Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  In fact, Iran’s “soccer revolution,” in each of its incarnations, has changed nothing. This illustrates a greater truth about soccer and politics: the game is a good way of studying what is going on in repressed societies, but it rarely changes these societies.

  Terrorists have long been enchanted by soccer. To them it is often more than just a hobby. The two pursuits have certain similarities. Being a member of a soccer team is a form of male bonding not completely unlike being a member of an Islamic terrorist cell. In both groups, young men tend to develop a sense of “us against the world.” It’s no wonder that the Palestinian soccer team of the Jihad mosque in Hebron doubled as an incubator of suicide bombers: five of its players blew themselves up attacking Israeli targets.

  But the main allure of soccer to terrorists is the game’s global reach. Terrorism is a form of public relations. The aim is to spread the greatest fear with the least effort. To do that, terrorists seek out the most public places and events. That means sport. This is why the Palestinian group “Black September” kidnapped and killed eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972. Thanks to recent improvements in satellite technology, hundreds of millions of people watched the horror live on TV. Terrorists everywhere realized that sport could bring them a big audience.

  Louis Mizell, a former special agent and intelligence officer with the state department, told me in 2005 that he had logged 171 terrorist attacks in sport since Munich. When anti-Castro murderers exploded a plane carrying the Cuban fencing team in 1976, they may not have been thinking chiefly about sport, but later terrorists were. Many atrocities are hardly remembered today: the twenty Philippine soldiers killed in a race in 1987, after terrorists posing as volunteers handed them poisoned water; or the Canadian killed by a booby-trapped softball bat at a tournament in Chile in 1990. Perhaps the worst atrocity was North Korea’s explosion of a South Korean airliner in 1987, which killed all 115 passengers. “The whole plan was to destabilize the 1988 Olympics in Seoul,” says Mizell, who worked on the case. But he adds: “The single sport targeted most is soccer, because it’s the most popular sport in the world.”

  Most terrorists used to be parochial. But in recent years, a new breed has arisen that seeks a global audience. And just as they began to go global, so did soccer. Since the 1990s the game has been conquering the final frontiers: Americans, Japanese, Chinese, women. It has left almost all other sports behind. The World Cup, in particular, has been spread by satellite dishes to the farthest-flung places. Each successive World Cup final becomes the most watched television program in the history of the world.

  The tournament was bound to attract terrorists eventually. On March 3, 1998, seven members of an Algerian terrorist group were arrested in a raid on a house in Belgium. On May 26, European police launched raids on dozens of suspects’ homes. Nearly 100 people in seven countries were taken in for questioning. “It was a matter of urgency,” said a French government spokesman later that day. “Now we can approach the World Cup more serenely.”

  Terrorism was then considered something of a yawn, and the episode was soon forgotten. European police never said much more about it. However, the plot against the World Cup is detailed in the curiously ignored book Terror on the Pitch by Adam Robinson, the pen name of a journalist based in the Middle East. Quoting letters detailing the plot sent by members of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, Robinson says they meant to strike at the England-Tunisia game on June 15, 1998. Why England? Partly because the well-known young players Michael Owen and David Beckham were already in their squad, such an attack would make news.

  The terrorists planned to infiltrate the Marseilles stadium, shoot some England players, blow up others, and throw grenades into the stands. Their colleagues were then to burst into the U.S. team’s hotel and murder players. Others would crash a plane into the nuclear power station near the French town of Poitiers, causing meltdown. The result would have been a European September 11, only worse. It is possible to dismiss this as a terrorist wish list, but we now know that these people aren’t dreamers.

  Many Algerian terrorists had served in Al Qaeda. Bin Laden, writes Robinson, “had funded and helped organize the plan when it was presented to him, and agreed to offer additional funding and arms, in addition to the Algerians sending key personnel for expert training in Al Qaeda camps.”

  One bin Laden biographer, Yossef Bodansky, writes that the plan reactivated “dormant terrorist networks.” He says one reason why Al Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, killing 224 people, was “the failure of the primary operation, an attack on the soccer World Cup.” The chief plotter against the World Cup, Omar Saiki, spent less than two years in jail, after which he requested political asylum in Britain.

  After September 11, 2001, when the world was introduced to bin Laden, Arsenal fans coined a new chant:He’s hiding near Kabul

  He loves the Arsenal

  Osama

  Oh oh oh oh

  Soon after that, bin Laden showed that he and his followers still retained a soccer fan’s view of the world. In December 2001, the U.S. Department of Defense released a videotape of him reminiscing about the September 11 attacks. On it, bin Laden recalls a follower telling him a year earlier: “I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots!” In the dream, the Al Qaeda pilots won the game.

  On the same tape, another Al Qaeda member recounts watching a television broadcast of the attacks on the World Trade Center. “The scene was showing an Egyptian family sitting in their living room. They exploded with joy. Do you know when there is a soccer game and your team wins? It was the same expression of joy.” The Manichean worldview of the terrorist had met the Manichean worldview of the soccer fan. This, as much as anything I had seen anywhere else, was soccer against the enemy.

  POSTSCRIPT

  WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

  IT’S BEEN SEVENTEEN YEARS since I finished my journey around the world to research this book. I will never do it again. Forty-eight hours in a Ukrainian train, weeks without hot water, and conversations in languages I don’t speak—I have had enough.

  What I remember most about the hundreds of people I met while writing the book is how nice almost all of them were. I was twenty-two to twenty-three years old (I celebrated my birthday with a falafel in Barcelona), shabbily dressed, staying in youth hostels, and claiming on no evidence to be an English journalist writing a book. Nevertheless, many gave hours of their time to answer my questions, and only a few seemed motivated by egomania. Unfortunately I have kept track of just a handful of them and their stories.

  The Dutch have begun to feel ashamed of their anti-German outburst in 1988-1992. Lately they have come to accept that their wartime behavior was mostly gray and cowardly. The younger generation has stopped laying claim to the heroism of the handful of mostly dead Resistance fighters. In 2003 I published a book devoted largely to this subject: Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe During the Second World War. As I predicted, Holland versus Germany is not such a grudge match anymore.

  I am still friendly with Helmut Klopfleisch. When he came to England for Euro 96, I bought him lunch. It was the least I could do. We have watched Hertha Berlin together since, and in 2009 I visited him in hospital in Berlin. He is a hero of the Cold War who was never rewarded for his heroism, and he has never quite recovered from his experiences in the GDR. When I visited Latvia in 1992, communism had just collapsed. When I returned there in 2009, capitalism had. That year the overheated Latvian economy shrank by 18 percent. Latvians seemed remarkably blasé. They had seen worse.

  For years I practically stalked Richard Möller Nielsen, whom I first met in Latvia. He appears three times in this book, and when I wrote an extra chapter on Finnish soccer for the Finnish edition of this book in 1999, he appeared in that again. He is now retired.

  Andrius Kubilius is one of the few people in this book to achieve fame after m
eeting me. He became a conservative politician, and as I write, in February 2010, he is in his second stint as Lithuanian prime minister (admittedly a poorly paid temp job). I still remember him fondly, for sitting down with a nervous twenty-two-year-old chancer in torn clothes and answering his questions about soccer.

  I have returned to Moscow twice since this book, and both times it was a cold and depressing experience. The city center now has Starbucks and designer fashion stores and some wealthy people. But the hope I sensed in 1992 that things could get better, that Russia could become a happy country, had disappeared.

  I think I’ll skip Kiev for the next few decades. I worry that some Ukrainian mafioso has heard of the chapter I wrote and is angry. I am also worried that the Dynamo official who told me everything has been made to suffer for it. I changed his name, but any insider could recognize him easily. I have not heard a word of him since. Paul Gascoigne is now battling alcoholism, Margaret Thatcher memory loss, and John Major—British prime minister for nearly seven years—has simply been forgotten.

  Nikolai Starostin died in 1996, Helenio Herrera in 1997, and Bobby Robson in 2009, after his fifth separate bout of cancer. In African soccer, there has been little to celebrate in the years before the South African World Cup. To my regret, I was right to predict that the African game would get worse.

  Cameroon has been through a miserable seventeen years too. Paul Biya remains president and will probably stay in office forever. The country remains extremely corrupt. I feel sorry for my friend Charles: a gifted young man in the wrong place. I sometimes wonder what happened to the Cameroon Post journalists in their hideout. Nobody outside the country seems to care, and Cameroon continues to make news only through soccer.

  When Mark Gleeson and I saw Thabo Mbeki lining up patiently at the Botswana border I took it as a good omen. From 1999 to 2008 Mbeki was president of South Africa, becoming only the second man mentioned in this book to run a country after meeting me. Essop Pahad was his minister in the president’s office, a power behind his throne, and jointly culpable in his awful policies on AIDS. I have stayed in touch with Essop over the years. He is as charming as ever, though when Mbeki was kicked out as president he had to go to. He still sits on South Africa’s organizing committee for the World Cup, though.

  Gleeson remains the prime chronicler of African football: if something happens in the African game and Mark doesn’t write it, it didn’t happen. When this book was translated into Serbian, a journalist at Serbian Playboy couldn’t believe that such a legendary African explorer truly existed. So he emailed Mark, asking, “Do you exist?” Mark said he did. The Serb asked him to prove it. Mark emailed a photograph of his big toe. The Serb published the photo in Playboy.

  Eric Wynalda’s good half-season in Saarbrücken proved to be the highlight of his career. In the 1994 World Cup he scored a beautiful free kick against Switzerland, but in 1998 he was as bad as the rest of the team. Now he hosts Fox Football Fone-In on Fox Soccer Channel. However, Bora Milutinovic has grown into something of a legend. As China’s coach in 2002, he became the only man to lead five different teams at five World Cups in a row. At the Confederations Cup in 2009, he popped up as coach of Iraq. Next job, Mars.

  At Euro 96 I ran into Bobby Charlton again, and he didn’t remember me. A couple of months later, at a reception in London, I spotted a familiar face: the diplomat who had introduced me to Charlton in 1993. He had forgotten me too. Carlos Menem reluctantly stepped down as president and then almost got the job back in 2003, but by then Argentine voters had wised up. Argentine soccer officials haven’t: Maradona currently coaches the national team.

  In 1999 I visited Brazil for the second time and interviewed Carlos Alberto Parreira again. He was no longer the manager of Brazil, but of Fluminense, then in the third division. In the posh neighborhood around the club’s ground, we watched kids kick around on a playground, and when Parreira patted one of them on the head, the boy did not even look up. Parreira had become a pariah in Brazil. Nobody seemed to be grateful to him for leading the country to the World Cup in 1994 because they played boring soccer. Parreira told me that, in retrospect, he should have given up coaching after winning the Cup. He could not achieve anything greater than that. Yet now (as I write, anyway) he is about to manage South Africa at another World Cup. Weird.

  I returned to Glasgow in 1999. The weather was still miserable, the city ugly, and the mood rude. I suspect that if Glasgow were a pleasant place, Celtics and Rangers fans would be sweet and shiny people. I have had another couple of meetings with Mark Dingwall, who has grown older but stayed a fanatic. He has spent a lifetime in the stands shouting the same curses.

  Maurice Johnston, once the Salman Rushdie of Scottish soccer, has been working in Major League Soccer for years now. When he became coach of the New York Metrostars in 2005, the club’s president and general manager, Alexei Lalas, said, “The fact that he’s a fellow redhead only made my decision easier. I’ve been saying for years that we don’t have enough of the mutant gene in MLS.” Currently Johnston is director of soccer at Toronto FC.

  Mark Viduka, whom I met at the start of his career, ended up having a fine one. He spent nine years in the English Premier League and captained Australia at a World Cup. As I write, he seems about to retire—possibly the last player mentioned in this book to go. Zagreb is probably just a bad memory for him now, as it is for me.

  President Tudjman died in 1999. Croatia seems to be becoming a decent country again.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  General Works:

  Lincoln Allison (ed.). The Politics of Sport (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1986).

  Peter Ball and Phil Shaw (eds.). The Book of Soccer Quotations (Stanley Paul, London, 1986).

  Neil Blain, Raymond Boyle and Hugh O’Donnell. Sport and National Identity in the European Media (Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1993).

  François Colin and Lex Muller. Standaard gouden voetbalgids (Standaard, Antwerp, 1982).

  Ronald Frankenberg (ed.). Cultural Aspects of Soccer, Sociological Review, Vol. 39, August 1991 (Routledge, London, 1991).

  Brian Glanville. The Puffin Book of Soccer players (Puffin Books, Harmondsworth, 1978).

  Brian Glanville. Champions of Europe (Guinness, Enfield, 1991).

  Philip Goodhart and Christopher Chataway. War Without Weapons (W.H. Allen, London, 1968).

  A. Tomlinson and G. Whannel (eds.). Off the Ball (Pluto, London, 1986).

  Russia:

  Nikolai Starostin. Futbol skvoz gody (Sovetskaya Rossiya, Moscow, 1989).

  Paul Gascoigne:

  Robin McGiven. Gazza! A Biography (Penguin Books, London, 1990).

  Bobby Robson:

  Pete Davies. All Played Out (Heinemann, London, 1990).

  Arnold Mühren and Jaap de Groot. Alles over links (SSP, Hoornaar, 1989).

  Nico Scheepmaker. Cruijff, Hendrik Johannes, fenomeen, 1947-1984 (Van Holkema & Warendorf/Unieboek, Weesp, 1984).

  Holland vs. Germany:

  Lútsen B. Jansen. Bekend en onbemind: Het beeld van Duitsland en Duitsers onder jongeren van vijftien tot negentien jaar (Clingendael Institute, The Hague, 1993).

  Theun de Winter (ed.). Nederland-Duitsland: voetbalpoëzie (Gerard Timmer Productions, Amsterdam, 1989).

  Old Firm:

  Raymond Boyle. Faithful Through and Through: A Survey of Celtic F.C.’s Most Committed Supporters (National Identity Research Unit, Glasgow, 1991).

  Jimmy Johnstone and J. McCann. Jinky . . . Now and Then. The Jimmy Johnstone Story (Edinburgh, 1987).

  Archie McPherson. Action Replays (Chapmans, London, 1992).

  Bill Murray. The Old Firm (John Donald, Edinburgh, 1984).

  Bill Murray. Glasgow Giants: A Hundred Years of the Old Firm (Mainstream, 1988).

  South Africa:

  Robert Archer and Antoine Bouillon. The South African Game: Sport and Racism (Zed Press, London, 1982).

  Argentina:

  Joseph L. Arbena. “Generals and Goles:
Assessing the Connection Between the Military and Soccer in Argentina,” in the International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 7, No. 1, May 1990.

  Eduardo P. Archetti. “In Search of National Identity: Argentinian Soccer and Europe,” paper presented at the conference “Le soccer et l’Europe,” European University Institute, Florence, May 1990.

  Eduardo P. Archetti. “Masculinity and Soccer: The Formation of National Identity in Argentina,” paper presented at the conference “Soccer: Identity and Culture,” University of Aberdeen, April 1992.

  Eduardo P. Archetti. “Argentine Soccer: A Ritual of Violence?,” in the International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 9, No. 2, August 1992.

  Eduardo P. Archetti and Amílcar Romero. “Death and Violence in Argentinian Soccer,” unpublished paper, January 1993.

  Osvaldo Bayer. Fútbol argentino (Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1990).

  Carlos Ferreira. A mi juego . . . (Ediciones La Campana, Buenos Aires, 1983).

  Amílcar G. Romero. Deporte, violencia y política (crónica negra 1958-1983) (Biblioteca Política Argentina, Buenos Aires, 1985).

  John Simpson and Jana Bennett. The Disappeared: Voices from a Secret War (Robson Books, London, 1985).

  Brazil:

  Janet Lever. Soccer Madness (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984).