speeches, because it passed through the body, through the assumed imperfection, through the discreet joy of not being at the center.
In 2006, when I began my thesis, I engaged in this work with almost excessive determination, convinced that daily rigor was the only possible path to success. The writing progressed quickly, too quickly perhaps, driven by enthusiasm mixed with anxiety. By 2007, I had already come a long way. I was planning a defense in spring 2009.
Football is no longer entertainment
Everything seemed clear, controlled, programmed. But the body no longer followed. Exhaustion set in silently, without visible drama, without spectacular collapse. An exhaustion specific to long, solitary, demanding work, where we converse more with our ideas than with people. I then asked myself a simple and dizzying question: how to stop without giving up? How to take a break without breaking the thread? How to withdraw temporarily without betraying the project? The response was neither heroic nor rational. I suspended, momentarily, the rigorous but now stifling daily process of writing.
In Bordeaux, I started going out again, seeing friends, living in the city other than through the prism of the thesis. Place de la Victoire has become familiar territory. Cafés, useless discussions, shared silences have taken over from libraries. We watched matches, a lot of matches, not to look for a hidden meaning, but to temporarily forget the weight of meaning. We played it too, once or twice a week, just enough to tire the body and relax the mind.
A counter-fire to social protest?
Football, at this precise moment in my life, was neither an ideological refuge nor an irresponsible escape. It was a valve, a breathing space, a very simple way of reminding the body that it still existed, that it was not just a support for thought. This parenthesis did not distance me from the thesis; it brought me back differently, with less rigidity, more lucidity, and a finer understanding of my own limits.
As the years passed, however, I began to notice a profound change. Not in the game itself, but in the way society viewed it. Football gradually ceased to be simple entertainment to become a device, a mass emotional language, a space where belongings, oppositions and simplified stories were created. I have seen how, almost everywhere in the world, political and media powers have learned to capture this raw energy, to channel it, to exploit it.
Individuals, tired by difficult living conditions, sometimes deprived of real spaces for demands, found themselves emotionally connected to matches, to victories, to defeats which became symbolically more important than their own existences. While social rights eroded, while work became more precarious, while inequalities widened, football offered a ready-made dramaturgy. I have seen insults become commonplace, hatred disguised as passion, the adversary becoming a moral enemy, and victory serving as symbolic compensation for very real impotences.
Football, the new opium of the people
Is this a game? Is this how it should be experienced? I felt a resistance growing within me, not against football, but against this metamorphosis, against this reduction of human existence to a few programmed collective emotions. My criticism then became clearer: I was not anti-football, I was anti-diversion, anti-confiscation of meaning. Football, in my eyes, has no essential connection with patriotism. It is neither a proof of national value nor a justification of hatred. It is a game, and it is precisely its fragility that makes it beautiful. To impose ideological burdens on him is to condemn him to lose what made him human.
My love for football is not a blind love. It is a lucid love, sometimes worried, sometimes nostalgic, but deeply honest. A love that knows that personal development, dignity through work, the ability to claim one’s rights, cannot be replaced by cries of victory or tears of defeat. Football can accompany a life; it must never replace it. And if it helped me breathe one day, I refuse to allow it to serve to dull consciences for a long time. This, without contradiction, is my love for football.
Mahdi Amri
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