Bread and circuses. How Circus Maximus inspires the Premier League « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Don McMahon

Few football supporters have given it much thought, but the truth is, we are being force-fed gladiatorial-like spectacles each week during the Football season and thus we have become addicted to this tribalism. We cheer on our favourite warriors (the language we use reflects this bellicosity) and proudly flaunt our colours, our banners, our flags and our victories like they actually meant something.

This weekly battleground has its peculiar attributes as well. We eagerly scream for a decimation of our warriors if they are seen to be under-achieving ( the favourite term is deadwood) and true to the Roman Legions tradition of killing every 10th soldier from a unit that ran away or froze in battle, our fickle fans passionately evoke the same ruthlessness when it comes to their less than preferred players.

The title of this post says it all. The modern game of Football has become the equivalent of the Roman’s Circus Maximus, with the bread portion being the steady diet of uninspired football and its rumours,gossip, innuendo, controversies, idle speculations and patently absurd recriminations against all and sundry at their Clubs who have unwittingly or knowingly invited the fans wrath.

The teams able to afford the best on-field combatants flourish, while their rabid fans wallow in the shallow glory that such unequal advantage brings.  Those, like Arsenal, who are more sagacious in their spending, are no less subject to the barbs and arrows of an outrageous, ignorant minority and have fewer options in re-mediating their situation.

Like every tilted competition, the haves enjoy an unlimited and unending stream of options when it comes to reinforcing their stables or achieving their aims. The have-nots, often in order to simply survive, are rigidly confined to focussing on staying afloat or remaining ¨competitive¨.  Thus they are obliged to sell their best players, resort to very unattractive Football and work in obsolete conditions to maintain a semblance of ¨success¨.

Arsenal is neither a have nor a have-not Club at the moment. It is on the verge of a civil war that will pit Jabba the Usmanov and his faithful companion Dein, cheered on by a small cabal of AAA ferrets against the BoD and an absentee landlord who neither understands or really cares about the Club’s traditions and history.

Meanwhile the powerful rich toy with our player’s futures…..RVP being just a case in point. City can sit back and clean out their stables, secure in the knowledge that if Robin stays and plays out his contract,they’ll get him on a free in 2013, or if they really want him now, they’ll send a camel from Riyhad laden with frankincense, gold and myrrh to woo Van Purse-strings to their greener Colosseum.

In Imperial Rome, the gladiators were unpaid but fought for their freedom, earning it after 5-8 years of weekly combat….while the unemployed mobs filled the stadium eating bread supplied by the Emperor and happily cheering on the adversaries displayed beneath them. Today we fill similar stadia and, while eating bad food supplied by the franchises, blithely cheer on our modern-day heroes/villains.

This is the same panacea, so successfully used by Emperors 2000 years ago to quell unrest and social disenchantment and now equally effective at distracting, if only for a moment, the huddled masses from their mundane and unfulfilling lives. Football is up there with the best worldwide opium of the masses and in fact has easily surpassed religion as the Earth’s principle passion, after sex, murder and mayhem.

The many positive things about this addiction are;  it brings the world together in a united passion every 4 years, has  significantly fewer casualties than real war  while being much less murderous in general and assuages the common man’s pathological need to compete and occasionally win, albeit vicariously and extremely clannishly.

As well, it is a way of doing something with one’s family and friends that doesn’t exclude entire sectors of the population based on gender or cultural preferences.  So on with the bread and circuses as the new EPL season looms on the horizon and lets all pretend that everyone is respecting the rules, trying to compete fairly and sharing an equal chance of being victorious. Ah, I love the illusion of equal opportunity, it is so democratic!

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Bread and circuses 100 year ago: Woolwich Arsenal, the club that changed football.

What is was like on the terraces in south London.

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