How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

  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 m
inor 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.

  On a smaller scale, the English hooligan has

  become like the gangsta rapper or the Mafioso, a glam-orized, commodified criminal. When the BBC finds itself in need of a ratings boost, it airs one of its many hooligan documentaries. Every month, it seems, one of HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

  the British men’s magazines rolls out a piece documenting some new wrinkle of domestic hooliganism or its foreign o¤spring. The full breadth of this phenomenon hadn’t struck me until I went to see Chelsea in person. Walking down Fulham Road, I came across a vendor laying out tables with a collection of hats and pins bearing the skull-and-bones symbol of the infamous Headhunters gang. In the stands, I saw one teen with spiky hair wearing a blue Headhunters T-shirt.

  Stadium security must have felt comfortable letting him through the gates, knowing that no true hooligan would be dumb enough to flash them such an advertisement.

  This hooligan industry only started in the late nineties, when the gentrification of the English game was already in full swing, at a point when hooliganism had ceased to flourish in its traditional form. Of course, hooligans still fought, just not inside the stadium. As Alan explained the mechanics of fighting to me, “You call up the leader of the other firm and say, ‘Right, meet you at Trafalgar Square at two.’ And then you hope that the police don’t get there before it goes o¤. Sometimes it goes o¤. Sometimes you see the coppers and walk away.” For Alan, this new mode of appointment hooliganism trampled the pleasure of pure art. It was far more exhilarating when fights took place in narrow cor-ridors of stadiums or in the stands. And with all the prearrangement, “fighting has lost it spontaneity.” He poses the existential question of the modern soccer hooligan: “If football violence doesn’t take place in the stadium, is it even football violence?” Even though it pains him to admit it, he believes that hooliganism has been domesticated, or domesticated enough to become an object of fascination and adoration.

  You can understand why the market might have an appetite for the hooligan. On the most basic level, he’s a romantic rebel, willing to risk bodily harm and battle police. He’s not just a nihilist. He fights for the colors of the club, the same colors that the average peace-abiding fan loves. Because the hooligan is so similar, he is so fascinating. Why would some fans—guys who are part of liberal, peaceful England—take full leave of conventional morality and become thugs?

  The hooligan literature doesn’t try to answer this question analytically. The mode is confessional and it aims to shock. (To quote at random from Alan’s work,

  “The body fall[s] face downward on the platform, blood gushing from a deep cut in the back of the skull.”) Nevertheless, the authors feel the need to justify their violent behavior. They may have left conventional morality, but they still live near it. The hooligans typically describe themselves as practicing a virtuous violence: They never assault innocent bystanders, and they never use weapons. Too often, the desire to self-exculpate combines with the narrative imperative to shock to produce comic book writing, all bams and splats.

  Garrison, like all the rest, sanitizes the story, omit-ting some of the most interesting biographical details.

  That’s too bad, because it’s quite a story. From his early days as a Chelsea hooligan, he had become a self-admitted addict of the violence and the adrenaline that precedes it. “Fear is a drug,” he says, “There’s a very thin line between being hero and coward. It’s better than sex. It lasts longer as well.” He decided that he HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

  wanted a career that would deliver the rush in regular doses. After school, with London in full swinging sixties mode, he bucked the emerging hippie zeitgeist and enlisted in the army. More specifically, he volunteered for a unit in the elite special services that would give him the most opportunities to practice his beloved craft of violence.

  Alan began living a strange double life. During the week, and for long stretches of the year, he would serve his country. At times, this would involve taking part in secret missions to fight and train armies whose identity he’s reluctant to divulge. On weekends, he returned to his teenage football fighting. He reckons that the army knew about his double life—how could they not, with such a long sheet of crimes?— but didn’t much care about any weekend havoc so long as he performed his weekday duties. As part of this double life, he began acquiring the trappings of conventionality. He married and had a daughter. Although his wife would plead with him to cut out the violence, she had no leverage to push her case. By the time they first met, “she’d heard about me from a friend who’d worked with her. We met at an oªce Christmas party. I introduced myself to her and she said, ‘I don’t want to know you. You’re a fucking hooligan.’ ” She could never accuse Alan of selling her a false bill of goods.

  His two lives fed o¤ one another. “I was trained to fight and I couldn’t turn it o¤,” he says. His other comrades didn’t want to turn it o¤ either. Garrison says eight fellow soldiers joined him in the hooligan ranks.

  They brought a measure of professionalism to the fight.

  On a trip to the States, Garrison smuggled back CB radios, then illegal in Britain, and used them to coordi-nate assaults. The hooligan soldiers would carefully map out stadiums and their surroundings. Alan would stand back from the fray and track proceedings using binoculars and radio reports. “We were the fire brigade.

  When someone got into trouble, needed some help, we would come in and sort things out.”

  But there was tension between his existences, and in 1977, they ceased to be compatible. Chelsea traveled to the southwest of the country for a match at Ply-mouth. As the game ended, Garrison and his friends began bullying their way into the section holding Ply-mouth fans. Garrison had settled into combat with an opponent when, without his ever seeing it coming, an iron pipe made solid, shattering contact with the back of his skull. The furtive attacker struck him on the hand, too. Unfortunately for the attacker, he failed to knock the consciousness out of Garrison, who rose to his feet, seized the pipe, and began extracting vengeance. A blow to the face knocked his adversary’s eye from the socket. “It was hanging by a string,” he admits. It was Garrison’s ill fortune that a police oªcer entered the scene at this moment, with the eye and pipe weighing heavily against Alan’s protestations of innocence.

  When he came to trial, Garrison supplied the court with x-rays of his broken hand and fractured skull to prove that he had acted in self-defense. This evidence, however, couldn’t overcome the eyewitness account of a cop. A judge sent Garrison away for attempted murder.

  He left his family to spend nearly five years in Dart-moor prison. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

  IV.

  On my next trip to London, Garrison met me at the Finchley Road tube stop near his home. We walked down the street for a drink at Weatherspoon’s Pub.

  When I took out my wallet to buy drinks, he pushed it away.

  “I’m Jewish, but not that Jewish. You bought last time.”

  Alan wore a T-shirt with air-brushed scorpions that he had purchased at a market near San Francisco a few years ago. He told me, “Bought it for seventy-five dollars o¤ the artist. I later found ou
t that was quite a good deal.”

  Conversations with Garrison invariably lead back to the Bay Area. In the eighties, after his release from prison, he fell into a career as a graphics designer, with a specialty in video games. When one of his friends landed in Silicon Valley, just in time for the dot-com boom of the nineties, Alan followed him to California.

  Miraculously, the Immigration and Naturalization Service overlooked his convictions and granted Alan a work visa. He bought himself a house in the San Francisco suburbs.

  “So what was the dot-com boom like?” I asked.

  He paused uncharacteristically to think it over and then responded with a non sequitur. “Jesus Christ, but the women out there are sharks. Sitting at a bar, they’re around you like flies to shit. One day I was chatting with one bird and she says, ‘Are you coming back to my place?’ Then she got into her purse and pulled out this thing. ‘This is my AIDS certificate. I’ve been tested.’ And I’m like what? She says, ‘I’ve been tested.’ I said,

  ‘When was that?’ She said, ‘Three weeks ago.’ And I said, ‘How many blokes have you been with since then?

  Fuck o¤.’ ” He waved his hand, laughing at his story.

  “Women out there are like sharks, especially around English accents.”

  In his book, he constantly flashes to scenes from his life in California and juxtaposes them with life in England. It makes for quite a contrast. But Alan also credits himself with bridging cultural gaps. The first time we met, he wore an Oakland Raiders jacket. It was an entirely appropriate outfit. Of all American football clubs, the Raiders have a reputation for surly, working-class fans that most closely approximate English soccer hooligans. During his years as an American, Garrison supported the Raiders as fervently as he could support any organization that wasn’t Chelsea. “We tried to teach them how to behave like proper hooligans,” told me. At a game in San Diego, he organized Raiders fans to make “a run” through the parking lot, throwing punches and asserting dominance over the home crowd that stood turning hot dogs on their portable grills. “They didn’t know what hit them.”