How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

  Because I buy a round of drinks, they enthusiastically welcome me. Jimmy asks me to pile into an already crammed corner of the ship. “Whatever you want to know, I’ve got it. Ask away. I’ll answer anything.”

  But before I can ask him anything, he begins to boast about his friendship with the guy who dresses as the Rangers team mascot. In the background, Jimmy’s traveling companions sing their anti-Catholic medley, repeating the phrase “Fuck the pope” with particular relish.

  Jimmy joins them, and then puts his beer on the table and his arm on my shoulder. “Say, ‘Fuck the pope,’ Frankie boy,” he implores me. “We won’t talk to you until you say it. Come on, ‘Fuck the pope.’ It feels good to say it.”

  Jimmy’s minions—two twenty-something women,

  an older mustachioed carpenter named John Boy, Ralphie the lorry driver, and about six younger guys—take their leader’s cue. They begin clapping and chanting rhythmically, “Fuck the pope!” One of the women is most strident: “Don’t be a fuckin’ Fenian, Frankie. ‘Fuck the pope,’ come on.” I shrug my shoulders, look around the ship to see if anyone else is watching, and try to recite the phrase as a rhetorical question. To the tune of

  “Camptown Races,” they begin to sing, as if planned in advance, “Frankie’s a sectarian. Doo-dahh, doo-dahh.”

  It’s obvious that the repeated and vociferous use of the phrase “Fuck the pope” hardly endears us to the rest of the boat. For the entire trip, Jimmy has traded looks with a middle-aged man in a sweater. Another group in a nearby bank of seats has been muttering about the songs. “Ruining our trip, they are. I didn’t pay forty quid to be insulted like this,” a woman complains to a stewardess. A few moments later, the stewardess approaches us. She leans over and says, “I’m sorry. You’ve got to stop. It’s the rules. It’s in your interest to stop.” Apparently, this is the third time that she has reproached the group. When we arrive in Belfast, she says, security will be waiting to deal with us. Under normal, more sober circumstances, the threat might have meant something. “Okay. Fine,” Jimmy tells her and then points his finger at me, “It was this American sectarian causing all the trouble.” Once again, he starts singing my name. The stewardess rises and walks away.

  The connection between Scotland and Ireland—or more precisely, the connection between Glasgow and Belfast—runs deep. You can see it across Belfast. In downtown, both Celtic and Rangers have shops selling their gear. Around the city, the Rangers fan clubs double as the lodges for the Orange Order. A cab driver called Billy takes me to his club in the middle of a neighborhood that had once been Protestant, but had almost overnight turned Catholic. His club has a bar, a HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

  billiards table, a TV set for watching games, and chairs for meetings. It’s a place you can unself-consciously roll up your sleeves and display the “’Gers” tattoo on your forearm. Billy’s club stands as the last foothold against inevitable Catholic encroachment in this part of town, a battle-scarred fortress without windows. A tall fence surrounds the building. A Scottish standard flaps atop a pole. Garbage lies scattered through the parking lot in front. “We’re more interested in staying than making it look pretty,” he apologizes. Across the street, he points to the rubble of a Protestant church. It had been burned to the ground three times.

  Old Firm matches, it seems, stir up as much may-hem in Northern Ireland as in Glasgow, if not more.

  Where the violence in Glasgow takes a desultory pattern, dependent mostly on drunken thugs randomly crossing paths, it occurs regularly in Northern Ireland on the frontiers that separate Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. The day I arrive from Scotland, a battle had waged through the night, across the province, in the town of Derry. The Old Firm had coincided with an annual Protestant march through town, and the

  confluence of the two events was explosive. News reports showed the town lit by burning cars, bands of Catholics marching en masse toward the city center to disrupt the Protestant celebrations, police holding their line as the Catholics shot fireworks at them. Stabbings and gunfights were reported.

  There’s a basic reason for the Northern Irish to embrace the Old Firm with such fervor. They have nothing comparable on their side of the Irish Sea. The country simply can’t accommodate it. It wasn’t always so. Once upon a time, the city housed a team called Belfast Celtic, ripped o¤ from the original Scottish concept; and it even had its own Protestant rival, a team called Linfield. But in 1949, the Catholic squad folded.

  Belfast Celtic’s management felt that the club could no longer depend on the Protestant police to protect its players and fans. A year earlier, they had watched police cheer Linfield goals. When Linfield’s fans invaded the field and began beating players, even breaking legs, the cops stood on the sides. Eventually, all the Catholic clubs in Northern Ireland followed Belfast Celtic in withdrawing from interfaith competition. Stripped of its own rivalries, it was natural that Northern Ireland turned to Scotland.

  On the ferry, Jimmy keeps slipping from playful-ness into earnest discourse. Sipping his lager, he leans back in a banquette, his sneakers propped up on a table. “Glasgow’s not like here.” He pauses. “You can walk down the street there in a Rangers top and nothing will happen to you. It’s life or death here, mate.

  They’re fucking animals. They’d kill little children.”

  Glasgow, he explains, allows for a strange kind of political escapism. It’s not that you leave your politics behind at home. In fact, the opposite occurs. People like Jimmy can indulge their deepest political passions in Scotland.

  They can indulge them in the most fanatical ways. The di¤erence is that in the safety of the Glasgow soccer stadium they don’t have to incessantly calculate the consequences of screaming their beliefs.

  Before the ferry lands in Belfast, Jimmy’s friends begin to settle themselves into a less frenzied state.

  One of them had been jumping up and down on the HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

  deck of the ship singing a song called “Bouncy, Bouncy,”

  an orange Rangers jersey clinging to his beefy frame. If you canny do the Bouncy Bouncy, you’re a Tim. Set against the night, the fluorescent shirt made him the only visible sight on the horizon. Disembarking at the port, he puts on a navy windbreaker and zips it up to his neck. He looks down at his waist to make sure that his shirt doesn’t hang out from the bottom. Pulling his blue Nike cap over his eye, he turns back to me. “All right,” he says and fades into the crowd of arrivals.

  On the ground in Belfast, passengers keep com-

  plaining to cruise oªcials about our group’s behavior.

  But the promised security entourage never arrives to deal with us. In the scheme of Old Firm o¤enses, these infractions are too minor to bother with. Waiting for a conveyor belt to spit out checked luggage, Jimmy sits in a corner arguing with his wife on the cell phone. He wants me to cancel my hotel reservation and crash on his couch. His wife wants to nag him for staying away all weekend. Before we go to his home, he insists that we stop for a drink with Ralphie the lorry driver at the Carrickfergus Glasgow Rangers Club. In Belfast, asking a cabbie to take you to a Rangers club can be a tricky business. For that trip, you wouldn’t want to gamble with a Celtic supporter or IRA sympathizer behind the wheel, especially if you’re drunk and intent on flexing your beer muscles. Jimmy repeatedly tells the driver that we’re headed to the Glasgow Rangers Club and carefully evaluates each reaction. When the driver’s blank stare remains blank, Jimmy starts singing and throws his duºe bag into the big black cab.

  Settling down, Jimmy calls a girl from Edinburgh that Ralphie had met at a bar after the game. Ralphie, small, mustachioed, barely comprehensible with his thick Ulster accent, the platonic ideal of a sidekick, has a crush on her. Jimmy hands him the phone, and Ralphie stammers. We laugh at his clumsy flirting. “She’s up for it,” Jimmy whispers to him. But as the driver turns out from the ferry station and down a dark street, Ralphie abruptly tells
the girl that he’ll call her later. A look of panic overtakes his face. “Shit man, Jimmy.

  Fuckin’ Falls Road.” The Falls Road is a notorious center of IRA activity, a place where a Rangers supporter would be instantaneously mauled. Jimmy grabs the cell phone out of Ralphie’s hand and begins to dial friends at the Carrickfergus Rangers Club. They would be our reinforcements — at least they would know where to gather our bruised bodies. “Just tell them you’re an American. Nobody would touch you,” he counsels. By the time he has dialed the number, a sign for the motorway emerges. Three days of debauchery has deprived them of any sense of geography. Jimmy bangs on the Plexiglas separating the driver from us and gives him the thumbs up. Jimmy and Ralphie break into song, “We’re the top of the league, we’re the top of the league and you know.” As he sings, Jimmy lifts his arms above his head in triumph. t

  H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

  t h e J e w i s h Q u e s t i o n

  “Do you want something to read?”

  “Yes, do you have something really light?”

  “How about this short leaflet: Famous Jewish Sports Legends.”

  —The movie Airplane!, 1980

  I.

  I had grown up thinking that great Jewish athletes come around about once in a decade, if the gene pool gets lucky. There was the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax in the sixties; the swimmer Mark Spitz in the seventies; and then many fallow years. At home, my father and I would imagine that various athletes were quietly Jewish, like the Marrano survivors of the Spanish Inquisition. My father was especially adamant that Sid Bream, a lanky, energetic first baseman with the Atlanta Braves, was a person of the book. And, to be fair, the name, both first and last, made him a plausible member. But in retrospect, there were biographical details that probably should have negated our analysis.

  Sid Bream liked to talk about his love of hunting, and he drove a pickup truck. Yes, he wore a Mark Spitz moustache, but that was twenty years after its vogue within our community. The simple truth was that we were too apprehensive to go looking for Bream’s real ethnicity.

  Before Bream captured the imagination of our

  household, I had stumbled across the soccer club Hakoah of Vienna, winners of the 1925 Austrian championship. Hakoah’s great triumph came at a time when Austrian soccer represented the world’s gold standard of style and strategy. Although they had only a few scarce encounters with the other great teams of the era, Hakoah usually triumphed in these matches. Based on all the evidence we have, the Jewish all stars were, for a short spell, one of the best teams on the planet.

  Hakoah first came to my attention in a book that I found rummaging through my uncle’s old bedroom, in my grandparents’ house: Great Jewish Sports Legends. It had a frayed blue spine that could be lifted to reveal the naked binding. Sepia photos filled its pages. When this volume came into my possession at age eight, it quickly became a personal favorite. Because it had been written in the early 1950s, it wasn’t so far removed from the mid-century American renaissance of Jewish athletes, which consisted of giant figures such as the Chicago Bears’ quarterback Sid Luckman and the Detroit Tigers’

  first baseman Hank Greenberg. Like so much of Jewish life at that moment, the book was schizophrenic about its ethnic identity. As I remember the book, it was both HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION

  a paean to Jewish achievement and to assimilation, but mostly to assimilation. There was no Star of David on the title page and no anecdotes about Greenberg skipping a crucial season-end game to attend Yom Kippur services. That’s why Hakoah sprung at me from the pages. There was nothing self-e¤acing about the Jewishness of the Hakoah players. The team had a Hebrew name and advertised its Judaism on its jersey.

  From the start, in other words, Hakoah had seemed chimerical to me. My search for the team made it even more so. I traveled to Vienna with promises of help from academics and community leaders. From them, I began to compile the names of Viennese Jews in their eighties and nineties who might have some memory of the championship season. Since 1940, Viennese Jewry has dwindled from approximately 200,000 to 7,000.

  Some of these remaining few include immigrants from the old Soviet bloc and a smattering of Israelis who have moved to town for business. The bulk consists of aging natives. Many of them have children in the U.S.

  and even spent years abroad themselves. But they’ve come back to the city of their youth for their last days so they can live a familiar lifestyle. Because so many Austrians enthusiastically welcomed the Nazis, they often apologize for continuing to reside in Vienna. A retired professor of economics told me in a perfect American accent, “What can I do? I know the Austrians are the worst. Maybe they would do it all over again. But I have interests here and friends. It’s comfortable.”

  These elderly Jews wanted badly to talk about the past, about politics and their love of the United States, to buy me a meal at a Chinese restaurant and a pastry at a co¤ee house. Unfortunately, for my purposes, these conversations didn’t have anything remotely to do with soccer. None of them had played the game. Their parents considered it too scru¤y, violent, and proletarian for their children. Viennese Jews were among the most bourgeois of the bourgeoisie. And even these old Jews were too young to remember Hakoah’s glory years during the twenties. “Maybe there’s someone in New York you could talk to,” they told me. I had gone all the way around the world only to be told that the answers to my queries might be found in the smoked-fish line at Zabar’s on Broadway. Sadly, in New York and Florida, where I had more names to contact, I didn’t make much more headway. I couldn’t. Anyone who might remember Hakoah at its best is too superannuated to remember, or no longer around. As far as I can tell, the historical memory of the club now resides with a gentile Swedish sportswriter from the town of Hässelby called Gunnar Persson who has obsessively tracked every shred of evidence vaguely related to the club.

  With his help, I began to cobble together the story of the wonder Jews.

  Although it seems so strange now, the idea of a professional Jewish soccer club, it is only strange because so few of the Jewish soccer clubs survived Hitler. But, in the 1920s, Jewish soccer clubs had sprouted through-out metropolitan Europe, in Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Innsbruck, and Linz.

  Jewish teams cloaked themselves in Jewish, not Hungarian or Austrian or German, nationalism, literally HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION

  wearing their Zionism on their sleeves and shirts.

  Decades before Adolf Eichmann forced them to don the yellow star, some of these clubs played with King David’s logo stitched onto the breasts of their jerseys. They swathed themselves in blue-and-white uniforms, the colors of Israel. Their unabashedly Hebrew names, Hagibor (“The Hero”), Bar Kochba (after the leader of a second-century revolt against the Romans), and Hakoah (“The Strength”), had unmistakably nationalist overtones.

  If all this seemed exceptionally political, it was because these clubs were the products of a political doctrine. An entire movement of Jews believed that soccer, and sport more generally, would liberate them from the violence and tyranny of anti-Semitism. The polemicist Max Nordau, one of the founding fathers of turn-of-the-century Zionism, created a doctrine called Muskeljudentum, or muscular Judaism. Nordau argued that the victims of anti-Semitism su¤ered from their own disease, a condition he called Judendot, or Jewish distress.

  Life in the dirty ghetto had aºicted the Jews with e¤emi-nacy and nervousness. “In the narrow Jewish streets,” he wrote, “our poor limbs forgot how to move joyfully; in the gloom of sunless houses our eyes became accustomed to nervous blinking; out of fear of constant persecution the timbre of our voices was extinguished to an anxious whisper.” To beat back anti-Semitism and eradicate Judendot, Jews didn’t merely need to reinvent their body politic. They needed to reinvent their bodies. He prescribed Muskeljudentum as a cure for this malady. He wrote, “We want to restore to the flabby Jewish body its lost tone, to make it vigorous and strong, nimble and
powerful.” Jews, he urged in articles and lectures, should invest in creating gymnasia and athletic fields, because sport “will straighten us in body and character.”

  Muscular Judaism wasn’t an egghead’s pipe dream.

  Nordau’s high-toned words trickled down to the leaders of Central Europe’s Jewish communities. Of the fifty-two Olympic medals captured by Austria between 1896

  and 1936, eighteen had been won by Jews—eleven times more than they would have won if they had performed proportional to their population. And while much of the achievement came in individual events, especially fencing and swimming, Jews thrived in soccer, too. During the 1910s and 1920s, a healthy portion of the Hungarian national soccer team consisted of Jews. For a brief moment, Jewish sporting success mimicked Jewish intellectual achievement.

  There is something creepy about Max Nordau’s description of the sickly, e¤eminate Jewish body. And the creepiness lies in its similarities to the anti-Semitic caricature. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence. Zionism and modern European anti-Semitism dripped out of the same fin-de-siècle intellectual spout. Both movements were born at the turn of the last century, in the midst of another wave of massive globalization and discombob-ulating social change, when the European intelligentsia reacted strongly against the values of the enlightenment. They embraced a scientific concept of race, an almost homoerotic obsession with perfecting the body, and a romantic idea of the motherland. Neither placed any emphasis on the universal brotherhood of man, the ideal of the French Revolution. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION

  But that counter-enlightenment phase passed long ago, defeated in war and intellectually discredited. The last fifty years of European politics has run hard in the opposite direction, a return to the celebration of reason and universalism. Certainly, that’s the theory behind the European Union, which assumes that conflicts can be avoided with dialogue and that commonality of interest can transcend even the deepest enmity.