Britain still represents a place where the ambitions of young men like Fabrice Muamba can be achieved
It says something about the changed place of football in English life that among the vast cast of characters created by John Lanchester for Capital, an ambitious new novel in which the author attempts to examine a number of the tensions of life as it is lived in contemporary London, should be a 17-year-old African footballer.
Plucked from his home in Senegal, Freddy Kamo has just arrived, accompanied by his father, to join a leading Premier League club (the novel is set in south-west London, so we are invited to assume that it is Chelsea). His gifts quickly make him an idol to the fans until this particular sub-plot, one of the many from which the book is constructed, takes an unexpected twist.
In what may be an intentional device to ease our way through the jump-cuts and diversions of the interweaved narrative strands, Lanchester's many protagonists are mostly archetypes: the Polish builder, the investment banker, the illegal immigrant working as a traffic warden. And none seems more familiar, in basic outline, than the teenaged African football prodigy.
That was how Fabrice Muamba would once have been described, although he was always a bit of a special case since he arrived in England at the age of 11 after being driven from his native land by the threat of violence. The very particular details of his back-story added an extra resonance to the wave of concern that surged through the game when he collapsed on the pitch at White Hart Lane on Saturday afternoon. But in a sense Muamba was also an archetype, an example of how the Premier League has mirrored English society over the past 20 years.
In a quiet way, he was a kind of poster-boy for the Britain that welcomes immigrants with the promise of opportunities unavailable in their countries of origin ? a very different land from the Britain that likes to scare its inhabitants with anecdotal evidence of overcrowding and welfare abuse. He learnt English from scratch, did well at school, was given British citizenship, made his international debut for England's Under-16s, captained the Under-19s and eventually played 33 times at Under-21 level, putting him second equal, behind James Milner and alongside Tom Huddlestone, in all-time appearances for England at that level. To those in need of the demonstration, he showed that immigrants, too, can come to embody the virtues ? stuff like civility and modesty ? we choose to see as our national characteristics.
It is easy to forget that there was a time before our game was populated by the Freddy Kamos and the Fabrice Muambas, when a player from the Channel Islands, like Spurs' Len Duquemin or Flip Le Flem of Forest and Wolves, could be considered exotic. But you can bet that Sir Dave Richards has not forgotten.
The performance of the Premier League's 68-year-old chairman at the Qatar International Centre for Sport Security ? who knew there was such a thing? ? last week reached a standard of bumbling offensiveness remarkable even in the chequered history of British diplomacy. The notion that such a man should also be serving as the chairman of the Football Association's international board verges on the surreal, like putting Captain Mainwaring in charge of the SAS.
As a proud Yorkshireman, Richards might be expected to nurture a belief that most of the good things in this world originated within the 3.6m acres of England bounded by Skipton to the west, Darlington to the north, Scarborough to the east and his own home town of Sheffield to the south. But pride in Yorkshire pudding and Pontefract cakes are one thing; the claim that football was invented in Sheffield and stolen by foreign gangs is quite another.
What a man like Richards finds it hard to recognise is that real achievements need no advertising. The rest of the world is quite aware of Britain's contribution to the history of football, as Fifa acknowledges by the award to the individual UK associations of four of the five places on the body responsible for the game's laws.
"For all the evidence of early ball sports played elsewhere in the world," Fifa's own website says, "the evolution of football as we know it today took place in Britain." The louder we shout about this ourselves, the less indebted the outside world is likely to feel ? as the hapless 2018 World Cup bid committee members, originally including Sir Dave, were dismayed to discover.
The thing to be proud of is that to the real Muambas and the fictional Kamos, England still represents a place where their ambitions can be achieved. And where, when terrible misfortune befalls them, their plight becomes the object of widespread concern ? although in that, as in so much, we are no different from anyone else, and the effusive praise for the compassion of the "football family" was merely a recognition of people behaving like proper human beings.
All this gives a bit of perspective to the recent nationality debate, reminding us that the furious witchhunt for "Plastic Brits" was generated by the newspaper which, in 1934, proclaimed "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!". The wholesale importation of Olympic wrestlers from eastern Europe may be a misjudgement on someone's part, but an instinctive preference for inclusiveness is far more honourable and, in the end, more profitable than an urge to exclude.
richard.williams@ guardian.co.uk twitter.com/@ rwilliams1947
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/mar/19/fabrice-muamba-sir-dave-richards
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