How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

  Liberal northern California is hardly a place fit for a Chelsea hooligan. More than any club, Chelsea has been associated with the neo-Nazi right. I had just seen a BBC documentary that showed how many of the

  Chelsea hooligans—people that Alan knows—travel to concentration camps on tourist trips so that they can admire Hitler’s accomplishments. They deliver sieg heil salutes to the tourists and confiscate artifacts for their HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

  personal collections of concentration camp parapherna-lia. Back in London, they’ve provided protection for Holocaust denier David Irving.

  This history of English hooliganism can best be told as a distorted version of mainstream youth culture. At first, in Alan’s heyday, hooliganism imitated the early “I Want to Hold Your Hand” Beatles’ nonpolitical rebellion. It was all a good laugh, just for fun. Then, in the seventies, hooliganism began to dabble in radical politics. Only, as practitioners of hate and violence, they couldn’t credibly join with the peace-love-dope crowd.

  They went in the opposite direction, becoming the vanguard of the proto-fascist British nationalist movement.

  And just as the youth movement veered toward mindlessness, nihilism, and punk, the Chelsea movement became even more mindless, nihilist, and punk. During Alan’s imprisonment, admiration for the Nazis became a virtue.

  As their numbers grew, Chelsea hooligans began subdividing into groups called “firms.” The most famous of the groups called themselves the Chelsea Headhunters. After their assaults, they would leave a calling card with their skull-and-bones logo that read,

  “You have been nominated and dealt with by the Chelsea Headhunters.” In addition to linking up with the far right, the Headhunters joined with criminal ele-ments. They began peddling drugs and used other criminal rackets to become quite rich. Like the Bloods and Crips of L.A. street gang fame, they spent their money on fancy cars and designer clothes.

  Another group formed a coalition of hooligans

  across teams called Combat 18. It derived its moniker from a numerological breakdown of Adolf Hitler’s

  name, with the A yielding the 1 and H being the eighth letter of the alphabet. Originally, the group began as a security force for the racialist British National Party, which had some horrifying luck exploiting xenophobia for electoral gain. But in the early nineties Combat 18

  grew disillusioned with the softness of the BNP, even though the party unabashedly admired the Nazis.

  Combat 18 had no patience with the BNP’s reformist embrace of electoral politics. They wanted White Revolution and they exploded nail bombs in immigrant neighborhoods, instigated race riots in Oldham, and plotted to kidnap the left-wing actress Vanessa Redgrave.

  Although Alan identified himself as a right winger, he also presented his own politics as reasonably mainstream. Most of his judgments could have been issued by any conservative pundit on a TV chat show. But he also obviously hailed from the Combat 18 milieu. Many of the hard core from the terrorist right shared his demographic profile precisely. A slew of these thugs had even served in the special services, like Alan, before the police caught up with them. So I asked,

  “What about Combat 18?”

  Occasionally, on these sensitive subjects, Alan would tell me to turn o¤ my tape recorder and put down my pen. But, this time, he didn’t. He shifted his glass of Coke to the side. “First, this whole racist thing is bullshit. They’re nationalists. There are blacks in Combat 18. . . . That’s what I mean about this whole racist thing: It’s bullshit. If someone comes here [to England] like Kojak,” a black Chelsea hooligan, “he con- HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

  siders himself English. He talks with an English accent.

  He says, ‘I’m brought up here. I’m English. I don’t give a toss if my parents came from the West Indies.’ He’ll fight for anything English. And he’s in Combat 18, which is right wing. It’s not racist right wing. It’s nationalist right wing.” He was adamant about this point.

  “And what about the Jews? What about the Yids at Tottenham? Does that bother you?”

  “Nobody bothers me. They make jokes, but I joke about being Jewish myself.”

  While he spoke, I thought of the documentary I had seen the night before: the image of Chelsea hooligans sending postcards from Auschwitz to an anti-fascist activist back in England: “Wish you were here so that you could see me pissing on your mother’s bones.”

  V.

  The new economy may not have survived the nineties, but it left behind a new profession: the consultant.

  Every industry has them. Why should hooliganism be any di¤erent? While Alan doesn’t fight regularly, he and the other semiretired Chelsea hooligans advise and mentor a group of teens that calls itself the Youth Firm.

  “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 representat
ive 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.