Here's Terry Eagleton, never a man afraid to recycle old clichés:
If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse. It reminds us of what is still likely to hold back such change long after the coalition is dead. If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football. No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead….
In a social order denuded of ceremony and symbolism, football steps in to enrich the aesthetic lives of people for whom Rimbaud is a cinematic strongman….
[f]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished.
Better surely, in the spirit of Brecht, to abolish the ignorant and gullible working class, who have over the last hundred or so years shown such a discreditable lack of enthusiasm for the radical ideas of their intellectual betters: people like Terry here, for whom Rambo is a 19th Century French poet.
Mick Hartley 
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