Gramsci's Game
Gramsci’s idea of football is certainly odd; the scholar Steve Jones describes the ol’ Italian’s mistake in the very first place, in suggesting football held no future in Italy, due to its Northern European ‘work ethic’. What else? Well, according to Gramsci, at a symbolic level of behaviour, football represents a capitalist society in flowing function. In the specialised, division of labour of roles across the pitch, football is described as crudely ‘individualistic’ and ‘hierarchical’. For Gramsci, this specialisation demands ‘initiative’; an initiative eagerly regulated by the rules upon which the game is structured, and to maintain the analogy with capitalist societies, the bourgeois bite of the law. Here, I think resides a painful, plaguing error of judgement, an error that decays the foundations of Gramsci’s argument in front of the reader’s eyes. The general, most basic rules of football are historically accepted; moments of tension surrounding the development of these