Notes
I kept noticing the ways that globalization had failed to diminish the game’s local cultures, local blood feuds, and even local corruption. In fact, I began to suspect that globalization had actually increased the power of these local entities—and not always in such a good way.
This book has three parts. The first tries to explain the failure of globalization to erode ancient hatreds in the game’s great rivalries. It is the hooligan-heavy section of the book. The second part uses soccer to address economics: the consequences of migration, the persistence of corruption, and the rise of powerful new oligarchs like Silvio Berlusconi, the president of Italy and the AC Milan club. Finally, the book uses soccer to defend the virtues of old-fashioned nationalism—a way to blunt the return of tribalism.
This book tries to use the metaphor of soccer to address some of the nagging questions about this failure: Why have some nations remained poor, even though they had so much foreign investment coursing through them?
The clubs stoke ethnic hatred, or make only periodic attempts to discourage it, because they know ethnic hatred makes good business sense.
But the Celtic-Rangers rivalry represents something more than the enmity of proximity. It is an unfinished fight over the Protestant Reformation.
More than any club in the world, Chelsea has been transformed by globalization and gentrification. It went from the club most closely identified with hooliganism in the eighties to the club most identified with cosmopolitanism in the nineties.
According to most schools of social science, places like Glasgow were supposed to have conquered ancient tribalism. This was the theory of modernization, handed down from Karl Marx, refined in the sixties by academics like Daniel Bell, enshrined in the foreign policy of the United States government, and rehashed by the globalization enthusiasts of the nineties. It posited that once a society becomes economically advanced, it would become politically advanced—liberal, tolerant, democratic.
Gangsterism and its nihilistic violence had become fully globalized. And it was in the Balkans that this subculture became the culture and unfolded toward its logical conclusion.
Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous, even when they deserve to be left in the past. So, in a way, a hooligan’s nostalgia for his youth is the most honest kind of nostalgia.
The city has kept alive its soccer tribalism, despite the logic of history, because it provides the city with a kind of pornographic pleasure.
Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and high priest of this new order, hailed “the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before—in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.”
It’s easy to link support for a soccer club with religiosity. But in an important way, Rangers has actually replaced the Church of Scotland. It allows men like Findlay to join the tradition and institutions of their forefathers, to allay fears about abandoning history without having to embrace their forefathers’ eschatology.
Red Star Belgrade is the most beloved, most successful soccer team in Serbia.
My interest in Red Star centers on the 1990s, his heyday as thug, when the fan clubs played a pivotal role in the revival of Serbian nationalism—the idea that the Serbs are eternal victims of history who must fight to preserve a shred of their dignity.
Unwittingly, Alan boiled down the essential cultural argument against globalization made by No Logo author Naomi Klein, the McDonald’s-smashing French farmer José Bove, and countless others: multinational capitalism strips local institutions of their localness, it homogenizes, destroys traditions, and deprives indigenous proletariats and peasants of the things they love most.
When Rangers sing, “Hello, hello, we are the Billy Boys,” they are associating themselves with a gang that rampaged against Glasgow’s Catholics between the wars. In the 1920s, the Billy Boys established the local affiliate of the Ku Klux Klan.
During Franco’s rule, the clubs Athletic Bilbao and Real Sociedad were the only venues where Basque people could express their cultural pride without winding up in jail. In English industrial towns like Coventry and Derby, soccer clubs helped glue together small cities amid oppressive dinginess.
This was the first of many favors the regime granted to Real Madrid, which seemed to return the affection by placing its new stadium on the Avenida de Generalissimo Franco.
The government needed a force that could terrorize civilians, causing Muslims and Croats to flee their homes in the territories that the Serbs hoped to control.
Among soccer fans, there’s a continuum of hooliganism. On one extreme exist true thugs like the notorious supporters of such British clubs as Millwall and Cardiff City. Although they’ll profess love of club, beating the shit out of people (including fellow fans) is their telos.
For that matter, so are most of the Rangers players. Since the late nineties, Rangers routinely field nearly as many Catholics as Celtic. Their players come from Georgia, Argentina, Germany, Sweden, Portugal, and Holland, because money can buy no better ones. Championships mean more than religious purity.
“We fans first trained without weapons…. Since our first beginning I insisted on discipline. Fans make noise, they want to get drunk, fool around. I decided to stop all this with one blow; I made them cut their hair, shave regularly, stop drinking, and everything went on track.”
Rangers fans stabbed, shot, and beat senseless three young Celtic supporters. They murdered one and left another in critical condition. If these events hadn’t coincided, perhaps Findlay could have defended himself in the press. But the environment wouldn’t stand for any excuses.