Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  Then, suddenly, Tudjman asked: “Where is Ciro?”—his pet name for Blazevic. “And suddenly,” Blazevic recounts, “everyone smiled and started waving at me to sit next to them.”

  Now Blazevic and Tudjman are best friends again, despite Blazevic’s brief embroilment in the Bernard Tapie bribery saga in France. When a Croatian newspaper recently pressed him on the affair, Blazevic began by arguing that he was honest. Then he switched tack, and asked: “Is there any soccer player in the world who has not received money in an illegal way?” And then he began to impress on the magazine how close he was to Tudjman. Before a recent game against Estonia, he said, Tudjman had predicted that Croatia would win 6-1. With 15 minutes to play the score indeed reached 6-1. Blazevic shouted to Boban, the captain: “Stop! Do not score anymore.” Sadly, Davor Suker had made it 7-1.

  Blazevic was very happy when I met him. He told me that hours before, England had agreed to play his team in a friendly at Wembley. This had eased the slight that the English had delivered by refusing to play Croatia in September 1995. That was just after Croatian troops had invaded the Krajina, the quarter of the country where Serbs lived, and had driven people from their homes and worse. The British Ambassador in Zagreb had to appear on Croatian television to say that the FA’s decision to ban the game had had nothing to do with him. The Croats knew why the English refused to play: Britons and Serbs are best friends, and Terry Venables knew that England would lose against Croatia.

  The day after Croatia drew against Italy, at a celebratory breakfast, Tudjman had still been talking about the banned match. “It would be very important for Croatia to play at Wembley,” he is reported to have said. “But never beg anybody for anything. Let England invite us again!”

  Playing in England means something special to Croats. People in Zagreb are keen to let you know that they are not part of the Balkans. They say that Serbia is a crude, Balkan state where people use the Cyrillic alphabet and gouge each other’s eyes out and drink too much, while Croatia is a sophisticated, western country very like Sweden or Holland. “We don’t belong anymore to this part of the world. We are in Europe,” I was told by a man named Zajec, a Croat who had captained Yugoslavia in the 1980s.

  In fact, of course, Croatia is a mix of “Europe” and the Balkans. The streets are clean and no one talks to anyone else in the trams, but cafes and nightclubs have signs saying “No guns please,” the drinks list on menus is always several times longer than the list of dishes, and there is the little matter of the torture camps in which Croats held Bosnian Moslims. “The others had camps as well,” counters Tudjman.

  So, Croatia desperately wants to be accepted by the West, and there are few stronger symbols of Western Europe than Wembley. The stadium stands for the old, unchanging Europe. For Croatia, playing at Wembley is almost as if Tudjman were asked to address the House of Commons. To play at Wembley is to be accepted.

  Darko and Neno were coming to the European Championships, to watch Croatia and stay with their friends at Chelsea and Sheffield United. They came in peace, they said, however, “If you say fuck off, sure thing I will kick you in the head.”

  CHAPTER 21

  GLOBAL GAME, GLOBAL JIHAD

  IN EARLY 1994, OSAMA bin Laden spent three months in London, where he visited supporters and bankers and went to watch Arsenal play four times. Before returning to Sudan a step ahead of being extradited to Saudi Arabia, he bought his sons gifts from the club’s souvenir shop.

  Bin Laden had been steeped in soccer for most of his life. In fact, it was the game that first drew him toward fundamentalism: as a teenager in the Saudi Arabian town of Jedda, Bin Laden was one of a group of boys persuaded by a Syrian gym teacher to stay after school in the afternoons, on the promise that they could play soccer. The Syrian then educated them in a violent brand of Islam, as Steve Coll reported in the New Yorker in December 2005.

  Bin Laden’s affection for the game did not stop him from getting involved in a plot to massacre the American and British teams at the World Cup of 1998; still, after his visit to London, he told friends he had never seen passion like that of soccer fans.

  Possibly nowhere else does soccer have more importance today than in the Middle East and North Africa. To the region’s terrorists, the game must seem the perfect entertainment: a traditionally masculine and sexless passion with a global reach, often contested between opposing tribes. The local dictators—a dying breed elsewhere in the world—use soccer for prestige. And to find dissent in these dictatorships, go to the stadium.

  One reason soccer matters so much in this part of the world is that there are few other entertainments going. There’s a joke told about various of the region’s capitals, which has a foreign visitor getting into a taxi. “Listen,” whispers the taxi driver, “do you want to go to a place where you can have some fun?” “Yes,” says the foreigner. “And where you can get a drink?” “Yes,” says the foreigner. “And where there are women?” “Yes!” says the foreigner. “There isn’t one,” says the driver.

  For a young man in the Middle East, obliged to spend his leisure time hanging around with other young men, soccer is often the only recreation. That’s why in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, games between the two biggest clubs draw crowds of 100,000—more than anywhere in Europe except occasionally at Barcelona or Real Madrid. All this passion hasn’t made the region any good at soccer. If you inhibit most exchange with the West—if your best players don’t join European clubs, or watch European soccer on TV, or play against European teams—bad soccer is the almost inevitable result. Yet the game does help us understand this secretive region. In societies like Libya, Iran, and previously in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where there is no free press, no legal dissent, and hardly any foreign journalists, soccer can reveal the undercurrents.

  Iraq. When the Finnish translator of this book visited Iraq as a journalist in 2002, several months before the U.S. invaded, he was surprised to find himself constantly engaged by Iraqi men in erudite debate about European soccer. Didn’t he agree, for instance, that Luis Figo was not playing quite as well for Real Madrid as he had for Barcelona?

  My friend discovered that Iraqis watched oodles of European soccer on both satellite and state television. Many of them walked around in the club stripes of Manchester United, Juventus, or Real Madrid, or at least pirated versions bought in Baghdad markets. He was delighted with the almost perfectly authentic-looking Arsenal strip he got for just $10.

  Going to a match, he was surprised to find that the soccer was excellent too. This was partly because, as President Bush used to complain, the sanctions against Iraq were not watertight. The country had sent four athletes to the Olympics of 2000, while the national soccer team happily played in international competitions, in 2002 winning the West Asian Soccer Championship in Syria. It had prepared for that with a training camp in Italy.

  Even while waiting for the Americans to invade, fans were preoccupied by Iraq’s soccer league and the Mother of All Battles Cup. In fact, then probably more than ever: the soccer stadium was a good place briefly to forget that your relatives might soon be tortured in one of Saddam’s gulags, or your country razed by American bombs. So trying to forget politics for a couple of hours, Iraqis went to cheer on the Police Club or the Air Force Club or the Anti-Aircraft Club.

  Saddam’s family liked sport. Each April, to celebrate Saddam’s birthday, Baghdad hosted the Saddam Olympics. You won’t have caught these on Fox Sports, but in their final incarnation in 2002, with Baghdad’s Russian-Iraqi Friendship Society as sponsor, they attracted athletes from seventy-two countries. Perhaps inspired by this, Saddam’s Iraq was bidding to host the 2012 Olympics. The plan was to build a 100,000-seat stadium in Baghdad that would meet all international standards, and include a sealed-off VIP area for Saddam and his entourage. Who knows whether London would be hosting the Games if Saddam had been free to lobby IOC members?

  However, the president mostly left sport to his son Uday. A mix of playboy and torturer, pa
ralyzed from the waist down in an assassination attempt in 1996, Uday has no equivalent in the sport of any other country. He ran Iraq’s soccer federation, its Olympic Committee, and also a prison in the National Olympic Committee building, where athletes were tortured if they underperformed. Many Iraqi athletes quit sport out of fear. One member of the national soccer team in the Uday era reported being beaten on the soles of his feet, dragged on his bare back through gravel, and then put in a sewage tank so that his wounds would be infected. Other defectors told similar stories. Issam Thamer al-Diwan, a former Iraqi volleyball player who now lives in the U.S., told Sports Illustrated that he carried a list of fifty-two athletes he says were murdered by Saddam’s family.

  FIFA sent a committee to Iraq to investigate the claims of torture. The Iraqis produced players and coaches who swore blind it was all lies. FIFA swallowed this, and so Saddam’s Iraq was allowed to play international soccer. American soldiers killed Uday and his brother Qusay in July 2003, after a tipster betrayed their hideout.

  Libya. In Libya, Colonel Qaddafi used to be wary of sport. He devoted the last chapter of his Little Green Book, the Qaddafi answer to Mao’s Little Red Book, to an attack on spectator sports. “It is stupid for crowds to enter a restaurant just to look at a person or a groups of persons eating,” he wrote. “The same holds true of the crowds which fail to practise sport themselves because of their ignorance.”

  The colonel had reason to be wary. Libya is the epitome of the country where the only haven of free speech is the soccer stadium. “The last display of public discontent and resentment towards the [Libyan] government,” reported the U.S. State Department in 1999, “occurred when a riot broke out over a penalty called at a soccer match in Tripoli on July 9, 1996. The rare instance of public unrest began when a contentious goal was scored by a team that Qaddafi’s sons supported and the referee called the play in their favor.”

  Fans started chanting anti-Qaddafi slogans, whereupon the ruler’s sons and their bodyguards began shooting (some say at each other). Spectators stampeded onto the streets, where they stoned cars and continued to chant against Qaddafi. The government later admitted that eight people had died, but others spoke of up to fifty deaths. The most extraordinary thing was that because all this occurred at a big soccer match, it was shown live on TV. For the first time Libyans could see that dissent existed. A Spanish woman who worked in Tripoli at the time told me that after that game, people suddenly began approaching her with complaints about the regime.

  It was only later, though, that soccer in Libya acquired a political piquancy it possesses nowhere else. Around the turn of the millennium, the colonel’s son Saidi decided he wanted to play for the national team. At the time he did not even play for a club—as he was chairman of the Libyan soccer association, that would have broken Libya’s strict ethics codes—and so he hired a private Dutch trainer.

  Saidi pumped much of Libya’s oil money into soccer. Stadiums shot out of the sand like oil. On the advice of Saidi’s friend and mentor Diego Maradona, Carlos Bilardo, who had coached Argentina to the World Cup of 1986, came to manage the national team. The disgraced Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson (apparently the world’s worst soccer player) became the team’s athletics coach.

  Later, when Saidi did join a Libyan club, the odd hilarious video would emerge of opposing defenders running away from the ball to let him shoot. Meanwhile, the stadium during his team’s matches became the one place where people could mock a symbol of the Qaddafis. When a donkey wearing a team shirt with the No. 10 was kicked onto the pitch during one game, everyone understood that it represented Al Saidi. He must have had some admirers, though: Saidi was named Libyan soccer’s MVP, and became captain of the national team.

  Eventually, like so many great players, he moved to Italy’s Serie A. He began at Perugia, where he appeared in one match, but was soon banned for taking drugs. (Perhaps he had been listening to Maradona and Ben Johnson.) Despite all this, Udinese was delighted to sign him next. As I write, Saidi and his entourage are occupying the finest hotel in Udine (which isn’t saying much for someone used to spending his country’s oil wealth). He has yet to appear in an Udinese game, but all of us who ever dreamed of being a pro know exactly why he is there.

  It’s thought that Saidi pops Udinese the odd few euros, in contravention of the tradition that a club pays its players. But the Italian club that gets most Libyan oil money is Juventus. In 2002 Saidi’s father bought a stake in the great Turin club. Now the Qaddafis are paying $285 million over ten years to advertise Libya’s oil company, Tamoil, on Juve’s shirts. It’s the biggest shirt deal in soccer, even though you wouldn’t have thought an oil producer had much need to reach consumers. The sponsorship may just be Qaddafi megalomania. On the other hand, it may be more thoughtful than that: perhaps the Qaddafis, by entwining themselves with one of Italy’s most popular institutions, hope to have the country’s friendship next time Libya squabbles with the U.S.

  Iran. The game may matter even more in Iran, where at times in recent years observers have spoken of “a soccer revolution.” This began in 1997, when Iran beat Australia to qualify for the 1998 World Cup, and great crowds poured onto the streets. Thousands of women broke into the Azadi stadium to join the celebrations, with some removing their veils. (Few countries seem to have as passionate female soccer fans as Iran.) At street parties across the country, men and women danced and kissed, defying government warnings and clerical taboos. It was a popular explosion on a scale not seen even when Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in February 1979.

  At the 1998 World Cup, I saw the Iran-USA game in Lyon. Beforehand, the newspapers had portrayed the match as a clash of two great enemies. The hardline conservative press in Iran had warned the Iranian players not to shake hands with the representatives of the Great Satan.

  In fact, the American and Iranian players showed no great interest in each other. “None of the players is viewing it as anything other than an incredible opportunity to get three points against a team we should beat,” Alexei Lalas, the goateed American defender, assured me when I visited the U.S. team’s chateau before the game.

  And indeed, at the match, the political clash was not between Iranians and Americans at all, but between Iranians and Iranians. Most of the spectators in the ground seemed to be Iranians in exile. They all wore T-shirts showing the face of the female leader of Iran’s mujahedin, an opposition group then based in Iraq. Every time the ball went into the stands, people would stand up holding forward their T-shirts for the world’s cameras to see.

  The only problem was that the cameras didn’t show them. I was sitting in the press stand, with a television on my desk, and could see that whenever the ball went out of play, the surroundings were blacked out. FIFA, which could teach courses on media management to aspiring dictators, had apparently decided to censor anything political. And so the mujahedin’s demonstration never reached the hundreds of millions watching on TV.

  Yet that World Cup introduced many Iranians to soccer. Fandom began to replace cigarette smoking as the iconic image of Western youth culture. A British friend of mine, walking through the Iranian town Isfahan soon after the September 11 attacks, was approached by a student who bombarded him with questions: “You are from England? After Israel and America, you are our biggest enemy. Don’t you think George Bush is the biggest terrorist of all for supporting Israel? Do you think Beckham should play on the right for Manchester United, or in the center?”

  Trying to answer at least the last two questions, my friend said: “Sure. On the right?”

  “What?” said the flabbergasted student. “And Paul Scholes in the center?”

  That fall of 2001, as Iran looked as if it would qualify for the World Cup again, the street parties resumed. Initially the fans just seemed to be expressing nationalism, but in some towns the mood changed. Fans attacked state-owned banks and other public buildings, chanting, “Death to the Mullahs.” There were chants in support of the exiled monarchy. Hund
reds, perhaps thousands of people were arrested over several nights. Eventually Iran had only to beat tiny Bahrain to qualify for the World Cup. The tournament would have brought weeks of street parties and demonstrations. So when Iran lost the game 3-1, rumors abounded in Tehran that the mullahs had pressured the players to lose, in what may be a unique case of a regime wanting its national team to fail. No one knows, but Iran’s forwards appeared so unwilling to try to score that eventually the Iranian television commentator exclaimed, “Why doesn’t someone shoot that ball?” A few thousand people, who believed the government had ordered Iran’s defeat, subsequently clashed with police.

  In November 2001, in a playoff against Ireland, Iran failed in its last attempt to reach the World Cup. Nicola Byrne, an Irish woman who was among the forty or so foreign women admitted to the Azadi stadium by special dispensation of the Iranian authorities, reported in London’s Observer, “Under an enormous mural of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, Iranians ripped out and set fire to seats, tore down banners depicting images of the country’s senior mullahs and trashed the windows of several hundred cars outside.”

  In 2005, when Iran did qualify for the World Cup, many of the team’s victories sparked demonstrations. After the team beat Japan that March, six fans were reported to have been killed, the worst toll yet in Iranian soccer, possibly by police firing at demonstrators after the match.

  A few Iranian women had been allowed to watch the game against Japan. The right of women to watch soccer became an issue in the presidential elections that June. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, trying to woo young people, said he favored permitting it. But he lost the election to an even more conservative man, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.