When Football and Beer Are No Longer Enough: Sport, Power, and Civilizational Hypocrisy
My love affair with sport began long before I became a political scientist, columnist, or incurable observer of international affairs. It began in my childhood, embraced by two people who mattered most in shaping my sporting passions: my father and my brother.
Through them, I learned not only the rules of various games but also their beauty. Sport was never merely about results or medals. It was about skill, creativity, strategy, perseverance, and those rare moments when individual talent merged with collective effort. In our home, in addition to poetry and literature, sport was part of everyday life, family culture, and the language through which we connected.
Of course, there was also another dimension. Yugoslavia was not a large country, but in sport it often stood among giants. Whether in basketball, football, handball, water polo, volleyball, athletics, skiing, or numerous other disciplines, Yugoslav sportswomen and sportsmen were world champions, Olympic medalists, or formidable rivals capable of defeating anyone. For a child, this created a powerful emotional attachment. We were the champions!
Some of my fondest memories are tied to the Olympic Games. I still remember one edition held in Latin America many decades ago. Because of the time difference, many competitions took place at night. My brother and I would stay up until dawn, despite our parents’ desperate attempts to send us to bed. We would sit glued to the television, cheering for Yugoslav athletes. Whenever one of them won a medal and the national anthem, Hej, Sloveni (”Hey, Slavs”), was played, our excitement became impossible to contain. We would sing loudly, often forgetting that normal people were trying to sleep. Our parents worried more about the neighbors than about our exhaustion the next morning. We did not care.
Watching football is not like attending the theater. It is not even comparable to watching a tennis match. It belongs to an entirely different emotional register—closer to collective ritual than to refined spectatorship. Football is not meant to be consumed in silence and solemnity. It demands reaction, noise, and embodied presence. Ideally, it requires a beer in hand and the freedom to shout without restraint. When I was younger, whenever my reactions at home became too loud for the “good taste” of my (now former) husband, I would simply take my beer and go upstairs to my brother’s home, where this shared passion had begun in childhood.
Perhaps this explains why I still love sport. Even now. In spite of everything that tells me differently.
Even at a time when wars dominate headlines, when genocide is streamed live into our homes, when international law collapses before our eyes, and when the global political order appears increasingly unstable and dangerous. And when the USA resembles Germany of 1936.
I confess that I am following the current World Cup with a profound sense of guilt and unease. Part of me wonders whether it is morally defensible to enjoy ninety minutes of football while so much suffering unfolds elsewhere. Another part of me knows that human beings cannot survive on outrage alone. So let me explain why I still watch.
Honestly, I have grown tired of several familiar refrains that accompany every major football tournament. One comes from men who still seem surprised that women enjoy football and treat female fans as an amusing anomaly. Another comes from women who cannot understand why grown men scream at television screens because of a colorful ball rolling across a field. But perhaps the most tiresome refrain comes from self-proclaimed intellectuals who look down with barely concealed contempt on those who spend weeks immersed in sporting events.
Allow me, then, to risk my intellectual credentials and confess something simple: I love football. For many intellectuals, however, major tournaments are occasions to demonstrate their superiority over what they regard as the primitive passions of the masses. Football, they argue, fuels nationalism, distracts people from real problems, and serves as an opiate that keeps citizens occupied while political and economic elites continue their work undisturbed.
There is truth in some of these criticisms. Indeed, modern professional sport has become a gigantic industry. For instance, FIFA is less a sporting organization than a global corporation. The same applies to other associations. Players are traded as assets, coaches are bought and sold, television rights generate billions, and betting industries thrive on public obsession. Athletes increasingly resemble modern gladiators performing for global audiences while corporations harvest enormous profits.
Yet none of this erases a deeper human reality.
Human beings remain, at their core, homo ludens, the beings who understand themselves through play. Play is not a luxury. It is a fundamental human need. Sport, at its best, satisfies that need. It offers moments of beauty, creativity, uncertainty, and collective emotion that transcend ordinary life.
The problem is that, in our age, even play has been colonized by power.
The world of football reflects the broader hierarchy of global power. The same countries that dominate finance, media, and international institutions often dominate the narratives surrounding sport. Some nations are automatically assumed to embody football culture, sophistication, and legitimacy. Others must constantly prove that they deserve to be present.
The treatment of Qatar during the 2022 World Cup revealed this dynamic with remarkable clarity.
The criticisms directed at Qatar were not entirely unfounded. Questions about labor conditions, migrant workers, and civil rights deserved attention. Yet the selective outrage was impossible to ignore.
Western media suddenly discovered concerns about exploited migrant labor, despite decades of silence regarding similar exploitation throughout the global economy. The same political and media establishments that rarely reflect on colonialism, contemporary wars, migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, or exploitative labor practices elsewhere suddenly discovered an extraordinary moral sensitivity when the World Cup moved outside the familiar Western sphere.
One could not help noticing a familiar pattern. The discussion often went beyond legitimate criticism and drifted into cultural arrogance. Qatar was portrayed not simply as flawed but as inherently unqualified. The underlying message was that major global events belong naturally to certain civilizations and only conditionally to others.
This attitude has a long history.
Edward Said called it Orientalism: the tendency to view non-Western societies through a lens of superiority, exoticism, and suspicion. The debate around Qatar often sounded less like a discussion about human rights and more like a reaffirmation of who is presumed to belong at the center of the world and who is expected to remain on its margins.
Today, similar contradictions are visible as the World Cup unfolds in the United States.
Officially, the tournament is presented as a celebration of openness, diversity, and global unity. Yet many visitors encounter a different reality. The host country is experiencing one of the most restrictive periods in its treatment of migrants and foreigners in recent memory. Stories of visa complications, detentions, aggressive border enforcement, and political hostility toward immigrants stand in sharp contrast to the welcoming image usually associated with global sporting festivals.
Some observers have even drawn uncomfortable comparisons with the 1936 Berlin Olympics—not because the situations are identical, but because both events reveal how international sporting spectacles can coexist with exclusionary political climates. The comparison should not be exaggerated, yet it reminds us that sporting events never exist outside politics. They often expose the contradictions that societies would prefer to hide. Certain aspects of contemporary politics in the USA increasingly evoke uncomfortable historical comparisons with 1936. Fascism is knocking on many doors.
Football therefore becomes much more than a game.
It is a stage on which civilizations imagine themselves. It is a site where national myths are performed, where geopolitical rivalries find symbolic expression, and where global inequalities become visible in unexpected ways.
This does not mean that we should stop enjoying sport. Quite the opposite.
The beauty of football lies precisely in its ability to reveal both the best and the worst of humanity simultaneously. It brings joy, creativity, solidarity, and genuine collective emotion. Yet it also exposes prejudice, arrogance, commercialization, and power.
That is why I continue to watch.
Not because I am blind to the realities surrounding modern sport, but because I am fully aware of them. For ninety minutes, football allows us to experience the playful dimension of human existence while simultaneously reminding us of the world beyond the stadium.
And perhaps that is why football remains so powerful.
Even when the game is commercialized beyond recognition, even when politicians exploit it, even when corporations dominate it, and even when nationalism turns ugly, something genuinely human survives.
For a brief moment, the game still belongs to the players, the spectators, and the imagination.
The tragedy is that football alone can no longer help us forget the world.
The consolation is that it still helps us understand it.
Football is often described as a symbolic war between nations. Yet the irony is striking. National teams are becoming increasingly transnational. Players frequently come from migrant backgrounds, carry multiple identities, and often feel stronger ties to their clubs than to the flags under which they compete. Two brothers may represent different countries. Coaches are imported from abroad. National pride is performed through thoroughly globalized structures.
In this sense, football reflects the contradictions of the contemporary world: deeply global in its organization, yet still framed through national imaginaries. It is also shaped by class relations that remain largely invisible behind the spectacle of flags and anthems.
The game has never stopped being play—but it has been deeply transformed. Capital has partially kidnapped homo ludens from neighborhoods, from working-class streets, from ordinary spaces of collective joy, and relocated it into a hyper-commercialized global industry.
And yet, even in this distorted form, something survives. A fragment of play. A trace of freedom. A moment of shared imagination that no structure of power fully manages to eliminate.