by Simon Kuper
It’s a grand old team to play for,
It’s a grand old team to see,
And if you know your history,
It’s enough to make your heart go oh oh oh
(“And all you’ve got is your history,” the Rangers fans retort.)
Other countries have no history. German fans can hardly reminisce about great matches of the 1930s, not with the old photos showing swastikas and Hitler salutes. In Russia, many clubs changed their names after the Bolshevik revolution, and Stalin once even disbanded CSKA Moscow—by accident, but that is another story. Some countries just have no time for tradition. Ajax, the club with the most glorious past in Holland, is to move to a new stadium outside Amsterdam later in the 1990s, and none of their fans seems to mind. The British bent for the past extends even beyond soccer. Take our Parliament: when the Conservative Party broke its election promise and levied VAT on fuel in 1993, Michael Heseltine pointed out that Harold Wilson had once raised VAT after vowing not to. What happened 30 years ago seemed relevant still, because like Celtic, the Labor Party is a unit with a history. When Labour plays the Tories, their histories play each other too. Margaret Thatcher liked to invoke Winston Churchill; the Tories never tire of discussing 1979; and on the Labor side, Tony Benn and Peter Shore complain that Labor is drifting away from its traditions. When John Motson tells us that “these two sides last met in the Cup in 1954, Rovers winning 1-0 thanks to a 31st minute own goal,” he is making a very British point.
British fans enjoy fan culture, and most of all they enjoy hating their rivals. Celtic and Rangers fans need each other. Perhaps their rivalry is still based on real religious divides in Glasgow, but I question whether these divides alone are strong enough to make the Old Firm such a phenomenon. After all, more than 40 percent of Catholics who marry now marry Protestants. And if Celtic and Rangers really do stand for two poles in the city, then this is not reflected in Glaswegian politics: Celtic and Rangers fans alike vote Labor. Yet perhaps that is because the political divide in Glasgow—Labor, Conservatives and Scottish Nationalists—is a Westminster divide.
Had Labor won the 1992 elections, it would have created a Scottish assembly. Soon, truly Scottish parties would probably have replaced the Labor and Tory Parties. How to know what kind of new parties these would have been? By using the Old Firm rivalry as a guide to feeling, in the West of Scotland at least. By this guide, it would appear that in an independent Scotland, a left wing, republican, Catholic party would oppose a center-left, Unionist, Protestant party.
Unless, that is, the Old Firm rivalry has outlived religious hatred. I suggest that that is the case, and that the Old Firm has survived as a phenomenon because the fans enjoy it so much. They are not about to give up their ancient traditions just because they no longer believe in God.
That day’s Celtic View (known to fans as Pravda) had an Old Firm quiz that started with an easy one: “True or False—it took Rangers nearly five years to beat Celtic for the first time?”
Our end sang for the IRA hunger-striker,Will you swear to bear allegiance to the flag of Ireland
Bobby Sands MP
Bobby Sands MP
Will you swear to bear allegiance to the flag of Ireland?
Will you wear the black beret?
Will you serve the IRA?
If you can,
You’re a man,
BOBBY SANDS!
and, “Get the Brits, get the Brits, get the Brits out NOW!,” and, even more simply, in praise of the IRA, “Ooh aah up the Ra, say ooh aah up the Ra!” That very afternoon, an IRA bomb killed two children in Warrington.
The Rangers fans were singing, Surrender and you’ll die, die, die,
The cry was no surrender,
Surrender and you’ll die, die, die
With heart in hand . . .
We’ll guard old Derry’s walls
and “Nooooo Pope of Rome!”
As for me, I was just freezing. Being a neutral among fanatics is tiring. Had I really left Ulster that morning? Was this really part of the country I lived in?
The Ninety Minutes’ Hate kicked off, and the man leaning into my ear became the ten millionth person in history to shout “Fuck off, you Orange bastards!” during an Old Firm game. Celtic scored, and a few dozen people hurled themselves down the stands at my back while Rangers nearly equalized. As the Celtic board later noted, Rangers kicked off while Celtic players were still celebrating, and Stuart McCall’s shot came just 12 seconds after Celtic’s goal hit the net: the referee’s an Orange bastard. Then Celtic scored again.
The match was poor—Old Firm games tend to be. As the Glaswegian joke goes, “And in the middle of it all, a soccer match breaks out!” Tradition is that Celtic have a more refined style than Rangers, but all I could see was two teams running around much too fast. Half the players are fans in jerseys, and they play in a frenzy of rage. Peter Grant of Celtic is known to Rangers fans as “Rasputin,” “The Mad Monk,” or “The Mad Priest,” and according to Gary Lineker, Terry Butcher used to sing Rangers songs in the England changing room.
The match ended at last, Celtic winning 2-1, though since Hateley had scored the Rangers goal many would consider it 2-0. I returned my scarf to D.J., turned left into the London Road and realized my mistake. No one else was coming my way, and Rangers fans were walking down the road towards me: on Old Firm days, the fans of the two clubs use separate routes. The first few fans to pass gave me uncharitable glances, and then one man carrying a banner threw me a fake head butt (a “Glaswegian kiss”) as he went by. I say it was fake, but I only knew that when his nose stopped moving an inch from mine. I pretended not to notice and walked on.
My room in the B & B was freezing, so I went to write up my notes in the TV room, where the temperature was nearly bearable as long as you wore two coats. Two men, one wearing a ponytail, the other a military moustache, were drinking whisky from bottles. They offered me some. I refused. The ponytailed one pulled a newspaper clipping from his coat and handed it to me.
The story—from the Sun, and about a year old—certified that he had been arrested for driving a horse and carriage down a highway. The man’s picture beamed from the page. “That’s what I do,” he told me. “I’m a gypsy.” Every few seconds he would repeat the offer of whisky, and each time I would refuse. I asked the man with the military moustache what he did. “Ask me! I’m his boss,” the man with the ponytail said. The man with the moustache was silent. “What does he do?” I asked. “He works for me.” I asked them who they supported, Rangers or Celtic, but they said they didn’t care.
By now my temperance was offending the man with the ponytail, and he said that he was going to break the whisky bottle over my head. I got up to leave. He looked at me and said, with disdain: “You’re ignorant, do you know that? You’re an ignorant cunt.” I went to bed.
CHAPTER 19
FROM BOSTON TO BANGLADESH: AT THE 1994 WORLD CUP
MY JOB AT THE World Cup was identifying players for American TV. I sat in the commentary box for the Boston matches and when a player scored, or otherwise attracted notice, I had to say who he was. The technical people then flashed his name up on screen.
Five minutes into my first game, Argentina vs. Greece, a big, dark haired, rather Argentine-looking Argentinian collapsed in midfield. “Tell me who it is, brother!” the assistant producer demanded over the headphones.
I had no idea. “Balbo, number 15,” I said. And as the name “Balbo” appeared on screen, clarifying matters for millions of Americans, the player stood up. It was Chamot.
“You cannot do this to me, brother!,” came the voice over the headphones, and foreign journalists wrote more articles about know-nothing Americans. I spent most games wishing they were over.
So I visited the Nigerian training camp to find out what the players looked like. Emmanuel Amunike was little, Peter Rufai was easy to spot because he always wore a keeper’s jersey during matches, and Daniel Amokachi had a strangely shaped head.
“No,” said Amokachi, and pointed at his Nigerian teammate Sunday Oliseh. “He’s Daniel Amokachi.” The woman went off to tug at Oliseh’s shirt and Amokachi returned to his room.
I sympathized with him. Every newspaper in Italy had to fill ten pages a day on the upcoming game against Nigeria. Most of the paparazzi were sticking with Arrigo Sacchi’s team in New Jersey, where they could ask players things like, “Who is better, Signori or Yekini?” (the answer went, “Signori is a great player, and Yekini is a great player too.”), but a few dozen had come to the Holiday Inn near Boston where the Nigerians were staying. Every journalist had to produce a world exclusive every day. The woman who had addressed Amokachi wanted to know whether the Nigerian players roomed together. They did. And (this with raised eyebrows) did they enjoy it?
Worried that I would not be able to identify the South Korean players, I visited their camp too. It was an hour outside Boston, in a small town called Boxborough, where England had stayed before losing to the U.S. the year before. The South Koreans were bored witless. When I arrived with a Boston journalist named Frank, we were the first foreigners to drop by and were given an interview with the South Korean manager, Kim Ho, in the hotel bar. Players and journalists crowded round, and the next day our photos were all over the Seoul newspapers.
The Greek journalists had to cover a terrible team. At practices, an outfield player stood in goal while others blammed shots over the bar. Then they would form pairs and pass the ball over each other’s heads or into the bushes. Soon the Greek papers were printing photos of Athenians in bars making obscene gestures at TV sets. The players complained that the coach, Alkis Panagoulias, a Greek American, made them travel to receptions all the time to meet other Greek Americans. Panagoulias replied that the World Cup was about culture, too.
The foreign journalists got most of their stories on Greece from Minas Hantzidis, a midfield player and the only man in the squad who spoke English. It was astonishing to see how often he was profiled.
For Argentina, Maradona was in a great mood. He spent most practice sessions hanging around the touchline, granting audiences and bantering with three old men in the stands dressed in togas. They hosted the Argentine version of Fantasy Soccer League.
Later, when he was banned, 20,000 Bangladeshis marched through Dhaka chanting, “Dhaka will burn unless Maradona is allowed to play.” Few people threatened to burn down London’s West End for him. Maradona, the little man, friend of Fidel Castro, conqueror of England, appeals more to poor nations than to rich ones.
But in those days before ephedrine, all ran as smoothly as if Maradona were a relatively normal human being. An Argentine radio journalist named Roberto, who had come to Boston a month before the World Cup just to be prepared, complained to me: “Nothing ever goes wrong in America. The organization is perfect. I prefer England, which is more like Argentina.”
Not totally like. “The year after the Malvinas War British journalists voted Maradona the best player in the world,” he said. “That’s the difference. Argentine journalists would never have done that.”
Roberto also told a story about Antonio Rattin, the Argentine captain sent off against England in the 1966 World Cup. Rattin, said Roberto, had been arguing with the referee, holding his arm across his chest and pointing at his captain’s armband to indicate his right to talk. But the referee, thinking Rattin was making a “short arm” at him, sent him off.
Many of the American journalists knew everything about soccer. They had spent years telling their sports editors how important the World Cup was, pronouncing it “World Cup” as if to emphasise its significance. Their sports editors just didn’t understand them. One Boston journalist told me he was descended from the great Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman. This man, who owned 0.3 percent of the shares in Charlton Athletic, talked about the state of the Albion Rovers ground, and was an expert on the Taylor Report. I avoided him whenever possible.
I met a Mexican who hoped Americans would go back to ignoring soccer. “Whenever the Americans like something, they take it over,” he explained. In fact, the World Cup conquered the USA rather than vice versa. People stopped thinking soccer was posh and boring, even though George Bush went to the matches in Boston. The murder of Andres Escobar, the Colombian who scored an own goal, helped persuade Americans that this thing really mattered—this was the World Cup. In Britain, I was often told, fans care so much they even kill each other.
The more desolate the country, the more the World Cup mattered. The competition changed little in Norway or Switzerland, but in Rwanda it briefly stopped the killing. Rwandans of all tribes supported Nigeria, and during the World Cup whole armies powered up generators and clustered around TV sets.
However, the World Cup always inflames conflict and causes more deaths than goals. In Ulster only Catholics supported Ireland. On June 18, Protestant gunmen stormed into a Catholic pub in the village of Loughinisland, where the patrons were watching the Republic beat Italy, and shot dead six Catholics.
When the Irish lost their second game, to Mexico, the text “Viva Mexico” appeared on a wall off the Shankill. And when they drew their third game, against Norway, to reach the second round, young Catholics in West Belfast chanted at British Army patrols, “It’ll shut the Brits up when we win the Cup.”
At the Shorts aircraft factory in Belfast, a Catholic was suspended for wearing an Ireland shirt to work. Shorts said it was trying to create a neutral workplace. Elsewhere in Ulster, Protestants wore Glasgow Rangers shirts to work when Ireland were playing.
In South America, three presidents went on TV to criticize their teams’ lineups. “Perhaps if we had strengthened the attack after Luis Garcia was sent off, we would have had more opportunities,” commented the Mexican president, Salinas, after his team were knocked out by Bulgaria.
President Menem of Argentina offered views too, but though he was in Boston, he watched Argentina’s matches on TV in his hotel suite. Famously, he had attended Argentina’s 0-5 defeat to Colombia in 1993. “If I get to Boston and we lose, I will get the blame,” a senior diplomat quoted the president as saying.
The Bolivian president did watch his team live. Asked whether he shouldn’t be attending to domestic priorities, the answer came: “In Bolivia, the World Cup is the top domestic priority.”
The Brazilian president, Itamar Franco, went on TV during the tournament to beg his coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira, to pick the 17-year-old striker Ronaldo. Parreira paid no attention. Franco cared. Presidential elections, due in October, set his finance minister, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, against the radical socialist “Lula.”
A quarter of all Brazilians said they would decide who to vote for only after they knew who had won the World Cup. No Brazilian does anything until Brazil is knocked out, and each competition costs the country more than £2 billion in lost production.
What would sway the floating voters? A London stockbroker specializing in Latin American markets explained: “The feeling is that if Brazil wins, people would think things in the country are not so bad after all, and that would benefit Fernando Henrique.”
Brazil won, and so did Cardoso, who made Pelé his sports minister. Romario, who scored five times for Brazil, had supported “Lula.”
On the streets of Haiti, the way to get applauded was to wear a Brazilian soccer shirt. Haiti missed the World Cup—they were kept out by Bermuda—so the whole country supported Brazil.
Meanwhile the Americans were trying to force Haiti’s ruling junta to step down. President Clinton considered sending in the army, but first he tried imposing economic sanctions. TV-watching Haitians ignored these. Indeed, everyone was so busy that talks between the generals and the opposition could not take place. At match halftimes the junta broadcast bloody videos of the U.S. invasion of Panama, with texts like “No to Intervention” superimposed. The Americans did
nothing.
When Rumania beat Argentina, Rumanians of all ethnic groups embraced. President Iliescu said the team, led by the ethnic Macedonian Gheorge Hagi, had created a “national consensus.” That was before the ethnic Serb Belodedici missed the deciding penalty in the quarter-final against Sweden.
This book argues that soccer affects politics, and that it always has. Yet it makes sense to think that the World Cup matters more today than it did even in 1990.
For a start, there are far more TV sets in the world now than there were then. The average human (a Chinese peasant, John Travolta, Essex Man) watched six World Cup matches in 1994. In 1950, Britain learned by telegram that the USA had beaten England in Belo Horizonte. Few telegrams send thousands of people out onto the street. Haitians, Rwandans and Bangladeshis saw the games on TV in 1994.
Thanks to TV, the World Cup is the best way we have of ranking the nations of the world. Many people understand life as a constant struggle for status between 200-odd nations. That is how they read the Gulf War (Americans annihilate Arabs in longstanding grudge match), the Maastricht Treaty talks (“Game, set and match to Britain,” said John Major), or international trade (Japan beats America, again and again). But the World Cup is the ideal stage. It is hard to compare GDPs in a way that is quite as visually appealing, and in the World Cup the USA does not dominate and little countries have a chance.
For Rumania, the World Cup meant sudden status. To prove it, Rumanian newspapers reprinted stories about the team that had appeared abroad.
“In the World Cup, all we lost is two games. We didn’t lose our national honor,” a Colombian state governor tried to argue. But he was standing beside Andres Escobar’s coffin. In the World Cup you do lose your national honor. The soccer team is the nation. “Mexico always attacks. That’s what Mexico is,” said the Mexican goalkeeper Jorge Campos.