How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

  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.

  Some women threw o¤ the hijab and partied without any of the mandated head coverings. When the basiji, members of the religious paramilitary militia, arrived to shut down the demonstrations, they were persuaded to join the roistering themselves.

  Some delicate defusing was now in order. The government asked the team to meander back from Australia, taking a leisurely layover in Dubai, buying time for the situation in Tehran to cool down. Radio broadcasts warned citizens against secular celebrations that give Allah short shrift. Other messages specifically appealed to the women of the country, our “dear sisters,” urging them to stay home during the homecom-ing celebrations.

  When the team finally returned, three days later, the government held the celebration in the Azadi. The heroes arrived in the stadium via helicopters, as if Silvio Berlusconi had planned the event. But the real spectacle wasn’t inside the stadium. Thousands of women defied the state’s pleas and gathered on the other side of the Azadi’s gates, in the 27-degree chill. As the anthropologist Christian Bromberger has reported, when the police refused to admit these women to the HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

  stadium, they began shouting “Aren’t we part of this nation? We want to celebrate too. We aren’t ants.” Fear-ing the horde, the police let three thousand women into special seating, segregated from the rest of the stadium.

  But what about the two thousand women on the other side of the turnstile who hadn’t wormed their way into the Azadi? The admission of their dear sisters did nothing to placate them. Determined to get their own piece of the celebration, they broke through the police gates and muscled their way into the stadium. Intent on avoiding a major fracas that could steer the raw emotions of the day in a dangerous direction, the police had no choice but to overlook their entry and concede defeat.

  II.

  When future historians write about the transformation of the Middle East, they will likely wax lyrical about this moment, which already has come to be known as the

  “football revolution.” Like the Boston Tea Party, it will go down as the moment when the people first realized that they could challenge their tyrannical rulers. For the Iranians, the event has served as the model uprising, so much so that every subsequent high stakes World Cup qualifying match has led Iranians into the streets. Over time, the political subtext of these outpourings has become increasingly explicit. During the 2002 campaign, with each Iranian win—over Saudi Arabia, over Iraq, over the United Arab Emirates—festive fans chanted “Zindibad azadi” (long live freedom) and “We love America.” But even this may underestimate the significance of the football revolution. It is more than an event. The football revolution holds the key to the future of the Middle East. This future could be discerned in the waving of the pre-Islamic national flag, the graªti that praised the “noble people of Iran,”

  and the celebrants’ shouting of the name of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late shah—the roots of a nationalist uprising against Islam.

  But is the football revolution the revolution that the U.S. wants? Not so long ago, secular nationalism looked like the great enemy in the Middle East. Dictators like Gamal Nasser, Muammar Qaddafi, and Hafez Assad were the biggest thorns in America’s side, sponsoring hijacking and making war against Israel. In the eighties, however, these Arab nationalists fell upon tough times. They no longer could turn to the Soviet Union for patronage, and Gulf War I exposed how Americans could easily crush even the most powerful of this bunch. What’s more, since the days of Nasser, these secularists had competed with Islamic movements funded by Saudi Arabia. Now, with the nationalists on the ropes, Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and radical Wahabi preachers have gained a serious upper hand in their battle for hegemony over the Muslim mind.

  No doubt, the old dictators have caused many

  headaches, but America basically knew how to deal with them. It could play them o¤ one another, and ultimately dismiss them as relatively harmless bu¤oons.

  Islamists, on the other hand, were an unfamiliar, uncontainable problem. How to turn the tide against HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

  them? One answer has been to inject more globalization into the region. But so far it hasn’t worked. In places like Pakistan, a proliferation of KFC and Bolly-wood movies has arguably aggravated the problem. By displaying the western way of life, they draw attention to the Islamic world’s own humiliating lack of modernity. Another answer to the problem of Islamism, the neo-conservative solution, proposes that the U.S.

  aggressively push the Middle East toward democracy.

  But the mere fact that the U.S. is the only force seriously committed to democratizing means that blind hatred for the messenger will undermine the message.

  The football revolution shows that the best antidote to Islamism might not be something new, but something old—a return to secular nationalism.

  Indeed, the football revolution presages a promising scenario: That people won’t accede to theocracy forever, especially when they c
an remember an era of greater lib-erty before clerical rule. When they revolt, they might fleetingly plead for American help, but they’ll mostly rise up in the name of their nation. We might not always agree with the new nationalists—and they might take their rhetorical shots at the U.S.— but they may be the only viable alternative to government by Islam.

  III.

  The history of modern Iran can be told as the history of Iranian soccer. It begins just after World War I with Shah Reza the Great, King of Kings, Shadow of the Almighty, God’s Vicar and the Center of the Universe, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. Reza Khan, the man who would become Reza Shah at the ripe age of forty-seven, wasn’t born to the palace. He had been a semilit-erate soldier from the provinces who made his name leading a band of Russian-trained Cossacks. But in the eyes of the British, who lapped at the pool of Iranian oil and tried to quietly run the country, he was the perfect cipher—a man without political ambitions, accustomed to taking orders. In 1921, the general Sir Edmund Ironside, stationed in Tehran, humbly suggested that Reza might want to seize power. The old government had grown too nationalist and unreliable for Ironside’s taste. With the British blessing, Reza’s coup was a fait accompli. Four years later, Reza received the ultimate reward for his cooperation. He sent the old monarch packing to Europe, assumed his lengthy title and the full trappings of royalty. It was quite a leap for a simple village boy to make. But, as the British will attest, he proved to be far less of a pliant bumpkin than first imagined. He would use the military as his blunt instrument for remaking Persian society in the image of Prussian society, a modern nation to compete with Europe. Like his other role model, the great Turkish modernizer Kemal Atatürk, he built roads and railways and trampled traditional practices, belittling the mullahs and banning the chador. He legislated that men trash their robes and don proper western suits. To make a modern nation, he wanted to create a modern Iranian man who understood the values of hygiene, manly competition, and cooperation.