Football & Fascism

Two events in football this week. Arsenal's victory in Spain, the first British team to ever beat Real Madrid at home. Real were Franco's team during the Fascist years, a key element in the state militarisation of the culture. They were the nemesis of Barcelona who were doublecrossed and hindered at every turn, because they were both communitarian and separtist and therefore a grave threat to the totalitarian order.

Which segues us to the second major game - Barcelona's defeat of Chelsea. Chelsea are owned by a Russian oligarch who made a vast amount of money in a rapid series of opaque deals and has made some kind of arrangement with the ex-KGB crypto-militarist order in Russia. The manager of Chelsea is a Portuguese autocrat with unpublicised but not unclear hard right political notions.

Football and populist politics have always dissolved into each because large crowds defined by regional sympathies assemble every week at football games, and that in itself is some kind of a political act. The manager of Chelsea has taken this a step further because he clearly sees himself, in image and in context, as a charismatic leader who preaches a total creed of action and control.

Which brings us to this article by a British intellectual on Jose Mourinho and Portuguese fascism, which is really quite awesome. And that brings us to this observation on Mourhino, which is not in the article, by the Portuguese journalist Joel Neto:

He doesn't just work with people. He controls people. He dominates people. He works with people's minds.

Which summons up the image of none other than Dr Mabuse, Fritz Lang's criminal mastermind who psychically controlled the Berlin criminal classes from his prison cell. Mabuse was an allegory for Hitler, Lang had to flee Germany after making that film not so much because the Nazis hated it, but because Goebbels was so impressed he wanted Lang to work for them.

Football, fascism, mass entertainment.

In Mourhino's bronzed gaze clutching a Samsung phone I see sword & sandal fascism given a Gucci rubdown. And in some way, I see a cold, metallic shard of mass culture. 'The people need a leader'... and in the pouting cashmered sponsored-up-the-ass, touchline Mabuse that is Jose Mourinho those who really need it - have one.

And Barcelona's victory becomes even sweeter.