Talking about ‘Fairness’ in Football and Politics: The Case of Navad

ABSTRACT

We argue that sport in general, and association football in particular, are activities that invite spectators and players alike to talk about them. Using a Wittgensteinian approach, we argued more precisely that football, like any sport, may be understood as a form of life, and as such that it enables speakers to talk about it in quite specific ways, not least in the manner in which normative terms, such as fairness and bias, are used. Football thereby creates a metaphorical space, we suggest, in which there is a freedom to explore and play with language, and in particular normative language, even if that language-use is repressed in the wider political society. Using the example of the Iranian television programme Navad as a case study, we explore the ways in which talk about fairness in the context of football can develop and sustain a competence in the use of political and moral language-use even when that competence is under-threat elsewhere.

KEYWORDS:

• Fairness
• Football
• Navad
• Wittgenstein
• Form of life
• Politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This discussion draws on the Economist 2019. See also McManus 2018.

2. In March 2019 after almost 20 years, due to a dispute between Ferdosipour and the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting authorities, after months of ups and downs, Navad officially stopped broadcasting. In the same month, ironically, Navad won the best TV show award by people’s votes.

3. See Navad’s official website: http://90tv.ir/.

4. Sports may test physical qualities such as strength (be it in running, high jumping, or weightlifting); endurance and stamina (over minutes, hours, or days and weeks); reflexes (as the tennis player or baseball batter reacts to the oncoming ball, or the Formula One driver responds to the speed of their car); co-ordination (be it the balance of the gymnast or ice dancer, or the eye-hand co-ordination of the squash-player and eye-foot co-ordination of the soccer player). Sports will also test mental skills, such as self-discipline (including the ability to cope with pain and exhaustion, but also the mental strength to recover from defeat and even humiliation); strategy (be it the distance runner’s response to their competitors, or the quarterback’s ability to understand and use the space of the playing field); courage (the bullfighter faces the real possibility of serious injury and death).

5. Peter Winch suggests that ‘the philosophies of science, of art, of history, etc., will have the task of elucidating the peculiar natures of those forms of life called “science”, “art”, etc.’ (1990, 41). If so, the philosophy of football would have the task of elucidating the peculiar nature of the form of life called ‘football’. This is, presumably, our intention here.

6. We will suggest that more than one language-game can be supported by a given form of life.

7. It may be noted that the very rules of football can be questioned as fair. The rules are not a given, against which judgements of fairness are made. Rules, such as those governing the use of VAR, may be questioned precisely on the grounds of whether or not they serve to constitute a fair challenge for players. An inappropriate rule change may be unfair, insofar as it makes the core challenges of the sport too easy to achieve (e.g. widening the goal in football) or creates an imbalance between players (so that a wider goal biases the game in favour of attackers and against defenders).

8. See Kupfer (1995) on the divergent conceptions of a well-played game. In the 2009 film Damned United, Brian Clough, having become manager of Leeds United, berates the Leeds players, telling them that their haul of trophies were worthless, because their negative and brutal style of play had besmirched the ‘beautiful’ game.

9. A classic example of this came in the 2012 Olympics in a match between Iceland and Hungary. With the game tied, Iceland was awarded a penalty at the very end of normal time. If the penalty was scored Iceland would win, and this would be the last shot of the match. The penalty was missed and Iceland went on to lose, by a single goal, after two periods of extra-time. The rules of the sport thus placed an enormous burden of responsibility on the Icelandic penalty taker. ‘If only I had’. But equally, every player in the team must have had at least one shot that might have been taken differently, and would have scored that winning goal.

10. Chad Harbach’s otherwise excellent The Art of Fielding: A Novel (2012) has to violate this principle for the sake of his story. Needing his underdog heroes to win, they can only do so through a lucky play in a final which is contested over a single game. It is implausible that such underdogs could have ridden their luck through a five or even three match series. But then again, it is implausible that an important baseball competition would be decided in a single game.