Soccer Against the Enemy Read online

  Visiting Toronto in December 2009, I discovered a highly educated immigrant city that has quietly gone soccer-mad. That month, the website of Canada’s Globe & Mail newspaper crashed due to excess traffic for the first time in its history: during the draw for the World Cup 2010. I was in town to attend a conference on global soccer at York University—the sort of event that didn’t exist anywhere, and certainly not in Canada, when I first wrote this book—and while there I heard that New Fans are popping up even in the traditional soccer territory of Africa.

  This was revealed in a talk by a charming Nigerian academic named Muhammed Musa. He is himself a product of globalization—he lectures in mass communications at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand but during the African Nations Cup of 2008 he had returned to Nigeria and discovered that his fellow countrymen were turning off African soccer.

  In recent years soccer “show houses” had opened all over Nigeria, Musa told us. Often the show houses are simple sheds, where people pay entrance fees to watch English games as humble as Fulham versus Bolton on TV. “These places are jam-packed every weekend,” Musa said.

  He had visited show houses during the Nations Cup to observe the crowds, he said, “but to my surprise there were not many people there.” Even when Nigeria played, few Nigerians turned up to watch. The proprietors of the show houses told Musa the Nations Cup was ruining their finances. “People are not interested in this thing,” the owners complained. “We can’t wait for this to end so the Premier League can resume.”

  Musa polled customers in show houses and found that 90 percent owned European club souvenir replica shirts, for instance, but not Nigerian ones. But he was particularly struck by what had happened to national TV news. The program had begun at 9 P.M. since time immemorial, and had helped build the nation by gathering all of Nigeria together in front of TV sets. These days, though, the news sometimes moves from its traditional starting time if it clashes with a game between two of England’s Big Four clubs. “Now this national we-ness is built around Liverpool versus Chelsea,” Musa marveled.

  Afterward, some of the other conference-goers compared African experiences, and concluded that the desertion of African soccer for the English variety was happening in much of the continent. In Cameroon fans gathered to watch the Premier League in cheap restaurants known as “chicken parlors,” and in Uganda in cinemas. Some countries had followed the English game for decades. In Zimbabwe in 1999, for instance, I saw street vendors selling ancient copies of the British soccer magazine Shoot, and stood crammed among white and black yuppies in a sports bar in Harare watching Manchester United. (What has happened to those people since?)

  But African interest in English soccer had grown with cable TV and the Internet. A week after seeing Amit in Alabama, I went back to my country of birth, Uganda, for the first time since I was a baby and felt surrounded by the symbols of English soccer as I never had in England. Many of Uganda’s shared matatu taxis were painted in the colors of big English clubs. “You’ll Never Walk Alone: Liverpool Football Club,” is a typical decoration. Men went around their daily business in pirated English club shirts. One day, walking down a dirt path in a village, I stopped the umpteenth Ugandan wearing a fake Arsenal shirt, and asked, “Can you tell me why Ugandans love Arsenal?”

  He said, “I myself support Manchester United.”

  “But you’re wearing an Arsenal shirt,” I pointed out.

  “That’s just to wear,” he explained.

  It could be that this New Fan will one day have an American bomb dropped on his head, but at least he and the pilot will have something in common.

  You might dismiss all this as just anecdotal: of course Ugandans and Chinese and Alabamans support English soccer. It’s better than their own domestic leagues. But Musa believes that this support reveals something about changing allegiances outside soccer: people are deserting national symbols and attaching themselves to transnational ones. The Ugandan who supports Manchester United, like the Yemeni who attaches himself to Al-Qaeda, or the German who feels more European than anything else, are all to some degree post-national people. Musa measures these allegiances partly in violence. During some big European games, he notes, tensions in Nigerian cities can boil over. His parents told him not to park his car in a certain place on the day of Real Madrid games, because Real fans in Nigeria were known for their rowdiness. Nine deaths were recorded in one Nigerian town alone when Chelsea and Manchester United met in the Champions League final in 2008. And after Barcelona beat Manchester United in the final of 2009, an angry United fan in the town of Ogbo killed four people when he drove his minibus into a crowd of Barça supporters. Musa told the conference, “We have not seen people supporting their national team with their blood, but we are seeing people support corporate teams with their lives. The importance of the nation is diminishing, and what is replacing it is allegiance to a corporate club.”

  This may sound like an overstatement, but then in much of Africa the nation became an important concept only during the twentieth century. In many African countries, the most successful national institution is the national soccer team. When people stop caring about that, then less nation remains. And some version of that principle probably applies to New Fans in Japan, the U.S., Australia, and elsewhere. When people are developing their allegiances on cable TV rather than in their hometown stadium, they become emotionally more global and less local.

  There’s been a lot of talk in this first decade of the twenty-first century about the economics of globalization, but much less about the globalization of the heart. It’s often said that the nation-state loses significance in the age of cyberspace and global trade. Well, if that’s the case, then you would expect nationalism to diminish too. We’re already seeing signs of that at what used to be the world’s great festival of nationalism, the World Cup. For Brazil’s first game of the 2006 World Cup, against Croatia in Berlin, the stadium filled with tens of thousands of people wearing Brazil’s yellow shirts, only a small minority of whom were actual Brazilians. The others were Brazilians of the heart, globalized fans from all over who saw no reason why they should support their own “national” team. And in January 2010, Danny Jordaan, chief organizer of the South African World Cup, reported mournfully that his fellow countrymen had bought more tickets to see England’s games than South Africa’s. “South Africa has more supporters of England than Bafana—the sales for England matches here are higher,” Jordaan admitted. “It will be tragic if this trend continues, and I appeal to local fans to come out and support their country.”

  Blood and soil are losing out to satellite TV, and nationalism to globalization. If I was twenty-two again today and willing to sleep on trains, I’d still want to set off around the world (though not with a typewriter) to write a book like Soccer Against the Enemy, because I still think soccer works as a key to the world. However, it would be a different book: less about tribes and enemies, more about the quintessentially twenty-first-century experience of falling in love over the Internet.

  CHAPTER 1

  CHASING SOCCER AROUND THE WORLD

  NO ONE KNOWS HOW many soccer fans there are. World Cup USA 1994, Inc., put out a booklet claiming that the TV audience for the Italian World Cup was 25.6 billion (five times the world’s population), and that 31 billion are expected to watch the American World Cup.

  These figures may be meaningless. For any recent World Cup final, you can find viewing figures that disagree by billions, and the same booklet claims that Striker, the World Cup’s canine mascot, will have been seen one trillion times by the end of 1994. One trillion precisely? Are they sure?

  But for certain, as the booklet states, “soccer is the most popular sport in the world.” They say in Naples that when a man has money, he first buys himself something to eat, then goes to the soccer match, and then sees if he has anything left to find a place to live. The Brazilians say that even the smallest village has a church and a soccer field—“well, not always a church, but certa
inly a soccer field.” More people in the world go to church than to soccer matches, but otherwise there is no public pursuit to match the game. This book is about its place in the world.

  When a game matters to billions of people it ceases to be just a game. Soccer is never just soccer: it helps make wars and revolutions, and it fascinates mafias and dictators. I began writing this book with vague thoughts about how this works. I knew that when Celtic play the Rangers in Glasgow, Ulster grows tenser, and that over half the Dutch population took to the streets to celebrate when Holland beat Germany in 1988. I had read that the Brazilian team gave the military government a few more years in power by winning the 1970 World Cup (this turned out to be nonsense), and that the Nigerian-Biafran war ceased for a day to allow Pelé, then visiting the country, to play a match. We have all heard of the Soccer War between El Salvador and Honduras.

  My first question, then, was how soccer affects the life of a country. My second was how the life of a country affects its soccer. What, in other words, makes Brazil play like Brazil, England like England, Holland like Holland? Michel Platini told L’Equipe, “A soccer team represents a way of being, a culture.” Is that so?

  I began this book as an outsider to the world of professional soccer. I had lived and played and watched the game in Holland, England, Germany and the USA, and had written about it in magazines, but I had never sat in a press box or spoken to a professional soccer player. For this book, I traveled around the world watching games and talking to soccer managers, politicians, mafiosi, journalists, and other fans, sometimes even to the odd player. The big names scared me. Interviewing Roger Milla, for instance, I could barely look up from my list of prepared questions. Slowly I grew less starstruck and now, ten months on from the Maracaña, sitting at home in London, I almost miss the soccer life.

  I traveled for nine months, visiting 22 countries, from Ukraine to Cameroon to Argentina to Scotland. It was a disorientating time. There are now several languages in which I can more or less say, “I am an English journalist,” but in Lithuanian and Estonian I never progressed as far as that. I relied a lot on friends, and on interpreters when I could afford them.

  Then there was the moving about. Once, I flew home from Los Angeles, spent 48 hours in London, flew to Buenos Aires, from there to Rio, returned to London a month later, spent another 48 hours there, flew to Dublin, took a bus up to Ulster, and then the ferry to Glasgow. I arrived in Scotland a week after flying out of Rio, and five days later I was home again. My small budget—£5,000 for the whole year—made the trip even more complex than the itinerary suggests.

  Traveling the world, missing the English winter, and watching soccer was sometimes bearable, but I never lived in luxury. All right: I did in the old USSR, where anyone with Western money is a millionaire who can take taxis, but as soon as I returned to the West I was back in youth hostels. Not that I minded, of course, but I worried what people in soccer would think. Soccer directors, managers, and players are rich, and they respect wealth in others. They were always asking me which hotel I was staying in, and wondering whether my jacket was ripped across the seam because I liked it that way. Josef Chovanec of Sparta Prague asked me for £300 for an interview. They all have expensive hairstyles—which is why they need to earn so much money—and hanging around them, I tended to feel unclean.

  But wherever I went I was told, “Soccer and politics! You’ve come to the right place here.” Soccer turned out to matter rather more than I had thought. I found a soccer club that exports nuclear materials and gold, and another that is setting up its own university. Mussolini and Franco understood the game’s significance, and so do Silvio Berlusconi, Nelson Mandela, and President Paul Biya of Cameroon. Because of soccer, Nikolai Starostin was sent to the Soviet gulags, but it was soccer that saved his life there. He was amazed, he writes, that these “camp bosses, arbiters of the life and death of thousands upon thousands of human beings . . . were so benevolent to anything concerning soccer. Their unbridled power over human lives was nothing compared to the power of soccer over them.” Enough has been written about soccer hooligans. Other fans are much more dangerous.

  CHAPTER 2

  SOCCER IS WAR

  THINGS MAY CHANGE WHEN Serbia first plays Croatia, but for the moment the greatest grudge match in European soccer is Holland vs. Germany.

  It all began in Hamburg, on a summer night in 1988, when the Dutch beat the Germans 2-1 in the semifinal of the European Championships. Back in Holland, the staid nation surprised itself: nine million Dutchmen, over 60 percent of the population, came out onto the streets to celebrate. Though a Tuesday night, it was the largest public gathering since the Liberation. “It feels as though we’ve won the war at last,” a former Resistance fighter said on TV.

  Ger Blok, a 58-year-old Dutchman, heard the news in Tegucicalpa, where he was managing the Honduran national team. He responded by running through the streets carrying a Dutch flag. “Hysterical, intensely happy,” he said. “The next day I was ashamed of my laughable behavior.”

  In the Leidseplein square, Amsterdammers threw bicycles (their own?) into the air and shouted, “Hurray, we’ve got our bikes back!” The Germans, in the biggest bicycle theft in history, had confiscated all Dutch bicycles during the Occupation.

  “When Holland scores I dance through the room,” said Professor Dr L. de Jong, a small gray man who has spent the last 45 years writing the official history of the Netherlands in World War II in umpteen volumes. “I’m crazy about soccer,” he revealed. “And what these boys have done! Of course it’s got to do with the war. Strange that people deny that.”

  Willem van Hanegem, who had played for Holland against Germany in the World Cup final of 1974, told the magazine Vrij Nederland : “In general I can’t say that Germans are my best friends. Beckenbauer was OK. He seemed arrogant, but that was just because of his style of play. Everything was easy for him.” “What’s wrong with them?” asked the journalist. “Well, they’ve got the wrong ancestors, of course,” answered Van Hanegem. The Dutch word fout, meaning “wrong,” also has the specific meaning of “wrong in the war.” “That’s not their fault,” said the journalist, who was playing the devil’s advocate. “Maybe not,” Van Hanegem replied, “but the fact remains.” He had lost his father and two brothers to a wartime bomb, while Vrij Nederland, which means “Free Holland,” had started life as an underground newspaper in World War II. “A shame the Japs don’t play soccer,” it lamented, largely in jest.

  It turned out that Hamburg had purged frustrations all over the world. At the press conference after the match, 150 foreign journalists gave the Dutch manager Michels a standing ovation. A reporter for the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf (wrong in the war) wrote that an Israeli journalist in the press box had told him he was supporting Holland, and had added, “You understand why.”

  Professional soccer players are always polite about their opponents, because they know that they will run into them again somewhere. But the Dutch were not polite about the Germans. Ronald Koeman was furious that they had offered no congratulations after the match. He said that Olaf Thon, with whom he had swapped shirts, was the only nice guy among them. Rinus Michels, the Dutch manager and the man who coined the phrase “Soccer is war,” admitted to “an extra feeling of satisfaction for reasons which I don’t want to sum up now.” Coming out of the tunnel for the second half to jeers from the German crowd, he had raised a dignified middle finger. Arnold Mühren said that beating Germany meant the same as Ireland beating England, but that was weak indeed.

  A few months later, a Dutch book of poetry appeared under the title, Holland-Germany Soccer Poetry. Some of the poems are by professional poets, and others by professional soccer players.

  the Germans wanted to be world champions

  Ever since I can remember

  and before that

  the Germans wanted to be world champions

  wrote A.J. Heerma van Voss. The Rotterdam poet Jules Deelder, in a work called 21-6-88, fini
shed with these lines on Van Basten’s goal:Rose cheering from their graves.

  Those who fell

  Rose cheering from their graves.

  Hans Boskamp wrote:And then there was that unbelievably beautiful

  Dumb generalizations about a people

  Or a nation, I despise.

  A sense of proportion is very

  Dear to me.

  Sweet revenge, I thought, does not exist

  Or lasts only briefly

  And then there was that unbelievably beautiful

  Tuesday evening in Hamburg.

  The poems by players are mixed in quality. The worst are by Arnold Mühren, Johan Neeskens, and Wim Suurbier. Jan Wouters’ effort is the most sophisticated: blank verse with enjambements in clichéfree language. Ruud Gullit’s poem, two lines long and untranslatable, is the best by any player, and one of the best in the whole collection. Johnny Rep’s poem ends with:That new shirt is only really worth

  P.S.

  That new shirt is only really worth

  Wiping your bum with.

  The poet is referring to Holland’s foul, tiger-striped shirts, but also to the admission Ronald Koeman made after the match: that he had used the German shirt given him by his friend Thon as toilet paper. Almost all the poems make reference to the war.

  It is tempting to think that Van Basten (who refuses to speak German in interviews) unleashed the hidden traumas of 43 postwar years by scoring in Hamburg, but he did not. The war has less to do than one might think with European soccer’s greatest rivalry. Before Hamburg, few Dutchmen felt strongly about Germans.