How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

  Bosnians and Serbs were creative dribblers and passers, but occasionally lacking in tactical acumen. At Red Star, an amalgam of disparate Yugoslavs bundled their specialties and beat the superpowers of Western Europe.

  This performance should have given a modicum of hope for the salvage of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia. But in the shadow of this championship season, in Red Star’s headquarters and stadium, the destruction of this HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

  Yugoslavia was being plotted. From Red Star’s own ranks, a hooligan paramilitary force was organized and armed. Krle, who took a bullet in his leg, would serve in this army. The Red Star fans would become Milosevic’s shock troops, the most active agents of ethnic cleansing, highly eªcient practitioners of genocide.

  It’s hard to imagine that Ultra Bad Boys are typical figures. They seem a product of a war-torn country and its diseased ideology. But they’re really not such a homegrown oddity. Starting in the 1980s, the soccer hooligan widely came to be considered a leading enemy of the West. “A disgrace to civilized society,” Margaret Thatcher once said. Based on death toll—more than one hundred in the 1980s—the English were the

  world’s leading producer of deranged fans, but they were far from alone. Throughout Europe, Latin America, and Africa, violence had become part of soccer’s culture. And even in places where violence had long accompanied soccer, it became more widespread and destructive in the eighties and nineties. The Serbian fans were merely a bit better organized and much better armed than the rest of the world.

  Susan Faludi and a phalanx of sociologists have an explanation for this outburst. They have written about downsized men, the ones whose industrial jobs were outsourced to third-world labor. Deprived of traditional work and knocked o¤ patriarchal pedestals, these men desperately wanted to reassert their masculinity. Soccer violence gave them a rare opportunity to actually exert control. When these fans dabbled in racism and radical nationalism, it was because those ideologies worked as metaphors for their own lives. Their nations and races had been victimized by the world just as badly as they had been themselves.

  Economic deprivation and displacement are obvious explanations. But there’s so much these factors can’t explain. Ultra Bad Boys like Draza can also be college boys with decent prospects. The Chelsea Headhunters, the most notorious English hooligan gang, include stockbrokers and middle-class thrill seekers.

  Besides, human history is filled with poor people, and rarely do they get together in groups to maim for maiming’s sake.

  Something di¤erent happened in this era. An ethos of gangsterism—spread by movies, music, and fashion—conquered the world. The Red Star fans modeled themselves after foreigners they admired, especially the Western European hooligans. The name Ultra Bad Boys was ripped o¤ from Italian supporters’ clubs.

  Another fan club called itself the Red Devils, after British club Manchester United’s nickname. In the late eighties and early nineties, the Red Star hooligans would go to the British Cultural Center in downtown Belgrade to scan the papers for the latest antics of English hooligans. The Serb hooligans also paid tribute with their fashion. They wore Adidas track suits, gold chains, and white leather sneakers, just like the crazed fans they read about on the other side of the continent.

  Of course, the genealogy of this aesthetic had other roots than England. It borrowed heavily from African American gangster rap, a favorite genre of Serb youth, HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

  and filched mores from the emerging Russian mafia.

  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.

  II.

  In the history of hooligan warfare, no battle has been quite so spectacular. A year before Red Star lifted its European Cup, it traveled to Croatia for a match against the rival club Dinamo Zagreb. Signs that the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia might not have much more life could be seen all around Zagreb. Two weeks earlier, the Croats had elected the ultranationalist Franjo Tudjman, a former general and former president of the Partizan Belgrade soccer club. Tudjman’s adoption of Ustache icons—the symbols of the Croatian fascists who collaborated with Nazis to kill hundreds of thousands of Serbs—roused the long-dormant national passions of his people.

  During the thirty-five years the charismatic communist Marshal Tito ruled Yugoslavia, he had suppressed bad feelings over World War II, simply declaring the expression of such feelings illegal. Yugoslavia had never come to terms with the fact that its two largest constituents had slaughtered one another. Now, with communism dissolving, the old wounds reopened. Serbs and Croats began to openly expose one another’s war crimes—and demand justice for them. A rush of

  breathless revisionist literature described the “hidden history” of World War II. The books were turned into TV documentaries. And the TV documentaries were reduced to potent political slogans that moved the national agendas in nationalist directions. As one of his first acts, Tudjman “demoted” Serbs from the Croatian constitution. The new, or rather old, enmity could be seen visibly at the soccer stadium. In matches between Serb and Croat teams, fans sang about their respective slaughters.

  The match between Red Star and Dinamo, however, was the first time in fifty years that Yugoslavia had seen its ethnic groups openly battle one another. At first, the trouble seemed manageable by the standards of the European game. Red Star fans ripped down billboards and shouted, “We will kill Tudjman.” When the

  Dinamo fans began throwing stones at them, the Red Star fans used the billboards as shields. Fences that separated the opposing fans mysteriously disappeared.

  A brawl engulfed the entire stadium, with the combat-ants identified by the color of their shirts, and then moved onto the field. The police handled the situation with ineptitude. As a cop beat a Zagreb fan, a Dinamo player called Zvonimir Boban intervened with a flying kick into the oªcer’s gut. Helicopters descended on the stadium to evacuate the Serb players from the melee.

  To anyone watching, it was clear that both Serbs and Croats had come ready to fight. Rocks had been carefully stockpiled in the stadium before the game, waiting to be thrown. Acid had been strategically stored so that Croatian fans could burn through the fences separating them from their Serbian counterparts.

  Standing next to the Red Star coach, guarding him HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

  from the violence, was an even more ominous presence, a secret-police hit man called Zeljko Raznatovic.

  Through his career as a gangster, he’d reached mythical proportions, so much so that everyone simply referred to him by one of his approximately forty aliases. Considering all the Muslims he would later massacre, it is ironic that he went by the Turkish name Arkan.

  Arkan came of age in the placidity of Tito’s Yugoslavia, a Balkan’s version of June-and-Ward’s America, where Serbs and Croats were supposed to be happy neighbors.

  But Arkan had bucked communist conformism. His father had served as an oªcer in Tito’s air force and used the military rulebook as a Dr. Spock–like guide for raising his son. Predictably, the harsh discipline backfired. By about age sixteen, Arkan had dropped out of a naval acad-emy, stowed away to Italy, and taken up life as a petty criminal in Paris. Not long into this stint, he was nabbed and sentenced to three years in juvenile detention. Unlike the other Yugoslav criminals with whom he teamed, Arkan hadn’t become a thief to fund a luxurious gangster lifestyle. One of his cronies recounted celebrating a heist in Milan with whiskey and whores. Arkan refused to join the party. He sat alone in a room with the window open, letting cigarette smoke escape, performing calisthenics.

  The myth of Arkan has more to do with the after-math of crimes than the crimes themselves. He had a magical capacity for escape. In 1974, the Belgians locked him up for armed robbery. Three years later, he broke free from prison and fled to Holland. When the Dutch police caught him, he somehow managed
to slither away from prison again. That same year, he repeated the feat at a German prison hospital. The masterpiece in this oeuvre was his appearance at the Swedish trial of his partner Carlo Fabiani. Arkan burst into the courtroom carrying a gun in each hand. He aimed one at the judge and tossed the other to Fabi-anni. Their audacious escape through a courtroom window could have been orchestrated by Jerry

  Bruckheimer.

  With such attention-grabbing escapades, Western Europe became too hot for Arkan. Back in Belgrade, he reconciled with his father and then worked his connections to the Yugoslav security apparatus. Well before Arkan’s return, the police had begun recruiting criminals to perform dirty work, mostly assassinating exiled dissidents. As part of the government arrangement, the criminals could violate the law abroad and then return to haven in Yugoslavia. Arkan became a star in this system, and he flaunted his status. He drove through Belgrade in a pink Cadillac. After he killed a cop, an extremely rare occurrence in the well-ordered communist society, he unsheathed his Ministry of Interior credentials and casually walked out of his trial.

  In his brash manner, Arkan had prefigured the late-eighties transition away from communism, an epoch when gangsters and smugglers came to rule the booming Serb economy. And he was more than just a representative figure. He helped Slobodan Milosevic, who became the Serbian Communist Party boss in 1986, manage an exceptionally tricky task. Milosevic had amassed popularity and power by exploiting the long-suppressed nationalism of the Serbs. But as a cynic he also understood how quickly these inflamed passions could turn against him. Nationalism needed to be care- HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

  fully regulated. One glaring danger spot was the Red Star Belgrade stadium, where the team’s hooligans had become politicized. They had begun lofting placards with the faces of Serbian Orthodox saints and the ultranationalist novelist Vuk Draskovic, head of the Serbian Renewal Party. Their chants called for secession: “Serbia, not Yugoslavia.”

  It wasn’t strange that the stadium should become so fervent. From the start, Red Star had been a bastion of nationalism. Under communism, eastern-bloc soccer clubs adhered to basically the same model of sponsorship. There was usually a team founded and supported by the army; another with the police as patrons; others aligned with trade unions and government ministries.

  In Belgrade, the army supported Partizan and the police backed Red Star. To Serb nationalists, the army represented the enemies of their cause. The ideology of the communist army rejected any notion of separate Serb identity as anathema to worker solidarity and ethnic harmony. Tito’s partisans, the namesake of the army club, had murdered, jailed, and beat the Chetniks, the army of Serb nationalists (some say fascists) who had also battled the Nazis. It had suppressed the Serbian Orthodox church. With such odious opponents, Red Star became a home for those Serbs with aspirations of reclaiming their nation.

  Throughout Red Star’s history, police eminences sat on its board. In 1989, Milosevic’s interior minister was there. The minister understood that Red Star had become a caldron of post-communist alienation and an uncontrollable mess of gangs, especially ultranationalist ones. Newspapers filled with stories decrying the sta- diums as symbols of “general civilizational disintegra-tion.” To control the mess, the police tasked Arkan, a Red Star fanatic himself, with corralling the fans.

  Arkan negotiated a truce among the warring factions, placing them all under one organization, with himself at the helm. Where Red Star fans had called themselves the “Gypsies”— an opponent’s insult that they had turned into a badge of honor—Arkan

  renamed them Delije. Like Arkan’s name, the new title derived from Turkish. It meant something close to heroes, and its distinctly martial connotations fit the new spirit of the club. Almost instantly, Arkan imposed the same discipline that he practiced in his own life.

  Petty acts of violence ceased. “Red Star’s management proclaimed him its savior,” one of the team’s oªcial magazines reported. Krle, who had become a foot soldier in the Delije, told me, “It was impossible not to have respect for a man like that.”

  As Arkan tamed the nationalists within Red Star, the political tides turned. Milosevic’s nationalist rhetoric had convinced the leaders of Croatia and Slovenia that they couldn’t remain partnered with the Serbs—or, at the very least, Milosevic gave them a pretext for stok-ing their own nationalisms. Croatia and Slovenia moved toward declaring their own independent states, declarations Serbia countered with war.

  Romantic trappings of war could be found everywhere. The media railed against the Croatian treatment of its Serb minority, a story that tugged at the heart strings of the nation. But Serbia didn’t have enough men in its army willing to go o¤ and do the dirty work.

  Draft dodging became a rite of passage. My translator HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

  described to me how he faked insanity and created pus-filled infections on his face to end his service after fifty-two days. Young men slept in di¤erent apartments each night, hoping to evade the conscriptors. At one desperate point, police began pulling men from restaurants in Belgrade and shipping them to the front. In addition to the problem of the rank and file, there was the problem of the brass. The army’s high command had

  emerged from a military culture steeped in communism. They had been trained to believe in an even-handed Yugoslavian state arbitrating between the ethnicities.

  Without a reliable regular army, the Serb leaders began to discreetly compile paramilitary forces. Arkan’s Delije proved an irresistible recruiting vehicle. The Delije, after all, had a reputation for inflicting cruel violence and then celebrating it in their songs (“Axes in hand/and a knife in the teeth/there’ll be blood tonight”). Under Arkan, they were now operating within a carefully delineated hierarchy that responded to the commands of a single leader. And as they proved against Dinamo Zagreb in the famous televised match, they actually enjoyed fighting Croats. The government preferred this hooligan style. Serbia didn’t need conventional troops to fight another army. Very little of that sort of combat actually took place in the Balkans.

  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.

  In Yugoslav papers—and for that matter across the world—war had been a metaphor for sports. Teams would battle and attack; they had impenetrable

  defenses and strikers who fired volleys. Now, Arkan’s men brought the metaphor to life. As he put it in an interview a few years later, “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.”

  Arkan called his army the Tigers, but they might as well have been called the Delije. Recruits from Red Star trained at a government-supplied police base in the Croatian town of Erdut. They were, by all accounts, armed to the hilt. Writing in a Belgrade sports paper in 1992, a reporter filed a dispatch on the Tigers: “I wind back the film of my memories and distribute these brave boys through all the stadiums of Europe. I know exactly where each of them stood, who first started the song, who unfurled his flag, who lit the first torch. The Delije have left their supporters’ props somewhere under the arches of Marakana stadium and have set o¤

  to the war with rifles in their hands.”

  But they hadn’t left all their fan behavior behind.

  The Belgrade anthropologist Ivan Colovic has shown that the fans took their stadium songs with them to the front. They tinkered with the lyrics ever so slightly to place them clearly into military context. Red Star players would drive to Arkan’s camp to visit wounded fans.

  Red Star’s captain Vladan Lukic told the Serbian Journal, “Many of our loyal supporters from the north end of Marakana [stadium] are in the most obvious ways writing the finest pages of the history of Serbia.” HOW SOCC
ER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

  III.

  Arkan’s army fought in the first Serb o¤ensive of 1991–92 and immediately began to earn its notorious reputation. Pictures of Arkan’s exploits turned the West decisively against Serbia. Most famously, there were the stomach-churning photographs from Bijeljina. In one, Arkan kisses the president of the Bosnian Serb Republic while standing over the corpse of a Muslim civilian.

  Others showed Tigers kicking lifeless bodies and stepping on the skulls of their victims.

  When Croatia launched a well-armed

  countero¤ensive in 1995, Arkan remobilized his army.

  He watched the Croats reconquer territory on the television in his home across from Red Star’s stadium. As his wife recounted the story to me, the images made him violently angry. “They are killing my people. I need to go to war,” he exclaimed. At the time, Arkan had only been married a few weeks. His wife says that she appealed to his sense of marital obligation. “You’ve got a family to think of now,” she told him. Instead of rebutting her, he silently retreated to their bedroom.

  Ten minutes later, when she went to check on him, she found him dressed in his fatigues and beret. Within thirty minutes, after one phone call, his army had assembled in front of the Red Star stadium.

  Arkan waged some of his bloodiest o¤ensives near the Bosnian town of Sasina. To oversee his operations, he set up a command post in the manager’s oªce of the Hotel Sanus. From there, he sent the Tigers on patrols to detain Muslim men, evict their families, and loot their homes. Theft had become a prime goal of the Tigers. One witness told the Los Angeles Times, “When they entered a cleansed Muslim house, a couple of them would head for the kitchen and start moving out kitchen appliances. Others would go for the television and the VCR. Somebody else would start digging in the garden, looking for buried jewelry. You could always recognize Arkan’s men. They had dirty fingernails from digging.” As the Tigers captured Muslims in Sasina, they transported them to Arkan’s hotel headquarters.