Ansgar Mohnkern: Criticism of football: Too decided against a draw

The German football Bundesliga was founded in 1963. Since then, over 18,000 games have taken place. About a quarter of them ended in a draw. You shouldn’t be blinded by the large number of draws, at least if you believe the German scholar Ansgar Mohnkern. He is certain: “Someone always loses,” which is the programmatic title of his new book. In it, Mohnkern takes stock of the capitalist football business as well as the sport of football as a whole.

The Amsterdam literary scholar is primarily dedicated to the “logic of the game”, i.e. the rules and conventions, the processes and events that make up football. He is concerned with an ideologically critical question: To what extent does football, as a “hegemonic cultural practice of our age,” help to consolidate and naturalize the prevailing social order?

Sport and ideology

As the title of the book makes clear, Mohnkern’s answer is clear. He doesn’t give a damn about the ideas of “left-wing football” that were coined by Argentine world champion coach César Luis Menotti in the 1970s. Menotti celebrated the creativity of the game and saw in it an alternative to “right-wing” football, which was focused on discipline and efficiency. Mohnkern, on the other hand, points to the relentlessness of the result. Football produces and reproduces “winners and losers” – “not only in the game, but also in the life that, as a game, it carefully claims to avoid.”

Mohnkern explores this thesis in eight chapters. He develops his analytical figures by drawing on a range of great, critical thinkers – from Immanuel Kant to Sigmund Freud, from Karl Marx to Nancy Fraser. At the same time, he devotes himself to football operations with knowledge and attention to detail. It’s about the “Rotterdam coin toss”, with the help of which Liverpool FC became the winner of a European Cup quarter-final in 1965 after three games against their opponents from Cologne had failed to produce a decision.

Mohnkern also looks at penalty shootouts and league operations as institutions that fueled meritocratic ideology, i.e. the assumption that social inequalities are fair because they are based on differences in performance. He talks about women’s football and the fragility of the liberal ideas of emancipation that surround it. Last but not least, it’s also about the myth-shrouded 1. FC Kaiserslautern, which has resisted “modern football” for decades and has therefore lost touch with the ruthless competition in the business.

»Fun is a steel bath«

Mohnkern’s conclusion is reminiscent of the criticism of everyday capitalist culture that the philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer once formulated in the “Dialectics of Enlightenment”: “Fun” is a “steel bath” provided by the “amusement industry.” According to Mohnkern, football “celebrates the act of class division anew in every game” because it always produces winners and losers and legitimizes their distinction through the principle of performance. He has thus become “not just a reflection, but rather an engine of the uninterrupted reproduction of a class society whose imbalances are … becoming hardened.”

Mohnkern’s achievement is that he calls for and actually implements a change of perspective. It encourages us to put questions of sports politics aside and think about football as an everyday practice, i.e. as an activity that Liverpool coach Bill Shankley once described as a “simple game” and which nevertheless has an impact far beyond the sidelines. And despite this – or precisely because of this – his line of argument raises doubts.

When Mohnkern devotes himself to the logic of the game, he sometimes exaggerates the observed facts. He supports his thesis about the inevitability and brutality of victory and defeat with catchy but one-sided statements. “Football, it seems, can’t tolerate a draw,” is one of them. In contrast, there are almost 5,000 draws in the history of the Bundesliga.

The situation is similar with the claim that the teams involved in knockout rounds are “not just concerned with staying in the competition themselves,” but rather with “switching off and – in military terms – eliminating opponents.” Cruciate ligament tears and fibula fractures are certainly one of the downsides of football. Nevertheless, the condition of losing teams after the final whistle cannot be compared to that of armies branded by the ravages of war. The fact that amateur sport at the lower levels is a gathering place for those who celebrate their “being left behind” over beer would first have to be proven with the help of empirical research into everyday culture.

Nobody always loses

Mohnkern’s tendency towards strong theses also means that he does not sufficiently take contradictory connections into account. The vast majority of teams that take part in the league neither become champions nor are they relegated. And league affiliations can change quickly. In the 2010s, SC Paderborn was moved from the first to the third division within two seasons – only to take the exact opposite path after a season break and return to the top division. No one always loses, Mohnkern would be countered.

It could certainly be argued that the economic inequalities between the very large and smaller clubs remain insurmountable. But the existence of “elevator teams” like the one from East Westphalia indicates that Bayern’s superiority in the Bundesliga does not necessarily result from the existence of a league system. Its emergence could perhaps be better reconstructed if one understood it as the end result of football becoming a commodity. A counter-thesis to Mohnkern would be that the emergence of football capital undermines the logic of the game. Because investors demand secure returns on investment and therefore that imponderables are eliminated.

A plea for a closer look

Overall, Mohnkern neglects ambivalences and contradictions by referring to the big, bad whole, which is why he misses out on the potential for social change. This can be seen, among other things, in his analysis of women’s football. Mohnkern complains that he resembles his male counterpart and therefore functions in a similarly exclusive way. Women’s football is a “matter of the bourgeois and structurally white middle class” from the global north, which adopts it as a liberal, individualistic emancipation project based on the principle of performance and thus blocks real liberation. The “difficult” because they are intangible, hidden and, above all, inarticulate women from large parts of a global south” would not play a role in women’s football.

It may be that the dominant media discourses about women’s football reinforce liberal narratives of emancipation and secure the global dominance of the North. But the fact that Brazil and China have each become runners-up once does not fit into the image of a closed society of privileged white women. In view of feminist mass movements against machist violence in Latin America and large strikes by women workers at the new hubs of global industrial production, the reference to “inarticulate women” of the South seems anachronistic.

An example: Mohnkern sees the fact that last year, for the first time, a predominantly Muslim country, Morocco, took part in a Women’s World Cup and even reached the round of 16 as confirmation of the north’s unchallenged dominance. After all, many of the players were trained in France and the coach is French.

On the other hand, Mareike Boysen describes in two impressive reports for the Viennese magazine “Tagebuch” that numerous national players were trained locally and still played in Morocco. And she talks about young club players from the industrial town of Safi. They claim the right to “express” themselves on the pitch and “find themselves” – on the back of the success of the national team and against resistance from traditionalist forces. By playing, girls and women improve their living conditions and defend themselves against the sexism they encounter in everyday life.

At the end there must be a plea for a closer look. Mohnkern is right when he calls for the uncovering of the effects of domination that arise from the game of football as a practice. But domination under capitalism can only be accurately represented if it is understood in its contested nature. This is precisely why it is important, when analyzing football, to give sufficient space to the contradictions and everyday conflicts that surround it. This is the only way to make it clear that dominance has arisen historically and that it can be pushed back again – and where the potential for change lies.

Alexander Gallas is a political scientist, strike researcher and private lecturer at the University of Kassel. He coaches a youth soccer team that plays in the district league.
Ansgar Mohnkern: Someone always loses. Considerations on football and ideology. Turia + Kant, 154 pages, br., 20 €.