Sportchor

After the World Cup is before the World Cup: King Football rules the world, but gets hopelessly lost in a maze of platitudes – or fights bitterly on the battlefield of opinions. Everyone competes against everyone else here: interviewers against players, managers against media people, fan clubs against team buses, players against players' wives, girls against boys, etc. Conceived as a kind of addendum to Ein Sportstück, Sportchor is a symphony of language – admonishing, fickle and fearful like the chorus in ancient drama – which in the end knows only losers, because as the saying goes: The winner takes it all.

«Sportchor is creative, it is intelligent, it is funny, it ironises the protagonists of football without branding them as idiots.» (Der Tagesspiegel)

«Jelinek's text on the World Cup, war, the media and gender relations brings together a multitude of voices that bombard us incessantly in order to explain the world to themselves and to us ... (and impressively finds) a form that brings out the underlying aggression and stupidity.» (die tageszeitung)