How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

  Some were beaten and interrogated. Others were crammed into a basement boiler room, five square meters in size. For more than three days, the Tigers kept thirty men and one woman in this space, without food, water, or adequate ventilation. A bus transported detainees from the boiler room to the foot of a hill looking up at a village church. They killed all but two of the detainees, shoving them into mass graves that would be exhumed a year later. By the end of the war in Croatia and Bosnia, according to State Department estimates, with throat slitting, strangulation, and other forms of execution, Arkan’s Tigers had killed at least 2,000 men and women.

  Arkan’s crimes had been documented well. In Serbian society, it wasn’t hard to find out about them.

  Milosevic hadn’t curtailed access to the Internet, hadn’t banned satellite dishes, hadn’t tossed out the human rights activists. The Belgrade dissident Filip David told me quite simply, “We knew.” But instead of greeting Arkan with moral opprobrium, Serbian society turned him into a hero.

  Many of the Serbs who watched Arkan’s veneration, now compare it to the laudatory, fascinated coverage HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

  that Americans devoted to John Gotti and Al Capone.

  This comparison, however, understates both Arkan’s wickedness and the swooning of the Serb press. With regular appearances on the wildly popular Minimaxovi-sion variety show, Arkan presented himself as a charming persona that even the country’s middle class could adore. He used these cameos to announce his marriage to the pop star Ceca and the impending births of their children. When he married Ceca in 1994, TV carried the event live.

  The war hadn’t just made Arkan famous; it made him rich, too. Patriotism had provided the justification for looting on a grand scale. Arkan ran his network, the Tigers, as a black market sanctions-busting conglomerate, cornering monopolies on petroleum and consumer goods. Some in Belgrade jokingly dubbed the city’s shopping districts “Arkansas.” Here, the American gangster metaphor really does work. Like many

  Mafiosos before him, Arkan was intent on parlaying this newfangled wealth into legitimacy. More

  specifically, he hoped to become the president of a championship soccer club that would provide him with international prestige and even more adoration. When Red Star wouldn’t sell the club to him, Arkan set out to create his own Red Star. First, he bought a team in Kosovo and purged its largely ethnic Albanian lineup.

  Then, in 1996 he traded up for the Belgrade club Obilic, a semi-professional team that had lingered in Yugoslavia’s lower divisions for decades.

  Part of Obilic’s appeal was its namesake, a knight who fought at the Serbs’ defeat in the 1389 battle for Kosovo—the defining moment in the national narrative of victimization. Just before the battle, Obilic infiltrated the Turkish camp and stabbed the Sultan Murad with a poisoned dagger. Arkan added to this preexisting mys-tique, figuring himself a latter-day Obilic. He changed the color of the club’s uniform to yellow, a tribute to his Tigers, and made the tiger a ubiquitous symbol spread through the stadium. Its face greets you as you enter the club’s headquarters. It appears on the doors of vehicles the club owns.

  Almost instantly, under Arkan’s stewardship, the club triumphed. Within a year of arriving in the top division, it won the national championship. Arkan liked to brag about the secrets of his success; the fact that he paid his players the highest salaries in the country; that he forbade them to drink before games; that he disciplined his players to act as a military unit. But his opponents provide another explanation for Obilic’s impossibly rapid ascent. According to one widely reported account, Arkan had threatened to shoot a rival striker’s kneecap if he scored against Obilic. Another player told the English soccer magazine Four-Four-Two that he’d been locked in a garage while his team played against Obilic.

  At games, Arkan’s message to his opponents was clear enough. Obilic’s corps of supporters consisted substantially of veteran paramilitaries. These Tigers would “escort” referees to the game in their jeeps. At games, they would chant things like “If you score, you’ll never walk out of the stadium alive” or “We’ll break both your legs, you’ll walk on your hands.” As English newspapers pointed out, it was in the player’s best interest to adhere to the demands. Fans were frequently waving guns at them. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

  According to Belgrade lore, Arkan made a habit of barging into opposing teams’ locker rooms during half time, where he would shout abuse. To avoid this fate, Red Star once simply refused to leave the field during the game break. Its players loitered on the pitch, even urinated on the side of field, rather than risk encounter-ing Arkan. After another match, Red Star Belgrade striker Perica Ognjenovic complained, “This is not soccer, this is war. I think I’d better leave this country.”

  With its overnight success, Obilic had qualified to compete against other top teams in the European Champions League. But even the European soccer oªcials—not exactly sticklers when it comes to criminals and dictators—couldn’t tolerate the presence of Arkan at their stadiums. They banned the club from continental competition. To get around the ban, Arkan resigned from the club. He installed his wife, Ceca, as his replacement. It didn’t take a prosecutor from The Hague to poke holes in this sleight of hand. When I interviewed Ceca, she told me, “I was the president. He was the advisor.” She chuckled at the mention of both president and advisor.

  Obilic never flourished in continental competition.

  Arkan hadn’t dared lock players from Bayern Munich and other giant European clubs in garages. Soon, Obilic began to slip in the domestic game, too. After Obilic’s championship season, clubs understood that throwing the championship to Arkan had exacted too great a financial cost. They banded together and dared Arkan to kill them all. “The teams called one another and said,

  ‘We can’t let this happen again,’ ” the theater director and soccer columnist Gorcin Stojanovic told me. With the clubs aligned against him, Arkan deployed intimidation less frequently. Obilic began to fade into the middle of the league table.

  In the end, Obilic may have been Arkan’s undoing.

  There are many theories to explain why in January 2000 he was gunned down in the lobby of the Inter-continental Hotel, where he liked to take his morning co¤ee and use the gym. One holds that Milosevic’s son Marko had resented the monopoly that Arkan possessed on the black market. Another holds that the secret police needed to eliminate Arkan. He knew too much and could be too easily lured to The Hague to tes-tify against Milosevic. Or perhaps it was simply a gang-land battle over turf. There is, however, another explanation, one that I favor for its poetic justice. Obilic might have been the proximate cause of his death. His partners had resented that he took such a large share of the profits from the sale of players; they felt that they could no longer do business with him. After he exploited soccer to destroy lives, soccer would now destroy his own.

  IV.

  There had always been a small, liberal anti-Milosevic opposition within Belgrade. Around the time of Arkan’s death, their moment finally arrived. Hardship had brought Serbs to an epiphany: What had a decade of warfare achieved, except international isolation and stupendous inflation? To jump-start the anti-Milosevic movement, the liberal leaders called in two groups to HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

  provide bodies for demonstrations, the student union and Red Star’s Delije. Ever since the late eighties, Milosevic had worried that the Delije’s sincere attachment to Serbian nationalism might stand in the way of his cynical machinations. Now, the Delije rose to obstruct him.

  Red Star fans like to say that they were the agents of political change. Indeed, the guys at the front of the barricades and the ones who stormed government buildings in search of evidence proving Milosevic’s corruption wore replica Red Star jerseys. They would leave games to fight with police near Milosevic’s villa. There, Delije members like Krle and Draza shouted for opposition politicians to “Save Serbia from this mad h
ouse.”

  At games, they sang, “Kill yourself, Slobodan.” To prevent protests, at one point, Milosevic’s regime allegedly began buying up tickets to national team matches and distributing them to friendly faces.

  Serbs have placed Milosevic’s overthrow in 2000—

  the Red Star Revolution, let’s call it—in the pantheon of great anticommunist revolts. They see it as the conclusion to the Velvet Revolution that began in 1989. But had this revolt changed a nation, with anything like the transformative e¤ect of Havel’s ascent to the Prague castle, or Walesa’s presidency? For a revolt to change a nation, the Serbs wouldn’t just have to pull down the iconography of the dictator Milosevic, as the Russians had knocked over the figures of Lenin. They would have had to topple Arkan, the wicked id of the country, from his central place in the culture.

  When I visited Belgrade, Arkan’s image remained upright. Two years after the Red Star Revolution, and three years after his death, he still haunted the streets of Belgrade. At newsstands, his mug gleamed on the glossy covers of big-selling tabloids. In bookstalls, he stared heroically from dust jackets. Notices fixed to lampposts advertised a kickboxing match held in the commandant’s memory.

  Obilic exists as the greatest monument to the man.

  Its stadium may be the most thoroughly modern building in Belgrade, with swooping steel, glass, and a row of plush executive suites. Arkan’s old oªce overlooks the field from the top of an adjoining tower. By postcommunist standards, it’s a remarkable room. Marble and Persian rugs cover the floors. On top of a wooden bookshelf, a framed photo lovingly captures the warlord in his battle garb. The room’s massive wooden desk displays a bronze statue of Arkan with Obilic’s championship medals draped from his neck. In a far corner, a collection of swords pays homage to the warrior Obilic as does a canvas-and-oil portrait of the medieval swain.

  On a shelf, in plain sight, a box advertises itself as containing a laser-guide for a pistol.

  In Arkan’s old oªce, I’d been granted an audience with his widow, the pop idol Ceca, the woman he had married on national television. She entered the room smoking a cigarette. Everyone had told me about her body. Now I understood what they meant. Her shiny green blouse failed to contain her enormous, silicone-filled breasts. This was not an unusual flaunting. Ceca won international renown for standing on the sidelines during Obilic matches in skintight leopard print outfits.

  She sat across from me on a leather couch. Before the meeting, my translator cautioned me to tread carefully. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

  Arkan’s family, he said, still had access to Arkan’s henchmen. I was not inclined to push the envelope that far. Besides, it wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere.

  From her experiences traveling in Europe with Obilic, she acquired savvy about Western journalists. She understood the need to puncture the aura of war criminality. “It’s horrible to make connections between politics and sports. I condemn any e¤ort to turn the game into politics,” she said with a look of earnest disgust.

  Over and over, she repeated, “This is a business, a game. Nothing more.”

  With her banality, it became easy to forget her evil.

  But she had a long history of dabbling in extremist politics. During the war, she played benefit concerts for Arkan’s ultranationalist political party. “You can be happy as me—just join the Serbian Unity Party,” she would announce to her many adoring fans. As the Serbian Unity Party’s Web site describes, she continues to fund a campaign to defend the Serb nation against the

  “white plague” of “non-Serb nationalities.” Even without Arkan, his party is run from her home. Last summer, she performed a concert at Red Star stadium, dedicated to Arkan, where she led 100,000 fans in chanting his name.

  But with her homespun charms and kitschy dance music, called “turbo-folk,” she succeeds wildly in fulfilling both parts of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase about the banality of evil. “I’m the team mama,” she says. “That’s how they think of me. I want my players to look the best, so I give them Armani.” She describes a forthcoming trip to the NBA All Star game in Atlanta and speaks of the pleasures of decorating Arkan’s oªce. Under Ceca’s presidency, since Arkan’s death,

  Obilic hasn’t had much luck. This is strangely fitting.

  The club really only existed as a tribute to the man—

  and what he represented. After I interviewed Ceca, she invited me to visit the club’s museum. Obilic’s top executive, a retired player, led me around the room. He showed me medals and photos. But the heart of the exhibit was a wall of photos that documented Arkan’s revival of Obilic’s fortunes. My tour guide pointed proudly and said, “Our father.”

  Serbia’s prime minister Zoran Djindjic frequently played soccer. In part, he played out of genuine enthusiasm for the game. In part, he liked the image that the game created, of youthful vigor. Elected in 2000, Djindjic sold himself to the country as the reformer who would reverse the damages wrought by the Milosevic regime. This was a program that necessarily put him on a collision course with organized crime, the bureaucracy, and the mafia-linked security services. It made him despised by the Serbian people, who hated his anti-inflationary policies and his close relations with the same European and American governments that had bombed Belgrade. With the political deck so stacked against him, Djindjic needed every Kennedyesque image he could get.

  Early in March of 2003, Djindjic played in a match between a government team and police oªcers. He arrived unannounced. Surprised police oªcers didn’t know how to play against a prime minister. Should they throw him the match or play extra hard so that they HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

  could later brag about beating the most powerful Serb?

  They must have decided that they would tackle him as hard as any opponent. In the match, the prime minister injured his Achilles tendon. For the next few weeks, he hobbled around on crutches. At lunchtime on March 12, he exited his car and began to move slowly toward a government oªce building. A man masquerading as a maintenance worker trained a Heckler & Koch G3 gun on the prime minister. A bullet pushed Djindjic’s heart from his body.

  The Djindjic assassination shocked Serbia into carrying out part of the Djindjic program. Outraged and mournful, the public finally got behind his plans for cleaning up organized crime. Police rounded up as many gangsters and their fellow travelers as they could find. Five days into this purge, they arrived at Ceca’s house across from the Red Star stadium and placed her under arrest. They had come after her because she had met frequently with suspected accomplices in the murder, including rendezvous before and after the dastardly deed.

  When police arrived, they found a door to a secret bunker beneath Ceca’s palace. It took several hours to break through the entrance, but when they did, they found quite a cache, dozens of guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, silencers, and laser guides, just like the one I had seen on the shelf in her oªce. The police locked Ceca in solitary confinement and left her there for a month. In the meantime, they began scour-ing her finances, especially related to Obilic, and found that there had barely been the pretense of legality in the operation. After selling her players, Ceca would allegedly stu¤ the profits into her personal accounts in Cyprus and Hungary.

  To be sure, Serbia hadn’t fully taken on its problem.

  Nobody particularly questioned the ideology of Serb nationalism, the idea that Serbs possess a morality and character superior to their non-Serb neighbors. Nobody questioned the idea of the Serbs’ eternal victimhood. In fact, the Djindjic assassination was cast as another instance of history screwing them. And, of course, the Ultra Bad Boys of Red Star continued to be ultra bad.

  But, finally, there were subtle signs of discomfort with the national culture of gangsterism.

  Ceca tried many stunts to yank the public into her corner, but none really worked. A hunger strike ended quickly after it began. When her friends held a rally on her thirtieth birthday, only 1,500 loyal
ists showed—a far cry from the 100,000 that attended her last concert in the Red Star stadium. Ultimately, a court ruled her incarceration unconstitutional, after she had spent four months behind bars. But for once, in Serbia, evil shed its coat of banality and could be identified as itself. r

  H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

  t h e Po rn o g ra p h y o f S e c t s

  I.

  In full throat, they sing in praise of our slaughter.

  We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood. There are 44,000

  of them, mostly Protestant supporters of the Glasgow Rangers Football Club. As this is their home stadium, Ibrox, they can make their songs as virulent as they please. If you hate the fuckin’ Fenians clap your hands.

  We, the 7,000 supporters of Glasgow’s traditionally Catholic Celtic Football Club, sit in a separate section of the stadium allocated to visitors, behind the goal. Sur-render or you’ll die. Although surveillance cameras track every move in Ibrox, it feels as if only a line of police-men in yellow slickers stands as a barricade blocking the home crowd from making good on its songs. With a rifle or a pistol in my hand.

  Outside the stadium, thirty minutes to game time, a crowd of Rangers supporters makes a move toward the visitors’ entrance. When police on horseback halt their progress, they extend their arms forward in a sti¤

  salute and belt “Rule Britannia,” the anthem of the empire. It goes without saying, they believe that Britannia should rule the Celtic stock of Irish Catholics. Compared to the rest of their gestures and songs, this hardly o¤ends. Scattered across the stands, Rangers fans wear orange shirts and hold orange banners to commemorate the ejection of the Catholic monarchy in 1688 by William of Orange, or “King Billy” as they call him.