How football got smart and art got dumb

March 2023. Emirates Stadium. Arsenal vs Everton. The gamesmanship of the visiting defender James Tarkowski gets to me. A shame, says a man one row in front, to see the name of the Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky sullied like this. What ensues is a brief exchange about the auteur’s distinguished if ponderous work. I haven’t got past Solaris and Andrei Rublev. Mirror is commended to me.

Someone should compile a book called You Hear the Darndest Things at the Emirates. A former colleague said it is the only stadium in which he has seen someone with a copy of Vanity Fair. “Not the magazine.” Then there was the incident when the QPR goalkeeper Júlio César earned the admiration of the home crowd. “We came to bury César,” howled a dissenting voice, “not to praise him!”

Yes, I know. Islington and all that. But my wider experience as a lover of the sport isn’t so different nowadays. The membrane that used to seal football from the life of the mind has become ever more porous. There is lots of good writing now — and not just, à la Norman Mailer, about human themes around sport. There is more tactical analysis than I can keep up with or sometimes fathom: on podcasts, on the YouTube Tifo channel, on Twitter. Next to the political debate, in which I have spent my adult life, the tone is sharper, droller, more allusive to other bodies of knowledge.

What happened? First, in the 1990s, hooliganism declined. White-collar fans could follow the sport without social stigma. (Martin Amis used to feel “pseudo-proletarian” in polite company.) Then, from 2008, when Pep Guardiola took over as manager of Barcelona, football became more tactically complex. People with a forensic cast of mind were drawn to a subject that might once have bored them. Finally, social media gave those people a platform. The result is a richer and more mind-stretching football discourse than was conceivable a generation ago.

Football became more tactically complex. People with a forensic cast of mind were drawn to a subject that might once have bored them

Yet there hasn’t been a net improvement in my life. Just as football went through its intellectual revolution, the arts discourse went the other way. Look at what gets broadcast now. ITV gave up on The South Bank Show, its long-running cultural series, in 2010. The BBC abandoned The Review Show in 2014. The premier books programme on national television is now Between the Covers, some of whose guests James Corden might blackball as too lightweight.

The peak-to-trough fall in the US is greater. On YouTube, there is a clip from The Dick Cavett Show in 1981 of Ian McKellen explaining the difference between stage and screen acting. Over the course of seven minutes. Without a whoop or holler from the audience. It is as unimaginable now as having to wait until Friday 8pm for your favourite show.

“Dumbing down” is a cliché, I know: itself a kind of dumbing down. But at some point, the evidence for that it is going on becomes hard to ignore. Even where culture is treated seriously now, it is treated ideologically. It is harder and harder to discuss or read about art qua art. Art as a window into “power relations”: there is lots of that. But the underlying work itself can get politicised out of existence as a subject.

The culture vulture, so well-fed a generation ago, now has two options. On one side, lowest common denominator programming, made by the kind of person who is liable at any time to write a children’s book. On the other, jargon-rich iconoclasm. (“Should we problematise Mozart?” etc.) There is no escape online. The ecosystem of podcasts and vlogs is not a tenth as good or as original as football’s.

No wonder I find myself turning ever more to the sport for “content”. It goes deeper than Arsenal’s present run of form. There is an old idea of football as where people go to let out something primal. That hasn’t stopped being true. More and more, though, it is also where people go to take their brain for a ramble.

Perhaps society as a whole never dumbs down: the intellectual energy is more or less fixed, and just moves from one domain to another. Precisely because the stakes are so low, football now gives more licence than the arts to those of a curious and argumentative bent. Call it a safe space.

Email Janan at [email protected]

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