REMATCH: RECLAIMING SPACES

by Timo Reinecke

I’ve been playing and enjoying REMATCH lately. You’ve probably already read all about its neat approach that turns football (I’m not calling it soccer, sorry, but this will make sense in a bit) into a tight 5v5 with a lot of personal responsibility and just enough room for skill expression to make every match feel like a Champions League Final. And it had me thinking about my personal relationship with the most beautiful game.

The last time I played football physically, outside of playing with my nephew, was probably in 9th grade when we had one of those big school tournaments. I also remember the boys’ team of class intentionally dropping out of the tournament in the first round so we could spend the rest of the day lunging around and playing Mario Kart on the DS. Good times. 

My relationship with the sport has always been weird, probably because when you’re a kid somewhere in Germany, it feels like it’s the only sport available to you. When I was young, my mother would drive us for almost an hour twice a week to attend training and matches on the weekends. I liked playing it, but not so much watching. Watching always involved sitting with a bunch of adults who chain-smoked their cigarettes and drank a lot of beer. Now that I think back on it, beer and old men yelling obscenities were always tied to the sport in my mind, and it’s probably why I eventually decided that it is just not for me anymore.

Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago, and I finally got around to watching Ted Lasso. It’s a show I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did, but it really opened my eyes again to what football can mean to people and the lives that are attached to it. One of the later episodes has some of the team owners plotting in a lavish dining room to form some sort of super league, and one of the characters scolds them that while they own those teams, they don’t belong to them. 

That single line of dialogue started a chain reaction in the back of my mind that concluded when my brother, my platonic life partner, and I played REMATCH.

I started seeing players who had obvious Nazi dog-whistles as their names, 18’s and 88’s on their backs, others who felt comfortable dropping some choice words into the chat whenever someone else screwed up, and there was a moment of clarity. The reason I don’t like football and a lot of other sports is that it’s a space that has been claimed by the worst kind of people. Shortly before writing this, the orange overlord handed the FIFA Club World Championship to Manchester United. Empowered by FIFA fuckstick president Gianni Infantino, who thought it was cool that Qatar sacrificed the lives of 15,021 migrant (most enslaved) workers for the sake of him making a shit ton of money. A year or so later, my government bent over backwards and whipped their asses with our constitution by banning protesting and other basic civil rights so the Euro Cup could happen here in Germany.

The people who own football, who invite Nazi’s, war criminals, slavers, pedophiles, rapists, and other fuckheads to stick around don’t care. It makes it very difficult to even inhabit this space as a metaphorical concept. But these spaces don’t belong to them. I’ve seen football change lives for the better. Change entire countries that first united behind their love for this sport. Just because a bunch of assholes make a lot of money parading their defiled shell around doesn’t mean we can’t reclaim it for ourselves.

I don’t know where it starts, I don’t know where it ends, but football, like many other sports, can make you believe in something bigger than yourself. It has the power to create heroes and villains and makes the impossible happen in the span of 90 minutes. As long as we’re willing to fight for it, there might still be a chance for football as a philosophical entity to be reborn and given back to us.