How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

H O W
S O C C E R
E X P L A I N S
T H E W O R L D
An Unlikely Theory of Globalization
Franklin Foer
To Abby,
My Wife
And the Waimbergs,
My Brazilian Cousins
C o n t e n t s
Prologue • 1
e H O W S O C C E R E X P L A I N S
the Gangster’s Paradise
7
r H O W S O C C E R E X P L A I N S
the Pornography of Sects
35
t H O W S O C C E R E X P L A I N S
the Jewish Question
65
u H O W S O C C E R E X P L A I N S
the Sentimental Hooligan
89
i H O W S O C C E R E X P L A I N S
the Survival of the Top Hats
115
o H O W S O C C E R E X P L A I N S
the Black Carpathians
141
p H O W S O C C E R E X P L A I N S
the New Oligarchs
167
a H O W S O C C E R E X P L A I N S
the Discreet Charm of Bourgeois Nationalism 193
s H O W S O C C E R E X P L A I N S
Islam’s Hope
217
d H O W S O C C E R E X P L A I N S
the American Culture Wars
235
Note on Sources • 249
Acknowledgments • 253
Index • 257
About the Author
Praise
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
P ro l o g u e
I suck at soccer.
When I was a boy, my parents would turn their
backs to the field to avoid watching me play. I don’t blame them. The game’s fundamental principles only dawned on me slowly, after I had spent many seasons running in the opposite direction of the ball.
Despite these traumas, or perhaps because of them, my love for soccer later developed into something quite mad. I desperately wanted to master the game that had been the source of so much childhood shame. Because I would never achieve competence in the game itself, I could do the next best thing, to try and acquire a maven’s understanding. For an American, this wasn’t easy. During my childhood, public television would irregularly rebroadcast matches from Germany and Italy at televangelist hours on Sunday mornings. Those measly o¤erings would have to carry you through the four years between World Cups. That was it.
But slowly, technology filled in the gaps. First, praise God, came the Internet, where you could read the British sports pages and closely follow the players that you had encountered at the World Cup. Then Rupert Murdoch, blessed be his name, created a cable channel called Fox Sports World, dedicated almost entirely to airing European and Latin American
soccer.* Now, a rooftop dish brings into my living room a feed from the Spanish club Real Madrid’s cable channel, as well as games from Paraguay, Honduras, the Netherlands, Scotland, and France, not to mention Brazil, Argentina, and England.
At about the same time these television stations began consuming disturbingly large chunks of my leisure time, op-ed columnists and economists began to talk about the era of globalization. Because I spend many of my non-soccer-watching hours as a political journalist in Washington, I found myself drawn into the thick of this discussion. Thanks to the collapse of trade barriers and new technologies, the world was said to have become much more interdependent. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and high priest of this new order, hailed “the inexorable integra-tion of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before—in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.”
As a soccer fan, I understood exactly what he
meant. It wasn’t just the ways in which the Internet and satellites had made the world of soccer so much smaller and more accessible. You could see globalization on the pitch: During the nineties, Basque teams, under the stewardship of Welsh coaches, stocked up on Dutch and Turkish players; Moldavian squads imported
* Yes, this book owes its existence to the beneficence of Rupert Murdoch and his company, HarperCollins.
•
2 • Nigerians. Everywhere you looked, it suddenly seemed, national borders and national identities had been swept into the dustbin of soccer history. The best clubs* now competed against one another on a near-weekly basis in transnational tournaments like the European Champions League or Latin America’s Copa Libertadores.
It was easy to be wildly enthusiastic about the new order. These tournaments were a fan’s sweet dream: the chance to see Juventus of Turin play Bayern Munich one week and Barcelona the next. When coaches created cultural alchemies out of their rosters, they often yielded wonderful new spectacles: The cynical, defensive-minded Italian style livened by an infusion of freewheeling Dutchmen and Brazilians; the English sti¤-upper-lip style (or lack of style) tempered by a bit of continental flair, brought across the Channel in the form of French strikers. From the perspective of my couch, the game seemed much further along in the process of globalization than any other economy on the planet.
What’s more, I could think of a further benefit of soccer’s globalization that had yet to be realized: Someone needed to write a book on the subject that would require the (oh-so-arduous) task of traveling the world, attending soccer matches, watching training sessions, and interviewing his heroes. For eight months, I took a leave from my job at the New Republic magazine and visited the stadiums that I most