We all know it’s wrong. We can see it happening before our very eyes. In the end our beloved teams will betray us. But they say love is blind. Dispatches is proud to welcome the fabulous Juliet Jacques to the Sofa as she confesses to her very tainted love.
The most rational football supporters are irrational. Even arch positivist A. J. Ayer, author of Language, Truth and Logic, held a season ticket at White Hart Lane (nicknamed ‘The Prof’ by Spurs fans: a label usually given to any footballing figure who reads a broadsheet, but probably fair here) – one of millions hooked despite football’s warped values system, its often abhorrent culture and our utter helplessness before our team’s fortunes.
I’ve always had strong passions for Norwich City and Olympique de Marseille. I like to consider them (betraying that the English side are my first team, and the French my second) as polar opposites: Norwich being the provincial team who try to play ‘good’ football, hand chances to youngsters and run themselves prudently, and L’OM as the resentful outsiders who would stop at nothing, financially or ethically, to break into the European elite. Naturally, it’s L’OM that I will write about here.
Like many middle-class English youths, the 1990 World Cup confirmed my love of football. I fell for L’OM the following season, when they fielded two of my favourite players from Italia ’90 – Dragan Stojkovi? and Chris Waddle. I delighted in their European Cup run, understanding them to be a joyful attacking side despite only watching the final. I felt crushed when they could find no way through an untypically defensive Red Star Belgrade line-up and lost on penalties after an arduous 0-0 draw.
For L’OM as for Norwich, 1992-93 was an annus mirabilis. Whilst the Canaries clinched their highest ever finish (third in the new English Premier League), L’OM won their fifth consecutive title and became the first French club to win the European Cup. It is well documented that after their failed attempt to bribe Valenciennes into throwing a crucial match, president Bernard Tapie was imprisoned, the title was revoked and L’OM were banned from defending the continental trophy – which they retained despite strong suspicion (and admissions in court) that they had bought vital games for several years, and doped Spartak Moscow players before beating them 6-0 in the Champions League.
So why have I continued to love L’OM despite the fact that their triumphs were discredited as the club were demoted to Division 2? Despite the fact that two former players, Jean-Jacques Eydelie and Tony Cascarino, have both alleged that players were given ‘injections’ before matches? Despite former chairman Robert Louis-Dreyfus and ex-manager Rolland Courbis being investigated for €22m of illegal payments between 1997 and 1999 as OM tried – and failed – to buy their way back to the top of French and European football?
I’m tempted to say that it’s because of the blind love that comes with supporting a football club. Certainly, the club and its fans test the patience: after the scandalous summer of 1993, L’OM went through numerous players and managers as they went seventeen years without a trophy; as an openly transsexual woman who has campaigned against homophobia in football, it was particularly problematic when their notorious Ultras unfurled a banner reading “Man up, you bunch of poofs” as L’OM laboured against pitiful Arles-Avignon. But I can’t really claim to support L’OM – I have no local or familial connection to France, let alone Marseille, and I’ve only been to their Stade Vélodrome once, earlier this year – so the attraction must reside in what they represent for me.
Football’s central moral dilemma has always been the tension between playing beautifully (stylistically or morally) and winning at any cost: since Tapie, no club, except perhaps Juventus, has so deliberately and delightedly chosen the dark side as have L’OM. I find the sanctimony and faux-moralising of many football pundits unbearable, and unbelievable: if I put morals aside and admit my basest instincts, what often attracts me to – and repels me from – football is the indulgence, stupidity and childishness of its protagonists, the limits that its players and clubs will push in order to succeed, and the desperation with which fans, myself included, will attempt to excuse any wrongdoing on behalf of their heroes. (I admit above all, I despise sanctimony, and my love has grown in proportion to the ever more pious trumpeting of Barcelona’s apparently perfect principles, and tedious refusal to acknowledge any failure to live up to them.)
Above all, I enjoy the simple, intense emotions that come with a clear knowledge of who is the enemy. L’OM style themselves as the people’s club, if not as the wretched of the earth, their fans convinced that the French Football Federation punished Tapie’s transgressions so severely because it could not tolerate a provincial club asserting itself so successfully over the capital. L’OM still list 1992-93 on official lists of French titles, and Tapie has been recast as an anti-hero, his systematic corruption being a weapon against the detested metropolitan elite. (This led me to think, in a more pretentious moment, that if Dostoyevsky had created a football club, it would look like L’OM.)
The demands of fans raised on sustained success continue to make L’OM almost unmanageable, intensifying the constant power struggle between owner Marguerite Louis-Dreyfus, sporting director José Anigo and manager Didier Deschamps, and the long shadow of 1993 will only be escaped if they win the Champions League within the rules of the game. Given how football has changed since the early Nineties, this will only be possible if, like their hated rivals Paris Saint-Germain, they are bought out by a foreign consortium. Then, history may repeat itself – L’OM spent huge fortunes on international superstars under Tapie, and even if they only bought players and not matches, this would be deeply dissatisfying – a handshake with the game’s hegemony rather than a slap to its face.
With speculation building that they could be taken over by a Middle Eastern investment company, I remain entranced by the endless circus around L’OM, even if writing this piece has made me realise how hard it can be to defend the club’s twisted moral universe. Even after all the financial irregularities and the allegations (proven and unproven) of match-fixing and doping, the team’s decision to publicly back striker Brandão, arrested on a rape charge, left a particularly sour taste. I do not attempt to apologise for this – to their credit, the club did after president Jean-Claude Dassier expressed his fury – but it brought home the (obvious) moral precariousness of identifying myself with the damned Olympique.
Following L’OM just makes me more aware that, for football supporters, you can never feel certain that it won’t be your favourite player who is accused of a crime, your owner who is convicted of corruption, your club that is bought out by people with direct involvement in political atrocities, and that, in the end, you probably won’t do the decent thing and cut off all connection with it. Instead, you might despise the moral universe within which your club operate, critique it with all your reason and continue to support the team you instinctively loved from childhood, contradicting yourself in your surrender to the absurd. It has also made me realise that my position on Norwich City is as pious as it is hypocritical.
Juliet Jacques is a freelance writer best known for writing A Transgender Journey for The Guardian. She has also written for the New Statesman, Cineaste, Vertigo, 3am and numerous football websites, and can be found on Twitter @julietjacques.
loving the illustrations NT xxxx