Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  Bezverkhy was friendly, but then he was a contented man. “Thank God our club was created two years before the market came to our country,” he told me. The ministry of sport had wanted all clubs to go pro simultaneously, which would have been the Soviet way. Dynamo made a lot of money before their rivals became independent.

  I asked why it was rumored that Dynamo was connected to the mafia. “It’s news to me that we have links with the mafia,” Bezverkhy replied, but the topic seemed to appeal to him, and he grew talkative. Did the mafia do much work in soccer itself? “Two mafia men came to a Russian club, said that two players had to transfer to another club and it was done.” Why did the mafia care? “The mafia understands that transfers can be profitable to it.” And in Ukraine? “There is a process of arranged matches in Ukraine. I can’t be sure. I can only suspect.” Did Dynamo have experience of this? “Two years ago, there was an attempt to dictate the result of a match here in Kiev. We were able to evade it, not thanks to links with the mafia, but thanks to our links with the KGB.” What had happened? “One member of our team was approached in the street, and was told that the next match had to end in a draw. It was pointed out to him that players had wives and children in Kiev. The situation was clear. To avoid these situations, we have created two organizations of bodyguards, who guard not only the players, thanks to our joint venture with the British firm Securitas.”

  Even with bodyguards you could never be sure. Not long before I arrived, “Vata,” a Kiev mafia boss, speaking to a man in his car at the Dynamo Stadium, suddenly found himself riddled with bullets. Vata had 16 bodyguards, and only let people near him whom he trusted, so the murderer must have been a friend. Vata was a big Dynamo fan, and the whole squad attended his funeral. Bezverkhy stayed away: given Vata’s reputation, to attend would have been unseemly. Instead, reported one newspaper, on the day of the funeral the president cried in a five-star restaurant.

  On Friday afternoon—within hours I would be on a train to the West—the Dynamo press officer dug out his umbrella and walked me to the statue in front of the Dynamo Stadium. It depicts four men, all ten feet tall with conservative hairstyles, who stand arm in arm gazing into the distance. There is not a soccer ball in sight, and no accompanying text either, but the clue to their identity is that they wear shorts. This is a monument to a soccer match.

  On invading Kiev, the Germans arranged a match against Dynamo. The spectators were all German soldiers with machine-guns, and when the Ukrainians took the lead the soldiers began to fire at their legs. Though several players went down, Dynamo hung on to win. After the final whistle the whole team was executed. It was, in short, Escape to Victory with an unhappy end. In fact a famous film was made of the match, and the actor who played the goalkeeper looked so much the part that a club offered him a contract.

  The press officer told me the story of the game, and then asked me not to write it: because it was not true. The match was a myth concocted after the war by the local Communist Party. No doubt some kind of game had taken place, for one survivor, age 86, lives in Kiev, but sensibly he keeps mum.

  It was time to go. I had spent six weeks in the remains of the Soviet Union, and to celebrate my departure I blew $3.00 on the Guardian international edition. It told me that the day of Dynamo vs. Rapid had also been Black Wednesday, the day the pound dropped out of the ERM. I waited at the station from midnight to 5 A.M., and let a group of Pakistanis studying in Moscow read the Guardian cricket reports. Meanwhile I watched two old women with the worst job in the world: cleaning the waiting room at Kiev Station on the 3 to 5 A.M. shift.

  Perhaps because of the state of the currency markets, perhaps not, the woman at the ticket desk refused to take my British pounds. Minutes before the train left, at five in the morning, the Pakistanis changed my pounds into dollars, taking a sizeable cut for themselves.

  Fifty-six dollars to go from Kiev to Prague is a bargain, if you consider that the journey passes through a large swathe of Europe and takes 48 hours. I slept for the first day, waking up every few hours to see exactly the same countryside as before. It was soothing. At 2 A.M. we reached the border with Czechoslovakia. A Ukrainian border guard who looked about 15 told me that my visa was invalid (it was valid). He swiftly added: “No problem, no problem. How many dollars do you have?” I had three. “Two,” I said. “You give me two dollars, no problem.” It was my first ever bribe, and I thought of Kukushkin in Moscow. Back at the train, another border guard asked me, in deliberate tones, for he had memorized the sentence: “Do you have a present for me?” I said not. I asked for the Prague train, and he directed me to it. I waited in it for five hours, in cold weather, and when it finally left it made for Bratislava. Two trains and 12 hours later I was in Prague, and it looked like the West to me.

  CHAPTER 7

  LONE SKINHEAD SAVES NATION

  I TOOK A TRAIN from Prague, passed through Bratislava again at three in the morning, and arrived in Budapest a couple of hours later to find soccer on the front pages of all the newspapers. A shame they were in Hungarian.

  Twelve days before, Ferencváros of Hungary had visited Slovan Bratislava of Slovakia to play a European Cup match, and 15 Hungarian fans had landed up in the hospital. Soccer hooliganism had nothing to do with it. I was in Budapest for the return match, and revenge was in the air. Ferencváros vs. Slovan looked like it was turning into something more than a soccer game.

  In Bratislava, Slovak anti-terrorist troops in black masks had repeatedly stormed Ferencváros fans who may or may not have been chanting, “Greater Hungary” and “Give us Southern Slovakia back.” The troops had used tear gas and wooden clubs, and had been thorough. The Slovak crowd had applauded. Tibor Nyilasi, Hungarian legend of the past and now manager of Ferencváros, had thought of the Heysel. And, he told Kurir: “I’m not afraid to say that it reminded me of the cruelties of the fascists.” At the final whistle, Slovan had thanked the troops over the loudspeakers (“a peculiar and repulsive act,” said the Hungarian consul), and then police had chased Hungarians in the streets around the stadium while Slovak fans stoned Hungarian cars and buses. Slovan won the match 4-1.

  “This is not a soccer roar, it is a political question,” said Gyula Horn, the Hungarian elder statesman. Within three months, Czechoslovakia was to split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Bratislava, scene of the beatings, was to become the Slovak capital. Independent Slovakia, under President Meciar, showed signs of becoming a nasty little nationalist state. Meciar, often seen at Slovan matches, liked to say that Slovakia had been “truly free” only as a puppet state of Nazi Germany during World War II. He blamed all problems on “enemies” at home and abroad. “I wonder who is playing this dirty game at our expense?” he asked when bugs were found in the American Embassy in Bratislava.

  The 600,000 Hungarians who live in Slovakia were frightened. Meciar was already complaining about bilingual road signs in Hungarian areas, and they feared that worse was to follow: no more Hungarian schools, a ban on their language, and one day perhaps even “ethnic cleansing.” Yugoslavia, after all, was just down the road.

  The Hungarian diaspora is the largest in Europe. It spreads across Rumania, Slovakia and the Ukraine, and politicians in Budapest fret over it. The year before, Hungarians in Rumania had been killed in a pogrom. When Slovak troops beat Hungarian soccer fans, Budapest protested immediately, but Meciar retorted that the fans were hooligans who had got what they deserved.

  Meciar knew exactly what he was doing. A Slovak nationalist (who used to be a Communist), Meciar wanted to show both Slovaks and Hungarians that he would stand for no nonsense. He deliberately chose a soccer match to deliver his warning: people who pay little attention to politics watch soccer on TV, and the only place in which Slovaks and Hungarians appear in opposing mobs is a soccer stadium. The problem with using soccer was that the West watched too. CNN sent pictures of the match around the world, and Western governments and businesses reminded themselves not to deal with the brutish Meciar.<
br />
  Meanwhile Ferencváros was still hoping to reach the second round. On the afternoon before the return leg, I spoke to the club’s general manager, Mihály Havasi—though only for three minutes, as he was about to meet the Hungarian home affairs minister. Havasi claimed that three of his players had had their wives and one his father in the crowd in Bratislava, and he mimed to me how they had played: looking briefly down at the ball, and then lengthily up at the stands. He had asked UEFA to overturn the 4-1 defeat and have the match replayed, but instead UEFA had fined both clubs 15,000 Swiss francs. “It’s a typical Western decision,” commented a Prague radio station (the Czechs remained neutral). “Faced with an annoying Eastern European phenomenon, instead of investigating and deciding according to the facts, the West gives both mischievous children a slap and tells them not to do it again.” Later Ferencváros appealed the fine, and it was lifted.

  UEFA had ranked the return leg as an “A” on the danger scale. “A” seemed an understatement. Most Slovak journalists had decided to give the match a miss, and Slovan was begging their fans to stay at home too. Even the team was planning to arrive in Hungary only just before kickoff. “Where are they arriving?” I asked one Czech journalist, and he smiled and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you.” I tried to ask the Ferencváros president, a red-bearded giant, whether he expected trouble, but all he would say was, “Soccer is here, and politics is there.” Then I went to look around the club museum. The curator spoke only Hungarian, but when he gathered I was British he produced the largest bottle of Johnnie Walker I have ever seen. It was noon.

  Outside the metro station by the Ferencváros ground that night, I passed five or six boys in black balaclavas, all leaping up and down and shouting, in English, “Fuck you Slovan, fuck you!” at a pack of press photographers. I was led into the ground with a group of Czech and Slovak journalists. We were searched and then escorted by police past Hungarians shouting abuse. The Ferencváros support cares.

  The little stadium is one of those corners of Eastern Europe that the Communists never got round to spoiling. The stands do not dwarf the crowd, as stadiums in Russia do; they are not in gray concrete, but painted green and white, the club colors; and there is no running track. All quite British, in fact, and the fans were trying to be Britons too. They wore English club scarves, waved Ferencváros flags in the shape of Union Jacks, and the chant to which they always returned was, “Fuck you Slovan, fuck you!” Yet they never quite mastered our style. They sang in Hungarian accents, and I saw two boys in Chelsea scarves kiss each other on both cheeks. Even the Union Jack has another meaning in the East: there, it evokes the West, pop music, and above all, soccer hooliganism. Our thugs may have hurt Britain’s image abroad, but to one section of every society they are heroes.

  The stadium was packed. In the press stand, which is behind one of the goals, were 200 journalists, for most newspapers had sent both soccer and political reporters. I could see no Slovan fans, though Czech radio had said that more than 200 had crossed the border.

  The Slovan players took the pitch first, to warm up, and were whistled at nonstop for half an hour. They were separated by a fence and a few fat stewards from 30,000 people who hated them, and as 4-1 leads went theirs did not look safe. “I’ve never seen an atmosphere like it,” I told a Hungarian journalist. He asked, “Have you never seen Liverpool against Manchester?” which is what Continentals call Manchester United. That was different. English fans enjoy their rivalries; this crowd loathed Slovaks.

  And then, though Slovan had returned inside, the crowd suddenly began to bay again. Below me, at the bottom of the press stand, a small skinhead in dungarees was carefully tying a blue-and-white Slovan flag to the fence.

  We journalists pounced on him. The skinhead declared that he was 16 years old, spoke no Hungarian, and had travelled alone from Bratislava. The manager of Slovan was alerted and walked over to tell the boy, “We are grateful.”

  It later transpired that five other Slovak fans had made the journey, but the “Lone Slovak Hero” story lost little of its shine, and the boy gave interviews and posed for photographs throughout the match. He was a pleasant enough skinhead, and now he was a national hero. Though our grandstand was an all-seater he watched the match standing, presumably from force of habit.

  Ferencváros proved a slow team even by Eastern European standards, and stirred themselves only when it came to kicking Slovaks: no Nyilasis in this team. The crowd stopped chanting, and the political reporters grew bored and began to talk politics. The match ended scoreless, so Slovan went on to the next round, where AC Milan was to thrash them. But first they had to get out of Budapest.

  Outside the changing rooms, Nyilasi gave interviews and the Slovan players sat on their bags and waited for their bus. The skinhead, still on his feet, was among them, for he had been invited to fly back with the team and had graciously accepted. The reporters surrounded him, ignoring the players.

  The Ferencváros fans were outside awaiting their prey. I went to join them. After an hour, a bus came out, its telltale Czechoslovak number plate ineffectually covered by a plank. The fans rushed it, only to find themselves face to face with worried middle-aged Czechoslovak journalists. Then policemen on horses came galloping out of the gateway, the fans ran away, and the Slovan bus tore out of the gate. The Hungarians went home, but now and then I read in the newspapers that Meciar is still bullying his Hungarians. Slovakia and Hungary are rearming.

  CHAPTER 8

  GAZZA, EUROPE AND THE FALL OF MARGARET THATCHER

  WE IN BRITAIN TEND to divide soccer players into two classes: one class is “British,” and the other “Continental.” Tony Adams, David Batty and Tony Cascarino are British players, and Chris Waddle, John Barnes and Eric Cantona are Continentals. It was the same in the past: there were Englishmen like Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter and Nobby Stiles, and Continentals like Liam Brady, Glenn Hoddle and Ossie Ardiles. The terms have so little to do with geography that Ron Greenwood could even call the Brazilians “those marvelous Continentals.” (In fact, the Brazilians are more Continental than the Continentals and want to change).

  The Briton and the Continental tend to differ not only as players. Often, the Continental is a more cultivated character. He discusses soccer, reads books, and may move abroad and learn a foreign language. Hoddle and Liam Brady are examples.

  Not Paul Gascoigne, the most Continental player England has today. Gascoigne is, perhaps, more commonly known as Gazza (“Guzzle” to one fanzine) and is the subject of Gazzamania.

  When the soccer fan dies, he goes to Italy, where he finds the best players in the world, matches shown in full on public TV and numerous daily sports newspapers. Nice weather, too. In October 1992 I reached Rome and went to the Olympic Stadium to watch Lazio Roma (complete with Gazza) play Parma. It was Gazza’s first home game in Italy.

  Aron Winter, Lazio’s Dutchman, had filled in the Dutch magazine Voetbal International on Gazza’s start in Rome:Gascoigne is here with his brother, his best friend, and his bodyguard. And as long as Paul plays here, they stay in Rome. Each one has his own flat. But take last night . . . It was a little over half past twelve, and Yvonne and I had just decided to go to sleep, when there’s a knock on the door. I open it, Paul’s there. Completely naked, wearing only a very small pair of glasses. “If you need something, call me,” he says. This morning he had the police in his room. A policeman had tied up his friend with handcuffs which they just couldn’t get off. Tied to a chair. The four of them always drive around Rome together, escorted by a police car with howling sirens. He’s just absolutely mad.

  Apparently Gazza’s friend had already been fool enough to make a telephone call without covering his back, and had been urinated on, but Winter refused to confirm the story. Winter’s business manager added: “It’s a bit of a pose of Gascoigne’s, he acts a bit. Because if you talk to him alone, he’s quite normal, but as soon as his friends come in, he starts again.”

  Mussolini built Gazza�
��s home ground, and on the forecourt is an imitation Roman mosaic, bearing the text, over and over again, “A Noi Duce.” Sitting in the Curva Nord among the more intense Lazioli, I felt as though I had trespassed into a Fascist rally. By the fence at the front of the stand stood four men, their backs to the game, who took turns with a microphone to dictate chants to the masses. Sometimes the chant would be “L-A-Z-I-O, Lazio,” each letter accompanied by the thrusting forward of right arms in a familiar salute. Sometimes, instead of a chant, one of the leaders would utter a string of shrieks and groans into the microphone, to which the tifosi would respond with fast handclap.

  The match was fantastic, as was Gazza. There was a moment when he had the ball in midfield, while Thomas Doll ran into space on the right wing, marked by the Parma left-back. The back saw that Gazza was planning to thread the ball past him, and blocked off the space expertly. Yet Gazza put the ball, over 30 yards, inches over the defender’s left shoe and into Doll’s stride. The thugs around me rose in adoration. The English boy was their hero, and they sometimes seemed to shout the opera title La Gazza Ladra—“The Thieving Magpie”—at him. Opposition fans prefer to call him “Ubriacone con l’orecchino”—“Drunkard with an earring.” Lazio won 5-2.

  The next day, the Lazio man at the daily Il Messagero explained to me that the fans liked Gazza because he was an extrovert. I agreed that Gazza was an extrovert, but pointed out one thing he had in common with British failures in Italy like Luther Blissett and Ian Rush: he speaks no Italian. Rush left Juventus after two sorry years saying, “It was like playing in another country,” while Blissett, at AC Milan, complained, “No matter how much money you’ve got, you can’t seem to get any Rice Crispies.” Il Messagero’s Lazio man nodded. It was true that Gazza spoke no Italian, and of Lazio’s Italians only Fiori spoke English. Fiori and Gazza were pally. “But,” said the Lazio man, “Blissett and Rush were like this”: and with his hands he made a tunnel before his eyes. “Gazza is like this”: and he threw his arms out wide and waved them about.