I love being a fan.
As a lifelong Red Sox supporter, this means the kind of heartbreak and devotion that rivals any of the world’s major religions. As the mother of a Harry Styles and Taylor Swift fan, this means equal amounts of frustration and patience – and I’m looking at you, Ticketmaster – to get the kid to the shows. As a college professor, I get to absorb the joy and heartache of students as they win and lose on the pitch, the court, and the ice – this month has been a particularly good one for Manhattanville hockey, I have to say – and standing ovations for their on-stage and behind-the-scenes artistry, including the recent thought-provoking and joyful production of “Damn Yankees!” on our campus, with male and female roles reversed.
For reasons I haven’t entirely figured out, Ethics in Sport is my most popular course, generating long waitlists each semester of students who are eager to discuss sportsmanship, competitive edge, performance enhancing drugs, and – oh yes – the morality of fandom. At its core, a moral fandom calls on us to be what sports ethicists call moderate partisans – fans who demonstrate respect for opponents, ask for fair and skillful play from both teams, and celebrate athletic excellence when they see it. This kind of fandom isn’t easy because while it doesn’t condemn someone’s devotion to a team – it isn’t a call for us all to be expert sport purists – it does discourage a strictly emotional loyalty to one side, a win-at-all-costs mentality.
While being a moderate partisan might be ethically ideal, merging a fan’s love for a team with a more universal love for the game being played, it might not fulfill the “why” of being a spectator in the first place: to create some kind of meaning in our lives through whatever it is we are watching.
With the men’s World Cup now up and running in Qatar, many fans of the beautiful game are in a bit of an ethical jam. On the one hand, it is important to call out Qatar’s well-documented human rights violations (although not the way the president of FIFA did with his somewhat incomprehensible “whatabout” speech at a presser in Doha, in which he claimed to understand discrimination because he was once bullied in school for having red hair). Yet it is also important to do so without racist and essentialist posturing, remembering that no one’s house is entirely clean. Yet still, calling out such rhetoric should not take away from critiques of the systemized oppression that is part and parcel of Qatar society, most notably for women and the LGBTQ communities, as well as the exploitation – and deaths – of the thousands of workers from Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and India who built the very pitches upon which the games are being played.
While FIFA – and we don’t have enough time to really talk about FIFA – is not devoid of making political decisions, including the banning of Russia from this World Cup after its invasion of Ukraine, it does have an odd way of picking and choosing what matters.
Sportwashing, which describes how controversial governments use sport to try and clean, launder, their reputation – recent Olympic Games in China and Russia are excellent examples – can be effective, no doubt, building on the myth that sport transcends politics and focusing on how competition should serve to bring people together. But as sportwashing goes, the planners of this World Cup, which should be operating as a veritable laundromat but seems more intent on things like banning alcohol from venues, seem to have forgotten the detergent.
So what is a fan to do? I, for one, am going to look to our friends up North, where the Vermont Green FC has developed a game plan for loving soccer, but hating the circumstances that surround its largest stage. “With our mission always at the forefront of our decision-making process, Vermont Green FC can’t support FIFA as an organization, nor its decision to host this year’s tournament in Qatar,” the club announced on its webpage. “The global footballing community deserves a better vision of what the sport can be.” So, while the club, in its own words, “will not be officially engaging in any activities that might support revenue generation for FIFA,” it does support fans who want to dive in and watch the tournament.
So watch. But watch in a way that vigorously challenges the injustices we know to be true. Watch in a way that develops the kind of community and consciousness needed to battle inequity and oppression. Watch in a way that might fundraise locally on behalf of migrant workers or the LGBTQ community or women’s rights. Because when we find ourselves with a better soccer, we might find ourselves with a better world.
Amy Bass is professor of sport studies and chair of the division of social science and communication at Manhattanville College. Bass is the author of ONE GOAL: A COACH, A TEAM, AND THE GAME THAT BROUGHT A DIVDED TOWN TOGETHER, among other titles. In 2012, she won an Emmy for her work with NBC Olympic Sports on the London Olympic Games.
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