Dion Fanning: Where do we find consolation in this sporting world?
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In 2006, I was at the Olympiastadion in Berlin when many of us began to wonder why Italy’s Marco Materazzi was lying on the ground apparently in a great deal of pain. In the press box, few around me knew what had happened until the replays showed Zinedine Zidane turning back towards Materazzi, walking towards him with some purpose before…well, you know what came next.
One reporter near me was so outraged by what he saw on the screen that he demanded instant retribution for Zidane. He did so with such mania and fury that myself and a colleague had to ask him to return to his seat. Today, he would have simply summoned allies to his position online, before finding many more who would have made him feel that his initial stance was too forgiving and compassionate.
Zidane had retired from international football two years earlier only to be drawn out of retirement. Now he was gone for good, having delivered the headbutt that was the final mysterious act of his playing career.
It was a moment which managed to remain most of that mystery over the years as people wondered what led Zidane to this moment. There was speculation, rumour and fantasy.
Three years later in 2009, Materazzi received “substantial” libel damages from the Sun in an out-of-court settlement after the tabloid wrongly reported that Materazzi had called Zidane “the son of a terrorist whore”.
"The Sun newspaper has paid substantial damages and has now withdrawn the allegations made against Marco and accept that he did not say anything of a racist nature to Zidane," Steven Heffer, Materazzi’s lawyer, said.
But the questions remained, not just about Zidane’s motivation but how the referee — who appeared to have missed the moment like many of us in the stadium did — had still been so confident about what had happened that he could send a player off in the final minutes of a World Cup final.
In 2009, I was in the Stade de France when Thierry Henry’s handball set up William Gallas to score as France qualified for the World Cup. If anyone had wanted to control the message that night, they would have failed as Ireland players and management raged against the injustice and found themselves floating conspiratorial suggestions as to why France were going to the World Cup and Ireland weren’t.
When Argentina won the World Cup in 2022, Lionel Messi was wrapped in a bisht by the Emir of Qatar. He then got to celebrate this moment surrounded by his team-mates and, of course, Salt Bae. The celebrity chef pestered Messi for selfies, put one player’s medal in his mouth and grabbed the World Cup trophy and posed alone with the greatest sporting prize. Reassuringly, Salt Bae has promised never to go on the pitch at the end of a World Cup final again.
There is nothing new in a victor being surrounded by hangers-on and opportunists, just as there is nothing unprecedented in the defeated or the diminished being left alone with their reflections, rage and regrets.
Yet sport has been changing fundamentally too. To look back on 2006 is not to look back on a golden age. It was the opposite. The World Cup then was dreaming of what it has since become. Zidane’s headbutt was a moment when football broke free of the guard rails where it operates. Only in transgression could it, briefly, be seen as a game of rebellion and defiance.
Henry’s handball three years later was a staging post as football took greater steps towards control. On that night in Paris, it seemed clear that referees could not be allowed to make mistakes as critical again. Surely technology would make all our lives better? What happened instead was another surrender of spontaneity.
By the time Messi won the World Cup in 2022, nothing had been left to chance. This moment of spontaneous joy was being controlled by those who now own football. The greatest footballer of all time was part of a curated experience designed to advance the cause of Qatar. The only transgression came from Salt Bae whose friendship with Gianni Infantino had allowed him to break the rules. Infantino would take swift and decisive retribution by unfollowing Salt Bae on Instagram.
In August this year, I found myself in the town hall in Skibbereen on a Friday morning. It wasn’t just any Friday morning. In under an hour Fintan McCarthy and Paul O’Donovan would row for gold medals at the Paris Olympics.
In Skibbereen on that morning we watched as McCarthy and O’Donovan pulled away from their challengers. You felt that joy as an outsider, yet it was at its most profound for those who were part of the community that had nurtured not just these two gold medallists but the idea of rowing in the town itself. “Back to the real world now,” said one woman as she went back to work.
Sport these days feels like the real world too. The Olympics was a spectacular fortnight for Ireland, a glorious time when the effort and dedication of the athletes and those who support them was rewarded. We celebrated and rejoiced but is there something more?
When discussing jazz and blues, Clive James once wrote that “much beauty begins as a consolation for what can’t be mended.” From this place of consolation comes much of what we consider creative and inspiring.
We live in a time when so much seems unsustainable. Professional sport is not a consolation, but one of those things that has become more determined not to be mended. Boxing — a sport whose history allows itself to deflect the most unseemly partnerships with a bit of whataboutery, — transports to Saudi Arabia; the Olympics remains the Olympics, not just a byword for the ultimate in sport but a byword for how many will go to any lengths in pursuit of the ultimate; football is the giant which tramples on all those sports below it, aided now by petrostates and private equity.
In Ireland, we despair and agonise about the Irish football team and what can be done to fix it. We talk too much about structures and pathways. But the pathway always leads to the world of elite professionalism, a world where there have always been compromises but now there are no choices but bad choices.
Sport at the highest level only seems spontaneous when something goes wrong. The rest of the time, even in victory, it appears to be part of an ordered and controlled campaign. The victors celebrate, they engage in banter with a pundit on the sideline after they collect their medal. Television gets their viral moment and nothing that happens will upset those who have paid to be in control.
To complain that we have surrendered control is to be an old man yelling at clouds. Just as few care that they have compromised their privacy in order to present a version of their lives on social media, there aren’t many who care about what sport has become as they get to witness excellence.
But sport is at its most meaningful when there is something beyond cold brilliance. There needs to be joy and, ultimately, joy is authentic. The difference between the real thing and the artificial is as noticeable as the difference between winners and losers, the difference between control and freedom.
We find this joy more easily, not in the entertainments delivered for the petrostates but in the moments, increasingly rare, when we glimpse what it is to be part of a community. Professional sport has come to believe it can do without those connections, that we will be happy with the curated entertainment. They might be right but they miss the point. The connection is often why we are here in the first place. It brought us to sport and without it, sport is no longer a consolation, but just one more ugly thing in a world that is overflowing with them.