In five parts and totalling about 15,000 words – analysing the final of the tournament, viewing all thirty-two competing nations, and offering a wider perspective comprising fashion, politics, music, technology, and football’s myriad engagements with popular culture – my site may provide what is, at this point in time, the definitive history of the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
While on the field, the 2014 World Cup saw the rise of new superstars, the decline of footballing philosophies, the interplay between varying formations, and appeared to demonstrate the narrowing of traditional power gaps in the international game – in the knockout stages, from the round of sixteen through to the final, only three of fifteen matches were won by a margin greater than one goal – this piece extends beyond the confines of the pitch and beyond the immediacies of the sport. It looks at the wider cultural aspects which informed or which emerged from the World Cup.
In turn, it considers how Brazilian society functioned towards and about the tournament, and the ways in which the mass media depicted Brazilians; views the psychology and sociology of individualism as it is increasingly made manifest throughout the game; analyses the rise and spurt of soccer in the United States, and Twitter’s role in soccer’s recent prominence; plays upon the nature and extension of World Cup chants; and contemplates the innovative and encompassing uses of technology which influenced and drew upon the month-long affair.
Brazilians: Competent Organisers, Not So Crazy About Football
Even FIFA delegates described the preparations as ‘hell’ and the ‘worst ever’ – allegations which have already been made regarding Rio’s progress towards the Summer Olympics in 2016. Across the couple of weeks immediately preceding the start of the World Cup, it was repeatedly asserted that Brazil was not yet ready to hold the tournament, with particular worry over the stadiums in Sao Paulo and Manaus. Manaus was the target of additional mockery when, just days before the venue was to host its opening match between England and Italy, it was claimed that ground staff had been painting the pitch green to hide the fact that it was dry and underfed.
At the same time, the World Cup itself appeared to suffer little from any architectural or infrastructural issues. The stadiums were ultimately all completed in time; few problems were reported with travel between airports or to and from stadiums; and even the pitch in Manaus held up for its four group games. Preparations for major sporting events tend to prove problematic. It must be remembered that the City of Manchester Stadium, built with two temporary stands for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, was still undergoing work in the days before the event’s opening ceremony, and a metro link between the stadium and the city went incomplete. The Athens Summer Olympics in 2004 saw soaring costs and a race to be ready amid numerous delays to construction. While the Olympic venues were completed well within schedule for Beijing 2008, the Games brought considerable controversy over forced relocations: which affected somewhere between the Chinese government’s suggested 6,000 families, and the 1.5 million residents predicted by human rights groups.
The argument persists that the response of the Brazilian police has been marked by aggression, and that their heavy-handed approach limited the capacity of demonstrators during the World Cup. Still, there appears a discrepancy between the notion of Brazilians set upon trouble – and distraught to the point of violence or insensibility upon the loss of a football match – and what actually occurred after their side’s capitulation. Instead of attacking or mourning, Brazilian supporters seemed models of magnanimity following the game against Germany, recognising the flaws of the Brazilian team, and praising the abilities of their competitors. Appreciative of good football rather than narrowly and viciously partisan, the positive atmosphere in Brazil around the game and around the teams of the World Cup remained for the duration of the competition.
A Surfeit of Individualism
Though individuals have found themselves the centres of attention at many previous World Cups – Diego Maradona in Mexico in 1986, for instance, and again for less savoury reasons eight years later at USA 94; while Ronaldo came to dominate the world’s focus in the buildup to the final of France 98, as he suffered a convulsive fit just hours before kickoff – never before has a tournament been built so thoroughly upon individual players. Many of the top teams seemed structured round one player, whether by design or by necessity.
Brazil and Argentina, the two favourites going into the tournament, were – despite a divergence in experience and subtly differinggameplans – from the start orchestrated around their outstanding attacking players, Neymar and Lionel Messi. Though both players had strong tournaments, finishing with four goals apiece, Brazil floundered dramatically after Neymar suffered an injury in their quarter-final game against Colombia, while – despite leading Argentina to the final with an array of crucial goals and assists – the unduly critical perception shared by many was that Messi had failed to excel. After a lackadaisical close to the season with Barcelona, it was thought that he could go on to consolidate on the international stage his reputation as one of the world’s greatest ever players. He was awarded the Golden Ball, and so officially declared the tournament’s best player; but this decision was broadly derided, by figures including FIFA President Sepp Blatter and by Maradona, who triumphed with Argentina back in 86.
Elsewhere, with their striker Radamel Falcao out of action owing to a knee injury, and despite impressive performances by Cuadrado and their defensive players, James Rodriguez became the figurehead for Colombia and – though Monaco spent €45 million on him a season ago – the breakout star of the World Cup. Alexis Sanchez occupied a similar position for Chile, and was the standout from their side especially as Arturo Vidal struggled for fitness. Arjen Robben was clearly the Netherlands’ exceptional player, the impetus to their attack as Robin van Persie stuttered and Wesley Sneijder indicated a career on a steep decline. Uruguay were capable and committed with Luis Suarez on the pitch, but abject without him. Clint Dempsey for the USA and Tim Cahill for Australia – attacking midfielders or second-strikers for much of their careers – were tasked with leading the line and focusing their sides. And likewise Nigeria and South Korea were largely reliant on their wide attackers, Ahmed Musa and Son Heung-Min respectively.
While the focus on individual players was variously tactical it was also philosophical, and extended beyond the immediate contexts of the sport to reflect a wider sociological impulse. Even where facts on the pitch seemed to refute the reliance upon star men, still nations clung to individuals. Wayne Rooney continued, in the lead up to the tournament, to be regarded England’s best hope for success, and he continues to be considered the squad’s only world class player, quite ignoring a litany of mediocre performances at major tournaments and the emergence of youngsters who would seem to challenge his place in the team. Didier Drogba was restored to the Ivory Coast eleven for their decisive group encounter against Greece, despite looking his age and in spite of Wilfried Bony’s two goals in the two previous matches.
Most egregious, however, was the decision to interrupt the World Cup final itself with an individual awards ceremony for FIFA’s chosen players. Thus – before Germany were able to lift the World Cup – Manuel Neuer and a defeated and deflated Lionel Messi ascended to receive their awards for Golden Glove, as the tournament’s best goalkeeper, and Golden Ball. James Rodriguez, the winner of the Golden Boot with six goals, and Paul Pogba, decreed in association with Hyundai the tournament’s best young player, were not dragged out for the occasion; but postponing the celebrations of the victorious team in order to regale and reify the individual contribution seemed an error indicative beyond football, and especially absurd given that one of the awarded individuals had just lost arguably the most important game of his career.
Twitter and the Rise of Soccer in the United States
A further 1.8 million people viewed Germany vs. Argentina online using WatchESPN. Adding those online viewers via ABC and Univision, the total number of people on all devices watching the game live came to just over 29 million. And these figures remain restricted to those who watched within the confines of their own homes: the figures do not account for the people who packed America’s bars to watch, or attended viewing parties hosted in clubs, parks and cinemas, and in their potential thousands at local stadiums.
Domestically, the average attendance figure for the 2014 season of Major League Soccer so far has been 18,704: a slight increase on the previous season’s average, but still marginally down on the number from 2012, and leaving many stadiums well short of capacity. In fact, despite rising from a low of 13,756 in 2000, since the first season of Major League Soccer in 1996, match-day attendances have hardly boomed: then, a novelty and just two years after the 1994 World Cup, 17,406 people on average attended Major League Soccer games. If the trend is for more and more people in the United States to watch football on television, this does not appear to be translating into behinds upon stadium seats. Perhaps this will change in 2015, on the back of a World Cup which has been so popular – and which has been widely discussed as a turning point for the game in the US – and with new players, including Kaka, David Villa, and Frank Lampard, set to bolster the domestic league. Meanwhile NBC continues to invest time and effort in the English Premier League, having spent £250 million for the rights from 2012; and Fox have acquired the rights to the Bundesliga for five seasons starting next year. Major international football will return to the US in 2016, when it will host the Copa America Centenario: a special edition of the Copa America to celebrate its centenary, which will feature the ten South American teams plus the United States, Mexico, and four others from CONCACAF still to be determined.
Still sung for and most closely associated with the Italian national team, the melody has since extended throughout the world of sport. It was ubiquitous during the 2008 European Championships in Austria and Switzerland; and featured again four years later in Poland and Ukraine. In the United States, ‘Seven Nation Army’ has become a staple of college football and college basketball games, and has been utilised through the NBA and in the NFL, where it is especially favoured by the Baltimore Ravens. Emerging amidst the 2006 World Cup which was hosted in Germany, greeting the goalscorers of the 2013 Champions League final between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, and becoming – in remixed form – an anthem of the Bayern side, ‘Seven Nation Army’ is also entwined with German football, and sometimes sung by Germany’s supporters – so that it remained present in Brazil even beyond Italy’s early elimination.
The culturally outstanding chant of the tournament belonged to the Americans. With its beginnings over a decade ago in the United States Naval Academy – and in Navy football, American style – ‘I believe that we will win’ ascended rapidly throughout the World Cup, usurping the traditional three-syllable utterance ‘USA!’, to become one of the hallmarks not only of the US team but of the entire competition. Impelled by ESPN, who used it for its World Cup commercial, the chant soon grew to dominate in the bars of America and at public screenings. On the page, ‘I believe that we can win’ initially appears debased, a reduction of the football chant to absurdity: its words offering only the slightest of sentiments, a simple belief that the essence of sport – a physical competition in which the winner is uncertain – remains its essence. Yet when performed, the chant is both powerful and memorable, drawing from gospel music in its call-and-response and simple rhythms, which drive towards a crescendo.
The other bold innovation of the World Cup has in fact already been a feature of Brazilian domestic football for eight years. This was the ‘vanishing spray’, a white foam which referees may use in an attempt to ensure that defenders remain the requisite ten yards from the ball upon attacking free-kicks. So during the tournament referees sprayed a white mark by the site of the stationary ball, then a horizontal line by the feet of defenders – meant to keep them at bay, and disappearing after a minute or so on the playing surface. Hitherto used in the domestic leagues of Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, there is no conclusive evidence that the spray contributes to more goals scored from free-kicks. Still an eminently sensible if only partial solution to a real problem, the spray has been ratified for the forthcoming seasons in Italy, Spain, and France, and will feature in the UEFA Champions League. While the English Premier League first proposed compiling a series of reports on the issue, and allowing the spray from 2015 at the earliest, it has ceded ground and will now introduce it too in 2014-15. The Germans are still contemplating whether to use it for the coming season.
Away from the pitch, The Time of the Game drew upon a variety of interconnected technologies – televisions, and the other screens through which we watch; cameras, which as facets of mobile phones and tablet computers have become extensions of ourselves, and allow us to share images seamlessly; and online social networks – to provide an interactive history of how the world saw the World Cup final. A collaborative project devised by the writer Teju Cole, and achieved alongside software artist Jer Thorp, and artist and developer Mario Klingemann, The Time of the Game describes itself as ‘a synchronized global view of the World Cup final’. Before Germany and Argentina kicked off, Cole asked his 160,000 Twitter followers to post photographs of their screens as they watched the game, noting the minute of action and their own location, and using the hashtag #thetimeofthegame.
Collecting all the submissions which used the hashtag – and those too which used the tag #timeofthegame – resulted in a body of over 2,000 images. The Time of the Game collates these images and shows them chronologically. Fixed and centred upon the viewing screen – most often a television, but also frequently a laptop or tablet – the photographs flash consecutively across the 120 minutes of football played. So The Time of the Game offers a unique perspective, a fractured collage of the World Cup final, and it can be viewed with an eye for the football on display: showing players’ expressions, decisive moments, even differences in coverage between broadcasters from different nations. But more than this, it provides the specifics of how people watched the World Cup – the devices which they used, their surroundings, the materiality of their lives – and a broader sense of a communal experience shared equally among people between different time zones, parts of different cultures, and living with differing circumstances.
As Cole wrote when introducing the project, ‘We live in different time zones, out of sync but aware of each other. Then the game begins and we enter the same time: the time of the game.’ While the images are ‘formally satisfying’ because the focus on the screen affords a ‘frame within a frame’, in an interview with The Atlantic Cole conceptualises the cumulative result as an investigation of ”public time’ […] which is the chronological equivalent of ‘public space’.’ Indeed, The Time of the Game plays thoroughly with the concepts of public and private. It seems to publicise the private space as much as it makes the public space intimate; and contrasts the public sphere of football – which moves beyond the playing of the game, and beyond its broadcasters and analysts, to the discussions we share about football with others – with the individual act of sitting, often alone, and staring and viewing. In addition to the full thread of pictures, it is possible to select via the site a range of images based on time or location: selecting all photographs taken, for instance, in Brooklyn, or in the 45th minute, or for the thirty-minute duration of extra time.
Pierrot, the sad clown, with white face and loose white blouse, expressing slowly and subtly and in the absence of and beyond words, emerged in the nineteenth century from his roots in stock comedies and pantomimes to become the embodiment of a certain artistic type, a specific strain of artistic emotion: sensitive, melancholy and solitary, and at once playful and daring in subverting language and suggesting the fraught but still facile and fluctuating nature of gender.
The character of Pierrot can be traced back to Molière’s Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue, first performed in February 1660 at the Palais-Royal theatre in Paris, and with Molière playing the role of Sganarelle. Pierrot is the name of a peasant character who appears in the second act of the play, the fiancé of Charlotte. The Palais-Royal theatre had been established by Cardinal Richelieu, in the east wing of the Palais-Royal, in 1637; and by 1662, Molière’s acting troupe was sharing the venue with a troupe of Italian Commedia dell’Arte performers, including Domenicio Biancolelli, famous for his performances in the role of Harlequin. The Italian Commedia dell’Arte flourished throughout the seventeenth century in France, and in fact the character of Molière’s Sganarelle already drew from the Italian comedians. With Molière and Biancolelli’s troupes in such proximity, this interplay and cross-pollination continued, the Commedia dell’Arte incorporating Pierrot into its repertoire and well establishing the figure by the time of the Italians’ expulsion from France, by Royal decree, in 1697.
So Pierrot persisted on in Italy, and then again in France after Italian troupes were permitted to return during the second decade of the following century. Through the 1700s, though the character began to appear in performances in European centres outside of Italy and France, the Pierrot on display often featured in lesser and disparate roles: the basis of the character, his unrequited love for Columbine, who prefers Harlequin, was sometimes lost, and he was frequently portrayed in a purely comic, or even bumbling and foolish manner. It was in the 1800s that Pierrot gained stature, and began his reach into the other arts, developing in literature and painting as an emblem and as a muse.
Jean-Gaspard Deburau, a mime from Kolín, in what is now the Czech Republic but was then Bohemia, was most responsible for this recreation of Pierrot. Born in 1796, he began appearing in Paris at the Théâtre des Funambules some time around 1819, under the stage-name ‘Baptiste’. The Funambules had opened in 1816, on the Boulevard du Temple, otherwise known as the Boulevard du Crime owing to the volume of crime dramas shown nightly in the Boulevard’s numerous theatres – all but one of which, including the Funambles, were demolished during Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the 1860s. The Funambules originally hosted only acrobats and mimes; and Deburau, taking the role of Pierrot as a young man, would continue at the part until his death in 1846. He extended and deepened Pierrot, his restrained and nuanced acting style replacing the tendency towards bold and gesticulating comedy; gaining recognition and increasing fame towards the end of the 1820s, Deburau’s Pierrot would even be compared to the works of Shakespeare when, in 1842, the versatile and distinctly modern man-of-letters Théophile Gautier wrote a fictionalised review entitled, ‘Shakespeare at the Funambules’.
Other mimes would continue to have success playing Pierrot after Deburau’s death. These included his son, Jean Charles, and most notably Paul Legrand. Still, it was Deburau who enshrined Pierrot within French culture, and established the sense of Pierrot as a sensitive and anguished artist. This conception of Pierrot was celebrated, explored and entrenched in 1945 with Marcel Carné’s film, Les Enfants du Paradis, often considered one of the greatest films of all time; which suffered its own anguishes as it was made in occupied France, with damaged sets, short of supplies, with a cast and crew short of food and comprising several Jews who had to work secretely or risk production shutting down; and consisting of a fictionalised story drawing upon real figures from early nineteenth century France. Deburau is portrayed in the film as ‘Baptiste’, a lovelorn mime who achieves success in the Funambules, in a magnificent performance by Jean-Louis Barrault.
Gautier’s piece on Deburau’s Pierrot was but one of the first entwinements of Pierrot with literature. Writers including Flaubert (who, early in his career, wrote an unperformed pantomime entitled Pierrot au sérail), Verlaine and Huysmens incorporated Pierrot into their works. Most extensively, he was the central figure in the poetry of Jules Laforgue. Laforgue – a French Symbolist poet who died in 1887 aged just twenty-seven years old – wrote three of the ‘complaints’ in his first selection of poems, Les Complaintes (1885), in Pierrot’s voice; then devoted his second collection, L’Imitation de Notre Dame de la Lune (1886), entirely to Pierrot and his moonlit world, influenced by Albert Giraud’s poetry cycle published a couple of years previously.
In his book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, first published in 1899, which served to introduce French Symbolism to an English readership, Arthur Symons devoted a chapter to Laforgue. Symons describes Laforgue’s verse and prose as,
‘alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious…It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys.’
and defines Laforgue’s laughter in the following terms:
‘His laughter, which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as ‘the laughter of the soul’, is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot, Pierrot Lunaire, and it is of abstract notions, the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman’s patter.’
Laforgue was a great influence upon a young T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Eliot would write that, ‘Of Jules Laforgue I can say that he was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech’, and, ‘I have written…nothing about Jules Laforgue, to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language’. In this way the figure of Pierrot maintained a relevance beyond French Romanticism and Symbolism, on into the literature of the Anglophone Modernists. He also appeared in canvases by painters who led their art-form into modernity: in Seurat’s Pierrot with a White Pipe (1883); in Cézanne’s Pierrot and Harlequin (1888); whilst Picasso’s Pierrot and Columbine (1900) was the first of several pieces in which he depicts Pierrot.
Pierrot became a canonised figure within twentieth century classical music with Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, a setting of twenty-one poems from a German translation of Albert Giraud’s cycle. Schoenberg’s work was premiered in Berlin, on 16 October, 1912, with Albertine Zehme the solo vocalist. Theodor Adorno, theorist, philosopher and musicologist, wrote some of his earliest pieces on Schoenberg; including a 1922 review of a performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Frankfurt, in which Adorno puts it that Schoenberg’s piece characterises ‘the homelessness of our souls’. Musically and aesthetically, Pierrot has exerted his influence too on popular music: Björk, a fervent admirer of Schoenberg, sang Pierrot Lunaire in a one-off performance at the Verbier Festival in 1996; whilst David Bowie, after studying theatre and mime, played a role in the 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise, and appeared as Pierrot in the video to his 1980 song, ‘Ashes to Ashes’.
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Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis
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Jules Laforgue – ‘Autre Complaint de Lord Pierrot’ (‘Another Complaint of Lord Pierrot’). In French; then translated into English courtesy of Paul Staniforth and brindin.com
——–
Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme!
Nous lui dirons d’abord, de mon air le moins froid:
“La somme des angles d’un triangle, chère âme,
Est égale à deux droits.”
– Et si ce cri lui part: “Dieu de Dieu! que je t’aime!”
– “Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.” Ou piquée au vif:
– “Mes claviers ont du coeur, tu seras mon seul thème.”
Moi: “Tout est relatif.”
–
De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:
“Ah! tu ne m’aimes pas; tant d’autres sont jaloux!”
Et moi, d’un oeil qui vers l’inconscient s’emballe:
“Merci, pas mal; et vous?”
–
– “Jouons au plus fidèle!” – “à quoi bon, ô Nature!
Autant à qui perd gagne!” Alors, autre couplet:
– “Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j’en suis sûre…”
– “Après vous, s’il vous plaît.”
–
Enfin, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,
Douce; feignant de n’en pas croire encor mes yeux,
J’aurai un: “Ah! ça, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!
C’était donc sérieux?”
——–
The one who’ll give an update on her sex!
We’ll tell her first in our least frigid air
“The sum of a triangle’s angles makes
exactly two right angles, dear.”
–
And should she peal “O God! how I love you!”,
‘God’ll know his own’ – or, cut to the quick:
“My heart knows love’s keys; I’ll play but of you!”,
then I: ‘All’s relativistic.’
–
Then, with all eyes, feeling too commonplace
“You don’t love me whom men crave with each muscle?”
And I, with an eye on Unconsciousness,
‘Oh, not so bad, ta, and yousel’?’
–
“Let’s vie in fidelity!” – ‘Might as well play
(Nature!) loser wins.’ And after those, these:
“Oh, you’ll tire of me first, you’ll go away…”
‘Oh no: ladies first, if you please.’
–
Last, if one night she die in my ‘Divan’,
soft … with fake disbelief in my closet
I’ll go ‘Well, now, we’d something to live on –
it was serious then, was it?’
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Pierrot with a White Pipe, by Seurat
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Pierrot and Harlequin, by Cézanne
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Pierrot and Columbine, by Picasso
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Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21
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David Bowie as Pierrot
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Raine, C. T. S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Symons, A. The Symbolist Movement In Literature (Dutton & Company, 1919)
Wiggerhaus, R. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (MIT Press, 1995)