Bala, The Bard and the Base Football Player
Fair Trade, football, and Renaissance literature. Not the most obvious line-up. A bit like asking for a banana, coffee, and cocoa sandwich. Hold that thought. If you give me five minutes, I think I can change your mind.
“You base football player.” That’s a Shakespeare quote. You’ll find it in Act 1, Scene 4 of King Lear, and it’s not a compliment. Kent (good guy*) says it to Oswald (bad guy*) while tripping him up. Kent is the noble, selfless servant of King Lear (good royal*/temporarily insane); Oswald is the slimy, self-serving servant of Goneril (bad royal*/Lear’s daughter). We, the audience, are supposed to laugh at the humiliated Oswald: “take that you base football player, you! You’re such a lowly worm it would be beneath the dignity of my falcons to eat you!”
Football, in Shakespeare’s day, was not a “gentleman’s game.” If you were rich and famous, your sports of choice were hunting and hawking, falconry, bowls, golf, maybe a bit of tennis, and sword fighting. Aristocrats did not assemble on the village green, doublets for goal-posts, and start booting around a pig’s bladder. In fairness, I wouldn’t have done either, given that football back then was more deadly than any sport other than archery. In the 1500s, football only had one rule – don’t kill anyone – and the fatality rate indicates a lot of players were getting red cards.
Yet there is, nevertheless, a certain hypocrisy in Kent’s insult. The world’s oldest surviving football was found in the bedroom of Mary Queen of Scots, and historical writings testify that her majesty enjoyed a kickabout (her football was made of stitched leather). King James I of England discouraged his courtiers from playing football but he relished watching games and even had special stands built so he could better observe the action. Aristocrats were, records suggest, only fair-weather football foes.
Even a moiety of a millennium ago, we can begin to see hints of a future when football will lose its “base” status and become instead the “great equaliser.” The prestige of football steadily rose over the following centuries, getting a boost from the introduction of more varied rules than “don’t murder.” By 1660, kicking players anywhere other than their shins had been ruled out (although tripping was still fine and dandy).
Around 1838, Cambridge University students helped create “rules that should equalise the different game” and “be fair to all the schools.” Fairness became an integral part of the sport, both on the pitch and off (albeit perhaps more aspirationally than actively). In theory, by the 21st century, anybody with enough talent from any background could become a football superstar, a goal conferring eye-watering wealth and celebrity.
A modern-day Kent would never think of calling Harry Kane a “base football player” (interestingly, Kane’s erstwhile club, Tottenham Hotspur, owes its name to Harry Hotspur, a character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1). Footballers are now made knights of the realm.
All of this is very cool, but alas, the beautiful game is, in some very important respects, less fair now than it was in Shakespeare’s time. It is less fair trade. Yes, you read that right. Consider that football found in Queen Mary’s bedroom. The leather would likely have been stitched by a skilled craftsman belonging to a livery. Liveries offered apprenticeships, protected the interests of both their craftsmen and customers, and gave alms to ensure members were cared for in sickness and old age.
While nobody was getting Silicon Valley rich on a leather-stitcher’s salary, the profession generally paid well enough to ensure a decent, if modest, standard of living. Alack, the same cannot be said of the football manufacturing industry in the 21st century.
The average football stitcher in Pakistan in 2026 earns the equivalent of 60p per ball. Each ball takes around three hours to make. If a stitcher worked a classic 9.00 to 5.00, he/she would earn less than £40 a month. In Pakistan, you need to spend roughly £380 per month, per person, in order to have what we in the West consider an okay standard of living: rent, food, transport, eating out occasionally, some leisure (note, this doesn’t include any savings, holidays, or pension fund). Working 9.00 to 5.00 as a football stitcher in Pakistan is, very literally, no way to make a living. Unless, of course, you are fortunate enough to work at a Fair Trade factory. Then it’s an entirely different story: fair pay, fair treatment; fair trade premium.
I am overall quite a polite person, and not one to go scurrying to Shakespeare’s big book of barbs every time I see someone doing something I don’t like. I also acknowledge that Kent’s comment had some pretty classist undertones. But justice often involves turning things on their heads, and I think I’d be amenable to resuscitating the insult with a twist: “you base football-manufacturing magnate.” If that’s what it takes to reform the industry and make every football a fair trade one, I’m on bard.
Oh, and as for what links the ingredients in the aforementioned strange sandwich: you can get fair trade versions of all three and Shakespeare never tasted any of them (they were all introduced to England in the mid 17th century).
*Many, many apologies to my Shakespeare professor of yore for this flagrant flouting of nuance.