1/14/2024 0 Comments Tecatito corona skillsIt is within this climate that the soccer highlight video has proliferated. Just last year, Newcastle United was acquired by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. It’s unsurprising, then, that this strategy should inspire imitation, and by even bigger players. In France, the petroleum-boosted PSG has won Ligue 1 in eight of the last ten seasons. In the 14 years since Manchester City became a jewel in the UAE’s crown, it and Chelsea have combined for no fewer than nine titles-and that’s in the Premier League, widely regarded as the most contested of the continent’s biggest domestic competitions. (Personally sanctioned following the invasion of Ukraine, Abramovich was forced to sell last year.) These moves, deemed “sportswashing,” have been harshly decried, but they have also been undeniably successful image-laundering operations. Putin-allied Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s purchase of Chelsea in 2003 was followed by Abu Dhabi’s takeover of Manchester City in 2008 and the 2011 acquisition of Paris Saint-Germain by Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar. While FIFA has rightly been pilloried for awarding the present World Cup to Qatar, this is only part of the much larger story of the political instrumentalization of the game that has accompanied its integration into globalized capitalism. The rise of Real Madrid, for instance, was facilitated by General Franco, while Stalin was willing to put his finger on the scale for Dinamo Moscow. This is not just due to a much more Darwinian competitive environment, in which the strong feed on the weak in more ways than one, but also a longstanding interpenetration of politics into the sport. Soccer, on the other hand, is not a respite from an unfair world but an unapologetic reflection of it. Stateside fans can take for granted systems and regulations-from salary caps to player drafts-designed to ensure a certain degree of parity. Unlike American sports, global soccer holds few pretensions to meritocracy. These videos, helpful introductions to the many stars of global soccer, often enlivened by digital effects and terrible music, may in turn provoke more questions than they answer: What is this? Who makes these? Why are there so many of them? To answer these questions is also to make sense of the tremendous changes that have come over the sport in the present century and what they say about the inner lives of people who devote countless, irreplaceable hours of their mortal lives to the business of watching a bunch of strangers kick a ball around a big field. Perplexed followers of the World Cup, attempting to make sense of the various teams and players, may take to the internet, where they might encounter an evolution of the old sports highlight package, pitched between cool analysis and fevered partisanship, individual and collective loyalties, amateurism and artistry. Daniel Witkin on the politics and proliferation of the soccer highlight video
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