Can sports explain the world? Let’s take an indirect approach at answering that question. In the Middle Ages, Europe’s landed aristocracy settled disputes by building up mercenary armies of peasants, giving them weapons, and directing them in battle like pieces on a chessboard. Military commanders were lazy rich people who bought their ranks rather than earning them based on skill or prowess (does this sound familiar today regarding big corporate business?). Other members of the idle rich class sat on the sidelines of these petty wars, cheering on their allied battalions while the unfortunate peasant soldiers, who would probably prefer to be at home relaxing, slaughtered each other in the mud, all for the benefit of the land-owning barons and dukes who profited from these skirmishes. This style of warfare was a part of the political system known as feudalism, though there was a lot more to it than that. But the theory here is that these pointless and brutal wars eventually looked like petty sadism that wasn’t too popular with the peasantry who grew the food that was leeched from them by the aristocrats, so the practice was sublimated into games and what we now call team sports. So can contemporary soccer explain how we got from feudal warfare to the most popular worldwide pastime? You would need a certain amount of education and cultural literacy to be able to make that connection, so the answer would have to be a reluctant no, at least not for most people. Therefore, the title of Franklin Foer’s book How Soccer Explains the World should be ignored if you plan on getting anything out of this.
We don’t hear much about globalization these days. In fact contemporary right wing faux populism could well be a reaction against it. But twenty years ago, when this book came out, globalization was a big topic of discussion especially because 9/11 was still fresh in everybody’s minds. So Foer approaches his subject matter with that world view in mind. After all, aside from the Olympics, soccer is the most global sport. This is a very loose framework for this collection of essays, not a thesis to build an argument around.
Foer starts with discussions on hooliganism. We all know that soccer teams attract gangs that fight like boneheads with other gangs who support rival teams and sometimes the violence spills out into the streets where anybody or anything unlucky enough to be in their way could get smashed. Some of these gangs have ties to organized crime mafias or nationalist political movements. The first essay is about Serbian war criminal Arkan (may you never rest in peace) and how he brought all these elements together. The author, while embedded in the hooligan culture, also shows how Catholic and Protestant rivalries in Glasgow manifest in sectarian gang violence. These chapters leave some unanswered questions, like whether soccer makes ethnic or tribal conflicts worse or if it functions by containing them in localized conflicts rather than allowing them to flood out into the wider societies. The author doesn’t actually pose this question and doesn’t go deep enough to help you draw your own conclusions either. These essays are simply sketches based on interviews done with people he sought out.
There are a couple essays dealing with racism in soccer that stand out as the best in this collection. One is a historical piece about a Jewish soccer team in Austria before the Holocaust. Their motivation was to overcome the stereotype of Jewish people being physically weak and non-athletic. Another essay examines the life of a Nigerian footballer who dreamed of making it big by being hired to play in Europe, only to be slimed into playing for a team in Ukraine where he wasn’t welcomes with open arms. Thus, Foer addresses the issue of the internationalization of soccer to the point where teams are made up of players hired from other countries while local athletes get little or no representation in their home countries. The dream of globalization bringing the whole world together hasn’t worked out the way we all hoped it would.
Then we get some chapters on Brazilian soccer and the endemic corruption involved in its management. One sleazy team owner worked his way into politics and ran his team into the ground through graft and financial mismanagement. And of course no proper book about soccer in the 20th century would be complete without at least mentioning Pele. The world’s greatest footballer raised himself out of poverty by being the cleanest and most entertaining player. After making his fortune in America, he returned to Brazil and entered politics in an attempt to eliminate corruption from sports. The system got the better of him and he ended up falling into corruption like the rest of them.
This makes a transition into the subject of management and team ownership. The subject of soccer transitioning from a working class spectator sport to an upper class one complete with clubs being flush with money from investors and advertisers. This all has a deleterious effect on the relationship between the teams and their fans, many of which can no longer afford to attend matches. This all ends with a chapter on the promise of soccer as an instigator of political change in Iran where the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have been unable to steer women away from attendance at games.
Franklin Foer is an investigative journalist and these essays read like what this book really is: a collection of magazine articles, quick and easy to digest, accessible, ephemeral, entertaining, and not too deep. It’s like iceberg lettuce, cheap and filling but not loaded with nutrients. It would be safe to say that each essay portrays an aspect of society that is an outgrowth or an intersection with the culture surrounding the sport; it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Foer uses soccer to explain much of anything happening outside this culture. One thing is certainly conclusive though: soccer and the dark side of the human psyche are intimately connected. How you feel abut this book in the end might have a lot to do with how you react to the disconnection between the title and its contents. I, personally, was a little disappointed. I’m not interested in watching soccer since it looks to me like a bunch of guys kicking a ball back and forth for an hour or two and I’d much rather be doing something fun like having sex, so I was hoping for something a little more introspective and it didn’t deliver on that point.
How Soccer Explains the World is light reading. It’s conceivable that soccer can explain the world, but that doesn’t happen in this book. It provides some snapshots of the culture of the sport, but as a reader you will be left to sort out the information and what it means on your own. It’s interesting for what it is and I can’t say it’s bad writing, but it isn’t literature to be taken too seriously. Maybe it’s something to be read on a long bus ride, in an airport terminal, in the waiting room at the DMV, or if you have some obnoxious friend who insists on making you listen to Jordan Peterson lectures. Maybe its something to keep your mind busy when your proctologist insists on not using general anesthesia during a colonoscopy. Anyhow, I’d rather read about why most Americans don’t know who David Beckham is or why they get lost if you talk about Manchester United, Arsenal, or Juventus. I’d also like to know why Brits gets so red-in-the-face angry when Americans use the word “soccer” instead of “football” considering that “soccer” is a word of British origin that was used by them until they switched to “football” in the 1980s. Can soccer explain why people like to fight over such petty trivialities? It must be the narcissism of small differences. I’d like to read a book that explains that.
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