As wars go, it was quite short lived. 100 hours. But around 6000 people died and thousands injured in what came to be known as ‘La Guerra del Fútbol’ or the ‘Football War’ fought between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969. Though football was not the reason for the conflict, it offered the spark that ignited it, in an atmosphere already saturated with distrust and negativity arising out of the protracted and heartfelt animosity between the two. The 1970 World Cup qualifiers coincided with this adverse political climate, and nudged the countries over the edge.
Tension was mounting when El Salvador journeyed to Honduras for the first leg, where, having deprived of sleep by bellicose Hondurans who pelted stones at their hotel and honked incessantly all night outside, they lost by a lone goal. As was expected, in the return leg, the Salvadorans requited by throwing paper bombs and eggs at the visitors’ hotel windows, forcing the team to spend almost the entire night on the roof. The horrified and sleep-starved Hondurans, who had to be taken to the stadium the next day in military tanks, lost 3-0, while their national anthem was jeered and their flag defiled in the stands.
Then, on the day of the final playoff in Mexico City -- those days the goal difference didn’t matter -- El Salvador severed all diplomatic ties, accusing Honduras of genocide, and a fortnight later, invaded it, and came within shouting distance of the capital, when, following desperate pleas by Honduras, the neutral Organisation of American States intervened, and like a referee breaking up two scuffling players, forced an uneasy ceasefire.
Sport instigated wars are rare, but there’s no denying the animalistic passion and intense fieriness that football, unlike any other sport, evokes. The players’ habitual irascibility on the field and their fans’ impetuous conduct off it, the traditional rivalries and the indelible grudge-bearing, the readiness at which a routine game instantly degenerates into mob violence, all run contrary to the romantic ideal of warm fraternity that Pierre de Coubertin -- the father of modern Olympics -- believed sports would bring, and presents football not as a recreational activity but as a metaphor for conflict.
“Football is war” said the late ‘General’ Rinus Michels, the legendary coach of the Dutch team that narrowly lost to Germany in the 1974 World Cup final, fortuitously alluding to that inscrutable but defining characteristic of football -- an innate propensity for fatuous belligerence. Zoologist Desmond Morris, after witnessing a game that never reached full-time owing to mass rioting, theorised that everything about football -- its origins, costumes, customs, facial paints and chants, heroes and fans, their rituals -- relates to tribal living, and originates in the tradition of tribal warfare among our ancestors in which the male members formed coalitions to destroy local rivals.
Football hooliganism, whose antecedents exist in the game’s antique origins and its thuggish and obstreperous upbringing, betrays our primal instinct for war, and prompted by the very nature of the game -- its speed, the collective aggression and the physicality -- we evoke for our own subconscious gratification, the days when fierce warriors donned warpaint, shouted war chants, held up pennants and fought as clans. Football encourages the nostalgia of war.
Before public schools in England infused some urbanity into it in the 16th century, football was mob ruled. Literally. In England, hoards of rival villagers would kick a pig’s bladder across the heath all day, and then clash brutally, along with their supporters, destroying each other with such vehemence that King Edward II banned it for the violence it bred; In America, football’s precursor Pasuckuakohowog involved teams of 500 people each sadistically fighting over one ball for days, with unsurprisingly catastrophic results. Afterwards, the players would disguise themselves to escape retaliation from rival teams.
Even after patriotic nationalism emerged as the new tribalism in the mid 18th century, football continued to preserve its sectarian sentiments. Scotland supporters who unite for country, stand bitterly divided for club as Catholic Celtic and Protestant Rangers in Glasgow. The passion for Holland hardly diminishes the vicious hatred between liberal Amsterdam’s Ajax and blue collar Rotterdam’s Feyenoord. Almost all club rivalries have a parochial or clannish motivation. Arsenal is ‘Irish’ and the Spurs is ‘Jewish’. Barcelona is ‘Catalan identity’ and Real Madrid is ‘Nationalist’.
After the Second World War, when nationalism got hobbled with racism and its expression became taboo in Europe, football provided the vent, and the context, for tribal emotions to be expressed with relative freedom, and stadiums provided the stage for the symbolic redress of old affronts and indignities. Though the actual violence of the past has been channelled mostly into ritual violence -- the taunting, chanting and heckling, football invokes our long forgotten, feral past, and asserts that universal brotherhood and world peace come less naturally to us than evolutionary instincts and raw emotions of the tribe.
Football, for better or worse, blows away our carefully placed fig leaf and delightfully exposes us, at least for ninety minutes, for who we really are -- admiringly civilised, remarkably cultured, savages.
