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Kick back: the curious appeal of soccer's tribalism
Washington Monthly, July-August, 2004 by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization By Franklin Foer HarperCollins, $24.95
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I have spent each of the past three Sundays watching the European soccer championships via satellite at a small bar just south of Dupont Circle in Washington, the only establishment in the District I've found which shows these matches. Having grown up in the Bronx, I have little native interest in the odd geopolitical clashes on offer--Sweden versus Bulgaria!--but then neither do most of the 200 or so other yuppies who watch with me, and who show up to grab seats even earlier than I do. What we are watching is not so much the games themselves, whose quality has frankly been up and down, but the few European expats, pasty-faced development bankers and diplomats with soft bellies, who are accorded a momentary celebrity status, sitting at the best tables and singing obscure, off-key patriotic songs to root their elevens on. There is a ferocity to their fandom that I have not seen elsewhere in American sports, a sense that when England faces France on the pitch, two cultures really are in conflict, and the result might have something meaningful to say about which one is superior. The Americans at the bar, who outnumber the expatriates 20 to one, stand around the mom's edges like wallflowers at a junior high school dance, shooting each other geeky smiles, feeling privileged to be party to the action. Only the most imaginative of us, after all, have ever been able to invest the pennant runs of the Florida Marlins with anything approaching the same historical importance or symbolic heft.
Sportswriters of a particular liberal-sensitive cast have spent three decades patiently pressing upon their readers the demographic inevitability of soccer's conquest of the American sporting scene. First, they say, there are the participants: millions of suburban soccer kids, who will as adults lock onto the sport they grew up playing. Next, there are all those Mexicans--and other immigrants too--for whom soccer is a happy link back to their homelands. But the minor roots that the sport has established so far in America have been put down neither by the immigrant fans nor the Saturday morning shin guard posse but instead by cultural tourists like those who watch each Sunday with me, returned refugees from junior years abroad. Third- and fourth- generation immigrants, we wistfully align ourselves with working-class allegiances from the old country, looking at those pasty-faced bankers in the bar, the postmen in the stands in Portugal, and imagine whom we might have been had our grandparents stayed home. We cheer and try to lose ourselves in borrowed pride, in these blind, chesty European nationalisms.
It is difficult to watch soccer from America today and not notice this shifting interplay of class and national identity, where rivalries that spark proletarian blood-feuds in Europe are symbols of something quaint and charmed in Washington. In How Soccer Explains the World, the political journalist Franklin Foer has mapped, delightfully, the ways in which soccer's emerging international brands and symbols clash with stubborn local tribalisms. Each of his 10 chapters is a discreet, deeply-reported case study on what soccer has come to mean in different spots around the world--on soccer and Serbian nationalism, on soccer and the corrupt cronyism of Brazilian oligarchs, on the ways in which a nascent, secular nationalism has emerged through soccer in Iran.
The book's subtitle--An Unlikely Theory of Globalization--promises a discussion of the new, post-Cold War world, but in truth there are only one or two chapters that could not have been written 20 years ago. Foer seems less interested in documenting something new than in using soccer as an organizing concept, a diagnostic lens for assessing the state of the world's lumpenproletariat in the era of The Economist and the global triumph of Pepsi and MTV. Soccer, with its national teams and the furied local passions that fire the supporters of its professional sides, has always been a tool of the sort of vain tribalism liberals have long wished gone from the earth, and had hoped that globalization would banish. The weight of the reporting--Foer spent what must have been eight magnificent months traveling the world and hanging out with the diehards--suggests continuity, rather than disruption, for the survival of old parochial prejudices and antagonisms against all odds.
Foer offers an artfully-told, and often horrifying, rogues' gallery of hooligans and corrupt executives, the ways in which a general global economic and political optimism has failed to dissolve or even diminish the odious traditions and rites of the developing world, or the stubborn elements of the developed nations: the hideous, sometimes murderous clashes between Catholics and Protestants, a pre-Enlightenment tension that finds voice in the rivalry of Celtic (Glasgow's Catholic club) and Rangers (the city's Protestant, royalist side). There is the sad account of the fix-ridden let-down of Brazilian soccer, where corrupt government officials and cynical billionaire have let the game fall into a state of such rot that only a few thousand people show up in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo for matches between even the biggest clubs, leaving the world's most creative and gifted athletes to perform in what is nearly a vacuum. There is Italy (Italy!), where inter-city rivalries are fraught with the most epic of political tensions (in Milan, there are two sides--the socialist team which holds poetry readings and never quite lives up to its potential, and the Berlusconi-owned right-wing side, which always wins), but the referees all favor the biggest clubs and the nation is left with a furious cynicism.
