Sarahel's Semiotics 4U

also the fact that it is entirely amateur players but at a high level who have an actual attatchment to the team they play for kind of changes the bodies for hire dynamic of most pro sports

also players being nationally famous but also having regular jobs and being normal ppl is pretty strange

all sports can be summed up as an endless riffs on that one scene in Troy when Brad Pitt jumped up and skewered the shit out of that other dude with the axe and everybody on Brad Pitt's side cheered

Lol!

posh athletics like cricket

at my club, where i play, i am by a country mile the most RP-voiced member. cricket is as beloved and practiced in working-class communities as it is among the toffs of the world. especially in the Indian subcontinent, where everyone plays.

one can have a great interest both in sporting pursuits and in oppressive corporate systems. to block everything except sport out is a false choice, yes, but for those of us who can handle both entertainments and socio-political machinations, there isn't even a choice to be made.

i am sure many NFL fans are equally capable of seeing the bigger picture, even in the heat of recent on-field events. don't let the actions of a few idiots cloud your perspective of sport and its (hugely important) role.

harbl, the idea of 'supporting one's local team' is perhaps a fallacy. i know plenty of people who don't, people who support for far more logical reasons. myself, i support my local football team foremost, because they are likeable and because i feel an instinctive tribal affinity for SE London, but when it comes to favouring other teams, i try to reason on purely sporting terms, and not let 'regionalism' or 'archaic opposition' cloud my judgement. it's fun to have old rivals, but i agree there are those who take it too far. there ain't nothing racist about supporting any football team unless that team is Athletic Bilbao, who still employ a Basque-only policy in order to retain some sort of quasi-national identity. they're as much an ongoing political project as a football team, though, and i wouldn't describe them as corporate whores, razzle-dazzle of La Liga aside.

Here it's a pretty classic example of Marxist "this is what's wrong with capitalism."

I disagree and oddly enough, I think it's more capitalist in 'socialist' Europe. Here (US) we have 'leagues' which sell franchises. In Europe, they mostly stem from the FA model in England which codified a gentleman's game in the mid 1860's and which oversee all competitions which desire their stamp of approval. The individual clubs are often massive examples of dynamic capitalism whereas American teams, for the most part, have wealth sharing and drafts and other systems to try to ensure that nobody gets TOO big or too small. Sure, we have the Yankees and other behemoths like the Red Sox, but no-one is really ever allowed to fail entirely and the leagues protect their own.

oh, there is something a bit racist about Lazio and Chievo as well but I'm not getting into all this now

field sports are good to watch if you are a painter because they are full of different ideas about using a space and movement

...also Glasgows Celtic and Rangers...yawn...stupid...

ok. i can't explain good enough.

xp there is probably a more interesting semiotic analysis in that i think

Lj can aorrect me if I'm wrong but I thought most of the early football (soccer) clubs were local workingmen's sunday affairs as leisure and a day off became a reality in Victorian Britain. In the US, iIrc, many of the early teams were semi-pro 'exhibitions' that toured in very ramshackle, to say the least, orbits that only barely could be called a league.

Definitely something racist about Lazio.

whereas American teams, for the most part, have wealth sharing and drafts and other systems to try to ensure that nobody gets TOO big or too small. Sure, we have the Yankees and other behemoths like the Red Sox, but no-one is really ever allowed to fail entirely and the leagues protect their own.

But this is a classic example of monopolistic behavior.

field sports are good to watch if you are a painter because they are full of different ideas about using a space and movement

One of the reasons I really love the look of baseball.

I don't know anything about European sports/futbol but is there anything analogous to the bending/changing of rules by American sports leagues for profit- I'm specifically thinking of baseball and the home run ball, from the introduction of a livelier baseball after Babe Ruth to the whole blind-eye during the steroids era

i have never actually seen baseball played outside of movies where gang of rapscallions takes it all the way to the little-league finals

Honestly, I'm not into sports, and don't know enough about the structure and roles they play in the lives of "ordinary" people to be able to contribute well to this topic.

nah harbs i do getcha. sports teams promote only themselves, and encourage tunnel-vision, placing themselves at the summit of one's sporting attention. it is frequently quite amusing, the lengths team spokespeople will go to in order to retain one's undying devotion. this element i can do without.

M White, that is pretty much OTM. Frequently, cricket and football clubs were shared institutions. Derby County started as an offshoot of Derby County Cricket Club, for instance. And played, confusingly, at the Baseball Ground.

Bending of the rules in European sports only really happened in football, and the rules bent weren't really on-field. Financial rules, concerning the buying of clubs and the transfer of players, have been fucked to high heaven.

But this is a classic example of monopolistic behavior.

And as Marx said, capitalism tends towards monopoly but even Marx would have admitted that the vigor of 'real' capitalism, real supply and demand, real risk and real failure, was far greater than monopolies. The NFL is an amazing business story, to be sure, but it's also as much of a business story as a sports story. You can hear Briton after Briton bemoaning the death of the old ways, how much money there is in the game now, how many poseurs or people of the wrong class, but you can actually straight-up fail in Britain. You can be relegated to the farm leagues (that's inexact but bear with me) and you can get league points dedcuted for financial shenanigans like bankruptcy. You can even disappear altogether... The competition is very, very real and only part of it plays out on the field.

i liked semiotics better when it was called symbology and it allowed maverick professors to crack ancient codes about the bloodline of jesus

raoul de keyser is a former sportswriter btw

http://bloggy.com/mt/archives/raoul-de-keyser.jpg

unfortunately he is belgian so i think all his sports writing is in dutch there are lots of sports references in his work in a way that makes you think of painting when watching a game of soccer for eg

http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/classes/ah111/kosuth1.jpg

Speaking of football and poststructuralism, the following link is both awesome and a total hoot: http://aaa.t0.or.at/documents/aaarules.htm

The key to the game is that it does not foster aggression or competitiveness. Unlike two-sided football, no team keeps a record of the number of goals they score. However they do keep a tally of the goals they concede, and the winner is determined as the team which concedes least goals. The game deconstructs the mythic bi-polar strcuture of conventional football, where an us-and-them struggle mediated by the referee mimics the way the media and the state pose themselves as "neutral" elements in the class struggle. Likewise, it is no psycho-sexual drama of the fuckers and fucked - the possibilities are greatly expanded!

wait is that an actual painting or just the redacted cover to his Ph.D thesis xxp

Bending of the rules in European sports only really happened in football, and the rules bent weren't really on-field. Financial rules, concerning the buying of clubs and the transfer of players, have been fucked to high heaven.

The transfers market makes aHollywood look positively human and gives a sickening insight into what the slave markets of Bordeaux or liverpool or Charleston must have been like in flavor.

Lj, what about off-side and back passes and the card system? Aren't some of those relatively novel?

ur right that is awesome LJ

this is actually a really astute obvservation imo

this is:wait is that an actual painting or just the redacted cover to his Ph.D thesis xxp

― a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful (dyao), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 10:09 PM (1 minute ago)

i mean

the mythic bi-polar strcuture of conventional football, where an us-and-them struggle mediated by the referee

I think this is the system Harbl was referring to, sort of! The mythic false choice.

Offside, back-passes and the card system are all universal and widely-acknowledged improvements to the game. Nobody has suggested that they are for the benefit of the few, unlike the transfer system. In fact, they all encourage a fairer and more balanced style of game.

This should overcome the prominent resistance to women taking their full part in football.

Ha ha!

the mythic false choice in competitive sports refers to following/rooting for a particular team, when they are more or less the same ... unless I'm missing something.

In fact, they all encourage a fairer and more balanced style of game.

I agree but they ARE tinkering, albeit helpful and successful.

yeah there are probably hundreds of different false choices you could find but i was thinking it related to the team you picked

when they are more or less the same

Much of the fun of sports for those who follow its narratives, is the discussion of whether x team's long term strategy, recent acquisitions, game tactics will prove to be successful and the fact that the result is far more concrete that most results in human affairs. Some games are even played entirely by the rules and one or the other side succeeds.

but yeah, the us-and-them struggle too

okay, the soccer mom thing ...

The "soccer mom" is definitely a polyvalent (can be read as having positive or negative connotations, depending on the reader) term.

Before the LPA organised its first game at the Glasgow Anarchist Summer School in 1993, there is little evidence of any games being played.

yeah xxp. i agree with that too. it can still be interesting.

more i think about it, it is harder to insert sports into a semiology of value systems and commodity exchanges of players etc. notwithstanding

eg the complete lack of messianism of team sport which employs you know "a level playing field" and where victory is regulated and endlessly repeatable (not definitive)

this is why it is always so lame to see players celebrating winning

Nah, I think you're on it Sarah, but my argument is that the choice can be made for reasons outside of Debord's 'preposterous ontological superiority' argument; many sports fans accept that their team isn't very good, but they support due to an almost familial desire to belong. A tribal and yes often regional association, but not necessarily a regionalIST one.

M White's last post is excellent. Not every team is the same. If you've invested consideration into one (or more) particular team, it follows that you'd want to see how the team(s) fared.

I really want to play 3-sided football. The instantaneous switchings of allegiance would be just so so so amazing and lol.

Winning is a transient state, but it's fun to bask before time has its revenge.

http://www.richardhellergallery.com/dynamic/images/detail/44_19_ONSPORTS5P.jpg

fyi

The basic definition of a "soccer mom" is a woman who spends a significant amount of time serving as chauffeur to her child or children to a variety of organized extracurricular activities that are chosen with the child's development in mind.

this is why it is always so lame to see players celebrating winning

And yet, oddly, so natural. Games are at the very heart of human child development and competition is the nature of life on Earth. It may be childish but what's more childish than an adult playing sport professionally?

adultbaby.jpg

not just a chauffeur which implies passivity, but is also an active planner and hunter out of those organized extracurricular activities xp

looooool @ that jpg

my issue with 'soccer mom' is that it has itself become a lifestyle label, associated with overcompetitive parenting and conversely subjugation to the needs of a child, whereas individual cases are not quite so black-and-white as this

i wouldn't say an adult playing sport professionally is childish. an adult playing sport professionally and throwing a wobbly when things go badly, now that is childish