Game as Conflict – The Racial Politics of Football

Jul 24, 2022 Gaming

Sport is employed as an expression of national pride and prowess on an ongoing basis, but particularly sometimes of collective national anxiety. In this context team sports be more crucial than individual sports from the nationalistic perspective, particularly when the team is representing the nation in place of a club. From a racial perspective; individual sporting encounters might have great psychological significance, particularly if they take devote highly combative sports e.g. boxing.

Throughout the so-called ‘Cold War’ the Olympic medal table was a way to obtain fierce competition involving the US and the Soviet Union (White Russian Empire) and the GDR (German Democratic Republic). This desperate want to top the medal table was the catalyst for the proliferation of the utilization of performance enhancing drugs by both the US (using a ‘free market’ capitalist methodology) and the Eastern bloc nations (using circumstances controlled methodology).

‘We’re probably the most evolved and human of most peoples/races. It’s our destiny to rule the Earth and everything above and beneath it. We can do anything that is required to maintain our dominant hegemonic position, including acts of genocide. Afrikans are in the positioning they occupy (economically, educationally, militarily, healthwise etc.) because of their inferiority (genetic and cultural) and the benefits of European intervention in Afrika (despite any past wrongdoings) have outweighed any detriment caused.’

‘Europeans have proven themselves utterly ruthless, untrustworthy, imperialistic, racist and intent upon world domination. Since they will not and cannot accept the equitable sharing of the Earth’s resources in accordance with the population sizes and needs of different sets of people on Earth they should be confronted and defeated by us. History has taught us that we cannot rely upon every other number of people to come to our aid.’

These completely different psychological positions 1xbet зеркало the collective or dominant, comparative; European and Afrikan responses to all facets of people activity, including sport. Whereas Europeans allow us a whole lexicon of words and phrases which bring together the psychology of war/killing/violence and sport e.g. ‘killer instinct’, ‘finish them off’, ‘hammer blow’, ‘sucker punch’, ‘kill off the opposition/game’ to describe events, even yet in non-violent sports, Afrikans do nothing more than mimic this aggressive way of sport having no indigenous cultural reservoir of such extreme sporting hostility to tap into. One of the most famous quotes in British sport originated from Bill Shankley, a former manager of Liverpool football club. When asked about the significance of football, Shankley said,

Association Football is the most used sport in the world. It’s played in every country in the world and virtually every country on the planet features a national team. Given this example; football generates a large amount of domestic and international media coverage and success becomes the origin of a great deal of national pride. It absolutely was even reported that the ceasefire was called to the civil war in the Ivory Coast for the duration of this country’s participation in the 2006 World Cup. Team sports are noticed to represent a nation’s culture and character far a lot more than individual sport and therefore as the most popular sport in the world just how a national team plays football is presented as telling the viewer a great deal about who and what that nation is like, their strengths and virtues, weaknesses and vices.