The Pleasure Zone

First the Eduardo thing, now the Chelsea thing. I'm beginning to think that something's gone wrong (or right) in the world order. It's not us being made an example of, or treated differently because we're Man Utd - it's them. That was my first thought. My second was that it was the same thing but on a global scale - our relationship with UK football projected outwards, the Premier League as the Manchester United of world football, hated for success. And then I paused, read a bit... and despite many protestations to the contrary, kept that thought.

Of course in FIFA's defence we can look at other cases, The Guardian looks at a few:

Chelsea have said they will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but in recent cases the CAS has encouraged Fifa by upholding its rulings. In January the CAS upheld a Fifa penalty against the Al Kuwait sports club which was very similar to the one imposed on Chelsea. Al Kuwait were found to have sacked an Estonian player, Vjatseslav Zahovaiko, in breach of his valid contract. The club was fined $120,000 (£73,500) and, like Chelsea, banned from signing new players for two transfer windows.

The case being cited to give Chelsea hope was in 2005, when the CAS reduced a Fifa sanction against Roma, who were found guilty of inducing the centre-half Philippe Mexès to breach his contract with Auxerre. Still, the CAS upheld the ban on Roma signing players, reducing the period from two transfer windows to one.

There are several other cases in which the CAS has upheld Fifa rulings over players breaking their contracts, and FC Sion, of Switzerland, are currently appealing to the CAS against a two-transfer-window ban imposed in May.

The problem I have is with a certain jouissance, or enjoyment, which is involved. Jouissance is a term used by Jacques Lacan to specify a certain kind of enjoyment. I have written here before about enjoyment and football in Lacanian terms, and from there here's a quote from Slavoj Zizek glossing the term:

enjoyment is not to be equated with pleasure: enjoyment designates the paradoxical satisfaction procured by a painful encounter with a Thing that perturbs the equilibrium of the "pleasure principle." In other words, enjoyment is located "beyond the pleasure principle." (Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative)

In that previous piece I linked this enjoyment to watching football - finding enjoyment in the mixed emotions of a football match. What we find here is different. Here the emphasis is on the difference between the pleasure principle, which is less about finding pleasure, and more about avoiding pain, finding an equilibrium, and the Death Drive, going "beyond the pleasure principle." There is no need to go into this at length, my main point being that the pleasure principle is under the star of reason - "it is unreasonable to continue in this pursuit of pleasure because it will eventually lead to pain, if I stop now I will lose some pleasure, but all in all, the benefits outweigh the risks."The important point being that jouissance is not connected to reason. In the context of the Chelsea punishment what this means is that, despite all the reasonable evidence to suggest that there is no anti-English agenda to the punishment, there is still jouissance operating here which suggests the opposite. Take this from The Times:

Almost as soon as the news came through, we heard that familiar thwack; it was the race card on the table. But this is no conspiracy against the English. Even through the haze of paranoia it could be seen that exactly the punishment delivered to Chelsea by Fifa yesterday in the Gaël Kakuta case had been given to Sion, the Swiss club, five months earlier for the manner in which they lured Essam El Hadary, the Egypt goalkeeper, from Al Ahly.

That other transfers involving English clubs are being investigated should be no surprise. Few clubs have as much money to throw about as the leading members of the Barclays Premier League and it is predictable that less financially muscular institutions in other countries should feel vulnerable and, when deprived of what they understandably view as the fruits of their labours - a potent young footballer or a large sum of money - outraged enough to complain to the world governing body.

First paragraph - there is no anti-English agenda; the second paragraph then goes on to explain the reasons why there is - throwing money around, stealing the fruits of others labour. To refer back to my previous piece, and another quote from Zizek:

What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing. We always impute to the "other" an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. ... To the racist, the "other" is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labor. The basic paradox is that our Thing is conceived as something inaccessible to the other and at the same time threatened by him. (Tarrying with the Negative)

No matter how reasonable the arguments, or illegal Chelsea's actions may have been, we are still in the realm of jouissance, and it is precisely this which makes the punishment of Chelsea different to the other cases cited. The starkest example of this in today's papers is the usually reasonable Henry Winter, trying to express how reasonable the verdict is, while at the same time using the language of enjoyment:

Whether exploiting loopholes, as Manchester United and Arsenal did respectively to acquire Federico Macheda and Cesc Fàbregas or inducing a youngster to breach a contract, as Fifa rule Chelsea did with Gaël Kakuta, Premier League plundering of foreign youth academies needs stopping.

As ever with football, the emotional reaction to rulings can cloud the reality that the underlying principle is sound. Chelsea are seething about the Kakuta decision, and may even get the two-window ban halved by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but, as in the Eduardo diving controversy, the logic behind the authorities’ judgment is indisputable. Why should Lens not reap the rewards of all the hard work they poured into nurturing Kakuta?

He continues to describe the working-classness of Lens, a piece of information which can only be intended to bask in the contrast between the nasty rich club and the hard-done-to small club. Which is again, perfectly reasonable, but on the other hand, smacks of "them" stealing "our" enjoyment, as does this later in the article, "the Premier League raiders of foreign and domestic nurseries," as does the Lens president's comment that "they came and stole him away."

Of course James Lawton also gets in on the act, using the same sort of language to describe the Eduardo ban:

First, Uefa, Europe's governing body, announced the two-game ban for Arsenal's Eduardo da Silva after finding him guilty of diving to deceive a referee – and at one stunning stroke finally accepted its responsibility in the face of a form of cheating that for so long has horribly cheapened football at every level.

The divers who steal our enjoyment, he may as well have said. So "horribly cheapened" our game, that it generally brings a yellow card punishment, if it deserves a two game ban, change the rules, make it a red card offence, don't on a one off occasion arbitarily choose a player to give a worse punishment to as an example to everyone else. That's not justice, no matter how reasonable it may appear (to some). And on Chelsea:

Chelsea and to a much lesser extent their rivals Arsenal have been inconvenienced this week, the former to the point where the whole basis of their wealth-fuelled operation has been undermined."

Elsewhere in the article he claims that people who opposed the Eduardo ban were "hysterical," but the whole tone of the article comes across as almost "hysterical" in the praise of the authorities' reasonable stance.

So yes, reasonably it can be said that there is no anti-English agenda in all this, but at the same time, in the peculiar enjoyment to be found in those siding with reason, sometimes reason serves jouissance well...