Had a fascinating family experience in London recently, on a Friday in the Easter holidays. I joined my partner and her son on a visit to Trafalgar Square, where the sports manufacturer Nike was holding something called a Joga 3 tournament. We wandered up to the familiar landmark, and saw five small pitches, a full stand, and hundreds of wiry kids-to-late-teens, playing three-a-side football/soccer with remarkable skill and intensity.
Joga turns out to be a new set of soccer rules, adapted/appropriated by Nike from the Brazilian tradition of futsal – three minute games, no tackling, the most goals wins or it’s sudden death, and a high premium on close control, tricks and skills. The event was heavily branded, not just with the familiar swoosh sign but with the slogan Joga Bonita – ‘play beautiful’ in Portuguese/Brazilian.
We were there because of what had effectively been a guerrilla media campaign by Nike.
My partner’s boy tried to access his Arsenal.com site one day, and was blocked by a blipvert – in which Eric Cantona, the poetic French hero of late-nineties Manchester United, exhorts a sports television studio to return to the values of the beautiful game. ‘Hon-or! Skills! For too long we have let liars and cheaters make a fool of our game!" he barks with manic Gallicness, as footage of the most transcendent (and most egregious) football antics flash by. At the Trafalgar Square event, they constantly flashed the Joga Manifesto: “diving is for swimmers, and arguing is for politicians”.
We sat and cheered our way through all the heats, my daughter delighted to see the girls’ players given equal status in the contest, and a fun afternoon was had by all. My own take was, privately, much more conflicted. Yes, this was in the absolutely precise sense, a ‘play ethic’: the play-form of sport as a set of binding rules which enforce respectful behaviour, yet which also promoted the sheer joy and artistry in football, rather than its more pugilistic, violent face. The conversion of a London landmark into a free-to-access ‘playground’ followed the best traditions of collective carnival. I don’t know if Nike’s marketers had been reading the Play Ethic book, but it’s as if they were at least ticking off Sutton-Smith’s rhetorics of play.
Yet not all of them. The idea of ‘play-as-imagination’, in my experience of play auditing, is always the rhetoric that punctures overly controlling attempts to create a ‘fun/play’ culture in an organisation. There are other mental angles on a brand than the ones invited. Clearly, Nike want us to be swept up in the Brazilian narrative of Joga Bonita – the winners from scores of countries gathering in Rio De Janiero to complete the competition, under the outstretched arms of the Christ statue. But it takes some effort to mask the inequalities and brutalities of life in Rio, which four years of Lula’s regime have barely dented, behind a shining image of football purity. And does the line about ‘argument being for politicians’ stick in the throat of anyone who ever supported the ‘No Sweat/No Logo’ protests against Nike’s sweatshop manufacture regimes in the nineties, which they fulsomely confirmed last year?
I couldn’t deny the joy of the young players, nor the sheer street energy they brought to their competition (my favourite team name was the Mustapha Three). But it makes me even more convinced that ‘play ethics’ should be as diverse a discourse as the forms of play themselves. Invoking the infinite game of football as physical beauty, to serve the extremely finite game of a sports’ corporation’s market share, still raises an alarm for me.
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