You may, just conceivably, have heard about a football tournament going on in Russia at the moment. The Fifa World Cup is the megalomaniac’s idea of sport, and for many football fans it’s far removed from what we love about the game. It’s not just the corruption and corporate sponsorship, it’s the fact that we struggle to love the players the way we used to. They’re world-class, sure, but hardly seem to represent us or our struggles.
That longing to find champions with whom we can identify is, presumably, why there are now so many alternative “World Cups”. They’re uplifting events in which the footballers may not be world-class, but the idealism is. In northern Italy, in the first week of July, there’s the Anti-Racist World Cup; in Spain the blind football world championships is currently in full swing; in May there was a Street Child World Cup; and in November there’s an amputee World Cup in Mexico … there are World Cups for psychiatric patients, for the homeless, for refugees, for pensioners and for prisoners. Through Conifa (the Confederation of Independent Football Associations), there’s even a World Cup for unrecognised countries, such as Padania, Kurdistan and, er, Yorkshire. You name it, the tournament probably exists.
For a fan, these events are about as far from the Fifa-fest as it’s possible to get: matches are free, the threat of violence is nonexistent, friendship is infectious and the fan feels not like an exploited consumer but a campaigning participant. Just being present at the event implies a form of support for players that is comparable to, but far more profound than, normal football fandom.
For players, too, the games are subtly different. In the Anti-Racist World Cup in Modena, teams are mixed (to promote inclusiveness) and there are no referees (to foster fair play). Teams are awarded an additional three points for organising social events, such as talks or workshops. In the Amputee World Cup, outfield players only have one foot, and goalkeepers only one hand. In the Homeless World Cup (being held in Mexico this November and featuring 47 different countries) the teams all play the same number of games, regardless of results. There are eight trophies on offer, as well as a daily fair-play award.
There are differences in organisation, too. Whereas the Fifa brand fiercely defends its exclusivity, these events are open-source, delighted to be imitated, emulated and modified. As well as the Modena tournament in the first week of July, there are, in Italy alone, anti-racist “World Cups” in Florence, Genoa and Bologna. There’s another in Belfast in August, too. As part of the 20th Refugee Week (18-24 June) there are Refugee World Cups in Manchester, Leeds and London, a One World Cup in South Yorkshire and a Community Nations Cup in Coventry. Rather than claiming copyright, organisers actively hope to be copied. “We would happily see another 10, a hundred, even a thousand anti-racist World Cups,” says Daniela Conti, the organiser of the Modena event. “The more there are, the better.”
Some of these World Cups eschew the notion of country. The various anti-racist tournaments, with their emphasis on internationalism, are obviously the antithesis of dividing people according to borders. Their teams are hybrid in terms of race and the whole ethos is more ludic than combative. In Modena, teams can agree to make up whimsical rules (such as the goalkeeper turning their back to the action) and, from the quarter-finals onwards, matches are solely penalty shootouts in order, as Conti says, “to lower the competitive element”.
But in most of these tournaments the on-field competitiveness is as feisty as it is in conventional games: even if football is a means to an end, not an end in itself, there’s still a healthy desperation to win. And what’s intriguing is how much a country’s successes and failures reflect that of the “real” team. Brazil has won the Blind World Cup four times, and the Homeless World Cup three times. I used to play in something called the Word Cup (for writers) and the behaviour of the national teams was comparable to the pros. Forgive the stereotypes, but we English drank too much beer on the first night and then lost, the Swedes were charmingly laid-back (I remember their goalkeeper smoking a pipe during a penalty shootout), the Germans were efficient and the Italians were argumentative but technically superb.
It was at that Word Cup that I met Francesco Trento, a former Lazio youth coach and now a renowned film-maker and writer in Italy. For years, he has helped organise matches and tournaments for psychiatric patients (the Dream World Cup took place in Rome this May). In his book, Crazy for Football, he jokes about how his players complained not that the speedy opposition were on something but that they weren’t (because meds can slow you down or make you gain weight).
“When psychiatric patients are playing football,” says Trento, “they are, for once, not in their head, but in their bodies.” The game, he says, teaches people that you need to lose your marker: if you hide in life, people can’t pass you the ball. The psychiatrist of the Italian team, Santo Rullo, believes that the results of his patients playing football has been “astonishing”. “The fact of having a real adversary,” he says, “allows people with mental disturbances to combat ghosts in their minds … people who in some ways have given up following rules off the pitch are easily able to follow and accept the rules of football and that often opens the way to a social recovery.”
Sport’s ability to teach people about the importance of rules is, clearly, useful to prisoners, too. Prof Rosie Meek is the author of Sport in Prison and has written a forthcoming independent review for the Ministry of Justice on the subject. “Bringing together disparate groups of prisoners to take part in football tournaments can have a powerfully positive impact, not only on the prisoners and their families, but on stressed and undervalued staff,” she says. In her book, she writes about the ways in which sport can offer “an alternative means of excitement and risk-taking to that gained through engaging in offending behaviour”.
The beneficial effects of sport are, in some ways, obvious: socialisation replaces loneliness, self-esteem increases as players become valued, discipline is discovered through organisation and integration, physical health improves and so on. But the creation of all these tournaments affects not just the participants but also wider society. As Niall Mann of Refugee Week says: “It’s a chance to break down barriers, to show that everyone is still a human being, and to highlight the skills of those seeking sanctuary in the UK.” Mariana Mercado of the Homeless World Cup believes that the event “showcases the homeless as heroes. It removes the stigma and highlights the heroism.” Daniela Conti says that these events create “a very powerful social inclusion because people get to know each other and that is at the base of combatting all discrimination”.
It would be easy to dismiss all these tournaments as niche events, but history has often been changed by sporting encounters. It’s well known that ping-pong played a pivotal role in thawing US-China relations in 1971 and that rugby, despite all sorts of hiccups, has helped post-apartheid healing in South Africa. In almost every conflict zone in the world (Cyprus, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Palestine, Rwanda and so on) there are organisations such as Football 4 Peace or Peace Players International (a basketball equivalent) that create bonds and friendships. It’s a truism that sport is simulated warfare, but at its best it’s very often a force for pacifism.
Although football is the sporting Esperanto, it is often other sports that have made the difference. Ping-pong and chess seem to be particularly popular as routes for inclusion: Cops and Kids Chess in Chicago, for example, is an attempt to break down distrust between police officers and schoolchildren, and Table Tennis for NepAll supports children with impairments in Nepal. But almost any sport is good for social purposes. Next year, in London, there’s a Street Child cricket World Cup.
Of course, the “World Cup” moniker is ubiquitous because it adds a hint of global glamour to what are often proudly vernacular events. And its usage is a reflection of our multicultural age in which even the most provincial town can find enough “foreigners” to have an international tournament of one sort or another. But the “World Cup” title is also used subversively, I suspect, to reclaim it from the clutches of Fifa. Because what all these tournaments are doing is reverting to one of the oldest concepts of sport, which is the Greek idea of “agon”: the notion that life is a struggle, an often tragic one, and that contests, in imitating that struggle, are solemn rather than frivolous affairs. Games teach us what it is to be human and fragile, to be failures or forgotten as much as garlanded winners. That is why contests were, in ancient Greece, semi-sacred rituals at funerals as well as weddings.
And the word “champion” – which is being bandied about a lot during the Fifa World Cup mania – originally meant someone who promoted or defended a cause in a field; being a champion wasn’t about spectacular sporting prowess, but about fighting for a principle and representing a cause. That’s precisely what the players and the public in these alternative World Cups are doing. They’re champions in that old-fashioned sense, on real fields of battle.
So if you are already tiring of wall-to-wall World Cup coverage, don’t give up on sporting tournaments. Just go to where the grass still implies grassroots.
There are various Refugee World Cups on in Leeds, London and Manchester, 23-24 June. The Anti-Racist World Cup is on in Castelfranco Emilia from 4-8 July. The Homeless World Cup takes place from 13-18 November in Zocalo, Mexico. Tobias Jones lives in Parma. He is writing a book about Italian football fans.