Glasgow

Football clubs form identities. There are the Jewish clubs, Tottenham and Ajax, who historically have had large numbers of Jewish supporters and whose supporters have become known as yids. In this instance there is a level of Jewish identification that exists between a Spurs or Ajax supporter and the idea of being Jewish, that is by supporting Spurs or Ajax one becomes aware of the club as being ‘Jewish’ and adapts subconsciously to that idea in order to conform to the idea of the club. The football club’s identity is created by its fan base which then becomes part of the identity of the club on a deeper level which then forces a club’s future supporters to adhere too. This is the basis of the identification process of football in which an individual identity is subjugated to a collective idea of identity.

For example after a series of goalkeeping errors by Artur Boruc against Northern Ireland in a world cup qualifying match legendary Polish keeper Jan Tomaszewski insisted that Boruc was being punished by God for starting a religious war in Glasgow. Boruc, from Catholic Poland plays for Celtic, a club with a strong Catholic identity. Boruc frequently makes the sign of the cross whilst playing against Celtic’s Protestant rival club, Rangers. Both Glasgow Celtic and Glasgow Rangers become two symbolic outlets for the deeply ingrained sectarian religious identities of Scotland. They make visible the divisions in society by becoming easily identifiable semiotic devices for the conflict.

This relates to a system theatrical identification; literature, theatre, poetry, the arts in general all act as ways for us pose ontological questions to ourselves. Specifically they work through the examination of roles and events that then cause us to consider our identity and how it changes over time. For example Shakespeare’s ontological questioning in Hamlet is naturally different from Beckett’s in Waiting for Godot. In football though we have a subjugation of questions of identity, for the purity of a moment of collective anonymity as a spectator who is never forced to question religious or political affiliation, only to accept every victory and defeat as a facet of a great cultural struggle. Identity is formed on the level of the communal, not on the ontological.

Italy

Before Mussolini’s Fascist Party turned to football as a way of creating a collective identity for his state he initially, in tandem with the Futurist movement, used theatre.

In Florence in 1934, 20,000 spectators amassed to witness a spectacle play that aimed to connect the masses to a new theatre of the average man, the project totally failed because the play’s protagonist was a Fiat 18BL truck. It was done on a huge scale, featuring 2000 amateur actors, an air squadron, one infantry brigade, one cavalry brigade, 50 trucks, four field machine gun batteries, ten field-radio stations, and six photoelectric units. It was trying to create a fascist/futurist theatre of the mass identity, to cause a crisis and end what they perceived as a bourgeois theatre. The complete and utter failure of this artistic project to connect the masses to theatrical performance resulted directly in the creation of Fiorentina Football Club as a way of focusing fascist identity upon a different type of spectacular performance.

Yugoslavia

In Yugoslavia football also became a way of focusing national identity, as the country split into independent states, clubs like Dinamo Zagreb from Croatia clashed with Red Star Belgrade, a team whose supporters identify themselves with Serbian nationalism. They played what was to be the last football game in Yugoslavia, before the country collapsed; the game was abandoned after ten minutes as the two groups of nationalist paramilitary hooligans started a riot that ended with the whole stadium being burnt to the ground. Zagreb player Boban assaulted a policeman who was trying to stop the Zagreb ultras from attacking the Red Star fans. Then at a game between fierce rivals Red Star and Partizan in 1992 a group of Serbian paramilitaries appeared in the stadium brandishing road signs from Croatian towns that had fallen to the Serbian Army. The two sets of opposing fans were united by their hatred for the Croats.

When Communism still existed in Yugoslavia, the hooligan ultras of these clubs used the violence of football as a way of asserting their own freedom from politics; their identity becomes one of freedom through the actions of mindless violence against the ‘other’ defined as opposing supporters. In a political system of collectivisation the collective identity of the football club can become, ala Fiorentina, a facet of the states control of identity, but in Yugoslavia the collective identity of the football club became a giant negative subversion of collective identity by using it as a rebellion against a state enforced collectivisation of identity. The individual becomes free to create their identity within the collective identity of Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Fascist, Anti-Communist et cetera in relation to the football club by existing outside of traditional definitions of what this identity should entail.

Football becomes the oxymoronic expression of the freedom of the individual identity in the manifestation of a collective idea of identity.