Football Delirium

In the tradition of Adam Phillips and Darian Leader, Chris Oakley shines his spotlight on the world of football and with wit and erudition looks at the question of why this worldwide preoccupation with Football and does anybody have the answer? It would appear that football has claws, for the world as we know it, is possessed. Somehow it never lets go, and not merely the sports pages are in danger of being swallowed by its hungry sprawl. For many what is in play is seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, delirium, in more or less manageable doses. Although of course, just as the effects of the psychoanalytic tie are hardly containable to the classical fifty minute 'hour', nor are these football passions bounded by the standard ninety minutes of any particular game. This book argues that football offers us the possibility of manageable doses of self-elected madness - a madness that is essential for a sane life. For the paradox is that this very madness is simultaneously therapeutic: football as an insistent provocation, repeatedly re-inaugurating the reverie or drift, disrupted by those moments of the most intense fracture, moments of the autistic stare. Proffering a roller-coaster of intense discomfort, anguish ecstasies interspersed with abstracted longings so redolent of the back ward inpatient, forever lurking in the discontinued corridors of our old lunatic asylums. Yet always present, just round the corner, lies the possibility of almost uncontainable happiness, always an abundance, always an overflowing. Simultaneously football provides us with our own utterly personal and yet simultaneously collective, as in programmed, delusional system: a universe organised around the fixtures.