According to Talimciler, in Turkey soccer is the true opium of the people. In the years after the 1980 coup, when political gatherings were barred, the government “used soccer to fill the vacuum left by politics.” And yet Çarşi, which formed during this time, developed many of the external characteristics of a political party. The group’s stands on national issues are reported in newspapers. Its representatives are invited to parliament and to political rallies. One senior member confessed to me that he was never really that into soccer, and had been drawn to Çarşi by its leftist social programs. Çarşi makes an interesting case study for Umberto Eco’s theory of soccer fanaticism, which he views as a systematic, one-to-one parody of political consciousness: you critique the record of soccer players instead of the record of parliament, second-guess the coach rather than the minister of finance. Sports thus drains the same resources—“possibilities of judgment, verbal aggressiveness, political competitiveness”—that the citizen would otherwise use for political debate.
Monday, November 30, 2015
Sports
There is no denying the appeal of sports. In each match there is a beginning, action, with instant justice meted out, and a finish leaving a winner or loser. The team sport seems a poor man's ballet in black and white summing up in just a few hours a macroscopic battle between little giants.Some of the battles are remembered for their fierce competition or a great upset,, but most just pass into a record book.
I read an article recently about turkish soccer which contained a quote by Umberto Eco about the nature of soccer which, it seems, could be applied to all sports:
According to Talimciler, in Turkey soccer is the true opium of the people. In the years after the 1980 coup, when political gatherings were barred, the government “used soccer to fill the vacuum left by politics.” And yet Çarşi, which formed during this time, developed many of the external characteristics of a political party. The group’s stands on national issues are reported in newspapers. Its representatives are invited to parliament and to political rallies. One senior member confessed to me that he was never really that into soccer, and had been drawn to Çarşi by its leftist social programs. Çarşi makes an interesting case study for Umberto Eco’s theory of soccer fanaticism, which he views as a systematic, one-to-one parody of political consciousness: you critique the record of soccer players instead of the record of parliament, second-guess the coach rather than the minister of finance. Sports thus drains the same resources—“possibilities of judgment, verbal aggressiveness, political competitiveness”—that the citizen would otherwise use for political debate.
According to Talimciler, in Turkey soccer is the true opium of the people. In the years after the 1980 coup, when political gatherings were barred, the government “used soccer to fill the vacuum left by politics.” And yet Çarşi, which formed during this time, developed many of the external characteristics of a political party. The group’s stands on national issues are reported in newspapers. Its representatives are invited to parliament and to political rallies. One senior member confessed to me that he was never really that into soccer, and had been drawn to Çarşi by its leftist social programs. Çarşi makes an interesting case study for Umberto Eco’s theory of soccer fanaticism, which he views as a systematic, one-to-one parody of political consciousness: you critique the record of soccer players instead of the record of parliament, second-guess the coach rather than the minister of finance. Sports thus drains the same resources—“possibilities of judgment, verbal aggressiveness, political competitiveness”—that the citizen would otherwise use for political debate.
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