Frankly, Mr Shankly, It All Sounds Like Politics To Me

Over the course of my football-watching lifetime, politics and the beautiful game have usually only ever crossed swords in times of crisis. Stadium disaster? Supporters rioting? All of a sudden football is thrown blinking into the public glare, scrutinised and condemned as ministers and public figures weigh in with, often unwanted, opinion. That's not to say that such horrid events don't warrant top level scrutiny – they do and quite rightly always will; a vastly profitable commodity, now the possession of the young and the old, the rich and the poor, football must of course be taken to task when matters of health, safety and, in the most dire of circumstances, mortality rear their ugly heads. Much good has come from these clashes – football hauled itself out of the dark ages thanks in part to clean, accessible all-seater stadiums, better policing and an intolerance towards the blood-chilling racism pre-eminent in grounds across the country during the 70s and 80s.

So can we see a pattern forming? The twin planets of football and politics almost inevitably collide only when the former's image is face down in the mud. To read this week that Brazilian legends Romario and Bebeto have become fully paid-up politicians in their home nation caused my mind to spill forth a heady broth of emotional responses, including (but not limited to) surprise, delight and a sizeable pinch of “how bloody weird is that?”

The 1994 World Cup medal-clutchers have been elected to the legislatures of Brazil and Rio respectively as members of the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB). There's a sentence you probably didn't think you'd ever read, and yet a quick Google informs me that socialism and football, quite logically, are by no means virgin bedfellows. Brian Clough famously worked the miner's strike picket lines while Bill Shankly believed that socialism's key principle of “everybody working for the same goal” should naturally translate from the revolutionary text to the tactics board. More recently, Tottenham net-botherer Roman Pavlyuchenko took a seat as a city council deputy in his home town of Stavropol, Russia, with a personal remit to provide a “concrete contribution to the development possibilities for exercise and sport”.

For most readers of this blog (i.e. all three of you) and to my own largely untrained eyes, the marriage of high office and the football pitch comes across as an strange pairing, the permeating cultural whiff being that political activity and playing football represent a vast chasm between so-called 'high' and 'low' pursuits. But should it really be that way? Growing up in an era where footballers of Championship ranking or above are held aloft to the level of rock star or Hollywood A-lister, to see a top-flight footballer run for office would surely lead to eyebrow-raising akin to that witnessed during Arnold Schwarzenegger's pursuit of the governorship of California. “That's mad, he can't do that... he's the Terminator!" translates as “Shadow Minister for Agriculture? Don't be ridiculous, he plays centre-half for Villa!"

Perhaps my own shock at learning of the Brazilian's fledgling political careers stems not so much from the promotion-of-footballer-to-deity idea, but rather a confusion of involuntarily ingrained cultural viewpoints, and the feeling that to be involved successfully in British politics today requires a certain degree of privilege and class cache. Lest we forget, the leaders of all three major political powers in England boast 40-something Oxbridge graduates as their leaders, blurring the basic conceptual line drawn in the casual observer's mind between socialist, communist, fascist, an so on. Yet maybe in Brazil, while politics, as here, may still be viewed as corrupt and desensitised to the needs of the ordinary, Romario and Bebeto are lauded for their local-lads-made-good aura not just on the pitch, but with a pervading sense of community pride on a broader scale, something which perhaps fades to jealousy on these shores.

In Britain, we witness footballers plucked from working class backgrounds and becoming multi-millionaires overnight. Yet despite the wealth and profile, I can't shake the feeling that being seen as "just a footballer" prohibits having your political ambitions taken seriously in this country. If true, does this not then equal a perverse double-standard toward those we hold in high esteem? You can be one thing but not another is a repugnant stench given off by British society, knowing your place being more respectable that pursuing personal betterment. They say a person should never abandon one's roots, but then if nobody ever strayed from theirs, would we not be forever lying on the ground? 

All of which has led me down a somewhat psychedelically-tinged pathway of the imagination over the past few days, as I try to mentally conjure a world where members of once great strike partnerships throw down their boots and head for the town hall in the name of civic duty. It's a brave new world the kind of which we're never really likely to see, a universe where Andy “Andrew” Cole walks the streets of Cheshire in the howling winter rain, campaigning door-to-door for better pay and conditions for local postal workers. Elsewhere, Chris Sutton rises phoenix-like from humble Suffolk County Councillor to Shadow Transport Minister, the voting public apparently ironically forgiving of his hitherto lack of mobility.

To my (admittedly somewhat warped) mind, the world would be a better place if football and politics learnt to love one another, for they may discover that each has more in common than previously assumed. Indeed, Joe Cole's positional sense reads like a concise summery of thirteen years of New Labour – they may start on the left but leave them untethered and in no time at all they'll inexorably drift towards the centre.

So I say let's encourage our super and not-so-super stars to seek out the office of the land and lend a hand to the little man. If I inspire a nation-wide cultural revolution with these thousand or so words, then I'll have made my own small contribution. And if not, then you've probably just wasted five minutes of your life. Now get back to work – you'd never have caught Shankly slacking off like this.

~ Matt