ABSTRACT
Football has become manifestly more visible and more central to certainly an English way of life, but simultaneously this is true for almost everywhere else. The one location that sustains a resistance, a good old fashioned psychoanalytical term, is the United States. But of greater significance is 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 reverie or drift, disrupted by those moments of the most intense fracture, moments of the autistic stare. The realm of the psychopathic is consistently elevated to the position of the ultimate alternative life-style: “million-airhead” footballers play their part; tawdry relics of a hooligan past regurgitate paperback narratives of violence addictions. Inevitably the charge of facetiousness in this linking of football and madness lurks just over the horizon.
