Literature & Football
Two weeks before the Qatar World Cup opening ceremony, Remigiusz Mróz’s football novel 'Z pierwszej piłki' (Hitting the First Ball) arrived in Polish bookstores. Why a football novel? Well, because it is thematically linked to this sport, almost entirely filled with descriptions of struggles on a football pitch, it depicts the adventures of a highly talented young footballer and the history of his club (the fictional Rewera Opole). The most interesting aspect here is that of literary form, and for at least three reasons.
Firstly, Polish literature is generally ignorant of this genre. If there were fictional works with football as the central motif in the past, they undoubtedly were novels for children and young people. Such as Adam Bahdaj’s very old novel Do przerwy 0:1 (Until the Break 0:1) (1957). Many other stories addressed to the non-adult reader contained scenes of backyard matches, showing an obvious truth – how important kicking a ball was and still is for growing boys. However, football matters did not fill the foreground.
Secondly, the football novel, perforce, has to use description; its dominance immediately clashes with the habits of a reader focused on consuming the novel storyline’s plot. To put it bluntly, a football novel is, by definition, boring because it invalidates what is most important about football: the spectacle, the dynamic show. Mróz's novel is thus an unbelievable anachronism – reminiscent of match reports from before the invention of television. Things are even worse than in the radio commentaries of the 1930s – in Mróz's novel, the execution of a penalty kick, spread over many pages, took longer than on the pitch.
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Cover of the book 'Z pierwszej piłki', author: Remigiusz Mróz, 2022, photo: Filia publishing house
Thirdly and finally, the modern football story – if such a challenge to write one can at all be accomplished – gravitates towards metaphor. Football matters – which I will try to elaborate on in a moment – become a pretext, allowing us to weave a story about something completely different. For example, about the incredible depravity and ubiquitous corruption – as in perhaps the best-known Polish football story, the film Piłkarski poker [Soccer Poker] from 1989. Or about the pathological subculture of football fans (ultras), from which many valuable sociological observations can be derived (here, for example, the plays Derby by Piotr Bulak or Tęczowa Trybuna [Rainbow Stands] by Paweł Demirski). Remigiusz Mróz’s football novel, however, is free of such fundamentally negative perspectives and contexts. The story of a talented teenager is almost idealistic in tone, as are the relationships within the Polish football league, which are characterised by dubious honesty. This picture of a football career and the league seemed so unrealistic to readers of Z pierwszej piłki that some of them started talking about 'football fantasy' (I found such comments on the Internet).
Mróz’s football novel is not a successful work. This type of writing endeavour could not succeed precisely because of the narrative technique. Football issues are successfully served by non-fiction genres, especially the essay and the opinion column, and occasionally by reportage. The most important form today remains an intimate, personal essay, in which one recounts the football experience (in the stadium or in front of the TV). Experiences that are recalled years later as key biographical events, sometimes even as foundations of identity. A common feature of these non-fiction football stories is perhaps that they are unfailingly moving, like one of Jerzy Pilch's most beautiful columns entitled Prawdziwa węgierska futbolówka (The Genuine Hungarian Soccer Ball), where he talks about how the object named in the title 'saved the life' of a little boy, a fat lad with glasses on his nose, with whom no one wanted to play. As this boy became the owner of the only real ball in the area, his social standing increased immeasurably. It is impossible not to be moved when reading Marek Bieńczyk's captivating essay Światło bramki [The Goal] (from the volume Książka twarzy [The Book of Faces]). In his work, the love of football is intertwined with the love of a father. A great text that could be a highlight of any world football literary anthology.
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A scene from the performance 'Tęczowa Trybuna 2012' (Rainbow Stand 2012) directed by Monika Strzępka, 2011, photo: Natalia Kabanow / Polish Theater in Wrocław
The football theme in Polish non-fiction prose has thus been strongly 'personalised', which to some extent falls under the heading of paradox. After all, there is so much talk of football as a sport that brings people together and produces all sorts of communities – from the collective support of a small local club to the multi-billion-dollar audience that every 21st-century World Cup enjoys, the one in Qatar, unanimously described as the most controversial in the history of football, too. To reiterate: the personal perspective dominates, and the text often takes the form of a confession which can sometimes be startling. I am thinking of the opening words of one of the essays by Michał Paweł Markowski, an eminent literary scholar who has been a professor working in the United States (University of Illinois in Chicago) for several years. This is because he noted:
I became a Pole on Sunday, 10 October 1971, at 12:28 pm.
What happened then? The Polish national football team was playing a match against the Federal Republic of Germany in Warsaw. Watching this game was the then nine-year-old Markowski. In the 28th minute of the match, Robert Gadocha scored a goal – the only one for Poland in this match (the final score was 3:1 for the Germans). The essayist explains in detail and very convincingly how the 'obsessive need for national affinity' works, referring to his own example, i.e., entering Polishness through identification with the national team.
As for a football column of literary merit, the matter seems simple. Such a column must be equipped with some stylistic surplus; it simply has to be brilliant on a linguistic level. A contemporary master of this form is Wojciech Kuczok, a writer who specialises in language games (his artistic prose is stuffed with them like a good chestnut cake with nuts). The column, which he wrote after one of Poland’s performances at the World Cup in Qatar (in the group phase), was given the awesome title The Champions Laga, which is, of course, a wordplay with the Champions League. A laga is, in the colloquial language of footballers and fans, a long forward pass, generally brought out of one’s penalty area towards the opponent’s goal, the most primitive play characterising football teams unable to construct an attack. Kuczok makes witty and merciless comments about the 'laga of champions', which should, in fact, be called the 'Polish laga', and writes how much he suffers watching the national team perform. He differs from other football columnists in that he is able to dress up that pain with intelligent mockery. One could say that he ridicules the hopeless level of Polish footballers’ play by using linguistic wit. His verbal humour has a soothing effect, at least on me. I smile instead of crying.