Sorry, Putin and Xi, autocracy and football don’t mix

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Neymar got a bollocking the other day from Juninho Pernambucano. The former Brazil and Lyon midfielder — arguably the world’s greatest deadball technician in his day — rattled Neymar’s woodwork for supporting Jair Bolsonaro against Lula da Silva in the Brazilian presidential election.

“I get sick when I see right-wing Brazilian players like Neymar supporting fascists,” thundered the beardy Juninho. “We come from below and we are the people. How can we be on the other side?”

Well, you can if the money is good enough. The theory goes that Neymar’s allegiance to the world’s top jungle-burner is not about their shared Christian faith or patriotism, as he proclaims, but all about a massive income tax liability to the Brazilian state and specifically about Bolsonaro’s willingness to make that liability disappear.

But the awkward fact is that nearly 60-million of his compatriots also voted for Bolsonaro — many of them working class — so it’s not entirely fair for Juninho to pick on the poor little rich boy known as Neymar. Democracy, after all, is all about the inalienable right of the people to put idiots in power. That ever-present risk is one of the many prices of freedom. And it’s not a small thing that Juninho and Neymar enjoy the freedom to snipe at each other, and at the incumbent president, and piss off half their compatriots in the process. The space to shout is priceless.

By way of contrast, it is not recommended to be a politically outspoken athlete in China or Russia. You will soon find yourself training in a confined space, all alone.

And that ever-hovering threat against independent thinking is part of the reason why Russia and China are so bad at football – or at least, why they are so much worse than they should be, given their big populations, their avid football cultures and their squadrons of football-loving oligarchs.

The maestro himself – Juninho (Photo by Denis Doyle/Getty Images)

Authoritarianism stifles ideas across a society but football is unusually sensitive to the cultural toxin of repression. Yes, some national sides have excelled under undemocratic regimes in the past – think Brazil in 1970 and Argentina in 1978. But football has advanced hugely since then, in so many ways – it is now a highly competitive and complex industry, straddling showbiz and science. It is astonishingly rich in ideas, information and innovation.

Football excellence on the pitch always lies at the blurry border between group structure and individual improvisation, between system and chaos. A good footballer needs to be able to try the crazy option, the statistically unjustified option, and fail. And then he needs to not be persecuted for that failure. Neymar, for example, takes the wrong option often – risk and self-indulgence are integral to his genius. And the similar licence to innovate and express unpopular views is just as essential in the work of good coaches, club owners and journalists.

In Russia and China, sporting excellence has been concentrated in Olympic sports, where discipline and outlier physiques reap bigger rewards. In both countries, gifted young athletes tend to find themselves funnelled through a tunnel of coldly merciless coaching and oppressive expectation from the powers that be. In the case of Russia, that tunnel has included an organised doping programme. Add in an imperialist invasion, and Russian athletes aren’t even allowed to represent their nation, let alone excel.

As we have learnt this year from President Vladimir Putin’s behaviour, despots tend to lie and cheat and, as a result, their lackeys lie and cheat all the way down the ladder. The moral rot of tyranny is not only expressed in doping, it poisons academy scouting, national team selection, refereeing, transfer dealing. Everyone in the national football ecosystem is more or less depressed by the moral vacuum. In such a cynical environment, everyone looks for a chance to console themselves with dirty profit. Actual excellence is an irrelevance.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Super League has all but gone bust, a few years after its richest clubs were outbidding the big leagues for elite players. Xi Jinping’s quixotic zero-Covid policies – another manifestation of autocratic anticreativity – have destroyed the business model, along with the debt crisis afflicting the property developers who owned the big teams.

This, despite Xi supposedly being an ardent football fan. He has reportedly made it a priority project to raise the standard of the Chinese game, partly by massively increasing the number of football schools. But, in practice, his lust for power and civil obedience far outweighs his lust for national football prowess.

And until Russian and Chinese footballers can think and speak and play as freely as Neymar does, they will struggle to qualify for the World Cup, let alone win it.