How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (11 page)

They set a new standard for their naughtiness during a 1963 match against a club from the industrial north called Burnley. A few hundred Burnley fans sat in
the North Stand of Stamford Bridge, opposite the Shed.

Alan and his friends fumed over this presence of so many outsiders. They decided that they would pay a surprise visit to the North Stand and teach Burnley a lesson about the etiquette of visiting Chelsea. Because Alan wasn’t even sixteen—and many of his mates were even younger—their attack was easily repelled by a bunch of thirty-year-old men, whose jobs in mechanic shops and factory floors had bequeathed them imposing biceps. “It was a right kicking,” Alan recalled to me many years later. Within minutes after he launched the attack, Alan was sent tumbling down several flights of terraces. The young men needed many pints of lager to make the pain go away.

But even the alcohol couldn’t erase the humiliation.

From that evening in the pub, Alan and his mates began planning a visit to Burnley the next season.

Stealth tactics would guide them. They would melt into the Burnley crowd, and only then mount their attack. It worked masterfully. Nobody can be sure how many men of Burnley were sent to the hospital that day. But enough fell that the newspapers took notice. The English press wrote about a menace it called football hooliganism.

II.

When I first met Alan in a pub, he looked like a man who spends a significant amount of time straddling a Harley Davidson. He wore a black satin Oakland Raiders jacket. His hair was short on the sides and
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

thick on the top, a half-mullet. A Wiccan amulet—an inverted pentacle—dangled from his neck on a piece of string. Upon seeing his middle-aged physique, I thought, if worst comes to worst, at least I’ll be able to outrun him.

Alan had arrived for our interview twenty minutes late and greeted me brusquely. “All right,” he said, shaking my hand, failing to acknowledge his tardiness.

I guided him to a table in the corner.

“Let me get you a drink,” I o¤ered.

“A Coke. I don’t drink,” he replied. “I learned the hard way that it disadvantages you in a fight.”

Very quickly in our conversation, he ostentatiously advertised his bona fides. “The police have nicked me twenty-one times. . . . I’m addicted to violence. . . . I’ve tried to stop, but I can’t.” He showed me battle scars, a bump on his wrist from a shattered bone that healed funny; an arm that folds around in a direction that would defy a healthy network of joints and tendons. But in making this presentation, he began to undermine the image he intended. Alan is a compulsive talker, with endless opinions on an endless number of subjects. My pen struggled to match the pace of his pontifications on the deficiencies of authoritarian governments, the morality of the Anglo-American war against Iraq, the genius of Alexander the Great, and the earnest temperament of Californians.

This profusion only came to a stop when he arrived at the subject of his beloved club, Chelsea. “This is a good place for you to visit,” he said, motioning toward the bar, “because of its symbolism.” The bar takes its name from the old, notorious Shed that once housed
the Chelsea toughs. In fact, the bar stands on that very spot. Only now the Shed can be entered from the lobby of a plush hotel—part of a massive upmarket development on the stadium grounds. Around the corner from the pub, it is possible to order lobster at the King’s Brasserie. Inside the Shed, professionals in suits laugh over pints. A plasma TV flashes an advertisement for massages and other treatments at the Chelsea Club and Spa on the other side of the stadium.

More than any club in the world, Chelsea has been transformed by globalization and gentrification. It went from the club most closely identified with hooliganism in the eighties to the club most identified with cosmopolitanism in the nineties. The real estate development of Stamford Bridge was only a piece of this.

Gentrification could be seen on the pitch, too. Chelsea hired a string of Italian and Dutch eminences to coach the team and leave their flashy foreign imprints. Under their stewardship, Chelsea earned the distinction of becoming the first club in England to field a squad that contained not a single Englishman. Their new panache exacerbated the trend toward the cosmopolitan, attract-ing a boatload of foreign investment. The Middle Eastern airline Air Emirates began advertising on its jersey.

In 2003, the second richest man in Russia, a Jewish oil magnate called Roman Abramovich, bought a majority stake in the club and began to spend his fortune constructing a championship-caliber team.

To many, Alan included, these improvements felt like a nasty swipe at the club’s working-class base, as if the team had dropped its most loyal fans for the ephemeral aªliations of the trend-conscious e¤ete. Of
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

the many changes, there was a single moment that hurt most. In 1983, Chelsea’s chairman Ken Bates proposed encasing fans in a 12-volt electrical fence that would shock them if they ever attempted to escape their pen.

“They would have treated us as badly as animals,” Alan says. Only intervention by the local government prevented this plan from going into action. But the public-relations damage had been done.

Until the 1990s, much of England’s social elite treated the game with snobbish disdain. Before Rupert Murdoch tried to acquire Manchester United, his paper the
Sunday Times
famously branded soccer “a slum sport played by slum people.” Britain’s prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the leading proponent of middle-class values soi-disant, exhibited this haughtiness as much as anyone. The Iron Lady’s good friend Kenneth Clark said that she “regarded football supporters as the enemy within.” For much of her tenure, she spoke aloud of her desire to declare war on hooliganism. And in 1989, her government had the ideal pretext for taking action. At the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheªeld, ninety-five fans watching Liverpool play Nottingham Forest were asphyxiated against the fences in the over-crowded terraces that held them. In response to this carnage, a government commission demanded that stadiums turn their standing-only terraces into proper seats, like the ones you might find at a theater. Policing at stadiums would finally become a serious business, with video cameras documenting every fight and song.

The new requirements transformed the game’s economics. To finance the reconstruction of their stadiums, the old owners, mostly small self-made businessmen,
imported loads of new capital. Much of it came from slick city investors, who understood that soccer held a giant captive market and massive untapped profit centers. The new stands included plush executive suites that they leased to corporations. They floated shares of their clubs on the stock exchange, raised ticket prices, and sold the league’s television rights to Rupert Murdoch’s satellite service. Their plan worked to perfection.

A new, wealthier fan began attending games in the safer, more comfortable stadiums. For the first time, women were plentiful in the stands.

But these changes came at a cost. The new clientele eroded the old, boisterous working-class ambience. As Alan explained this transformation, he invoked a time when “ten thousand would come to the stadium. Six thousand of them would be up for a fight. The rest came to watch a fight. Yeah, they’d say they were disgusted. But you’d ask them in the pub afterwards, ‘Did you watch the fight or the football?’ ” He leans back and imitates a prig’s voice, “ ‘Oh, the fight, of course.’ ” He laughs at his own observation. “Now, people just want to go to the game so that they can say”— he reverts to the prig persona —“ ‘Look, I’m cool. I go to Chelsea.’

When I get up to sing, they say, ‘Sit down.’ ”

Unwittingly, Alan boiled down the essential cultural argument against globalization made by
No Logo
author Naomi Klein, the McDonald’s-smashing French farmer José Bove, and countless others: multinational capitalism strips local institutions of their localness, it homogenizes, destroys traditions, and deprives indigenous proletariats and peasants of the things they love most.

It’s easy to understand how this argument would apply
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

to English soccer in general and Chelsea in particular.

When I attended a game at the Stamford Bridge, I went with an American investment banker and his Latin American girlfriend. We sat in part of the stadium that Alan Garrison had once ruled with his band of rowdies.

But in comparison to the taunting songsters of Glasgow, Chelsea looked like the audience at a symphony, with only a few beefy guys muttering incendiary obscenities under their breaths. They studiously kept their vulgarities to themselves, so that police scanning the crowd with handheld cameras would see nothing and have no basis for depriving them of their tickets.

(Alan has lost his three times.)

But it’s possible to overstate the change and the case against change. For starters, the game hasn’t gone completely yuppie. Sure, ticket prices may be high at Chelsea—about $50 for a seat—but they’re not prohib-itively expensive. Even in posh West London, perhaps the most yuppie stretch in the whole of Britain, Chelsea still manages to draw a largely working-class crowd.

The main di¤erence is that it’s an integrated crowd, labor and management, street cleaner and advertising executive together. In the course of English history, this may be an earth-shattering development.

In response to the rise of corporate power, there’s a natural inclination to believe that self-interest hadn’t always ruled the market. Soccer writers in England often portray the old club owners as far more

beneficent, public-minded citizens doing good for their old working-class friends. But this is nostalgia for a social market that never existed. Before the nineties, there was so little money in the game that owners let
their stadiums decay into reprehensible safety traps. In e¤ect, owners treated their fans as if their lives were expendable. Their negligence resulted in a complete breakdown, the broken-windows theory of social decay in microcosm. Fans began to think of life as expendable, too. They would beat the crap out of one another each weekend. To be sorrowful about the disappearance of this old culture requires grossly sentimentalizing the traditions and atmosphere that have passed. Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous, even when they deserve to be left in the past. So, in a way, a hooligan’s nostalgia for his youth is the most honest kind of nostalgia.

III.

Before I met Alan Garrison, I had dipped into his writings. Surfing Chelsea Web sites, I had stumbled upon a page maintained by Alan plugging excerpts from
We’re
the North Stand,
an unpublished novelized memoir of his early days as a hooligan. It is a picaresque work about a circle of friends who travel England and Europe picking fights. In the manuscript, he refers to himself as Alan Merrill—a nom de plume which separates him further from his nom de guerre which separates him from any self-incriminating admissions.

Garrison writes with surprising clarity and panache.

But as a novelist, he has a few shortcomings. The Merrill character has an unbelievable streak of heroic self-sacrificing interventions that remove innocent
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

bystanders from harm. He wins fights like a superhero disposing of common criminals. (“One [hooligan]

throws a desperate punch back towards Merrill, who ducks it easily before grabbing hold of the extended wrist. He then quickly pulls the youth around, using himself as the pivot-point, sending the helpless body crashing into the gate’s upright.”) Still, in many ways, it’s an astonishing bit of self-sociology. Garrison doesn’t try to elevate his friends into rebels pursuing a higher cause or monsters acting out the pathologies of poverty.

They are simply average guys stuck in a world of violence from which they don’t have any particular desire to escape.

Garrison is the thinking man’s hooligan, a careful reader of military history and newspapers and a devoted Hellenist, who spends his free time poring over works on Alexander the Great. He doesn’t admit it, but it must have irked him that he hadn’t thought of writing a memoir earlier. By the time he put pen to paper, three of his friends had already sent o¤ manuscripts to publishers. Steve “Hickey” Hickmont, who assumed Alan’s place in the Chelsea hierarchy during his prison years, had published
Armed for the Match.

His buddy Chris “Chubby” Henderson wrote another memoir. Yet another comrade called Martin King hit the shelves with
Hoolifan,
a di¤erent perspective on the same tale. Convinced that he had his own crackling version to tell, Garrison sent his manuscript to his friends’

publishers. Where his friends had worked with co-authors, Garrison wrote his by himself. Perhaps he hoped that the authenticity of his unadulterated voice would provide his competitive advantage. It didn’t. He
received polite rejections—the only way really to reject a hooligan. “They told me that the book was too violent and right-wing.”

If they were honest, however, the publishers would have given him another explanation. The market simply couldn’t sustain another memoir about hooliganism—or at least it shouldn’t. Aside from the Chelsea books, hooligans from West Ham’s Inter City Firm, Cardi¤ City’s Soul Crew, Portsmouth’s 657 Crew, and virtually every other major and minor club have produced their own tediously repetitious memoirs, with such titles as
Want Some Aggro?
and
City Psychos.
These days, the sports section at corner London bookshops largely consists of this hooligan lit. The genre goes far beyond these first-person tales. Two brothers called Dougie and Eddy Brimson, whose dust jacket shows them with appropriately shaved heads and comically attempting menacing gazes, have made a franchise of publishing pop anthropological studies of soccer violence. Their books quote heavily from hooligans and have names like
Eurotrashed
and
Capital Punishment:
London’s Violent Football Following.
A novelist called John King has added a shelf full of hooligan fiction, mostly about Chelsea. Another shelf includes books on hooligan fashion and the underground hooligan economy, as well as tomes by academics hoping to cash in on their sexy specialization.