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Books: Fortunes of war and football

Independent, The (London), Jan 14, 2005 by David Goldblatt

Is there anyone left on the planet who still thinks that sport and politics don't mix? Is there anyone, even in the anti-intellectual depths of the football world, who thinks the game utterly divorced from social and economic realties? If so, they are unlikely to pick this book off the shelves, but they ought. It will disabuse them of any lingering illusions about the purity, sanctity or social irrelevance of football in any culture.

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Franklin Foer is not the first writer to mine the rich mixed seam of football, politics, culture and travel-writing. As he acknowledges, Simon Kuper's seminal Football against the Enemy was his inspiration. But Kuper's book is now over a decade old; football and the world have moved on. Ten years ago, who outside the narrowest academic circles had heard the word "globalisation"? Now it is the common currency of the age, and Foer takes it as his theme in exploring the interrelationship between football and society on four continents.

Grand arguments aside, Foer tells some fine tales and travels with an engaging and engaged eye. He is funny, sharp, waspish, alert and reflective. In Serbia, he immerses himself in the complex relationship between ultra- nationalist gangsters and football. Fan clubs formed the basis of nationalist armies in the civil wars and leagues have been won and lost according to the rule of the gun.

In England, he finds out what happens to old hooligans who will not fade away; they get grotesquely nostalgic and a little soft around the edges. In Scotland, he endures drunken Rangers fans who insist on him cursing the Pope as the price of admission to their prejudiced revels. In Brazil, he nicely captures the grotesque arrogance and strut of Enrico Miranda, the toad-like president of Vasco Da Gama football club.

The plight of Nigerian players in Ukraine is among the most touching and humane tales in the book. Ukrainian football was rescued from its post-communist descent into debt by the nation's new industrial oligarchs. In pursuit of instant success at home and in Europe they tapped into the new global market in football players, and brought a slew of Nigerians to the steppes.

Not surprisingly, the Nigerians' experience has been mixed. Wages are certainly better than at home, but the climate is unspeakable; games are played at minus 25 degrees even in spring. Black faces are rare in Ukraine and the Nigerians have been exposed to high-level ignorance and low-level racism. But, like migrants everywhere in the global economy, they grit their teeth and stick it out in the hope of better times.

Does the book really explain the world? There is no doubt that Foer reveals the innumerable ways in which football reflects and parallels the wider social context in which it is embedded. Support for clubs matches pre- existing social divisions; patterns of economic power and wealth are reflected in club ownership; attitudes to the law and political power are matched by attitudes to the referee's authority. Patterns of football migration are not dissimilar to patterns of conventional labour migration.

The one issue where football might claim some primacy as a cause is in the area of identities and nationalism. Foer's account of Scottish football suggests that the enduring bitterness between Rangers and Celtic sustains sectarianism at a level much higher than the level of real discrimination would otherwise warrant. In Iran, Foer argues that football, especially the national team, has provided an outlet for an otherwise forbidden secular nationalism.

But in nearly all of the instances Foer explores, football helps illuminate what already exists rather than actively creating it. Deep social trends and structures explain football's peculiarities rather than the other way around. Thus America's great cultural divide between liberal, cosmopolitan Democrats and conservative, isolationist, Republicans broadly matches the distribution of football-players and football-haters in the US.

But football did not produce the division; the geography of these two Americas continues to match almost exactly the Union and Confederacy of the Civil War. The roots of America's culture wars are the economic geography of 19th-century capitalism and the attitudes to slavery and black people that created.

Football, as with other sports, may be war by proxy, but we should not kid ourselves that the blood and guts of the playing fields is the same as the blood and guts of the killing fields.

David Goldblatt's `World Football Yearbook' is published by Dorling Kindersley

Books: Fortunes of war and football

Independent, The (London), Jan 14, 2005 by David Goldblatt

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