Contexts, Technologies, and World Cups

[ NB :: this post is a bit more personal than the usual fare; feel free to take it or leave it... ]

In a certain sense, I neurotically measure phases of my life through the cycles of the World Cup. I vividly remember watching Maradona in 1986, at 12 years old. And I'll never forget watching Roberto Baggio, after a stellar tournament, sky the ball over the crossbar in the penalty shootout of the 1994 final, gifting the cup to Brazil.

The shifts in contexts and technologies between the 2006 tournament and the current 2010 edition are particularly striking for me, mainly because I research such things and am passionate about world football. If I say that the technologies are strikingly different, the statement will resonate with most, and I'll discuss that in more detail below. But reflecting on shifting contexts is a much more personal and situated matter, simply because, as I said above, I tend to measure important phases of my life by the cycles of World Cup qualifying and the tournament itself...

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I want to start, then, by exploring the contexts a bit. In the summer of 2006, I was living in El Paso, Texas, running a regional office of a Fortune 100 financial services firm. I was also about to make the transition from working in finance, an industry where I had spent the previous 8 years, to full time doctoral studies in Rhetoric and Writing. It was an exciting and anxiety-filled time simultaneously.

In June of 2006, my financial advisor colleagues and I moved the lone, ancient TV/VCR combo we had used very sparingly for training purposes into the conference room of our downtown office in order to watch nearly every moment of the group stage matches that took place during business hours. With no cable or satellite connection, we used the TV's built-in rabbit ears to fine tune reception of spanish language broadcasts of every match available.

There were several occasions when everything stopped. 6 or 7 of us, wearing expensive suits and silk ties, huddled around a 13" screen watching Sweden play Paraguay or France v. Switzerland.

During the knockout stage, my context shifted again, as my family and I made a trip to Las Vegas for the 4th of July holiday. In the MGM sportsbook, among hundreds of others (some passionate, some merely interested, some merely gawking at the spectacle), I watched France beat Brazil, and Portugal move past England. I was passionately pulling for France in 2006, mainly because of my love for Zidane, one of the most brilliant players the world has seen.

On July 5th, I stood in the sportsbook—for it was standing room only—and watched France defeat Portugal for a spot in the final. I ultimately watched Italy v. France from the comfort of home on July 9th.

This is just as well. When Zidane was sent off, I was crestfallen. By the time France lost on penalties, I was too numb for the defeat to register.

A few days after the end of the 2006 World Cup—a few days after Italy uglied their way to the world championship—I tendered my resignation (though I retained my advisor's contract for a few more months). The two events are in no manner related, of course, but the timing of the two events helps to sharpen my memory of both.

And here we are in 2010, and my contexts are staggeringly different, though my passion for the World Cup is as fiery as it was in 1986, or 1994, or 2006.

I left finance for good in February of 2007. I went on the academic job market in the fall of 2008—one of the worst years to do so in the last 20. I applied to 42 schools, and saw no less than 7 of them retract positions due to financial unrest.

In 2009 I defended my dissertation, and accepted a wonderful position at Ball State University.

During this 2010 World Cup, my contexts are dramatically different, as I attempt to measure my life via the blurry interstices and intersections of the everyday events that take place between World Cups.

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In addition to the stunning differences in my own contexts between 2006 and 2010, I can't help but marvel at the sociotechnical differences as well. During the 2006 World Cup, Facebook still wasn't open to the general public, there were no "apps" for anything (iPhone apps, that is), and Twitter was a sketch on a yellow pad.

In 2006, I watched most of the matches on either a grainy 13" TV with coworkers or multiple outsized Vegas screens with perfect strangers. In neither scenario did I obsessively check my phone (as I do today), and the iPad I now carry, with my 2010 FIFA World Cup app, was something I had not even imagined was possible.

The technical infrastructure of my viewing and monitoring practices are tremendously different (what an understatement). Where 2006 involved repeated, intentional forays in search of matches and in search of communal interest, my 2010 experience is ambient and ubiquitous. ESPN has gone all in with its coverage, attempting to capitalize on growing interest in soccer in the United States.

But the biggest difference technologically (for me, but for a great many others like me) is the mobile device, and the mobility of social ties: as I said above, it's the socio + technical differences between 2006 and 2010 that are particularly striking.

Go Timbers!

Tonight, the Seattle Sounders of MLS will travel down I-5 to PDX for a U.S. Open Cup showdown with the Portland Timbers of USL. No idea what I'm talking about? That's okay. A primer can be found here.

Go Timbers!

Representing Space

When I close my eyes and remember my childhood, I am running across a bumpy field in Holland, the ball at my feet. I am 12 years old, wearing the red-and-black of my club, Ajax Sportman Combinatie, and we are playing against some farmers' kids from a local village. Each of them is a head taller than us, and the Dutch are the world's tallest nation. It is a cold autumn Saturday morning. ~Simon Kuper

This post is about landscape photography, and about the manipulation and representation of public space. This post is also about football, the (mostly) fluid manipulation and representation of public space.

I've recently purchased a book of photographs called European Fields: The Landscape of Lower League Football by the famed Dutch photographer Hans van der Meer. I am running short of superlatives that will adequately describe this collection of landscapes so I'll keep it simple: it's stunning.

Van der Meer captures and weaves together so many of the things that inspire me, and thoughtfully articulates such representations--discursively and visually--in a way that is impossible to digest in one sitting. You see, these photographs are not about football, they are about spaces, places, and publics. Football, you see, is about spaces, places, and publics.

In 1988 someone in the Spaarnestad Archive in Haarlem, Holland's largest photo archive, showed me a pile of old football photographs. They were beautiful black and white prints of the Dutch national team's international games from the beginning of the twentieth century until the mid-1950's. Most of the photographs were taken from behind the goal, but some from a position up in the stands. The space in the images looked so obvious to me that I wondered why I had never seen football pictures like them before.

Taken with old large-format cameras, each photograph was pin sharp. You were allowed to see the entire setting of the match. The pitch was only the foreground. You could also distinguish the faces of hat-wearing men in long coats in the opposite stand, the flags on top of the roof and the trees beyond; sometimes even houses, or traffic in a street in the distance. I found these unintentionally photographed details touching.

In the archive you could see how radically the photography of football had changed at the end of the fifties: space disappeared from the images. In a sport which is all about the position of players on the pitch, the photographers had given up one of their most powerful weapons: the overview. ~Hans van der Meer

More importantly, photos of contemporary football elide the quotidian realities of the game: it's rarely played as spectacle, yet nearly always photographically represented as such, in the cathedrals of sport where comparatively few are granted admission. Yet variations on the sacred spectacle are played in the publics of the everyday, nearly everywhere. Van der Meer's photographs offer representations of everyday publics, "as far away as possible from the Champions League."

The precursor to Van der Meer's European Fields was Dutch Fields, a work that respected landscape architect Dirk Sijmons calls "the best collection of photographs about the Dutch landscape" he had ever seen. Van der Meer is interested in the "second world" beyond the pitch--in the juxtaposition of publics--the manipulation of space from touchline to touchline, and the orderings of space beyond both.

Many of the collection's most remarkable representations of public space are muted and difficult to spot. In Consett, England, a muddy community pitch sits opposite a skinny wooden fence, duplexes and row homes arrayed haphazardly up a hill, the sky a slate, formless gray. The action on the pitch, in the forground of the image, escalates just outside the 6-yard box, as the Blackhill Comrades mount a menacing attack. To the far right of the image, a shaggy-haired blonde boy, perhaps 12, stands on the back stoop of his family's duplex in short sleeves, taking in the action with neither glee nor contempt. It is what it is.

In Marxloh, Germany, two teams kick up dust on a pitch that resembles a baseball infield, all gravelly dirt and white chalk lines. In the distance beyond, impossibly tall smelter smoke stacks rise above the trees that ring the pitch.

In Lourmarin, France, players from Lourmarin JS and Cheval Blanc, teams with nearly identical kits, anticipate a corner kick, while a handful of spectators sit upon a stone wall that separates a car-lined street from the pitch. Across the street are tasteful, tile-roofed commercial buildings, two or three stories high, with signs that advertise a pharmacy, La Poste, and Credit Agricole.

In Salon de Provence, France, the detail is easy to miss. A keeper stands alone on a dirt pitch, framed at the left of the photograph, hands on hips, standing near the top of the 18-yard box. His shadow stretches long to the right, streets, trees, and homes in the background. Directly behind and parallel to the goal is a medium-sized chapel, its roof, bell, and cross striking against a pale blue sky. To the far right of the image, just inches from the touchline, stands a priest in full vestments, hands drawn up in a prayerful pose. Like the keeper, he takes in the action at the other end of the pitch.

These photos are rarely about football, and always about public space. Public space in each of these photographs is often about football.

In Brilliant Orange, David Winner argues that "space is the unique defining element of Dutch football," that "no one has ever imagined or structured their play as abstractly, as architecturally, in such a measured fashion as the Dutch." Winner's assessment of the ways in which the Dutch fluidly manipulated the space of the pitch is astute and inspiring. And yet I wonder, how are young players in the dusty streets of Angola being shaped by the space that surrounds them, as they play right now? How will the kids playing in an alley of Marseille shape the limited space of their makeshift pitch? How does public space structure football, and football structure space? And how will we represent such interaction where it occurs?

[The above photos may be found in there original contexts here.]