The problem with intelligent footballers
And it’s reminiscent of music: if a band are “for people who don’t normally like this genre”, then there’s something clearly wrong with them. I don’t normally like metal, but I love Within Temptation. I don’t normally listen to hip-hop, but there’s something about these Blackalicious guys. I don’t normally like footballers expressing themselves as actual living human beings, but me and India Knight both approve of Clarke Carlisle.
This isn’t an anti-Clarke Carlisle thing, even if the fact that his immense intelligence doesn’t manifest itself in being able to calculate how high a through ball is likely to bounce. It’s just that celebrating a footballer for having “intelligence”, however misguidedly, isn’t something that should be celebrated. It’s just smug for anyone to think that sets him above other players.
Look, inside the jumpers-for-goalposts fantasies some of us still misguidedly keep in our minds, football is an escape for kids who wouldn’t have gotten out of the kind of places I grew up in unless they either slung crack rock became a professional footballer or had a wicked jump shot joined the army. Football is an inherently anti-intellectual pursuit, one that celebrates the left side of the brain over the right. Celebrating players for being able to churn out the kind of “intellect” that sounds like a redbrick lecturer on an off day isn’t a good thing for football, it’s just another way of putting football down, of implying that unless a footballer becomes a generic middle class media figure he’s only worthy of scorn.
You know what Clarke Carlisle really reminds me of in all honesty? When porn stars decide that they’re intelligent. So they get their blog, get their Twitter feed, get a magazine column, get a few speaking gigs. And they’ve got opinions. Feminism, indie rock, video games, low-end leftist politics. And they’ve got a platform because people used to watch them get plugged airtight by three 43-year-old men called “Peter”. And these aren’t particularly “good” opinions, and all we’re doing is being patronising. Oh yes, well done, you came from a demeaning profession but if I squint a bit you could be one of us. You could be a man cub. And that’s what Clarke Carlisle is. The Joanna Angel of football. And that’s not a thing any man should aspire to.
By Dom Passantino. Read his blog which, intriguingly, has little to do with football.
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