What Are The Subconscious Effects Of Soccer And Nationalism
First Draft
In Simon Kuper’s book Football against the Enemy, Kuper explores how soccer has become convoluted in social, economic, and political views of society. This essay addresses the subconscious effects of soccer and nationalism on fans of the 1988 World Cup game between West-Germany and the Netherlands as well as how they use imagination to relive history through games and how they have all intertwined to prove soccer is a parallel to life.
What we can gather from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is that nations are merely made up borders to encapsle the ideas and actions of one people. The idea of nationalism feeds off a person's pride to make them succumb to a unity within these imaginary borders. When it comes to soccer, nationalism seems to be heightened. An example of this would be when the Dutch beat the Germans 2-1 in 1988, “over 60 percent of the population, came out on to the …show more content…
A fan’s mentality is that their team is good, and any other team must be evil, and in the context of this game Kuper joins in by saying “The Germans were evil and we were good” (11 Kuper). For example the Dutch were racist during this time period but “The Dutch briefly forgot their own discipline, their own staidness, and their own intolerance of Turks and Moroccans and Surinamese like Gullit” who was a black player on the team that helped lead the Dutch to victory. The Dutch blocked out their own racist beliefs, disregarding any and all of their shortcomings, that way they are able to place all the heinous acts on Germany without a sense of guilt. Kuper even says “Our shirts were bright, if unfortunately striped; the Germans wore black and white”, as if the Dutch were still prisoners of the Nazi invasion that happened over 40 years ago (Kuper 10). The “act of resistance” during the physical match was imagined to justify the way the Dutch acted and felt (Kuper
In Simon Kuper’s book Football against the Enemy, Kuper explores how soccer has become convoluted in social, economic, and political views of society. This essay addresses the subconscious effects of soccer and nationalism on fans of the 1988 World Cup game between West-Germany and the Netherlands as well as how they use imagination to relive history through games and how they have all intertwined to prove soccer is a parallel to life.
What we can gather from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is that nations are merely made up borders to encapsle the ideas and actions of one people. The idea of nationalism feeds off a person's pride to make them succumb to a unity within these imaginary borders. When it comes to soccer, nationalism seems to be heightened. An example of this would be when the Dutch beat the Germans 2-1 in 1988, “over 60 percent of the population, came out on to the …show more content…
A fan’s mentality is that their team is good, and any other team must be evil, and in the context of this game Kuper joins in by saying “The Germans were evil and we were good” (11 Kuper). For example the Dutch were racist during this time period but “The Dutch briefly forgot their own discipline, their own staidness, and their own intolerance of Turks and Moroccans and Surinamese like Gullit” who was a black player on the team that helped lead the Dutch to victory. The Dutch blocked out their own racist beliefs, disregarding any and all of their shortcomings, that way they are able to place all the heinous acts on Germany without a sense of guilt. Kuper even says “Our shirts were bright, if unfortunately striped; the Germans wore black and white”, as if the Dutch were still prisoners of the Nazi invasion that happened over 40 years ago (Kuper 10). The “act of resistance” during the physical match was imagined to justify the way the Dutch acted and felt (Kuper