How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

  table in the theater’s basement. It’s the type of evening that could only happen with Italian leftists, who have been nursed on Antonio Gramsci and his theories of counter-hegemony.

  The evening Tommaso and I attended Comuna

  Baires, the club held a reading to honor Javier Zanetti, Inter’s Argentine captain. Everyone in the club seemed to know Tommaso. A camera crew from Inter’s cable television network stopped him for a quick interview.

  Beautiful women in black stopped to kiss him on both cheeks. We dropped our coats in a cloakroom, away from the crowd. Tommaso whispered to me, “I have to warn you. These people really are communists. I don’t mean that as an exaggeration. They really are communists.” We walked out from the room and he nudged me, nodding toward a framed picture of Che Guevara that stared at us from a wooden beam.

  Like any boho theater, the Baires has a ramshackle feel. The main stage is in a stark black room with risers and rickety wooden benches. The reading had been organized in the round and a row of men and women in tiny spectacles surrounded Zanetti. He sat in front of a microphone at a table, draped with cloth the colors of Inter’s jersey. Waiting for the program to begin, he shifted in his seat.

  The theater’s director emceed the evening. A middle-aged man in an untucked linen shirt, he warmed up the audience with an impassioned stem-winder about Inter. He praised the club for its “anti-Bush, anti-Berlusconi, anti-American” worldview. To justify this claim, he cited the club’s long record of falling just short of winning championships. In contrast to the ethic of American capitalism, Inter fans know that there are “things more important in life than winning.”

  A parade of journalists and novelists and poets followed him to the microphone, each paying tribute to Inter and Zanetti, many taking the same anti-capitalist line as the emcee. Between speakers, the director handed Zanetti oil paintings that had been created in his honor.

  There were certain contradictions in this e¤ort to superimpose a left-wing identity on Inter. First of all, it doesn’t make any sense to link the club to the anti-globalization movement. An oil magnate owns Inter.

  Although he has center-left sympathies, and has even flirted with a political career, he runs Inter in the unabashed spirit of capitalism. Then, when they try to graft cosmopolitanism onto this club, they fail miser-ably. They can never get past the fact that Inter represents the petite bourgeoisie of northern Italy, a group that resents immigration more than any in the country.

  The stands of Inter games contain far more racist chants and banners than they do for Berlusconi’s club.

  This is certainly not the first instance of irrational-ism and inconsistency on the Italian left. More than any country in Western Europe, Italians have indulged a romantic politics. Where the show trials of the ’30s, the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact, the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, and the fall of the Berlin Wall turned o¤ most of humanity to communism, the Italian enthusiasm for Karl Marx’s doctrine never really abated. They kept faith with the Communist Party into the 1990s, even though the party kept mouthing crusty words about revolution and the dictatorship of the HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

  proletariat. This wasn’t a small segment of the electorate. Communists routinely received close to a third of the vote.

  And there’s another plague that curses the Italian left, a tendency toward snobbery. They’ve turned Berlusconi and Milan into a bigger villain than Agnelli and Juventus, because Berlusconi couldn’t be more déclassé. As one newspaper columnist told me, “He imports low-brow American TV shows and movies; he tells dirty jokes and commits ridiculous ga¤es.” An important investigation into the genesis of his empire was called The Odor of Money. But his real curse, it sometime seems, is to have the odor of new money.

  The left’s apoplectic reaction to Berlusconi undermines its ability to combat him. Instead of satisfying the Italian craving for spectacle, his opponents are gray politicians, usually with academic pedigrees and mild-mannered demeanors. (Berlusconi’s archenemy,

  Romano Prodi, for instance, makes a point of touting his own devotion to cycling, a sport that doesn’t have near the mass following of football.) They keep hitting Berlusconi for crimes that have already been exposed and, for better or worse, excused by the electorate. Like the Inter intellectuals, they seem ludicrously disconnected from the reality of their potential supporters.

  At dinner, Tommaso and I sat across the table from Zanetti. He couldn’t have been more appreciative or happier to be at the table. “Where are you from?” he asked me in Spanish. As we made pleasant, perfunc-tory chitchat, the table erupted into a voluble debate on the merits of past Inter squads. The intellectuals were especially prone to celebrating the mystical qualities and aesthetic sensibilities of players, in the same manner they had championed Zanetti earlier in the evening. Sitting on the fringe of this conversation, Zanetti listened intently, looking over the shoulder of other participants. At first, he tentatively tried to interject himself into the conversation, providing illustrative first-hand observations about playing for Inter. But these interventions weren’t heard, as far as I could tell, over the din. Debating Inter’s heroes of the past, the table ignored the Inter hero of the present they had just celebrated in such glowing terms. After a few minutes, Zanetti gave up on the conversation and focused on quickly finishing the pizza on his plate. The hero politely excused himself, gathered his paintings, and fled. a

  H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

  t h e D i s c re e t C h a r m o f

  B o u r g e o i s N a t i o n a l i s m

  I.

  The motto of FC Barcelona is “mas que un club,” more than a club. For the purposes of full disclosure, I agree.

  It’s more than a club; it’s one of God’s greatest gifts to leisure time. I wrote that last sentence while wearing a Barca cap and a frayed replica jersey that I bought ten years ago. Later today, I’ll pretend to write this chapter while constantly refreshing my browser for updates of Barca’s game against Newcastle United in the Champions League. And tonight, I’ll have a dream about a long curving pass from Xavi that will be met by Javier Saviola after the little man unbelievably crosses a large swath of grass. Even if the rules of reality have been suspended, it’s too much of a stretch to imagine myself on the field with Saviola. But I will still picture myself in the scene, in the lower tier of the Camp Nou, Barca’s stadium.

  With the rest of the stadium, I will be singing Saviola’s name like a Gregorian chant, exaggerating each syllable for maximum haunting e¤ect. The person sitting next to me will be flying a ten-foot Catalan flag above my head.

  Barca became my team in 1994 on a winter trip

  through the city. My visit coincided with the annual gratis opening of Barca’s museum. It is the most visited museum in the city, even ahead of a massive collection of Picasso canvases. With no admission fee, lines crawled across the stadium parking lot, filled with eight-year-old boys and their mothers, silver-haired men paying a visit to old friends in the trophy case, and teenage girls apparently brushing up on team history.

  The transcendent enthusiasm for a bunch of artifacts and sepia photos moved me. I felt like a nonbeliever watching a religious pilgrimage. And the sheer depth of their faith made me a believer, too.

  If you have liberal politics and yuppie tastes, it isn’t easy to find a corner of the soccer firmament that feels like home. The continent has too many clubs that have freaky fascist pasts bleeding into a xenophobic present.

  And this is only the first obstacle to finding a team. You could never accept clubs with a cloud of virulent racism trailing after them. (Remove from the list of potential favorites, then, Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, Glasgow Rangers, Red Star Belgrade, and almost half the teams in Italy.) And for the sake of the underdog, you couldn’t possibly abide the multinational conglomerates, like Manchester United and Juventus, which buy championships every year.

  Barca elegantly fills this vacuum. Over the course of its hist
ory, it has self-consciously announced its sophis- HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

  tication. The Barca museum houses paintings by Dali and Miro. Outside its front gate, it displays modern sculpture, ranging from Donald Judd–like minimalism to neo-futurism. A disciple of Le Corbusier designed the roof of its old grounds.

  I’ve heard, but never confirmed, a theory that the club explicitly plucked its colors—red and blue—from the tricolor of the French revolution. If not true in fact, the story has a spiritual truth. Indeed, the team’s modernist aesthetic flows from its leftist politics. At the height of the 1930s anarchism fad, Barca became a worker’s collective, a legacy that continues. Its season ticket holders still vote for the club’s administration, with presidential debates broadcast live on television and candidates making impossibly grand campaign promises to purchase a team of superstar players. More important, according to the lore of the institution, the club was the heroic center of the resistance to Franco’s military dictatorship. Only the Camp Nou provided Catalans a place to yell and scream against the regime in their own, banned vernacular. Manuel Vazquez Montalban, one of Spain’s great contemporary writers, published a novel about Barca called O¤side. He described the club as “the epic weapon of a country without a state. . . . El Barca’s victories were like those of Athens over Sparta.”

  Even now in more placid times, a charming fervor surrounds the club’s politics. Government oªcials expound on a¤airs of club as if they were a¤airs of state.

  At various moments, the longtime president of Catalonia, Jordi Pujol, recommended changes of lineup, strategic formation, and recruiting tactics. The major Catalan political parties form stealth alliances with the candidates for the Barca presidency, in hopes that the Barca president will invite party leaders to sit in the Camp Nou’s tribune of honor in the center of the stadium.

  Because of this sense of mission, the club makes fantastic gestures to prove its purity, to show that it resides on a higher plane than the base world of commerce. Of all the clubs in the world, only Barcelona has no advertisements covering the front of its jersey. Until 2003, the club refused even to entertain offers to buy this sacred space. When the highest paid players in the world—Maradona, Ronaldo, Rivaldo—demonstrate

  insuªcient enthusiasm for the cause, Barca and its fans turn on them. They send them to another city, despite the many goals they have scored for the team. If a coach adopts utilitarian tactics that skimp on artistry, he gets sacked, no matter the trophies he has accumulated. Supporters of Barca want nothing more badly than victory, except for romance. And as the club’s long history of underachieving shows, they get far more of the latter.

  Unfortunately, large swaths of the world don’t fully appreciate these many splendors of Barca. More than Real Madrid and Manchester United, richer teams that win far more championships, Barca provokes irk and ire. I’ve had Serb translators and Croatian friends bridge the deepest divides and shout their mutual hatred of Barca. I’ve witnessed Israeli academics and Muslim taxi drivers unknowingly form a union of schadenfreude when Barca self-destructs. I guess I can understand the sentiment. “Mas que un club” implies HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

  superiority. The pious refusal to turn its jersey into a billboard damns the business decisions made by every other club to stay afloat. The modern art and the novels may seem too precious by half. Soccer should be watched with beer and burgers, perhaps, not cappuc-cino and cigarettes.

  But if Barca’s enemies objectively considered the club they despise, they would find an important reason to stand up and bathe it in applause. Critics of soccer contend that the game inherently culminates in death and destruction. They argue that the game gives life to tribal identities which should be disappearing in a world where a European Union and globalization are happily shredding such ancient sentiments. Another similar widely spread thesis holds that the root cause of violence can be found in the pace of the game itself.

  Because goals come so irregularly, fans spend far too much time sublimating their emotions, anticipating but not ever releasing. When those emotions swell and become uncontainable, the fans erupt into dark, Dionysian fits of ecstatic violence.

  Barca redeems the game from these criticisms, by showing that fans can love a club and a country with passion and without turning into a thug or terrorist.

  Sure, its fans can ascend to the highest levels of irrationality—positing wild conspiracies, imagining their own victimhood, and pitting themselves against supposedly existential enemies. Yet they almost never cross into the darker realms of human behavior. There are no opposing fans that Barca considers subhuman and hardly any violence associated with the club. Its stadium is filled with more women and children than any in Europe. It is also filled with immigrants from the south of Spain, who aªliate with the club to ease their assimilation into Catalan life.

  Put more strongly, Barca doesn’t just redeem the game from its critics; it redeems the concept of nationalism. Through the late twentieth century, liberal political thinkers, from the philosopher Martha Nussbaum to the architects of the European Union, have blamed nationalism for most of modernity’s evils. Tribalism in a more modern guise, they denounce it. If only we abandoned this old fixation with national identities, then we could finally get past nasty ethnocentrism, vulgar chauvinism, and blood feuding. In place of nationalism, they propose that we become cosmopolitans—shelving patriotism and submitting to government by international institutions and laws.

  It’s a beautiful picture, but not at all realistic. And it turns its back on a strain of liberalism that begins with John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville and continues through Isaiah Berlin. This tradition understands that humans crave identifying with a group. It is an unavoidable, immemorial, hardwired instinct. Since modern life has knocked the family and tribe from their central positions, the nation has become the only viable vessel for this impulse. To deny this craving is to deny human nature and human dignity.

  What’s more, this strain of political theory makes a distinction between liberal nationalism and illiberal nationalism. The Serbs at Red Star, to take the most obvious example, practice the illiberal variety, with no respect for the determination of other nationalities. But there’s no reason that nationalism should inherently HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

  culminate in these ugly feelings. To blame the Croatian and Bosnian wars on excessive love of country drasti-cally underestimates the pathologies in Serb culture.

  Besides, in theory, patriotism and cosmopolitanism should be perfectly compatible. You could love your country—even consider it a superior group—without desiring to dominate other groups or closing yourself o¤ to foreign impulses. And it’s not just theory. This is the spirit of Barca. I love it.

  II.

  FC Barcelona could have easily gone the other direction.

  It could have become a caldron of radicalism, violence, and grievances. But the roots of Barca’s cosmopolitan nationalism run too deep. They are part of the national culture and part of the club’s founding spirit. In 1899, a Swiss Protestant businessman called Joan Gamper joined with English expats to launch FC Barcelona. It is stunning that a foreigner created what would become a defining institution of Catalan nationalism.

  There’s a simple explanation for Catalonia’s openness to foreign influences: Catalonia sits in the middle of the Mediterranean world. Before the fifteenth century, as part of the kingdom of Aragon, the Catalan conquered their way as far east as Athens, Sicily, and Sar-dinia. Even then, at the height of its greatness, the nation’s most powerful men were traders and capitalists.

  Barcelona became a great trading city deeply entangled in the global economy, growing into an industrial giant.

  By the late nineteenth century, only the United States, England, and France outpaced the production of Catalonia’s textile mills.

  But as it advanced economically, Catalonia sustain
ed political subjugation. Spain’s political power, concentrated in Madrid, consisted largely of Castilian landowners. The interests of the central government and Barcelona’s capitalists clashed. Barcelona’s growing cadre of bourgeois nationalists resented that the Castilians used the government to impose “Spanish” culture and language upon them. Nor did it help that Madrid tilted government policy so strongly away from industry and toward the protection of agriculture. The Catalans took out their anger at this unjust arrangement by crudely stereotyping the Castilians and their capital.

  Where Catalonia represented modernity and progress, Madrid consisted of cultureless yokels. It wasn’t entirely a self-serving image. Barcelona’s bourgeoisie proved its greatness to the world, by patronizing monumental works of art and architecture—Gaudí,

  Doménech i Muntaner, Miró. And because of its

  immersion in the world of global commerce, it happily opened the doors to foreign influences.

  Joan Gamper and soccer were just another of the imports to become part of the Catalan fabric. It didn’t hurt Gamper’s local image that he fervently admired the Catalan cause and had translated his own name, Hans Kamper, into the local language. By some

  accounts, Gamper wanted the club to celebrate the Catalans and their dreams of autonomy. Under his stewardship, Barca adopted a crest containing the colors of the nation and the cross of St. Jordi, Catalonia’s patron. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

  Catalonia’s proclamations of national superiority didn’t go down well in Madrid. The ancient Castilian regime tried to put the upstarts in their place. With the support of the king, in 1923, general Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power and ran a dictatorship that prefigured the Francoism to come. Primo de Rivera banned the Catalan flag and purged the Catalan language from the public sphere. Because of its symbolic role, Barca inevitably faced the same repression. After its fans booed the national anthem before a 1925 exhibition game, the dictator shuttered Barca’s stadium for six months and fined its directors. The government made it clear to Gamper that he should leave Spain or his family might su¤er some unfortunate consequences. Gamper fled. A few years later, in a fit of depression, compounded by his losses in the 1929