How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (24 page)

“Are you one of the poor children?” I asked.

“I’m giving you an opportunity to earn some money and we won’t receive anything? I don’t want the money, I won’t keep the money. I’ll give it to poor children. I
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

wrote a book in Spanish and it sold 600,000 copies.

Am I going to receive something or not?” I was now in the embarrassing position of having most of the team eavesdrop on our conversation.

“That’s not the way that I work as a journalist,” I told him.

“Would you pay Michael Jordan? Hristo Stoichkov will sell you many copies.” He said that if I wrote him a check he would personally deliver the money to UNICEF. “It’s not for me.”

I tried to explain the practice of American journalism. “This is just not the way we do business. It’s not part of our ethical system.”

While I spoke, he rose and stepped into his locker.

“Well, it’s part of my ethical system.”

“Then we can’t talk?”

“No.” He stripped o¤ his robe.

We didn’t shake hands. As I left the locker room, I angrily described Stoichkov’s solicitation of this bribe to his press handler, who just shrugged. Because Stoichkov is a hero of Barca, I couldn’t stay mad long, either. Besides, in our short exchange, he had told me nothing yet managed to encapsulate the Catalan ethos—canny about commerce alongside a streak of feistiness. And if Catalonia could find it in its heart to forgive his lunacy, so could I.

IV.

Some close followers of the game, especially in Madrid, might object to this characterization of Barcelona as a
bastion of healthy, nonviolent patriotism. They will point to recent games against Real Madrid in the Camp Nou, where Barcelona fans threw projectiles on the field, including sandwiches, fruit, golf balls, mobile phones, whiskey bottles, bike chains, and a severed bloody boar’s head. If there was any democratic spirit in such displays, it was the universality of this rage.

Men with cigars and three-button suits, women with pearls and Escada pantsuits screamed the same obscenities, just as vulgarly and loudly as the working sti¤s.

As a supporter of Barca, I can’t deny these o¤enses.

My club su¤ers a pathological hatred toward Real Madrid. They are the Celtic to our Rangers. But there are several key di¤erences between this rivalry and the Scottish one. Where Celtic and Rangers cynically col-lude to exploit and profit from hatred, no rationality governs our ill will, no superego regulates our id. When Barcelona froths over Madrid, it moves in stupid, self-defeating directions, not financially profitable ones.

Barca has a long history of underachieving, results that don’t befit its all-star rosters and enormous payrolls.

And this history can be attributed—at least in part—to our Real Madrid complex.

It is not easy to overestimate Real Madrid. By any measure, they are the most successful club in the sport—the New York Yankees on a continental scale.

They have won more Spanish League titles than anyone. They have dominated the Champions League.

Nevertheless, Barca still succeeds in giving Real Madrid far more credit than it deserves. This is their description of the politics of Spanish soccer:

A party with Francoist roots runs the Madrid city
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

council. To subsidize the footballers, the council bought Real Madrid’s training ground from the team, paying $350 million. With one check, the city council helped finance the purchase of David Beckham, Ronaldo, and Zinedine Zidane, arguably the three best players in the world. In the Catalan view, Real’s political network starts locally but extends all the way to the top. Spain’s right-wing president Jose Maria Aznar has been a Real fan since his seventh birthday; he cries when the club wins championships; he dines with Real’s board of directors.

Because of Madrid’s political connections, it gets what it wants. When Barca fans pelted Real players with the contents of their pockets, the league unjustly punished the club by making it play two home games behind closed doors, no fans allowed. “Madrid only wins championships when dictators, like Aznar and Franco, have power,” the Catalan talk radio host Xavi Bosch told me.

It’s a compelling portrait of power and influence, except in the details. Just as Madrid exploited a sympathetic city council, Barca has tried to do the same. But bumbling Catalan politicians have interfered with the sweetheart deal. When they describe Aznar as the new Franco, they are being highly ungrateful. For many years, Aznar included the Catalan nationalists in his governing coalition, plying them with lots of state spending and never saying a word against Catalan nationalism. Nor can they prove that Aznar has ever thrown his political weight around on behalf of his beloved club. Nevertheless, they go berserk over Aznar’s sympathies. After the president dined with Real’s directors, Barcelona’s president demanded that he be accorded the same honor.
When Real fans hear these accusations, they say

that they are symptomatic of the Catalan mau-mau.

They argue that the Catalans like to cry over their

“victimization” so that they can bully the central government—and the Spanish soccer federation—into giving them undeserved favors. How else can Catalonia get so much more money from the central government than any other Spanish region?

This explanation, while containing a seed of truth, lacks any empathy. Barca fans hate Madrid, because they also feel a measure of survivor’s guilt. Their fathers and grandfathers su¤ered under the tyranny of Madrid; they died in the civil war; they couldn’t speak their own language. But in the prosperity of the democratic era, Catalans have no objective basis for complaint. Their wealth and cultural renaissance should have provoked triumphalist celebrations. It hasn’t, because most Catalans aren’t in a mood to gloat. After witnessing their fathers’ heroism, they feel as if they have lived lives devoid of struggle and without any epic dimension. They worry that their fathers would be disappointed with their staid existence.

Barca is a balm to these feelings. In its small measure, it allows Catalans to imagine they have joined the centuries-old struggle against Madrid and Castilian centralism. It lets them feel as if they, in the same way as their ancestors, have been stuck under the thumb of the arrogant imperialists. “Catalans don’t want Barca to win,” the journalist Joan Poqui says. “If they did, they wouldn’t enjoy being victims so much.”

But even in this unbecoming, self-pitying side of Barca, there’s a becoming side. Contrast Barca to Celtic
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

or Rangers. The Scottish fans consider one another enemy tribes with inferior beliefs, who don’t really deserve to occupy their town. It is stunning that, for all the rage toward Real, Barca fans feel so little animus toward the supporters of the club. There are scant examples of Barca hooligans battling Real. That’s because they don’t hate an opposing group of people; they feel rage toward an idea, the idea of Castilian centralism. And you can’t beat up an idea.

Without a group of enemies to focus attention, there’s an aimless, scattershot quality to the hatred of Barca fans. Consequently, they turn their rage on themselves as often as they turn it on others. During my visit, I watched the city rise up against the club’s Dutch manager, Louis van Gaal. The city has a particularly robust press covering the club. Two daily sports papers have no other obvious purpose than expending approximately 280 pages each week delving into every bit of the club’s minutiae. For months they devoted this space to vilifying Van Gaal. A typical story analyzes lunches consumed by the Dutch coach, alongside photographs documenting the growth of his belly. When he sits in the thirteenth row of the team plane, reporters interpret this as a sign of his poor judgment and imminent demise. Remarkably, this only begins to chart the Catalan media landscape and its hatreds. A weekly TV segment parodies Barca, using puppets to produce cruelly cutting send-ups of players and management, regularly portraying Van Gaal as a pile of bricks topped by a mop.
For a week, fans held anti–Van Gaal rallies in front of the Camp Nou. At times, the hecklers turned so vile, so personal, and so distracting that Van Gaal interrupted his training sessions and moved them to another, more private pitch. When I visited the protes-tors, they looked to be mostly a group of middle-aged men. They stood behind a black iron gate and shouted toward the field, about thirty yards away. Although they only numbered about two dozen, they amplified

magnificently. They didn’t have a single message, just insults and quixotic demands for new lineups and new strategies. Because they had been protesting for a week already—and their demand that Van Gaal be fired seemed so close to being met—neither the team nor the media paid them much attention. They solemnly went about their business.

I tried to talk to these malcontents. A short stocky man with a combover in a sweater and blazer allowed himself to be momentarily distracted from his shouting. As I approached, his abuses came out so fast that I couldn’t really follow him. It was an unseasonably warm Mediterranean day and he constantly wiped his brow dry with a handkerchief.

“Why are you so angry?” I asked.

He grabbed my forearm with one hand. It was hard to know if this was a gesture of hostility or intimacy. In the moment, he might not have known himself.

“We hate him so much, because we love Barca so much. It hurts.”
s

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

I s l a m ’s H o p e

I.

The biggest stadium in Tehran, in the world for that matter, is the 120,000-seat Azadi. Its name comes straight from the lexicon of Orwellian Newspeak. Even though it translates as “freedom,” it represents something close to the opposite. Ever since the Islamic revolution of 1979, females have been forbidden to watch soccer in the Azadi. This prohibition isn’t exclusive to the venue or even to Iran. It applies in broad swaths of the Muslim world, where it holds without much contro-versy. But the fundamental fact of Iran is that it is not Saudi Arabia. During the last decades of the shahs, it hadn’t locked its women in black burqas. They had been high government oªcials, writers, lawyers, and fans of the beautiful game.

With so many people flowing through the Azadi’s turnstiles, it’s impossible to ensure conformity with the finer points of Islamic law. Fans will curse in the foulest, most clearly verboten language. They will throw punches that can’t be justified by any reasonable interpretation of the Koran. Some of these men are clean-shaven and dressed in suspiciously baggy clothes.

Under closer inspection, it would become clear that these men aren’t even really men. Risking severe punishment, Tehran’s women have been unable to let go of the Azadi. They have suppressed their breasts, tucked away their long hair, dressed in man’s garb, and snuck into the stadium.

This corps of aggrieved, soccer-starved women, it is reported, included the daughters of important clerics, the only women in Iran who actually had a voice in the governance of the country. Their unceasing complaints apparently struck enough of a fatherly chord to overcome juristic precedent. In 1987, the country’s spiritual and political dictator, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a new fatwa that revised the regime’s absolute prohibition of female fandom. Speaking through his long white beard, he decreed that women could watch soccer on television, which would carry games for the first time in the Islamic era, but still disallowed trips to the testosterone-laden stadium. And for a while, the Khomeini compromise satisfied all.

But even the mullah’s rare stroke of Solomonic reasoning couldn’t placate the deep desires of the Iranian women. Like all good fans, they understood that television is a poor substitute for the real, flesh-and-blood experience. In hindsight, it was inevitable that women would demand to be let back into the nation’s stadiums. Still, such a bold demand requires great courage
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

and pretext. The heroics of the national team in November 1997 gave the women of Iran both.

Iran’s campaign to qualify for the World Cup turned on a single playo¤ game against Australia, played in Melbourne. For most of the match, the Iranians knocked the ball around as if their government had ordered them to throw the match intentionally, to ward o¤ victory celebrations in Tehran that might spin dangerously out of control. But in the last fifteen minutes of World Cup qualifying—frantic, desperate

moments—the Iranians tossed o¤ their lethargy and struck two stunning, salvaging goals. Iran would advance to the World Cup for the first time since Khomeini’s 747 returned the exiled ayatollah to Tehran eighteen years earlier.

Because the regime possesses a Roman nose for

self-preservation, it began immediately bracing for celebrations, knowing that euphoric people take leave of their rationality, and without rationality guiding them, they might be crazy enough to take to the barricades.

Already, the soccer scene had begun to reflect the aspirations for a new, more liberal Iran—the same spirit that had catapulted the reformer Mohammad Khatami to the presidency a few months earlier. For the first time in the history of the Islamic republic, a foreign coach led the squad, a Brazilian named Valdeir Vieira.

When he paced the sideline, he wore a necktie — a fashion that the shahs had pushed as an emblem of modern Iran and the clerics had rejected as a European imposition. Many of Vieira’s players made their careers in European and Asian leagues, hopeful examples of Iran interacting with the global economy.
Indeed, the government had been right to feel anxious. After the victory, the streets of Tehran filled with revelers. Their joy led them to dispense with the oªcial morality. Dancing and drinking and western pop music, normally confined to homes, the private sphere, became the stu¤ of public celebration. If the revelers had been men, that might have been one thing. But in the well-heeled neighborhoods, and especially among the young, the celebrants reveled in mixed company.