How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (13 page)

“We help them plan. And when it goes o¤, we stay back with a map and mobile phone.” The old hooligans keep a hand in the youngsters’ operation, because they’re loath to give up all the pleasures of battle—and filled with nostalgia for their own youths. They also feel a sense of obligation to the institution that has nurtured
them for so long. “We feel a certain responsibility to the young guys,” Alan told me. “We want them to succeed.

They’re Chelsea. And we have experience that can be helpful to them.”

Like a college alumni association, the semiretired hooligans make a point of sticking together. They stay in touch through a message board, where they discuss the Youth Firm, exchange war stories and opinions about their beloved club. Not surprisingly, for a group that longs for the past, a large number of their posts concern their portrayal in the memoirs published by their fellow hooligans. They’re especially sensitive to the depictions of Chelsea in the books written by gangs from rival clubs. Responding to a memoir by a Hull City hooligan, a fellow with the handle “monkeyhanger” dismisses the bravura of the book’s authors: “[B]unch ov shity arse we took over there town, they stayed in there little pub the silver cod where were they were safe . . . as for the book we’ll say no more. toilet paper springs to mind.”

After reading a West Ham United memoir, one

respondent inveighs, “Pure Fiction! The Only Way They’ll Be Doin Chelsea.”

When the Russian-Jewish oil baron Roman

Abramovich bought Chelsea, I jumped online to gauge reactions on their message board—and to see if Garrison would weigh in. The board makes a point of declaring, “Welcome to the Chelsea Hooligan Message Board, This Board is Not Here for the Purpose of Organizing Violence or Racist Comment.” Needless to say, this warning doesn’t exactly deter the anti-Semitism.

Almost immediately after the Abramovich purchase, a
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

guy named West Ken Ken moaned, “I like the money but the star of david will be flying down the [Stamford]

bridge soon.” The title of his post is, “Not much said about Roman being a yid.” A few scattered comments endorsed West Ken Ken’s sentiments. Considering some of the attacks on Tottenham that come from his mouth, it is somewhat surprising that Garrison should be sensitive to West Ken Ken’s burst of Jew hating. But he is. Garrison appeared on the board and presented West Ken Ken with a stern, pedantic reprimand: “Being a Yeed means you support that shit from [Tottenham].

Totally di¤erent form [
sic
] being a Jew, you know the ones that kick the shit out of Muslims.” It’s a brilliant response. He invokes the idea of
Muskeljudentum,
of the ass-kicking Israeli, to defend his people on a hooligan’s own terms. And the only reply to Garrison that can be mustered is, “Yes, I forgot you are one of the chosen race.”

How much violence does Alan still cause? Alan says he has launched a second career as a soldier of fortune, working for a German company that hires out mercenaries. He mentioned his work in Croatia and Kosovo.

On his last trip to the Balkans, he had told his wife that he was just going to train soldiers, not to fight. “She thought I was too old and out of shape to be doing this anymore.” But when he returned, he and his wife were sitting at home, flipping channels. They came across a documentary on the Kosovo war. The opening scene showed Alan in mid-battle. “She wasn’t too pleased with me that evening.”
Those days of fighting are probably all in the past now. But Alan claims that he hasn’t fully retired from hooliganism. About four times a year, usually after games against Tottenham, he says that he goes out and throws a few punches. I wasn’t sure whether to believe him. The best way to judge, I thought, would be to watch him in his natural habitat. I wanted to see how close he was to the active hooligans.

On game day, I found Alan and his friends at a bar in the second story of a shopping mall not far from Stamford Bridge. Alan drank a Coke and hovered over a table. He introduced me to his best friend Angus, and reminded me of his appearances in his book.

Angus had brought along his twenty-something daughter. The three of them laughed at dirty jokes that Angus received via text message on his cell phone. To the side, there was a table filled with Alan’s other friends. Only Angus’s daughter wore a jersey. “We prefer not to identify ourselves. We like to be able to mix with the crowd,” Alan said.

But, based on their behavior and looks, these characters didn’t appear to be active goons. In fact, they didn’t seem like they had often risen from their couches, let alone recently kneed violent sociopaths in the testicles.

I told Alan that I had spotted fans of Manchester City, that weekend’s opposing club, at a pub down the street. “They were just sitting outside drinking. Are they allowed to do that? Will nobody give them a hard time?” I described the facade of the pub to Alan.

“That’s a Chelsea pub,” he told me.

He turned away and told one of his friends, “Frank
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

says that there were City fans down the street. They were in a Chelsea pub. That’s not right.” His tone was outrage.

His friend looked up from his table at me. He had been collecting cash from friends to rent a van that would travel to Liverpool for next week’s game. “Alan would still have a go. If Tottenham were here, he might even throw a punch.” He rolled his eyes. Besides, even if they weren’t too old to do it, they still wouldn’t be crazy enough to put themselves in that kind of situation, fighting so close to the stadium. That style of battle is a distant memory. Too many police hover outside the pubs.

Alan and I walked across the room to Angus and his daughter. Angus was now a bit drunk and the bar’s bouncer was trying to steer him into a seat, where he wouldn’t stumble into the path of waiters.

Angus began telling a story about traveling to Nottingham Forest, “It was just the two of us and two of them. The police saw us coming up against one

another. And they thought it was funny. They were laughing their fuckin’ asses o¤. They just let us have a go at one another. Of course, this guy here,” he pointed to Alan. “He got to go against the little twat. I took this enormous bloke.” He mimed a man flexing his muscles. “I jumped on ’im and bit his ear o¤.”

He turned to his daughter, doubled over in laughter, and then finished telling his tale.

“Them were the days,” Alan said. And so they went on, rendering each story with manic intensity and scenes of incredible drama.

A few minutes later we began to walk to the game
with the crowd. As we went down an escalator, Alan pulled up his pants leg to reveal a cowboy boot with a steel tip. “Good for giving a kicking.”

As he disembarked, sloppy drunk Angus leaned

over to me and whispered, “But when was the last time they were used for kicking?”
i

H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

the Survival of the Top Hats

I.

When players score goals at Rio’s São Januário stadium, they have visions of the crucifixion. Less than twenty yards behind the goalkeeper’s net, a dark wooden cross bulges forth from the stained glass of a mid-century-modernist chapel, Our Lady of Victories. A few yards to the left, in the sight line of corner kicks, a small garden is filled with pedestals displaying concrete statuettes of the Madonna and other icons. This is how the world expects the game to be played in Brazil, the cradle of soccer civilization: transcendently.

São Januário belongs to the club Vasco da Gama, and the stadium is itself a shrine to Brazilian soccer.

Throughout the club’s storied history, its players have perfectly embodied Rio de Janeiro’s Dionysian temperament—like Romario, the star of the 1994 World Cup.

He compensates for his undisguised distaste for running with his gift for deception. Long ago, every Rio journalist tells me, his coaches stopped pleading with him to leave the beach, to come away from his bar, and join the squad on the training ground.

In 2002, Romario ditched Vasco for a cross-town rival. Since his departure, the most iconic figure at São Januário is no longer a player. You can see his visage just above Our Lady of Victories, on a large billboard that hangs from a tower adjoining the field. It’s the unsmiling face of a balding, gray-haired, multichinned man with sizeable gold-rimmed glasses. His name is Eurico Miranda, a federal congressman and the president of Vasco da Gama. The billboard trumpets him as a “symbol of resistance.” When I visit São Januário, the symbol is everywhere. Signs for his reelection—“a voice against the powerful”— ring the outside of the stadium. Across the street from São Januário’s main gate, a Ford Escort with a loudspeaker mounted on its roof plays a samba tune that proclaims, “Eurico is the candidate of the poor people.” Entering the stadium, an unavoidable banner in midfield exclaims, “Passion for Vasco, Devotion to Eurico.”

Americans call their sporting teams “franchises.”

Brazilians would never tolerate that use of the term. It has too many commercial associations with chains of McDonald’s and dry cleaners. Instead, Brazilians call their teams “clubs,” because most are actually clubs.

They have swimming pools, restaurants, tennis courts, palm-covered gardens, and dues-paying members—

places for the middle class to spend a Saturday afternoon. Even though the clubs pay their players, they have retained their status as nonprofit amateur enter-
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

prises. This means that their finances are not subjected to public scrutiny; their executives have no legal accountability. In short, their management ranks make the perfect refuge for scoundrels. These scoundrels have grown so integral to the Brazilian game that everyone calls them by their nickname, the
cartolas,
the top hats. As part of the amateur structure of the game, the
cartolas
usually receive no salary. They supposedly toil for their gentlemanly love of their club. In practice, however, the
cartolas
reward their volunteer e¤orts with dips into the team treasury. João Havelange, the leg-endary ex-president of the Brazilian Soccer Confederation (CBF) and former boss of international soccer’s governing body (FIFA), once remarked, “I take no salary, just enough expenses to get by on.”

When Eurico Miranda joined Vasco’s management

in 1975, in his early thirties, he’d been a man of limited means. The son of a Portuguese baker, he’d worked as a salesman at a Rio Volkswagen dealership. But with his charisma, he quickly politicked his way up the Vasco hierarchy. It changed his life. He acquired ocean-side houses in Rio and a yacht. This is not a tale of wealth earned with up-by-the-bootstraps industry. By now, the Brazilian press and a congressional investigation have documented Miranda’s o¤enses. In 1998, Vasco received $34 million in cash from NationsBank (now Bank of America), eager to establish a name for itself in the vast Brazilian market by sponsoring a popular sporting brand. When the bank signed the deal, it announced that the cash would last the club for 100

years. Within two, however, this supply had more or less vanished. Approximately $124,000 worth had gone
to buy T-shirts and propaganda for Eurico Miranda’s last election campaign. Twelve million went to four accounts of a Bahamas company called Liberal Banking Corporation Limited. As it turned out, the company was very liberal. Any legal representative of Vasco could withdraw the money. According to a report published by the Brazilian senate, the withdrawn money ended up as payments to Miranda’s car dealer, business investments, credit card company, brother, and Internet provider. “It is clear,” the senate concluded, “Mr. Miranda has diverted to his accounts money that belonged to Vasco.”

Miranda hadn’t covered his trail very carefully. He didn’t need to. As long as he held on to his congressional seat, parliamentary immunity protected him from prosecution. With the support of Vasco’s many voting fans, he looked like he could hang on forever.

But because Miranda squandered the Bank of America investment, Vasco has slid into debt and mediocrity.

In 1998, it won the Latin American championship, the Copa Libertadores. Three years later, the club owed its star player Romario $6.6 million in back wages. Worse than that, to keep enough players on the pitch, Romario reportedly had to dig into his own accounts to cover the weekly paychecks of his teammates. Desperate for extra cash, Vasco packed fans into São Januário for big games.

In the last game of 2000, Vasco management crammed in more than 12,000 over the maximum seating capacity. After a brawl ignited in the stands, fans began fleeing and then falling on one another. They cascaded toward the pitch, their downward flow stanched only by a rusty fence. When the fence collapsed, the crowd came tumbling down onto the field. There were 168 casual-
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

ties. Any decent person would have canceled the match as soon as the injured bodies began stacking on the pitch and helicopters hauled them away. Miranda insisted that the game go on.

II.

Based on the stylishness of Brazil’s 2002 World Cup triumph—Edmilson springing backwards, catapult-like, into a poster-quality bicycle kick; Ronaldo scoring in-stride with a poke of the toe—you’d have no conception of the crisis in the national passion. But Brazilian soccer couldn’t be in a sorrier state—no more corrupt, no more discouraging to fans, no more unappealing to investors.

Only a handful of clubs operate in the vicinity of the black. In 2002, Flamengo of Rio de Janeiro, easily the most popular club in the nation, owed creditors over $100 million, an incomprehensible sum in the stunted Brazilian economy. You can see the signs of decay everywhere. Attending games in some of the country’s most storied stadiums, buying their most expensive tickets, I found myself worrying about splinters and rusty nails protruding from the rotting wooden seats.

Usually, such woeful conditions are attributable to poverty. The Brazilian game, however, has hardly starved for capital. In fact, there was an international, well-monied venture to raise the Brazilian game to a Western European standard of quality. In 1999, a Dallas-based investment fund called Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst sank millions into the São Paulo club Corinthians and into the Belo Horizonte club Cruzeiro. ISL, a Swiss
sports marketing firm, acquired a share of Flamengo. A few years earlier, the Italian food giant Parmalat began running Palmeiras of São Paulo. These investors came implicitly promising to wipe away the practices of corrupt
cartolas
and replace them with the ethic of professionalism, the science of modern marketing, and a concern for the balance sheet. “Capitalism is winning out against the feudal attitudes that have prevailed in the sport for too long,” Brazil’s venerable soccer journalist Juca Kfouri crowed at the height of the foreign influx. Newspapers carried their predictions that soccer would generate four percent of Brazil’s gross domestic product within years.