How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

  He became an enthusiastic proponent of physical education, a bow in the direction of German gymnastics, HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

  which he encoded in school curricula. Soccer soon became the regime’s activity of choice. Reza Shah ordered the armed forces to play matches, even in the provinces, where European shoes hadn’t yet made an appearance. “By the mid-1920s,” as the incisive historian Houchang Chehabi has put it, “football had become a symbol of modernization, and soon the game was promoted at the highest levels of the state.”

  Just like Reza Shah himself, soccer owed its initial strength to the British. The Iranian elite had learned the game in missionary schools run by foreigners. And the Iranian masses learned the game by standing on the touchline and watching employees of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The idea of modernization in general, and soccer in particular, represented a shock to the Islamic system. Even though Reza Shah suppressed the clerics, they still waged a quiet resistance. In the villages, mullahs ordered the stone pelting of Iranian soccer players. By playing in British uniforms, the Iranians had slipped into shorts and out of compliance with shari’a, which dictates that men cover their legs from the navel to the knees.

  But the old ways didn’t stand a chance against the might of the modernizers, backed by the powerful state. Reza Shah’s regime seized lands from mosques and converted them into football fields. Over time the state’s enthusiasm for the game grew even greater.

  Where Reza Shah embraced the game for largely theo-retical reasons, his son adored it with the passion of a purist. The crown prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi played it at the Rosey School in Switzerland. Returning home in 1936, he lined up as a striker for the oªcers’ school he attended. When the British forced Reza Shah to abdicate the peacock throne to his young son in 1941, after he stupidly made himself cozy with the Nazis, they enthroned the biggest football fanatic in the land.

  Even though Iran was far from both the Asian and European fronts, the Pahlavi push toward modernity su¤ered a major setback with the economic disloca-tions of World War II. In the country’s weakened condition, foreign influences—still the British and increasingly the American—became as pronounced as ever, culminating in the CIA-led coup that ousted the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. In the cities, both the socialist intelligentsia and traditional clerics began to assert themselves. Important matters of state weighed on the new shah’s mind. Nevertheless, as a devoted fan, he couldn’t tolerate losses that the Iranian national team su¤ered in the 1950s. He began devoting resources to the creation of a great team.

  In the second decade of his rule, the hard work paid o¤. As part of the regime’s continued program of hyperkinetic growth and modernization, the newly industrialized cities filled with millions of migrants from the provinces. These arrivals, for the first time enjoying a respite from the 24/7 grind of agriculture, began to fill their leisure time with soccer. The newly urbanized who couldn’t wrangle tickets to the stadium watched soccer on television—a medium that became increasingly mass in the late sixties. But the popularity of the sport rests largely on a single match played against Israel in the wake of the 1967 war. Unlike the rest of the Muslim world, the Iranians had a quiet HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

  alliance with the Jewish state that withstood the tumult of the late sixties. (Israel has often had great success cultivating non-Arab allies on the fringes of the Muslim world.) Because of this alliance, Iranians didn’t join with the other Muslim states, which had refused to even take the athletic field with Israelis.

  The game was played as part of the quadrennial Asian Nations Cup. While the regime kept up relations with Israel, the Iranian people weren’t entirely on the same page. Earlier in the tournament, when Israel played Hong Kong, Iranians pelted Jewish supporters with bottles. As Houchang Chehabi has reported, the game with Israel was a case study in ugliness. Fans released balloons covered in swastikas. They chanted,

  “Goal number two is in the net—a score. Moshe

  Dayan’s poor ass is ripped and sore.”

  Many theories explain the logic behind the shah’s decision to permit this contest to go forward. Many Iranians persuasively argue that the shah organized the match to harmlessly divert anti-Israeli sentiment. Others contend that the Israelis threw the match, 2–1, to buck up their friend, the shah. Whatever the shah’s rationale, Iran’s victory acquired a mythic significance.

  Pop singers enshrined it in song. Players became national icons, whose jukes and crosses were recreated by children in thousands of rag-ball street games.

  If the regime had subtly used the game against Israel to bolster itself, its exploitation was more obvious in the years that followed. The game boomed in the seventies, with intense club rivalries forming. Members of the royal family glommed onto the newfangled popularity and began publicly rooting for the club Taj (Crown). To cover the monarchy’s bases, the shah’s wife pulled for Taj’s great rival, Persepolis. With the monarchy so closely identified with soccer, the regime’s Islamist opponents inevitably targeted it, often disrupting games to stage their protests.

  The shah’s regime had many faults, especially handling its opponents with undeniable brutality. But its greatest shortcoming, the one that did it in, was the shah’s modernization program. He pushed the country too hard, too fast, to become urban and industrial. Centuries of Persian life were uprooted and overhauled in the course of a generation of fevered transformation.

  When the revolutionaries ousted the shah in 1979, however, they tried hard to reverse the sporting symbol of this modernization program. They appropriated the soccer field at Tehran University, reversing the seizures made by Reza Shah, and used it as a staging ground for Friday prayers. They nationalized the soccer clubs, changing Taj into Esteghlal (Independence) and Persepolis into Piroozi (Victory). In their papers and pam-phlets, the ascetic puritans made it clear that they considered soccer to be a debased calling. A typical revolutionary fulmination read: “Would it not have been better if instead of clowning around like the British and the Americans in order to ‘shine’ in international arenas, [the players] shone in the company of the brothers of the . . . jihad in our villages, where the simplest amenities are lacking? Have all our political, economic, and cultural problems been solved that we have turned to sport?” HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

  IV.

  In a very brief period, the Islamic regime managed to virtually eliminate Iranian pop culture, purging the divas and crooners, rejecting any movie that showed excessive flesh. But when this clampdown extended to soccer, the regime’s position became untenable. It put the new government in direct opposition to a great passion of the Iranian people. And very quickly, the mullahs realized that eradicating soccer wasn’t worth the political price. Since the clerics couldn’t ruin soccer, they did the next best thing. They tried to co-opt it and milk the game for all its worth. For a time, agents of the regime infiltrated crowds of fans and attempted to lead chants praising Allah. The regime also experimented with plastering its slogans on the placards that surround the pitch. Instead of flogging Toshiba and Coke, the boards screamed, “Down with the USA” and “Israel must be destroyed.”

  But the government probably didn’t ever seriously imagine that these political messages could break through—even subliminally—to transfixed fans. In fact, the crowds did something close to the opposite of shaking their fists and yelping Islamic chants. They laughed the religious cheerleaders out of the stadium.

  An unequivocal message to get the mosque out of the sport that the state ultimately heard. The regime stopped shoveling agitprop into soccer. It began to chart a more realistic course with a focus on cutting its losses and limiting the un-Islamic influences that might accompany the game. In this, it has been extraordinar-ily savvy. For some games, it insists on a slight delay in the broadcast, so that the censors have time to weed out the crowd’s foul language or political messages that might be overheard on television. For other
games, it electronically softens fan noise to a barely audible din.

  During the 1998 World Cup, the Iranian government lived in dread of its exiled opponents, especially a group of quasi-Marxists called the People’s Mujahideen, who filled the stadiums in France, bringing along banners and carefully preparing chants. To avoid transmitting their embarrassingly subversive messages, Iranian television didn’t shoot any footage of the actual crowd.

  Instead, it edited in stock images, and not terribly convincing ones. The televised crowds were bundled in heavy winter coats, hardly attire suited to France in June.

  So what does the regime fear from soccer? In a poignantly comic scene in the filmmaker Abbas

  Kiarostami’s Life Goes On, set in the wake of an enormous earthquake, men struggle to adjust an antenna to receive a match between Austria and Scotland. These aren’t, it should be noted, giants of contemporary soccer. But that’s beside the point. Iranians crave international soccer because the game links them to the advanced, capitalist, un-Islamic West. When they broadcast games from the World Cup, they can’t avoid seeing the placards on the side of the pitch that advertise PlayStation, Doritos, and Nike, a way of life that Iranians are forbidden to join. Conservatives understand this connection. In their papers, photo editors blot out the advertising that graces the chests of Western jerseys.

  But again, there’s only so much damage control that the conservatives can do. They can blot out the ads but HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

  not the players themselves. Any photo of David Beckham, for example, with his protean hair always shifting from buzz to mohawk to ponytail, represents an idea of freedom. It’s an idea that Iranian players have picked up on. Almost to a man, the national team plays without beards and with carefully coifed hair. They are heartthrobs, and many of them have gone on to careers in Germany, England, Singapore, and other outposts of the global economy. They couldn’t be more di¤erent from the ideal of pious Iranian masculinity that the clerics in the holy city of Qum would like to project.

  The 1997 presidential election featured the great white hope, the cleric and intellectual Mohammad Khatami.

  In his writings, he’d argued the compatibility of Islam and liberalism. His supporters daydreamed aloud that his election would usher in a new era of democracy, civil society, free speech, and greater rights for women.

  While the hopes of so many rested on Khatami, most Iranians didn’t allow themselves too much optimism.

  Khatami was the overwhelming underdog in the race.

  His opponent Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, also a cleric, came with the blessings of the nation’s top mullah, Ayatollah Khameni, and represented the forces of establishment conservatism. And in Iran, the clerics can, almost at will, bring down their strong arm, using militias to force their way.

  Khatami articulated bits and pieces of a more liberal agenda. But Iranian political discourse is hardly a model marketplace of ideas. Certain thoughts can’t be shouted. They need to be conveyed with subtext and symbols, like the athletes surrounding a candidate.

  Among Iranian leisure games and activities, the most ancient and venerated is the zurkhaneh, the strong house. More precisely, the zurkhaneh isn’t a sport but a gymnasium where sport takes place—

  indigenous games that involve the hoisting of heavy objects and other displays of brute strength that bear resemblance to wrestling and weightlifting. The rituals of the zurkhaneh are carefully prescribed. Moves begin with praise of the prophet’s family. Because of these Islamic roots, Iranian conservatives have an unsurprising aªnity for the zurkhaneh. Their newspapers devote heaps of coverage to the sport—and basically ignore soccer. In his campaign, Nateq-Nouri stumped with wrestling champions and let his devotion to the sport be widely known.

  Unwittingly, Nateq-Nouri had turned himself into Khatami’s perfect foil. Without having to utter too many words about democracy or the West, Khatami could prove himself to the reform-starved Iranians by aligning himself with the soccer stadium. Khatami surrounded himself with famous players, who endorsed him. There’s no way to gauge the full e¤ect of this strategy. But the logic is clear enough. The burgeoning youth population of Iran looked West and toward soccer for inspiration. In their eyes, the alliance with soccer indicated where Khatami’s feelings truly rested. In the end, Khatami surprised the public and took the presidency.

  But winning the presidency and satisfying the high hopes of your supporters are two di¤erent matters.

  Unfortunately, Khatami could never fulfill the dreams of young, secularly inclined Iranians, because he was HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

  never the creature they imagined. He was an intellectual without the courage or power to fully challenge the ruling clerics. More important, he was a traditional cleric himself.

  For the past three years, from time to time, discontent with Khatami has emerged from its subterranean home. Many of these occasions of dissent have followed World Cup–related matches. As always, the regime has tried to preempt these eruptions with token gestures.

  After a vital qualifier for the 2002 World Cup, the government baked a cake with 12,000 eggs, which it delivered across Tehran in refrigerated trucks. But sweets weren’t enough to restore the faith of youth. They have begun to seek out an alternative to both mullahs and reformist mullahs like Khatami. So far, the alternative hasn’t taken a clear shape, but there are signs of direction. There’s considerable nostalgia among youth for the days of the shah, even if they themselves never lived through them. Bootleg tapes of pop stars from the past have circulated widely; the necktie has been in resur-gence. It’s the same impulse behind the football revolutionaries shouting the name of the shah’s son.

  What should the West make of the football revolution? It’s plausible that it represents the inevitable challenge that globalization poses to Islam. But that can’t be the whole story. Soccer thrives in much of the Muslim world without counteracting radicalism.

  Hezbollah sponsors a soccer team in Lebanon and has in the past bought broadcasting rights to the Asian Nations’ Cup for its radio network. The

  Wahabi-oriented Gulf States have imported aging Western stars for one last paycheck to play in their leagues. They have built princely arenas with marble and gold leaf, like the awesome, Bedouin-inspired King Fadh International Stadium in Riyadh.

  What makes the football revolution di¤erent is that it has tapped into nationalist fervor and turned it against the state. As great as the Iranian commitment to Islam is the Iranian commitment to Iran—the two haven’t always been one and the same. There’s a recent history of secular nationalism that serves as an alternative. It might not be the optimal alternative, but for now it will have to do. d

  H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

  t h e A m e r i c a n C u l t u re Wa r s

  I.

  My soccer career began in 1982, at the age of eight.

  This was an entirely di¤erent moment in the history of American soccer, well before the youth game acquired its current, highly evolved infrastructure. Our teams didn’t have names. We had jersey colors that we used to refer to ourselves: “Go Maroon!” Our coach, a bearded German named Gunther, would bark at us in continental nomenclature that didn’t quite translate into English. Urging me to stop a ball with my upper body, he would cry out, “Use your breasts, Frankie!”

  That I should end up a soccer player defied the time-tested laws of sporting heredity. For generations, fathers bequeathed their sporting loves unto their sons. My father, like most men of his baby boom age, had grown up madly devoted to baseball. Why didn’t my dad adhere to the practice of handing his game to his son? The answer has to do with the times and the class to which my parents belonged, by which I mean, they were children of the sixties and we lived in the yuppie confines of Upper Northwest Washington, D.C., a dense aggregation of Ivy League lawyers with aggressively liberal politics and exceptionally protective parenting styles. Nearly everyone in our family’s social set signed up their children to play soc
cer. It was the fashionable thing to do. On Monday mornings, at school, we’d each walk around in the same cheaply made pair of white shorts with the logo of our league, Montgomery Soccer Inc.

  Steering your child into soccer may have been fashionable, but it wasn’t a decision to be made lightly.

  When my father played sandlot baseball, he could walk three blocks to his neighborhood diamond. With soccer, this simply wasn’t possible. At this early moment in the youth soccer boom, the city of Washington didn’t have any of its own leagues. My parents would load up our silver Honda Accord and drive me to fields deep in sub-urban Maryland, 40-minute drives made weekly across a landscape of oversized hardware stores and newly minted real estate developments. In part, these drives would take so long because my parents would circle, hopelessly lost, through neighborhoods they had never before visited and would likely never see again.

  As I later discovered, my parents made this sacrifice of their leisure time because they believed that soccer could be transformational. I su¤ered from a painful, rather extreme case of shyness. I’m told that it extended beyond mere clinging to my mother’s leg. On the sidelines at halftime, I would sit quietly on the edge of the HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE AMERICAN CULTURE WARS

  other kids’ conversations, never really interjecting myself. My parents had hoped that the game might necessitate my becoming more aggressive, a breaking through of inhibitions.

  The idea that soccer could alleviate shyness was not an idiosyncratic parenting theory. It tapped into the conventional wisdom among yuppie parents. Soccer’s appeal lay in its opposition to the other popular sports.

  For children of the sixties, there was something abhor-rent about enrolling kids in American football, a game where violence wasn’t just incidental but inherent.

  They didn’t want to teach the acceptability of violence, let alone subject their precious children to the risk of physical maiming. Baseball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters. Basketball, before Larry Bird’s prime, still had the taint of the ghetto.