The Beautiful TV?

It may seem weird but I have regained a fascination of football as a result of owning a TV and watching the Premiership. So why the fascination with 22 men kicking a pigs bladder across a field of grass?

Well it has a lot to do with human origin, evolution and the desire to compete with other tribes/communities. Humans can be compared with packs of wolves or even a swarm of locusts – working together to devour all the resources of the planet. Each life is too individual and precious for mankind, in his current form, to aspire to a termite or bee community. If local conflict and aggression vanishes there is a gap. Hence the need for sports like football and rugby and the degree of crime and violence in each and every society.

It is the desire to achieve and the need for competition that drives a game such as football. An addiction for the players and for the fans who are satisfied by their team winning and channel their worries and anxieties when their team loses. Over history sport and competition have become integral to human life. A thriving community, economy, and a thriving mass communication medium such as TV have made football the world spectacle it is now. It is the whole process of team selection, player transfers, speculation, betting, and going to a match or watching it on TV that fuels many an addiction of the beautiful and sometimes ugly game.

Television has made it possible to watch and fantasise about events across the world. Even the news has a large focus of the negativity permeating across far-flung communities. Local events often pale into insignificance if there is a war going on over 1000 miles away. Children introduced to TV at an early age are more likely to become distracted and less interested in their own life, responsibility and activity. Television is passive, hypnotic and generates a tiredness and lethargy that is not found from reading a novel or talking to friends. In fact there is something not right with the gogglebox that appears like brainwashing. Indeed the advertising found on TV and elsewhere fuels distraction and the economy. As a flock of sheep, we go out and buy the latest car or mobile phone and go to football matches.

Addiction has many angles. There is the physical addiction set off by hormones, adrenaline and endorphins that makes us want to do more exercise or become engrossed in a computer game. Then there is the psychological addiction of familiarity, peer interaction, and wanting to succeed that drives the players of a football match to excel and the fans to emulate in the form of their own fantasies. Seeing a match of TV is the least social way of watching football. Watching the game in a public place is much more interactive. At a match, as part of a crowd, you feel both powerful and helpless. You follow the crowd response as much as the match on the pitch. It is pure escapism. Yet it is only the modern interpretation of tribal warfare and mating competitions.