How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (28 page)

They portray the U.S. forcing Nike, McDonald’s and
Baywatch
down the throats of the unwilling world, shredding ancient cultures for the sake of empire and cash. But that version of events skirts the obvious truth: Multinational corporations are just that, multinational; they don’t represent American interests or American culture. Just as much as they have changed the tastes and economies of other countries, they have tried to change the tastes and economy of the United States.

Witness the Nike and Budweiser campaigns to sell soccer here. No other country has been as subjected to the free flows of capital and labor, so constantly remade by migration, and found its national identity so constantly challenged. In short, America may be an exception, but it is not exceptionally immune to

globalization. And we fight about it, whether we know it or not, just like everyone else.
N o t e o n S o u rc e s

There’s not much written on the connection between Serbian hooligans and the Balkan wars. As far as I know, the anthropologist Ivan Colovic is the only one to cover this ground. His work can be found in a translated collection,
Politics of Identity in Serbia: Essays in Political
Anthropology
(New York: New York University Press, 2002). Colovic mines obscure sources—pulp fiction, television shows, sports pages—and comes back with profound observations. Unlike many cultural critics, however, he has as good a grasp of reality as obtuse theory.

My chapter on Glasgow owes a huge debt to Bill Murray, an Australian academic, who has produced the two most rigorous histories of the Celtic-Rangers rivalry:
The Old Firm: Sectarianism, Sport and Society in
Scotland
(Edinburgh: John Donald, 1984) and
The Old
Firm in the New Age: Celtic and Rangers Since the Souness
Revolution
(Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1998).

Some of my anecdotes in this chapter come from Stuart Cosgrove’s
Hampden Babylon
(Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1991). T. M. Devine has edited a collection of essays on the sectarian divide called
Scotland’s Shame?

(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2000).

There’s sadly little written on the Jewish soccer renaissance. There’s John Bunzl’s
Hoppauf Hakoah: Jüdischer
NOTE ON SOURCES

Sport in Österreich von den Anfängen bis in die Gegenwart
(Vienna: Janus, 1987) and the Vienna’s Jewish

Museum’s exhibition catalog
Hakoah: Ein Jüdischer
Sportverein in Wien, 1909–1995
(Vienna: Der Apfel, 1995). In addition, there is an important book commemorating the club’s fiftieth anniversary: Otto Bahr’s
50 Jahre Hakoah
(Tel Aviv: Verlagskomitee Hakoah Tel Aviv, 1959). Hungarian soccer has received a little bit more attention. The historian, cultural critic, and MTK

fan Tamás Krausz has a superb essay on his favorite club’s ethnic heritage that can be found online at
http://eszmelet.tripod.com/angol1/krauszang1.html.

Miklós Hadas and Viktor Karády have also published a history of MTK’s Jewishness that can found at

http://www.replika.c3.hu/1718/hadas.htm.
David Winner’s
Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch
Football
(London: Bloosmbury, 2000) is one of the great books written about the sport. I particularly recommend his chapter on Ajax and the Jews. The same subject gets a more comprehensive treatment in Simon Kuper’s
Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football in Europe
During the Second World War
(London: Orion, 2003).

Finally, there’s lots written about Max Nordau, but I leaned heavily on Michael Stanislawski’s
Zionism and
the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism for
Nordau to Jabotinsky
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

Chapters from Alan Garrison’s manuscript can be found at
http://www.chelsea-desktop-wallpaper.co.uk/.
For an understanding of the recent transformation of the English game, I relied on David Conn’s
The Football
Business
(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1997).
NOTE ON SOURCES

Alex Bellos’s
Futebol, the Brazilian Way
(London: Bloomsbury, 2002) provided an account of corruption in the Brazilian game. I frequently found myself referring to
Péle: His Life and Times
(London: Robson Books, 2000).

Much of my knowledge of Brazilian history derives from Joseph A. Page’s
The Brazilians
(Reading, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1995) and Marshall Eakin’s
Brazil: The Once
and Future Country
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

Tobias Jones’s
The Dark Heart of Italy: Travels
through Time and Space Across Italy
(London: Faber and Faber, 2003) has a superb chapter on the Italian game.

I’ve found no better survey of Italian politics than Patrick McCarthy’s
The Crisis of the Italian State: From
the Origins of the Cold War to the Fall of Berlusconi
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).

Jimmy Burns’s
Barca: A People’s Passion
(London, Bloomsbury, 1998) does a marvelous job synthesizing the history of my beloved club. Phil Ball’s
Morbo: The
Story of Spanish Football
(London: WSC Books, 2001) was also a useful source.

For Iranian soccer, I depended on the scholarship of Houchang Chehabi. He allowed me to view an

advanced copy of his essay “The Politics of Football in Iran.” I also relied on his essay “The Juggernaut of Globalization: Sport and Modernization in Iran,” published in volume 19 of
The International Journal of the
History of Sport.
Christian Bromberger’s essay

“Troisième mi-temps pour le Football Iranien” can be found online (
http://www.mondediplomatique.fr/1998/04

/BROMBERGER/10280
).

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Peterjon Cresswell and Simon Evans for putting together
The
NOTE ON SOURCES

Rough Guide’s European Football: A Fan’s Handbook
(London: Penguin Books, 1999). I followed their anthropological insights and travel tips across the continent. Depressingly, many pages from my edition slowly came unglued from their binding and ultimately floated away in a Vienna breeze. Simon Kuper’s
Football
Against the Enemy
(London: Orion, 1994) was an inspiration for this book.
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

When I first tentatively mentioned the idea of this book to my agent, Rafe Sagalyn, I expected him to laugh it o¤. Instead, he told me to drop everything and write a proposal. And after I dropped everything, he never dropped me. I am so grateful for his loyalty, advice, and friendship. Tim Duggan, my editor, isn’t even a soccer fan—which makes me even more appreciative of his commitment to this book. Book editing, as a discipline, takes a lot of knocks. Editors are said to have become bean counters and tools of marketing departments. But Tim is wonderfully old school. He can structure a chapter, tease out an argument, and walk a writer back from the literary ledge. He cares about ideas.

Gabriele Marcotti is my learned soccer guru. He doesn’t just know his football, he knows his politics, economics, and culture. I’m so grateful for the many hours he spent with me on the phone. Thanks to him, I also found a network of journalists who opened their Rolodexes and shared their considerable reportorial expertise: Ben Lyttleton, Ian McGarry, and Graham Hunter. In Italy, Gabriele connected me with Aurelio Capaldi, who generously led me by the hand through Rome.

My cousin Marcelo Waimberg took two weeks o¤

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

his job to serve as my translator. Those were the two best weeks I spent working on this book. Even though he is an engineer, he has the mind and soul of a journalist—skeptical and inquisitive. My entire Brazilian clan continually sets new, unsurpassable benchmarks for hospitality. I spent several weeks living in Jacques and Nair Waimberg’s guest bedroom.

On my travels, I found myself in the protective grasp of an international fraternity of journalists. A thousand thank-yous to Fiachra Gibbons, Angelique Chrisafis, Pat Kane, Andrew Jennings, Richard Wilson, Gustavo Poli, Juca Kfouri, João Carlos Assumpcão, Mario Magalhães, Raul Lores, Leonardo Pinto da Silva, Dejan Nikolic, Dejan Anastasijevic, Ivan Colovic, Kevin Mousley, John Carlin, Taras Hordiyenko, Mike Ticher, Grant Wahl, Gunnar Persson, Joan Poqui, Beppe Sev-ergnini, and Tommaso Pellizzari. I’m also grateful for the help of Andy Markovits, Aleksandar Hemon, Colin Jose, Houchang Chehabi, Amir Afkhami, Afshin

Molavi, John Bunzl, Viktor Karády, Péter Szegedi, Sándor Laczkó, Tim Parks, Mario Sconcerti, Martin Vogel, Alex Alexiev, Eric Gordy, Walter Laqueur, Doug McGray, David Brett Wasser, and John Efron. (Efron came through with essential information about Tottenham’s Jewishness.) It pains me to know that I’m not expressing proper gratitude to dozens of others who provided boosts along the way.

In addition to Tim Duggan, this book benefited immeasurably from the eyes and pens of several dear friends: Bryan Curtis, Jodi Kantor, David Plotz, Jay Tol-son, and Jason Zengerle. I’m embarrassed to think of how much they improved my copy. David Hirshey, a
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

fellow Arsenal fan and a member of a great soccer family, played a vital role in championing this book at HarperCollins. My editors at the
New Republic
—Peter Beinart, Chris Orr, and Martin Peretz—gave me eight months leave to kick-start this project.

My family suggested the idea for this book on a vacation to Barcelona, as we sat in the upper tier of the Camp Nou. For the next two years, my parents and brothers talked me through outlines and read drafts.

Finally, more than HarperCollins, my wife was this book’s patron. Without her encouragement and support—not to mention understanding—I would have never traveled around the world for this book. I loved the hours we spent holed up in the home oªce as she read through the manuscript—and I love her.
I n d e x

Abramovich, Roman, 94–95,

Belfast, 57–64. See also Scottish

110–11

sectarianism

AC Milan club, 5, 170, 172–73,

Belgrade. See Serbian violence

177–92

Berlusconi, Silvio, 5, 170, 172–73,

African American gangster rap,

177–92

14–15

bigotry

Agnelli, Gianni, 170–77

anti-Semitism (see Jewish

Ajax club, 80–83

soccer)

American culture, 235–48

English, 108–9

anti-nationalism, 246–48

ethnic warfare, 7–8, 15–16, 111

anti-soccer lobby, 240–44

religious (see Scottish sectarian-

class issues, 238–40

ism)

gangster rap, 14–15

Serbian, 19 (see also Serbian

globalization and, 239–40,

violence)

244–46

Ukrainian, 153–58, 165–66 (see

yuppie culture, 235–38

also Ukrainian immigrant

Amsterdam, 80–83

players)

anti-Semitism. See Jewish soccer

Bosnia, 12

anti-soccer lobby, American,

Brazilian style, 3

240–44

Brazilian top hats, 115–40

Anyamkyegh, Edward, 141, 143,

globalization and, 119–21,

144–49, 152–53, 158–59,

128–31, 134–35

161–62

Pelé and, 121–28, 131–34

Arantes do Nascimento, Edson

José Luis Portella, 139–40

(Pelé), 121–28, 131–34

Eurico Miranda, 115–19, 134–39

Arkan (Zeljko Raznatovic), 8, 10,

Budapest clubs, 85–88

17–18, 28

AS Roma club, 80, 170

capitalism

athletes, Jewish, 65–67, 70

Brazilian, 120, 125–27, 134,

Austria. See Hakoah club

139–40

English, 96–98

Balkan Wars, 7–8, 15–16, 111

globalization and, 4 (see also

Barca (FC Barcelona) club,

globalization)

193–96. See also Spanish

Italian anti-capitalism, 189–90

bourgeois nationalism

Scottish, 38–40, 46–48

Basques, 4, 205

Ukrainian, 142
INDEX

cartolas. See Brazilian top hats

ethnic warfare, 7–8, 15–16, 111.

Catalonia, 199–201, 208–9. See

See also bigotry

also Spanish bourgeois

Europe

nationalism

anti-Semitism, 70–71, 77–88

catenaccio style, 169

hooligans, 13–15

Catholicism, Ukrainian, 165–66.

See also Scottish sectarianism

fans. See also English hooligans;

Ceca, 25, 27, 30–34

Scottish sectarianism; Ser-

Celtic Football Club. See Scottish

bian violence

sectarianism

Iranian women, 217–21

Chelsea club fans, 14, 79, 89–94,

Italian, 182, 185

101, 107. See also English

Spanish, 197–98, 211–16

hooligans

FC Barcelona (Barca) club,

clubs vs. national teams, 3

193–96. See also Spanish

Collina, Pierluigi, 167–68

bourgeois nationalism

Combat 18 club, 107–8

females, Iranian, 217–21

corruption. See also Brazilian top

Ferencvaros club, 85–86

hats; Italian oligarchs

Findlay, Donald, 52–57

globalization and, 5

Flamengo club, 119–20

Serbian, 25

football. See soccer

Croatia, 12, 15–17, 20–24

football revolution, Iranian,

culture. See also American culture;

221–23, 233–34

Iranian Islamic culture;

France, 3

nationalism; Spanish bour-

Franco regime, 4, 195, 201–7

geois nationalism

Friedman, Thomas, 2

English, 97–98

globalization and, 4–5

Gaal, Louis van, 215–16

Czechoslovakia, 75–77

Gamper, Joan, 199–201

gangsterism ethos, 14–15. See also

Dinamo Zagreb club, 15–17, 21

Serbian violence

discrimination. See bigotry

Garrison, Alan, 89–96, 102–14.

Djindjic, Zoran, 32–33

See also English hooligans