Football as a Paradigm of Change
While dwelling on my British apprentice years, I recall my first reading of
Shakespeare7s King Lear and how I was flabbergasted by one particular passage
from Act I, scene iv, when Kent, Lear7s loyal courtier, lashed out at Oswald, Goneril7s
steward, for being disrespectful to Lear, by calling the latter : 4You base football
player!5 . I did play football at school, and even in the late 1950s, football had already
become a well-recognized international game. By chance I was at that time preparing
for my university entrance at a tutorial college in Manchester, and the two football
teams, which are both world-famous today, were already among the leading clubs of
Europe. Football players were enjoying some kind of national status, far removed
from their abject conditions in the Shakespearean age. Then came an event that
heightened the status of football players even more: they moved from the status of
sport heroes to tragic heroes. On their way back home from a match in Belgrade, the
Manchester United team made a brief stopover in Munich, and their plane crashed