The Estadio Antonio Vespucio Liberti rises an incurvate bowl, puncturing the skyline of Buenos Aires. It has formed an integral part of the cityscape for 80 years. Known more commonly as the Monumental de Nuñez, or simply ‘El Monumental’, the stadium is situated in the Belgrano barrios of the Argentine capital and has provided a home to River Plate, one of the country’s biggest clubs. For a huge swathe of people, El Monumental is the beating heart of Argentine football; as far as River fans are concerned, you should remove your sandals, for the place in which you are standing is holy ground.
Imagine Honorio Bustos Domecq’s surprise, then, when he takes a walk around Belgrano and finds El Monumental nowhere to be seen.
A couple of opportune contacts later and Domecq finds himself in the offices of Tulio Savastano, president of the Abasto Juniors Soccer Club. To break the ice, he does what any fan would do and talks football: “What a goal! Canary Island All-Stars pressing through Zarlenga and Parodi but unable to prevent Musante’s delightful pass through to centre-half Renovales who smashed home. Football at its finest!”
Savastano sinks into his chair, takes a deep draft of his mate and, as if dreaming aloud, says, “And to think it was me who invented those names.”
Those of you familiar with the work of Jorge Luis Borges will have recognised the telltale signs: the surrealism, the scrupulous attention to detail, the fascination with the power of the imaginary.
As with so many of Borges’ works, “Esse est Percipi” is a modern-day morality play. Beneath the surface of the narrative lies a question about the role that the imagination plays in the production of cultural phenomena: even cultural phenomena as seemingly banal as football.
The title of the story means “being is being perceived.” Borges is asking a seemingly absurd question: To what extent does the reality behind our cultural artifacts even matter? To what extent do we rely on the stories that media tell us? Would it make a difference if football was just a sham? If being is being perceived, who cares about the substance that underpins it?
Mellow-voiced sportscaster Ron Ferrabas enters the room in which Domecq and Savastano are talking. Savastano relays a message: “Ferrabas, I’ve spoken to De Filippo and Camargo. In the next match, Abasto is beaten by two to one. It’s a tough game but bear in mind — don’t fall back on that pass from Musante to Renovales. The fans know it by heart. I want imagination — imagination, understand? You may leave now.”
Gradually, it dawns on Domecq. “Am I to deduce that the score has been prearranged?”
Savastano’s answer, in Domecq’s own words, “tumbles him into the dust.”
“There’s no score, no teams, no matches,” the Abasto president admits. “The stadiums have long since been condemned and are falling to pieces. Nowadays everything is staged on the television and radio. The bogus excitement of the sportscaster — hasn’t it ever made you suspect that everything is humbug? The last time a soccer match was played in Buenos Aires was on 24 June 1937. From that exact moment, soccer, along with the whole gamut of sports, belongs to the genre of the drama, performed by a single man in a booth or by actors in jerseys before the TV cameras.”
Domecq grows bold. “Sir, who invented the thing?”
“Nobody knows. You may as well ask who first thought of the inauguration of schools or the showy visits of crowned heads. These things don’t exist outside the recording studios and newspaper offices. Rest assured, Domecq, mass publicity is the trademark of modern times.”
“And if the bubble bursts?” Domecq barely manages to utter.
“It won’t,” Savastano says, reassuringly.
“Esse est Percipi” is a caution. For Borges, what begins as a shared social practice — the watching of football matches by fans — takes on a life of its own in the imaginations of these fans until, before long, the mechanisms by which fandoms exist become more important than the games.
The real protagonists, as far as Borges is concerned, are not the players themselves but the media — those who are literally in media res, or in the middle of things: “the men [sic] in the booth or the actors in jerseys in front of the TV.” Beyond these media, there is nothing. In the words of Savastano, “These things don’t exist outside the recording studios and newspaper offices ... mass publicity is the trademark of modern times.”
Borges carries the logic of his story to its reductio ad absurdum, but in the process he falls into the trap of jumping straight to the end without making his way there from the beginning. Is it necessarily the case that, because the imagination is involved in the production of fandom, that it is therefore entirely imaginary? Does reality fall away altogether?
At the end of “Esse est Percipi”, the most generative question of Borges’ narrative is left unanswered: “And if the bubble bursts?” What then?
“It won’t,” Savastano says. But he is wrong. In the last year, the bubble burst for a football club in England. And when it did, it taught us something deeper about the powerful role the imagination plays within the human endeavour.
Here’s another story; this one no less surreal than the Borges tale.
It begins in the United Kingdom in 2010. A general election is held and, when no political party holds an overall majority, a coalition government takes over, made up of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
One of the Tories’ manifesto promises is a restructuring of the payment system for people heading to university for further education. To determine the course of action, a review is carried out. By November, the government has agreed to raise the yearly cap on fees from £3,000 to £9,000 and, by 2012, these increased fees have been rolled out.
With this influx of capital into university coffers, a building boom takes place. Institutions in higher education see an opportunity to reinvigorate the tired fabric of a sector that has been underfunded for years. Unsurprisingly, where there is money to be made, there is a market. A number of companies spring up to respond to this boom.
One of these companies is Mederco, owned by Stewart Day. With business booming and the future looking bright, Day does what many industrialists have done before him: he buys a football club. Bury Football Club.
Unfortunately for Bury, Day’s company goes into receivership. Despite the riches to be found in university property, Day was reliant upon a ‘peer-to-peer’ lending company imaginatively titled ‘Lendy’. With Bury’s ground, Gigg Lane, mortgaged off to an equally dubious outfit, Capital Bridging Finance Solutions, the club accrues debt on their stadium to the tune of £1,500 per day.
Confusingly, the perceived solution to this conundrum is to find another equally unfit property magnate to buy out the club. This time, he arrives in the form of Steve Dale, who takes control of Bury FC after handing over £1 for the pleasure, and despite his failure to demonstrate to the EFL that he has the economic wherewithal to salvage the club. Dale fails to pay the players and holds onto the club long enough to instigate an insolvency process in which creditors receive just 25 percent of what they are owed.
If the creditors aren’t happy, neither are the EFL. After the Insolvency Practitioners Association announces that it will investigate a £7m claim admitted into a Company Voluntary Agreement as a debt owed by Bury to Mederco, the EFL offer Dale ultimatum. After a series of deadlines are not met, he is given a deadline of 5pm BST on Tuesday, August 27th, to provide proof he has the money to finance the club and its debts or to conclude a sale.
The deadline passes with no reply, and after 125 years of membership, Bury Football Club are expelled from the Football League.
What is left behind when a football club’s infrastructure collapses? When the stadium is dismantled? When all the historical artifacts of that club’s existence fade into oblivion?
If you were to ask Borges this question, he would say, “Nothing but the imaginary.” But as to the nature of this “nothing but,” Borges ascribes it a fair amount of heft. The power of the imaginary is enough to undercut the reality of the footballing sphere and leave it in the thrall of narratives spun by its purveyors.
Because of the capacity of the imaginary, Borges suggests that the need for actual players, actual matches, actual stadia, and the actual artifacts of fandom is entirely superfluous. In his short story, the reality that props up the imaginary realm of the football fan is slowly dismantled and the whole rigmarole continues unaffected.
The imaginary, then, as Borges views it, is detachable from the real; there is no necessary link between the two and, in fact, you can detach one from the other without the existence of either being affected.
This approach pushes us towards a bleak philosophical outlook. If the stories that we tell about the world bear no resemblance to the reality that underpins them, then what use does that reality have in any heuristic sense? You support this team, they support that team; there is nothing intrinsic to your support that makes it any more or less meaningful than that person’s fandom. The whole thing is arbitrary. It is hardly surprising that this worldview would lead Borges to utter the immortal words, “Football is only popular because stupidity is.”
In the end, Borges muses, the bubble will never burst in football because the world underlying our fandom will never break through; we are already too mired in the imaginary to allow the real to emerge before our eyes.
What is left behind when a football club’s infrastructure collapses? When the stadium is dismantled? When all the historical artifacts of that club’s existence fade into oblivion?
Bury’s slow decline illustrates that the relationship between the real and the imaginary is tighter than Borges suggests. Compared to the fictional Buenos Aires, the real Greater Manchester was less forgiving about the dismantling of one of its football clubs. Fan groups mobilised, attempts were made to find the club a new owner, and even local politicians were drawn into the conversation. The imaginary hardly continued on its merry way as the real Bury struggled.
The media also refused to play the part ascribed to them by Borges. Instead of persisting in their production of an imaginary that proceeded without accounting for what was going on, the media turned the situation to their favour, sending in news crews to Bury to interview fans, to speak to club and league officials, and to keep their audience abreast of things; a far cry from the cover-up of “Esse est Percipi”.
For fans of Bury, the reality where they now find themselves has an undeniable impact on the imaginary space in which they construct their fandom. Without a team to support at the weekend, without a stadium to visit, without a place to call their own, there can be no supposition that Bury supporters have not been affected by the situation of recent months. But rather than reveal the ultimate meaninglessness of fandom, Bury’s dissolution has done the opposite: fans have found renewed meaning, have been given a clearer sense of what their fandom consists.
When the club dropped out of the Football League, a number of fans and fan groups mobilised under the banner of the Bury Phoenix Club. On Oct. 26, they made the following announcement:
We are here to tell you that whilst the incarnation that we all know and love will soon be no more, from its ashes this club shall be reborn. 134 years of history will not die when Bury FC’s last rites are read. Bury FC is alive in every single fan.
We are what makes Bury FC and whilst we have fought tooth and nail to avoid the scenario that faces us, it is now time to look towards the future. A small team of supporters has been exploring ways to create a Phoenix Club from scratch. The aim is to have a football team playing competitive fixtures in Bury by August 2020.
This is not the end of the story for them. A club called Bury AFC could be playing in 10th-tier English football next season. Bury FC’s closure has not led to an existential crisis. This is simply the beginning of another chapter in the club’s history. Their imaginations are in overdrive as they make Bury Football Club a reality again.
The feted emergence of a new football club in Bury suggests a different relationship between the real and the imaginary to the one proposed by Borges.
Where “Esse est Percipi” is a tale of an imaginary whose relationship to the real has been slowly eroded, Bury FC presents a narrative in which the relationship is reciprocal: the threat of non-existence pushes Bury’s fans even closer to reality, until they are confronting it head on.
This return to reality doesn’t result in a negative attitude towards the imaginary aspect of fandom. Instead, they augment one another, creating possibilities where previously there had been nothing. A year ago, Bury FC were owned by an inveterate capitalist whose main concern was to break up the club and sell the parts for profit. Now they face the prospect of a fan-owned Bury, offering them the ability to make decisions in their own interests and take the club in any direction they want.
When Bury Phoenix Club make the claim that ‘Bury FC is alive in every single fan,’ then, this is not a rhetorical flourish or ideological nicety; it is a recognition that the imaginary which has slowly developed across the 134 years of Bury FC’s history is all that is needed to affect real change in the world.
So where does that leave us?
The story that Borges tells about football also tells a particular story about who we are as humans. As he sees it, our over-reliance on the imaginary makes us little more than automatons ascribing meaning to our meaningless lives in a bid to make sense of the world we find ourselves in. In Borges’ reality, those meanings are arbitrary; we could tell any story about ourselves and it would make little material difference.
This is why Bury Football Club must persist. Because it tells a different story about who we are as humans. It tells us that it is only through the operation of the imagination that we can ever catch a glimpse of the possibilities available to us within the world. And because the imaginary can impact upon the real, there is always the chance that we can enact these possibilities into existence.
The imaginary impels the real. Without it, there would be no Bury FC. The club would die, consigned to the annals of history. In reality, Bury Football Club only exists in the imaginations of its fans. And with them, exists the possibility that a dead football club might rise once more.