How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (17 page)

A youth team doesn’t sound like that big a deal. But in Nigeria, it is an enormous deal. National television
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

broadcasts the team’s games. Newspapers closely and harshly monitor its progress. After Edward’s team lost to Ghana in the final of the African championship, pundits prodded the coach to purge half his squad. But inevitably it is agents that keep the closest watch. Many of these agents made grandiose promises to Edward. Of the many o¤ers for representation, Edward picked an agent from the Ivory Coast called Ahmed. There was one part of his presentation that Edward liked best: Ahmed said he had already completed a deal with a club in Bordeaux, France.

Just before the World Cup, Edward made his first trip out of Africa. He traveled to the south of France, as wondrous a place as he had imagined. It inspired him to his highest caliber of play. During his two weeks of tryouts, he scored three goals playing on Bordeaux’s reserve team. But one afternoon, Edward’s agent told him that they would leave France the next day, much earlier than planned. “Why? Why are we going?”

Edward asked. “Because there’s paperwork that needs to be finished in Africa,” his agent replied. Satisfied with the answer, Edward returned to Gboko. Ahmed told him that he would pick him up in a week and they would return together to France. He never came. Later, Edward learned the details of the sordid transaction.

Bordeaux had given the agent $5,000 to pay Edward for his tryout. When Bordeaux learned the agent had used this money to bring other Africans to France for audi-tions with competitor clubs, it scuttled the deal.

This act of venality seemed to curse Edward.

Although Nigeria had been a favorite to take the World Cup, the team flamed out in the quarterfinals against
minnows from Oman. The result shamed Edward, as

did the fact that his teammates had all departed to play for European clubs. The torment of these thoughts prevented Edward from concentrating on the game and maintaining his fitness. Playing for his Gboko club, he ripped thigh muscles in both legs. Because of his state of mind, Edward’s Gboko club worried that he would neglect his rehabilitation, ruining any hopes of return.

They placed him in a hospital, where he remained for eight months, stuck in his own head.

Edward’s return to the pitch has a mythic quality.

Inserted in a game—with the coveted Nigerian Challenge Cup on the line, a tied score, and painkillers flowing through him—he added the decisive goal. A few days later, he sat in the back of an open convertible that displayed him to adoring Gboko. A few months later, he achieved his European dream. His new club might not have been nearly as prestigious as Bordeaux.

It might not have been even the most prestigious club in the former Soviet Republic of Moldova. But at least the club Sheri¤ resided in the city of Tiraspol, and Tiraspol was on the continent.

Moldova had experienced its own Nigerian fad. At Sheriff, Edward played with two compatriots. For a season, the arrangement worked wonderfully. Edward scored 11 goals and won player-of-the-month honors.

The Moldavians asked Edward to naturalize and play for their national team. But as his eighteen-month contract came to its close, other clubs began to make overtures to him. One team in the United Arab Emirates tendered a lucrative o¤er that Edward badly wanted to accept. Behind Sheriff’s back, he went to visit the
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

prospective team. After Sheriff’s ownership expired, he would join them.

Sheriff, however, had other ideas about Edward’s fate. It wanted to sell his contract to another club before it expired. That way, they could cash in on Edward’s success, too. According to Edward, when club oªcials learned about his trip abroad, they visited his wife and seized her passport. Edward didn’t know how to call the Nigerian embassy and wasn’t even sure that a Nigerian embassy existed in Moldova. Upon returning to

Moldova, Edward made it clear to the club that he would accept whatever decision they made for him.

They decided to sell Edward to Karpaty Lviv.

III.

The Lviv faithful idolize a twenty-eight year-old dentist named Yuri. In addition to expertise in drilling molars and scraping tartar, he captains Karpaty Lviv. As part of the culture of the Soviet game, players often obtained advanced degrees. Besides, only after the arrival of capitalism have players earned salaries that can sustain them through post-playing days. Yuri now earns enough that he doesn’t bother practicing. But after he retires, he’ll spend a few months reviewing his books and then will open shop in Lviv.

Yuri met me at the Viennese Co¤eehouse on

Prospekt Svobody, Freedom Avenue. If I didn’t know Yuri was local, I could have guessed. Like almost every Ukrainian man in Lviv, he carries a purse and has deep
blue eyes. In conversational style, the people of Lviv pride themselves on having an analytical, circumspect manner, an attribute they ascribe to the presence of thirteen universities and thousands of academics in their town. Yuri prefaces every statement with, “I can only speak from my own experience, but. . . .”

Lviv loves Yuri not only for his skills, but because he is one of them. He grew up in Lviv, went to every Karpaty home game as a kid, and wanted nothing more than to play for his beloved team. And they love him, because he represents the city exactly as the people want to see themselves portrayed: articulate, handsome, humble, and hardworking. When he plays badly, he’ll admit it without any exculpation. His work rate betrays an inexhaustible passion for his team.

During his captaincy, Yuri has presided over one of the most tumultuous eras in the history of Karpaty.

After Edward arrived, the team bought an eighteen-year-old Nigerian attacking midfielder with cornrows, named Samson Godwin. Because the old Ukrainian coach couldn’t speak English with the Nigerians, the club brought in a new Serbian manager, who had spent ten years playing for Southampton Football Club in England. The Serb, in turn, recruited four players from former Yugoslav countries. Suddenly, Yuri skippered a polyglot unit that included a coach and players whose languages he couldn’t himself speak.

This was a big change for Karpaty. Even in the Soviet era, it had been renowned for its localism.

Where most Ukrainian clubs contained players from Russia and the other republics, Karpaty consisted almost exclusively of men from Lviv and its environs.
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

This meant that Karpaty games reflected the implicit political reality of Western Ukraine: Lviv viewed itself as struggling against Russian masters who had imposed communism upon them. Of course, it was dangerous to make anything of Karpaty’s political symbolism. The state was always listening. An old-time chairman of the club has admitted that he supplied the KGB with Karpaty tickets, so agents could overhear any politically tinged shouts in the stadium. Nevertheless, people deeply felt the connection between their club and their national aspirations. When Karpaty won the USSR Cup in 1969, its fans sang Ukrainian songs in the Moscow stadium. The people of Lviv watching the game at home on television wept at the sound of their language resounding through the capital of their conquerors.

As he drank tea, Yuri explained this history.

“Karpaty never had political power; it never will have more money than the clubs in Kiev or Donetsk [the industrial capital of Eastern Ukraine]. But it has had a sense of spirit that has helped make up for these disadvantages. The big moments in Karpaty’s history happened when the team had local players and unity.”

With the arrival of the foreigners, the team had nothing resembling unity. It broke down into factions.

You would walk into the team dining room and find the various nationalities eating at their own separate tables.

They would sit apart on the team bus and at practice.

For sure, it didn’t help matters that the Ukrainians couldn’t converse with the Nigerians. (They had a much easier time integrating the Yugoslavs, whose language has close relations with Ukrainian and whose culture has the same Slavic underpinnings.) There were, how-
ever, less appealing reasons for this split within the team. Edward had been the most expensive acquisition in the history of the club. He earned, his teammates imagined, much more than they did.

Yuri had become particularly perturbed with the Nigerians. Too many of his fellow Ukrainians complained that the Nigerians weren’t trying very hard. Yuri agreed with this assessment. He felt the Nigerians didn’t run enough or sacrifice their bodies. The Karpaty jersey didn’t mean anything to them. For goodness sake, Edward and Samson said quite freely that they viewed the Ukraine as a mere way station on their routes toward the leagues of Western Europe. He felt their arrogance and indi¤erence would tear the club apart.

After one practice, Yuri pulled Edward and Samson aside. He told them that they needed to increase their e¤ort, to work with the rest of the team. “They were somehow o¤ended with such a conversation,” he

recounted to me. The next thing he knew, “Edward and Sampson went to Dyminskyy [the president of the club]

and told him that players weren’t giving passes to the Nigerians. The president met with me. He was furious,

‘Why isn’t the team giving passes to the Nigerians?’ I told him, ‘Do you not think I’m giving my best? I live for this team.’ ”

A day after meeting Yuri, I watched Karpaty practice. They trained in a village meadow. A rusty old rail car stood at one end of the field, a place for players to change clothes, although most players preferred to strip in public view. Team owner Petro Dyminskyy sat under an awning in front of this car. Even though it was a hot
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

spring day, he wore black. He remained ominously silent through the proceedings. The team went through its drills—small groups playing games of keep away, exercises in crossing and heading the ball. For each of these, Edward and Samson worked together. None of the other players volunteered to join them. Coaches filled those vacancies, even the Serbian head coach joined to give enough bodies. Under the blazing May sun, they worked their well-fed middle-aged bodies into supersaturated sponges of sweat.

IV.

On a street corner outside my hotel, I tried to make conversation with two sportswriters. One had been trained as an atomic scientist. Neither really spoke much English. We waited for a translator to arrive. As they filled the awkward silences with the phrases they knew, Edward serendipitously drove past us in an old beat-up cab with a cracked windshield. His driver slowed down for a moment and he put his hand out the window. I grabbed it. The other writers nodded in his direction. When Edward turned the corner, one of them chuckled. “Monkey,” he said in English. “Bananas,” the other one chimed.

It is diªcult to gauge how much of the resentment toward the Nigerians should be described as racism.

Clearly, many of the Ukrainian players feel the same as the journalists. They would complain to team oªcials that “they didn’t want to play with monkeys.” The Serbian coach told me, “I was surprised that some of the
young kids on the team don’t like black kids. This is not the way we should think in Europe. You associate Europe with civilization. That’s typical thinking for primitive people. You can feel how isolated [the Ukrainians] were in lots of manners and their way of thinking and so on.”

Yet their hatred doesn’t betray isolation, but the opposite. There’s a strange uniformity in the vocabulary European soccer fans use to hate black people. The same primate insults get hurled. Although they’ve gotten better over time, the English and Italians developed the tradition of making ape noises when black players touched the ball. The Poles toss bananas on the field.

This consistency owes nothing to television, which rarely shows these finer points of fan behavior. Nor are these insults considered polite to discuss in public.

This trope has simply become a continent-wide folk tradition, transmitted via the stadium, from fan to fan, from father to son.

Based on its history, you might imagine racism to be the logical conclusion of Lviv’s historical trajectory away from pluralism. Once upon a time, Lviv truly exuded cosmopolitanism. It was the kind of place you might expect to find odd cultural alchemies. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled, until World War I, the town was filled with grand opera houses and ornate co¤ee houses, like the one where Yuri and I took tea. It acquired the frilly atmospherics of
Mitteleuropa.
An energetic mix of ethnicities—Poles, Jews, Germans, Russians, and Ukrainians—helped give substance to this worldly aesthetic. The Lviv melting pot brewed schools of philosophy, great universities, poets, and
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

world-class intellectuals, like the economist Ludwig Van Mises and the ethicist Martin Buber.

Considering that Lviv had been founded as a

Ukrainian fortress, many Ukrainians found it strange that their people had achieved so little in the city’s era of greatness. They began to harbor deep resentments toward the presence of so many interlopers. During World War II, they seized opportunities to clean up this mess. Many local Ukrainians worked with the Germans to eliminate the Jews—who once accounted for about 30 percent of Lviv’s populace. Then, following the war, in a move sanctioned by Stalin, they deported the Polish half of town en masse. Finally, with the Poles and Jews purged, the Ukrainians could leave their villages and take up residence in Lviv’s vacant houses.

Upon arriving in Lviv, the Ukrainians compensated for years of self-pity by developing a new theory of their own superiority. They looked east toward the other big Ukrainian cities—Kiev, Odessa, Donetsk—and saw Russians mixing with Ukrainians. Without a fight, the easterners had exchanged the Ukrainian language for Russian, intermarried, and embraced the Soviet system. Quietly, in their homes, so as not to draw the attention of the Communist apparatus, they dismissed these other Ukrainians as cultural traitors.

In the atmosphere of nationalism and resentment, however, racism doesn’t really exist. Aside from the odd, crude paroxysm of hate, the situation isn’t nearly as nasty as in the West. At games, fans don’t make ape noises when Edward enters the field or touches the ball.