The midfield maestros and sharpshooters of Eriskay FC and Benbecula Juniors are officially world famous. An international crowd of 1,500 is turning up every week to watch them in action, along with the likes of Pele, Cruyff and Maradona, and more are expected as their fame spreads.
As the super-fit millionaires of European football compete in Euro 2016 in France, the modest heroes of the Hebrides have shot to improbable stardom in FIFA’s £96m World Football Museum in Zurich, a new shrine of Planet Football for fans of the beautiful game to pay homage to the sublime skills of legendary galacticos.
The first display in the entrance area is an 8m-high panoramic screen depicting amateur football around the world, from city slums to deserts and jungles. And the opening scenes are of a lumpy green field among the crofts and sea lochs of Eriskay, where the local club is battling it out with the pride of Benbecula. The skills on display in this inter-island derby are unlikely to interest Real Madrid, but friendly sporting rivalry is shown when the teams get together after the final whistle to wave cheerily at the FIFA cameras.
The aim is to illustrate how the international body has encouraged grassroots football throughout the world in an era of multi-millionaire stars playing for glamour clubs. And Eriskay is about as grassroots as it gets.
The museum, which opened in February, is an impressive counterpoint to the litany of corruption that has engulfed FIFA’s fat cats. Their disgraced former chief Sepp Blatter makes only a brief, wordless appearance in a short film, and one wonders why bother. The exhibits are all about love for the game at all levels that will survive the graft and greed of administrators.
Another ray of Scottish sunshine appears in a display of how football can change lives. It is Dougie Wotherspoon’s kilt and sporran.
As a foot soldier in the Tartan Army, bagpiper Dougie is a member of its Sunshine Appeal, which collects money before games for children in need. So his accoutrements and cheery face appear in a glass case along with those of other football-daft worthies such as Albert Camus and Bob Marley.
Among hundreds of videos, one that Scots visitors may wish to give a miss is grainy black-and-white footage of Scotland’s first-round match against Uruguay in the 1954 World Cup finals in Basel. We were humped 7-0.
This horror show aside, the thousands of multimedia displays, photographs and mementoes are an impressive showcase of the dramas, emotions and memories aroused by football, culminating in gladiatorial clashes for the supreme prize of the World Cup.
The solid-gold trophy depicting two athletes, arms raised in triumph holding the globe, is the star exhibit in an armoured glass case, and there is usually a queue waiting to pose with it for selfies. After being presented with the trophy, winning teams have to hand it back to FIFA for safekeeping and are given gold-plated silver replicas.
Marc Caprez, the museum’s communication manager, says, “Our vision is to bring people closer to football, and for them to relive great memories.” He cites a visit by Rainer Bonhof, the Borussia Monchengladbach midfielder who played in West Germany’s World Cup-winning team in 1974. “He could touch the trophy again. It was very emotional for him.”
For anyone with a passion for the game (even a Motherwell supporter like me), the museum is a wonderland of images, artefacts and interactive displays. Here is the tracksuit top of a 17-year-old Brazilian who announced his arrival on the world stage by scoring twice in a 5-2 final victory over Sweden in 1958. The name? Pele.
The boots worn by other Brazilian maestros Socrates and Ademir are there, along with the smooth white boots that earned Italy’s Andrea Pirlo a man of the match award in the 2006 final against France.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are represented in a hotchpotch of memorabilia that includes an Argentina shirt worn by Diego Maradona in Mexico in 1986, when he entertained us and sickened England with a goal helped in by “the hand of God”.
Arguably the most charismatic referee of recent years, the balding Italian Pierluigi Collina, donated his whistle from the 2002 final. And the display of England’s victory in 1966 contains a little-known refereeing anecdote. It was during this tournament that whistler Ken Aston had a eureka moment. Stopped at traffic lights, he mused on them changing from amber to red – and yellow and red cards were duly introduced in time for the next finals in Mexico.
It is notoriously easy and tempting to deride referees, but museum visitors can experience for themselves how tough it is to make split-second decisions without the benefit of slow-motion replays. Be a Referee is an interactive display of match videos with multiple-choice decisions on fouls. I try my hand at getting them right on three levels of difficulty and decide not to be so harsh on refs in future. I would have been booed off the park.
I don’t fare much better in Be a Commentator. Furnished with team lists, I enter a recording studio to report on a match video, and then listen to the result on headphones. I won’t be swopping a pen for a microphone any time soon.
It’s all great fun, reaching a stunning climax in a short film presentation of World Cup finals. All the passion, triumphs and heartaches of winning and losing the sport’s greatest prize are captured in frenetic clashes on a giant 180-degree screen with a stirring soundtrack.
Wondrous goals by the late Johan Cruyff and current Real Madrid boss Zinedine Zidane and miraculous saves by Italian keeper Gianluigi Buffon set the scene for players flying into crunching tackles that make viewers wince and gasp. I leave the movie theatre feeling emotionally drained.
It is perhaps not the best time to try the Game Corner, where visitors can test their skills in dribbling and shooting on obstacle courses. I don’t make the day’s top 10 on an electronic scoreboard, though the museum has been open for barely an hour. My glory days with Govan Amateurs are long gone.
I wonder if Camus or Marley could have done any better. It seems Camus, the Nobel Laureate philosopher and author, played in goal for an Algerian club. His conclusion appears in a glass case beside Dougie Wotherspoon’s kilt: “What little I know on morality, I learned it on football pitches.”
Marley’s credo evolved from playing football while touring with his reggae band the Wailers: “Football is a whole world. A universe to itself … football is freedom.”
And so it is. Just ask the galacticos of Eriskay and Benbecula.
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