How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (18 page)

Even the racism of players can’t compare to the leagues in England and Italy. In the Karpaty locker room, the
Ukrainians never have overtly racial confrontations with the Nigerians.

The di¤erence is this: Lviv has 830,000 residents and only fifty Africans. Except for Edward and Samson, most of them study at Lviv’s universities and will leave the Ukraine in a few years. There are simply not enough to generate friction or a political backlash or ideology. No fringe groups like the British National Party or politicians like France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen stoke and politicize the hatred. Ukrainian feelings are too primitive to even warrant the suªx “ism.” They feel something closer to a naïf’s dislike of the unfamiliar, like an eight-year-old refusing to try dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant.

Trailing Edward through Lviv, this reaction becomes plain. Sitting with him at McDonald’s, I looked up and noticed a little blond girl with a yellow duck on her red shirt, staring slack-jawed at Edward. When she pointed out Edward to her brother, he entered the very same state of shock. They covered their mouths to contain their laughter. Their mother tried to turn them away, embarrassed by the rudeness. But she kept casting looks at Edward, too. When I pointed them out to Edward, he told me that they probably hadn’t seen a black man outside of the television set in their living room. “No problem.”

There’s another reason for the hostility toward the Nigerians at Karpaty. It has to do with the politics of postcommunism. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukrainians began the project of cultural and national regeneration. You could see the push in their two most beloved institutions, their language and church. The
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

remaining Jews and Russians of Lviv who didn’t speak Ukrainian were bullied and shamed into switching vernaculars. Across the city, old Ukrainian churches were reclaimed from Soviet ruin. The postcommunist government restored the Museum of Atheism to its

baroque greatness. Crosses went back into these buildings. In fact, crosses began appearing everywhere, on hilltops and in the squares. Celebrations of Easter, once prohibited, became cause for grand investment in traditional costumes and meals.

When Edward arrived, the national ego was particularly fragile. Ten years into postcommunism the joys of freedom had begun to feel commonplace; the project of Ukrainian regeneration seemed stalled. To many Ukrainians, their country still felt like a colony of Russia. Those who spoke of an alternative to this condition didn’t have a much more appealing solution. They proposed that the Ukraine become (more or less) a client state of the European Union and the United States.

This despair played out in soccer, too. Ukrainians imagined that they once were a great soccer nation.

Now they needed to import Nigerians to become great again. This fact couldn’t be read any other way: It was a humiliation. It was short-term thinking of the worst kind. If the oligarchs wanted the Ukraine to become a great soccer nation again, why not invest the money spent on Edward into the development of young

Ukrainian talent? Yuri, the captain, told me, “For the price of Edward we could have created ten Ukrainian players.”
V.

Edward doesn’t like to admit that he has enemies or problems. In part, he is an a¤able guy. At practice, only Edward entertained the neighborhood kids hanging around their heroes. He recruited one to assist in his practice of headers. When he finished, he walked over to muss his little helper’s hair. But Edward also tries to bite his tongue, so that he doesn’t earn any ill will that could ultimately interfere with his dream of playing in Western Europe. I first became aware of his whitewash-ing on a visit to his apartment. He showed me photos that he’d just developed. A few of the snapshots documented team training sessions in February. I asked him if it was hard to play in the Ukrainian winter. “No problem. It’s not so bad,” he said.

His answer flew in the face of everything I’d heard about Ukrainian winters—precisely what you’d expect of the Carpathian foothills. Conditions become so arctic that the league takes nearly four months o¤ in the middle of the season. It is simply too cruel to play every week. When the club returned from its last winter break, an army unit spent seven days breaking through fifteen-centimeter-thick ice that crusted the stadium.

The restart of the season in early March, however, hardly coincides with the spring thaw. Last year, Karpaty played a game with the thermometer stuck at minus 30 degrees centigrade, and even this reading doesn’t actually represent a significant deviation from the norm.

In Edward’s photos, the club trains on a snow-

covered surface. Sand demarcates the sidelines. Even
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

the ruddy Ukrainians line up in wool hats, long pants, and heavy parkas. Many Nigerians playing in the Ukraine complain bitterly about their inability to maneuver in these temperatures. They say that their frozen feet feel like sledgehammers, while their style of play demands a chisel’s delicacy. Ukrainian sportswriters have pointed out that the Nigerians tend to score all their goals in the early autumn and late spring. Looking at Edward in the photo, with his arms pulled close to his trunk, it becomes perfectly evident that the Ukrainian winter is very much a problem for him, too.

Weather may be the biggest shock for Nigerians.

But it isn’t the only one. Ukrainian soccer culture clashes violently with the style of play to which Nigerians are accustomed. More than almost any other country in the world, the Ukrainians have an idiosyncratic approach to the game. The man behind the approach was a coach, trained as a plumber, called Valeri Lobanovsky. Applying the logic of scientific Marxism to the game, he believed that soccer could be mastered by uncovering the game’s mathematical underpinnings.

He created a system of numerical values to signify every “action” in a game. As he envisioned it, a group of “scientists” would tally passes, tackles, and shots.

These scientists would note “successful actions” and

“unsuccessful actions.” Their data would be run through a computer, which would spit back an evalua-tion of the player’s “intensitivity,” “activity,” “error rate,”

and “e¤ectivity.”

Lobanovsky intermittenly coached the club Dynamo Kiev for decades and later headed the Ukrainian national team. His system became gospel, internalized
by generations of coaches and players. Even after his death in 2002, the national federation continues to send scientists to every single Ukrainian professional game. His system rewards a very specific style of play: physical and frenetic. Players work tirelessly to compile points. They play defense more aggressively than o¤ense, because that’s where points can be racked up.

In a way, Lobanovsky’s system mimicked the Soviet regime under which it was conceived. Like the Soviets, it stifles individual initiative. Nothing in Lobanovsky’s point valuation measures creativity or daring. A vertical pass receives the same grade as a horizontal pass; a spectacular fake means nothing.

Compounding the stultifying e¤ect of Lobanovsky, Ukrainians have made a fetish of coaching. Managers play a role akin to the Communist Party, imposing rigid strategic formations and an authoritarian culture.

Ukrainian players commonly glance at their coach, trying to glean whether they have won his approval.

Human agency has no place in this world.

The Ukrainian game couldn’t be more di¤erent

from the Nigerian one. The paradigm ruling Nigerian soccer treats the game less as science than art. Nigeria is the Brazil of Africa—clever, undisciplined, and stylish. Ukrainians maniacally fling themselves at the ball, no matter its location on the field; Nigerians are trained to conserve energy and chase the ball more selectively.

In addition, they attack di¤erently. Ukrainians like to score goals by quickly exploiting lapses in the defense, moving the ball across the field with long passes. They often execute predetermined plays, with players moving in predetermined patterns, plays as intricate as any con-
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

ceived by Vince Lombardi. Nigerians, on the other hand, are used to a more deliberate pace of o¤ense, where skills and short passes create opportunities.

All this is a way of excusing Edward’s sub par performance for Karpaty—and the failure of the other Africans in the Ukraine to achieve their potential. In two years, Edward has barely scored. Despite his abun-dance of natural gifts, Edward never looks natural on the Ukrainian field. Players bang into him as he shoots, something he’d never experienced before. Coaches and teammates demand that he play defense. Because he never learned the art of tackling, he’s always mistiming his slides and accumulating ridiculous fouls.

When I attended a Karpaty game, the club desperately needed to win. The season would only stretch for two more months, and only a narrow sliver bu¤ered them from the relegation zone. At this defining juncture, the coach pulled Edward from the starting lineup for the first time in his stay with Karpaty. The coach played him less than five minutes as a substitute in the game’s finale. Edward ran hard up and down the right wing.

But only once in this spell did the ball touch his foot.

After the game, we met outside the locker room.

Every other player seemed elated—or at least relieved—

by the outcome of the game, a one-nothing win.

“Congratulations,” I told Edward.

“Why congratulate me? I played five minutes. I did nothing.”

This dismissive tone and naked insecurity seemed totally out of character. Even if Edward’s mannerisms
and tone of voice often betrayed nerves, his words always conveyed complete confidence. After his contract expired, he said he would move to a league in Western Europe. “Spain is a place I’d like to go next.” But outside the locker room, he faced the frightening fact that his career in the Ukraine might not last much longer.

Edward’s teammates had already changed out of

their uniforms and boarded the team bus that would drop them in downtown Lviv. A throng of jubilant Karpaty fans had sent them o¤. Edward didn’t join his comrades. An oªcial from the Ukrainian federation had picked Edward for a random drug test, and the coaching sta¤ wanted to put Edward on the scale. They were concerned that excess pounds had slowed him down. Edward walked around the Karpaty facility in bare feet, still wearing his kit.

“I don’t understand why the coach and the general director want to weigh me. They don’t weigh anyone else. No other players. They say I’m too heavy. But I was 77 kilos when I came here.” He gently grabbed my elbow to make sure that I paid attention. “Now, I’m 71.

I don’t know why they have a problem with me. Why do they have a problem with me?”

The groundskeeper interrupted Edward. He wanted to lock up the stadium. With his hand, he made a gesture to Edward to stop talking, to gather his clothes, and leave.

“You see, I am man of the world,” the Serb coach Ivan Golac says. In an accent that contains only slight traces of his Balkan roots, he ticks o¤ evidence supporting
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

this claim. He keeps his main residence in Vienna.

During the summer, he decamps to an apartment in France, just over the border from Spain, where he walks quiet mountain paths with his wife. But more than being a man of the world, he is, at heart, a man of England.

Golac’s case of Anglophilia began as a teenage obsession. Before even the arrival of such a term in communist Belgrade, he was a flower child. He wore his hair shoulder-length and acquired a fanatical interest in the English music scene that went far deeper than the Stones, the Kinks, and The Who. Swinging London had a soccer outpost, the World Cup–winning English team of the sixties. They played with such enthusiasm and panache that Golac desperately wanted to join them. “I dreamed only of playing in England.”

For a decade, he lived his dream, playing in Southampton and living like a country squire in verdant southern England.

Like Edward, Golac has been flung far and wide by the soccer economy. When the opportunity at Karpaty opened, a stint coaching with an Icelandic outfit across the bay from Reykjavik had just ended. “A friend told me there was a club in the Ukraine with an ambitious owner. This interested me greatly.” By the time we sat down in the Viennese Co¤eehouse and ordered ice cream, he had survived four months of Ukrainian soccer. The beginning of his tenure had not gone well.

Golac arrived at Karpaty and immediately ushered in an era of losing. His English understanding of the game didn’t jibe with the habits of the Lobanovsky-steeped players. Team oªcials would gasp at his predilection
for empowering players to make tactical decisions on the fly. And players would look like soccer idiots when handed a little piece of on-field volition. “It was a shock to me. They were not allowed to think.” The Nigerian problem needed to be dealt with, too. Nobody could deny that the team chemistry experiment had created corrosive compounds.

When I first met Golac, he made it clear that he considered himself blessed to have avoided Serbia in wartime. The hacking apart of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia saddened and disgusted him. In his condemnation of Ukrainian racism, he invoked this position again. “I know nationalism and was surprised at how strong it is here.”

“They’re good boys,” he said, turning the subject to Edward and Samson. “It’s hard for the African players to adapt, especially when you have training sessions at minus 25. It’s hard enough for us continental people. I can’t imagine for them. They get very low, very depressed. That’s where you’ve got to be very careful, very gentle with them.”

Listening to him talk in his confident pianissimo voice, I imagined him to be a superb psychologist. In training, I noticed that he e¤ectively criticized players without jabbing their egos. I pressed him to explain to his methodology. “Describe the gentle approach?”

“I’ve told them, ‘You’ve got ability, boys. You’ve got ambition, I suppose. If you don’t do well, if you’re not disciplined, if you’re not ambitious enough, and can’t match my ambition, I’ll send you back to Africa.’ ”