The Ball is Round

[F]ootball expresses the Faustian bargain that all modern societies have made with the forces of money and power. ... The logic of the market is to price, buy and sell everything.  Can your health be priced?  The market will try.  Can dignity or loyalty be bought?  Money will ask the question.

Football, in its transition from a chaotic folk ritual to a sector of the global entertainment industry, has encountered the same dilemma. ... The bottom line for those who follow football, is not calculated in money or power, but in victories and pleasures.  But spectac[le]s require backers, the circus must be paid for.

It is not just the bureaucrats and the moneymen, the cynical professionals and opportunist politicians who must make their deal, but everyone who plays, watches and follows football.  We want to see the best professionals play at the highest level, but we cannot bear that their wages might diminish their heart and their hunger.  We want to see grace and invention, but we will settle at half-time for a single grubby point.  We want pantomime crooks and villains as club owners, but we also want them to obey the health and safety laws.  We hate the way the media barons try to buy the game, but we pay our subscriptions anyway. ... Football, the game the world plays, offers a metaphor for the dilemmas that sit at the very centre of any moral framework or political programme that takes the reformation rather than the abolition of modernity as its starting point.

-- David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer

I used to struggle to couch my appreciation of soccer in a grand transatlantic socio-cultural critique.  These days, I just want to beat Portland.