Soccer Against the Enemy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  ALSO BY SIMON KUPER

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  PREFACE TO THE U.S. EDITION

  CHAPTER 1 - CHASING SOCCER AROUND THE WORLD

  CHAPTER 2 - SOCCER IS WAR

  CHAPTER 3 - THE SOCCER DISSIDENT

  CHAPTER 4 - THE BALTICS WANT TO BE IN AMERICA

  CHAPTER 5 - THE SECRET POLICE CHIEF

  CHAPTER 6 - RULERS OF UKRAINE

  CHAPTER 7 - LONE SKINHEAD SAVES NATION

  CHAPTER 8 - GAZZA, EUROPE AND THE FALL OF MARGARET THATCHER

  CHAPTER 9 - A DAY WITH HELENIO HERRERA

  CHAPTER 10 - FC BARCELONA AND THE SCOTTISH QUESTION

  CHAPTER 11 - DUTCH AND ENGLISH: WHY BOBBY ROBSON FAILED IN HOLLAND

  CHAPTER 12 - AFRICA (IN BRIEF)

  CHAPTER 13 - ROGER MILLA AND PRESIDENT BIYA

  CHAPTER 14 - MANDELA AT HELDERFONTEIN

  CHAPTER 15 - SHORT, DARK, AMERICANS

  CHAPTER 16 - ARGENTINA, CAMPEON!

  CHAPTER 17 - PELÉ THE MALANDRO

  CHAPTER 18 - CELTIC AND RANGERS, OR RANGERS AND CELTIC

  CHAPTER 19 - FROM BOSTON TO BANGLADESH: AT THE 1994 WORLD CUP

  CHAPTER 20 - THE PRESIDENT AND THE BAD BLUE BOYS

  CHAPTER 21 - GLOBAL GAME, GLOBAL JIHAD

  POSTSCRIPT

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR Simon Kuper’s SOCCER AGAINST THE ENEMY

  WINNER OF THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD.

  Voted best book on soccer ever by Four Four Two magazine

  Voted as one of the TOP 50 books on sport by the Observer newspaper

  “The best from the last few years.”

  —Nick Hornby, author Fever Pitch and About A Boy

  “It probably won’t be long before Americans discover the decade’s worth of smart British books about the culture, political history and sociology of the game, like Simon Kuper’s Soccer Against the Enemy.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “An inspiration.”

  —Franklin Foer, author How Soccer Explains the World

  “How Soccer Explains the World is a good and largely interesting read, but based on the failings that I found within its pages, I find it hard to recommend. A better choice for an interested reader would be Simon Kuper’s Soccer Against the Enemy.”

  —Roger Holland, Pop Matters

  “If you like [soccer] read it. If you don’t like [soccer] read it.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Highly entertaining.”

  —Financial Times

  “A terrific book.”

  —The Guardian

  ALSO BY SIMON KUPER

  Ajax, the Dutch, the War

  To my family, and to the memory of Petra van Rhede

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK COULD ONLY have been written thanks to conversations with hundreds of people around the world. Many others acted as interpreters (some paid, others not) or as contacts. Some simply helped me buy train tickets—an act of mercy in Russia. I thank all the people I met and have quoted in the text, and also:• in England, Debbie Ashton and Francisco Panizza; at Amnesty International, Henry Atmore, Rachel Baxter, Joe Boyle, Nancy Branko, Jordi Busquet, Rachel Cooke, Shilpa Deshmukh, Gillian Harling, Matt Mellor, Simon Pennington, Celso Pinto, Keir Radnedge, Gavin Rees, Katrine Sawyer, and Simon Veksner

  • in Scotland, Raymond Boyle, Mark Dingwall, Gerry Dunbar, Jimmy Johnstone, Mark Leishman, and John Scott

  • in Northern Ireland, Thomas “D.J.” McCormick and his family, and John McNair

  • in Ireland, John Lenihan, and Marina and Pauline Millington-Ward

  • in Holland, Willem Baars, Rutger and Jan Maarten Slagter, the staffs of Nieuwe Revu and Vrij Nederland

  • in Germany, the Klopfleisch family, and the Hertha BSC fan club

  • in the Baltics, the Norwegian Information Office in Vilnius and Markus Luik

  • in Russia, Julia Artemova, Ana Borodatova, Vladimir Shinkaryov, Mark Rice-Oxley, Carey Scott, Sasha, and Irina

  • in Ukraine, Peter Lavrenjuk

  • in the Czech Republic, Václav Hubinger, Karel Novotny, Jan Tobias, and the Press and Information Center for Foreign Journalists

  • in Hungary, Krisztina Fenyö and Gabor Vargyas

  • in Italy, the Herrera family, Isabelle Grenier, and Virginie

  • in Spain, Elisabet Almeda, Salvador Giner, and Nuria

  • in Cameroon, the staff at the British Embassy

  • in South Africa, all my relatives, Raymond Hack, Doctor Khumalo, Steve Komphela, and Krish Naidoo

  • in Botswana, the Masire family

  • in the USA, Michelle Akers-Stahl, Joy Bifeld, Sue Carpenter, Julie Faudi, Duncan Irving, Leo Kuper, Dean Linke, Celestin Monga, John Polis, Michael Whitney, Mike Woitalla, Ade, Ruth Aguilera, Andres Cavelier, Chris Cowles, Frank dell’Apa, Gus Martins, Meghan Oates, Derek Rae, Kristen Upchurch and Bea Vidacs

  • in Argentina, Rafael Bloom, Estela de Carlotto, Peter Hamilton, Fabian Lupi, Nathaniel C. Nash, Daniel and Pablo Rodriguez Sierra, and Eric Weil

  • and in Brazil, Ricardo Benzaquem, Cunca Bocayuva Cunha, Marcio Moreira Alves, Adam Reid, and Herbert de Souza.

  I also want to thank Peter Gordon and Nick Lord of Yorkshire Television. In 1990 they produced a marvelous TV series on soccer around the world called The Greatest Game, and they let me take what I wanted from their enormous files of facts and interviews. I took a lot.

  I owe a particular debt to Bill Massey and Caroline Oakley, my editors at Orion.

  PREFACE TO THE U.S. EDITION

  WHEN YOU DRIVE INTO the air force base, you feel like you’re in a small American town circa 1953. Amit and I putter at about 15 miles an hour past the wooden villas where the air force officers live. Kids are playing on the street. Pedestrians say “Hi” to passing strangers. When Amit parks he doesn’t even lock the car, and leaves the windows open. All this happens in the warm January sunshine of Alabama. It could be an old B-movie starring Ronald Reagan.

  Here on the base you’re at the heart of the mightiest military machine in history, but you feel utterly safe. It’s partly because nobody on the base is allowed to carry a gun. You have to hand in all weapons at the front gate. The right to bear arms is honored rather better in the neighboring town of Montgomery.

  I don’t spend much time on air force bases. I live in Paris, and I usually consort with wishy-washy liberals. But Amit, a professor at the Air War College here, has summoned me to give his air force officers a seminar on sport. It’s really because Amit is a Dutch soccer nut. We had never met before my plane landed at the Montgomery airport, but I knew Amit from his emails, because for years now he’s been critiquing all my articles about Dutch soccer.

  That first evening Amit takes me to eat ribs in a restaurant by the highway and tells me his ideas for the Dutch team as Euro 2008 looms. For a start, Marco van Basten, Holland’s manager at the time, has to recall Dennis Bergkamp from retirement. “He’s retired, who cares?” says Amit, with a very dead pig in his hands. “Van Basten has to go to him and say, ‘Here’s a train ticket, every game you’ll come on as a substitute with half an hour to go, and the other team will go crazy.’”

  Amit has lots of ideas. He knows what he’s talking about, too, because he coaches the air base’s soccer team. (Some of his players want to copy the 3-4-3 formation of the great Ajax side of the 1970s. Amit tells them first they’ll have to learn to kick a ball straight.) All he lacks is a direct line to Van Basten. “He should start a blog, with space for suggestions for the team,” says Amit. Becau
se as things stand, he’s losing patience with Van Basten. Amit used to be a devotee. He and his ex-wife have a pug named Mabel, and when Mabel started having knee trouble she was given the surname Van Basten. (In fact Van Basten’s problems were with his ankle, but perhaps Amit was misled by my articles.)

  Amit has only ever spent a total of about two weeks of his life in the Netherlands. While there he visited the club museum at the Ajax stadium, and the tomb of William the Silent and his faithful pug in the town of Delft. William led the Netherlands to independence from Spain in the sixteenth century, or as Amit puts it, “Thanks to that pug Holland remained free to develop its independent soccer style. Otherwise you would now have clubs with names like Real Amsterdam and Celta Alkmaar.”

  Amit does not actually speak Dutch, but as soon as the book appears he intends to read the autobiography of the former Dutch international Edgar “The Pitbull” Davids. I suspect Amit is more excited about Pitbull: My Life . . . than about any forthcoming publication on the Indian army, even one written by himself.

  Some version of Amit’s story will be familiar to anyone who follows soccer in the United States. Around the nation, people now get up at crazy times to cheer on teams based in countries that they will never visit. You might even say that this cheery little Indian is the New Fan incarnated. Like millions of Americans, Japanese, Australians, Chinese, and even Indians and Canadians, Amit supports teams that have nothing historically to do with him. In recent years the model of fandom that I described in Soccer Against the Enemy has begun to break down. The homegrown fanatics whom I met in the early 1990s in towns like Glasgow, Budapest, and Buenos Aires are giving way to New Fans like Amit. That, of course, reveals a truth about the changing world that goes beyond soccer.

  After I finished this book at 2 A.M. one night in 1993, I had intended to stop writing about soccer. I wanted to devote my journalistic life to important subjects like economics. Those whom the gods want to punish, they give what they ask for: I soon became currency correspondent of the Financial Times, writing a daily report on the doings of the dollar, yen, and Deutschmark. After two years, tedium forced me to quit, and I became a “world football” columnist at the Observer newspaper.

  I later drifted back to the Financial Times, where I now sometimes get to write about important subjects, like the vote for “Greatest Belgian,” but I have always kept writing about soccer. My weekly sports column in the newspaper is often a sort of update of Soccer Against the Enemy. The game remains too good a way of understanding the world to discard. Soccer matters as much today as when I made the journey that became this book, but it now matters in different ways.

  For a start, the world when I left England by ferry in July 1992, with a typewriter in my rucksack, was a much bigger place. Before the Internet it was hard to find out much about Ukraine or Cameroon, say, without going there. Because these countries were isolated, they were much more different from one another than they are today. Certainly their soccer cultures were more distinctive then. When I travel around watching soccer now, I notice the same things repeated everywhere: the face-painted fans, the Manchester United shirts, and, increasingly, the same style of play. The Dutch, English, Americans, and Cameroonians are all converging on the same kind of soccer.

  The meaning of fandom has changed too. When I wrote the book, soccer on the continent regularly set tribe against tribe: Dutch against Germans, or Scottish Catholics against Scottish Protestants. Soccer stadiums were then still the place to uncover Western Europe’s suppressed ethnic, religious, regional, and class tensions.

  Then one day in Glasgow in 1999 I met a Celtic fan who taught me that things had changed. This man was hard-core. When “Catholic” Celtic played their “Protestant” rivals Rangers, he shouted outrageous abuse at the “Prods.” He had even named his second son for every member of the 1967 European Cup-winning Celtic team. (“The subs wouldn’t fit on the birth certificate,” he grumbled.) It sounded like the usual story except that this man was married to a Protestant. While his wife was recovering in hospital, he had sneaked to the town hall to name his child. When she found out, she kicked a door down in frustration.

  He showed me a picture of his son at two days old, dressed in the Celtic home shirt, in the arms of his elder brother who was wearing the Celtic away shirt. “Put it this way,” said the father triumphantly, “the boy will never play for Rangers.”

  This man had no problem with Protestants. To him, Celtic versus Rangers was no longer about religion. Nor is it to many other Celtic or Rangers fans: almost half of Glaswegians who marry do so across religious divides. Few go to church any longer. In other words, though Celtic and Rangers fans still shout sectarian slogans at soccer matches, they usually no longer mean them.

  And this is becoming true all over Europe. When I wrote this book, soccer conflicts on the continent still reflected religious or class or regional passions. Just as FC Barcelona used to stand for Catalan nationalism, the Milan-Inter derby match once set the city’s migrant working classes against the local middle classes, while the Dutch in 1992 still carried around a war trauma about Germans. But today, these passions are weaker. Europeans are ceasing to believe in God, class divides have narrowed, and it is hard to be quite so fanatical about your region now that countries like Spain are decentralized democracies and regions like Catalonia could choose independence if they really wanted.

  So when Barcelona fans wave Catalan flags, or Glaswegian fans sing sectarian songs, they are simply using traditional symbols to express a soccer rivalry. For that Glaswegian father, his feelings for Celtic were stronger than any sectarian sentiment he brought to the game. What you hear in European soccer stadiums today is no longer the echo of other passions. Rather, soccer has become a cause in itself.

  When I wrote this book, soccer was still not quite a global game. It didn’t matter in 1992 that I had nowhere near enough money to go around the world to research it. I could safely ignore Asia because Asians barely played soccer. But just then, globalization, especially in the form of cable TV, was starting to spread the game to the last outposts. Between 1993 and 1996, Japan, the U.S., China, and India all acquired national professional soccer leagues. Increasingly, people in these countries began watching soccer. But they weren’t “blood-andsoil” fans, like the Celtic or Barcelona supporters I had seen, who followed the local team of their ethnic group. The globalized fans, people like Amit, often admired the blood-and-soil fans, but they had no local teams of their own. Nor did they particularly need any. Why bother stamping some third-rate outfit out of the Alabama soil when you could support Ajax instead? Many American soccer buffs worry about the lack of interest in Major League Soccer, but someone like Amit has little use for the MLS. Globalized fans tend to want global teams. This is the new “virtual” model of fandom, whereas the MLS with its “real” teams in actual places with appropriate local nicknames (like the Earthquakes) follows the old model.

  The first sign I ever saw of the new globalized fans was the day after France won the World Cup in 1998. On the back page of the British tabloid the Daily Mirror was a photo of Arsenal’s two French midfielders Emmanuel Petit and Patrick Vieira embracing beneath the headline, “Arsenal Win the World Cup.” If you were an Arsenal fan, you could now ignore blood and soil and support France. After all, if the players were globalizing, it made sense for the fans to follow.

  Over coffee in Montgomery’s only café, founded by a refugee from New York, Amit told me about the New Fans he had met around the world. New Fans live in Shanghai or Melbourne or Saitama, Japan, and had often never cared about soccer until they discovered European games on their cable channels. (Amit now regularly watches live Dutch league games on American TV. When I was a soccer-mad kid in the Netherlands in the 1980s, there was never a single live league match on Dutch TV.) Some New Fans support Manchester United without even knowing that Manchester is a town in England. Amit told me New Fans often choose their teams for ostensibly random reasons, like the color of the shir
ts.

  I asked him what had made him fall for the glorious Dutch teams of the 1970s and 1980s.

  “It didn’t have much to do with the soccer,” he said. “I saw the World Cup 1974, and I thought their names were so nice. Van der Kerkhof! In what other country do people have three surnames? And they were twins, too.”

  The motives of New Fans differ depending on where they live. A friend of mine who analyzed the deep divide that runs through Thai society—Liverpool fans versus Manchester United fans—said he thought much of it came down to the desire of people from a developing country to attach themselves to institutions that were indisputably “world-class.”

  Rowan Simons in his book Bamboo Goalposts reports that the Chinese often support multiple teams simultaneously but snub Chinese clubs. So keen are they on English soccer that every big English club now has an unofficial Chinese name. Arsenal translates as “Pander to Multiple Payments,” and Spurs “Crazy Irritation,” while Newcastle becomes “Cow Card Ugly.”

  For many New Fans in Asia, part of the motive is gambling. Declan Hill in his 2008 book The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime, about match fixing in soccer, quotes “a recent study for the journal Foreign Policy [that] estimated the entire Asian gambling industry, both legal and illegal, at $450 billion a year.” An obvious corollary of this is that some New Fans now fix traditional European soccer. In the mostly empty stands at Dutch second-division games, for instance, you can see Asians with mobile phones and earpieces who report every attack and corner-kick to listening ears across the world.

  In the States, being a New Fan is often a mark of being a cosmopolitan. Soccer’s advance in the country is an index of how American daily life is globalizing. The two groups of Americans who are probably keenest on the game—immigrants and their direct descendants on the one hand, and the highly educated on the other—are precisely the most globalized Americans. (Amit belongs to both groups, as does the alleged West Ham fan Barack Obama, son of a U.S. born mother and immigrant father.)