Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  Along with TV sets, democracy is spreading across the world. More and more politicians have to worry about voters, and they turn to soccer. The South Americans are desperate; President Clinton appeared on prime-time TV telephoning the American team; and General Abacha, the Nigerian military ruler, addressed his team almost daily during the World Cup. I put it to the Nigerian sweeper, Chidi Nwanu, that here was a politician trying to steal a bit of glory. Nwanu disagreed. He said the World Cup meant a lot to Nigeria, and it was the head of state’s job to acknowledge this.

  Cameroon, still under President Biya, was still running short of cash, and Henri Michel, the Lions’ French coach, had to pay for soccerballs out of his own pocket. There was no money to send the team to the USA, so the government organized Action Coup de Coeur, theoretically to solicit donations from fans. Instead, civil servants, who seldom got paid anyway, were forced to make “voluntary” donations.

  Most of the money disappeared and the campaign became known as Action Coup de Peur, or Cri de Coeur. The players, led by goalkeeper Joseph-Antoine Bell, spent most of the World Cup discussing whether or not to go on strike.

  The government officials accompanying the team put pressure on Michel to drop Bell, and to calm things down. Bell retired before the final match against Russia. Russia won 6-1, and Coup de Coeur became a big political issue.

  Cameroon’s goal against Russia was scored by Roger Milla, recalled to the team by President Biya as he had been in 1990. Perhaps Biya will do the same again in 1998, when Milla will be 46.

  Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister in 1994, did well out of soccer. Voters deserted the corrupt old parties to elect his new one, Forza Italia, in April 1994. (“Would you vote for a party named after a soccer chant?,” I asked a political scientist friend. He thought for a bit. “Yeah, probably,” he said.) It was Berlusconi’s work as president of AC Milan that persuaded many Italians to vote for him.

  He took over Milan in 1986, when they had returned to Serie A after a 1979 bribery scandal. At Milan, Berlusconi created a cosmopolitan, organized, rich team that beat all comers from the rest of Europe. This was exactly what voters wanted him to do for the Italian state, stuck in the European second division after its own bribery scandal. One article on the elections described a bar in which upstairs 40 people were attending a Forza Italia meeting; downstairs, 80 were watching a Milan game. Probably all 120 of them voted for Berlusconi.

  But the Brazilians beat the Italians, because their defense was soundest. Brazil’s coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira, had ignored the instructions of his mother, President Franco and Pelé, the troika leading those Brazilians who wanted the team to attack more. Parreira pointed out that Brazil had done that before, and lost. His Brazil was more Brazilian than Lazaroni’s team of 1990, but more European than Santana’s of 1982. Parreira found the synthesis.

  “You are asking which is more important—Brazil or a U.S. invasion?,” one Haitian fan asked an American reporter in 1994. “We are hungry every day. We have problems every day. The Americans talk about invading every day. But we only have the World Cup every four years.”

  CHAPTER 20

  THE PRESIDENT AND THE BAD BLUE BOYS

  IMAGINE IF BRITAIN WERE occupied by Austrians and Serbs. Britons would grumble for a few years, but after a while they would start forgetting they had ever been free, and they would bumble along, falling a little further behind the Germans each year.

  But if after hundreds of years they were suddenly freed, they would be pleased. They would say that Britain would now again become a glorious nation, just as it had been when it was led by John Major. They would build a statue of Major sitting on a horse in a main square, and Manchester United, renamed Rapid Manchester by the Austrians, would be given back their old name. For a couple of years Union Jacks would fly from every office. But after a while people would start forgetting that they had ever been occupied, and they would bumble along again, falling a little further behind the Germans each year.

  Croatia fought a war and left Yugoslavia in 1992 to become an independent country, after being ruled by Austrians and Serbs for hundreds of years. Walking around Zagreb you see red-and-white checkered flags everywhere, and now, in the main square, as in most central European towns, there is a statue of a local hero sitting on a horse. One tourist brochure told a long story about a Zagreb man “of Czech-Polish origin” who had invented something called a mechanical pencil, which the brochure said had changed the life “of the entire human population.” A Zagreb square had just been named after him.

  The city is full of people in pork-pie hats walking around shopping for things they can’t quite afford, and only at the Dynamo Zagreb ground—for no one calls the club by its new name, Croatia Zagreb—are you reminded that until very recently this country was at war.

  A statue of a group of soldiers stands in front of the ground, and the text beneath them says: “To the fans of this club, who started the war with Serbia at this ground on May 13, 1990.” No one yet believes that the Yugoslav war really did start at Dynamo Zagreb, but before too long they probably will. “You don’t need a century for this to become myth,” Zvarko Puhovski, a philosophy professor and basketball fan, grumbled to me.

  On May 13, 1990, Dynamo met Red Star Belgrade. The Croats who supported Dynamo and the Serbian fans of Red star fought a battle so fierce that many Yugoslav TV viewers realised then that it was all up with their country—that the quarrels between Serbia and Croatia would lead to war. Westerners tend to have heard about the Cantona-style karate kick that Zvonimir Boban, the great Croat player, deployed on a policeman at the game. However, Boban left Croatia soon after the match to join AC Milan. The Bad Blue Boys, the Dynamo fans, went to war instead.

  The Bad Blue Boys named themselves after the Sean Penn movie Bad Boy, which they all saw several times. They come from Zagreb suburbs so depressing that the blocks of flats daily surprise you by not falling down. When Yugoslavia was still one country, the BBB—as they are usually called—would follow Dynamo Zagreb to Sarajevo or Belgrade to fight Bosnian or Serbian fans. When war broke out, they put on army uniforms and went to fight Serbian fans in uniform.

  The original Croatian army was very largely staffed by the BBB. Many Croats in those days did not feel all that Croatian—after all, they had been living in Yugoslavia for nearly 50 years. Tomoslav Ivic, the great Croatian coach, said in the early days of the war that he felt Yugoslav and thought that all this fighting was silly.

  The Dynamo fans did feel Croat. Puhovski told me that when he was 12 years old his schoolteacher had asked the pupils what they were. Some had said Croat, and others Yugoslav. When two Algerian boys were asked, they said, “We’re Croats.” The teacher told them that this was absurd. Puhovski then led a protest for the Algerians’ right to be Croatian, and was hauled up before the headmaster. “Why do you say that they are Croats?,” the headmaster asked. Puhovski replied: “Firstly because they speak Croat, and secondly because they support Dynamo.” To support Dynamo was to be a Croat.

  When war broke out, many intellectuals also felt Croatian. But, Puhovski told me, “As you know, when a war starts it is not usually the intellectuals who are at the front line firing guns.” The Bad Blue Boys went instead. On the Serb side, Arkan (real name Zeljko Raznjatovic), one of the most evil war criminals in Bosnia, was head of Red Star’s fan club. He lives in a three-story bunker across the road from the Red Star ground, and he took many of the club’s fans with him into Bosnia.

  “The soccer fans were really influential in the fighting,” Laura Silber, the Financial Times correspondent in Belgrade, told me. “It’s like the Boy Scouts: if you all go in, it makes an influential force.” Laura was getting ready for dinner with a Western ambassador: “Oh, he’s so gross. He said to me, ‘I don’t have time to talk now—but,’ ” and she put on a Humphrey Bogart voice, “ ‘why don’t you come to dinner?’ ”

  Darko and Neno claim to be the leaders of the BBB. Sitting in Cafe Z, a clean bar f
ull of pretty girls, they told me about the war. Darko, who bears shrapnel wounds from a grenade in Vukovar, tried rolling up his sleeve of his lumberjack shirt to show me the mark on his arm. But the sleeve would not go high enough, and it looked to the other people in Cafe Z as though he was undressing. Embarrassed, he moved up a seat to sit behind a wall, and there he dislodged his clothes enough to show me a discolored patch. On his other arm he displayed a Union Jack with the word “Dynamo” on it. In the 1980s Darko used to sit in the British Council building in Zagreb reading reports about English hooligans in the Telegraph, The Times and Soccer Monthly. He fell for Chelsea because their fans seemed to be involved in 90 percent of the trouble.

  “Chelsea: good mates, good fighters,” he told me. “I like the English supporter, because he likes his club very much. It’s really the most important thing in the world for him.” So the Bad Blue Boys had chosen an English name for themselves, and Darko and Neno were drinking Guinness. They spoke good English, and remembered more as the conversation went on: after about ten minutes they suddenly began using the word “fucking,” as in “Vinny Jones is fucking mental.”

  Darko is now a war invalid, and gets a pension of £350 a month, which he considers lots of money. Prices in Croatia are about as high as in Britain. Some British volunteers had come to fight for Croatia in the war, Darko and Neno said. Most had ended up hanging around with Bad Blue Boys, who are natural groupies for tough Brits. The BBB had worn Dynamo badges on their uniforms, and Neno had slept in a house on the frontline which had a Dynamo flag hanging from the window. Convoys would hoot as they drove past.

  “Many people died in this war with the Dynamo emblem on their sleeve,” Darko said.

  I asked whether he and Neno had lost many friends. They reflected. Five or six had died, they said, but the strange thing was that they had all been killed in car crashes. One friend, who had tried to cross Serb lines, who had been under siege in Vukovar, and who had spent nine months in a POW camp with Darko, had been killed in a crash with a car full of teenagers on his way to a party two days before Christmas.

  Darko and Neno no longer go to watch Dynamo. Most of the BBB had stopped going after the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, rebaptised the club Croatia during the war. Crowds are now sometimes as low as 1,000, compared with 15,000 before the war. I asked Darko and Neno when they would start going to matches again. “When Dynamo will be the name of the club,” Neno said. But I suspected that the truth was that at 27 they had grown out of the BBB. Now that they had fought a war, wandering around Zagreb looking for fans from the Croat provinces to beat up must have seemed a tame way of spending a Sunday afternoon.

  The club’s name change had cost President Tudjman dearly. Born 25 miles from Zagreb, in a village near the birthplace of his hero Marshall Tito, Tudjman had always been a sports nut. As a young general forty years ago he became president of Partisan Belgrade, the club of the Yugoslav army. Today his political opponents in Croatia often ask: “How can a person lead us who used to run Partisan?”

  When Tito had tired of him, Tudjman had returned to Zagreb to work as a historian. He came to believe that Croats had been yearning for independence for 900 years, and he got it into his head he was the Croatian George Washington, the father of the nation. He became president, took to wearing military uniforms, fought a war against Serbia, and started changing the names of streets and soccer clubs. A father of the nation has to change things.

  Tudjman had watched Dynamo since his return to Croatia, but as president he took a special interest. Once, a few days before Dynamo were due to play Auxerre in a crucial European match, the club met Primorac in the league. “Before kickoff Tudjman came into our changing room,” claimed the Primorac vicechairman. “He said, ‘Boys, no illusions. It’s going to be 6-0, so pull your feet out of tackles.’ Dynamo won 6-0.” It is the kind of political support Manchester United would have appreciated before their European games.

  Tudjman renamed Dynamo while the BBB were away at war. The first name he chose, HASK Gradjanski, sounded dull, and older people remembered that HASK and Gradjanski had been rival clubs: it was a bit like calling a team Manchester City Manchester United. So the club name was later changed again, to Croatia Zagreb.

  Just before I arrived in Zagreb, Tudjman had been speaking at an election rally where he had spotted a Dynamo banner in the crowd. Losing his George Washingtonesque calm, he began berating the fans, whereupon they began chanting, “Dynamo not Croatia!.” “If you want Dynamo, go to Serbia!” Tudjman responded. The exchange had not done wonders for his reputation, and a month later his party lost the local elections in Zagreb. All the other parties had pledged to help the club change its name back. “Changing the name was a stupid thing, and it was a very important mistake,” Zvonko Makovic, a Croatian poet, told me, minutes before he crashed our car. I had to hitchhike back to Zagreb.

  Tudjman lost Dynamo, but he still had the national team. This was more important, as he still had a job to do to make his people feel Croatian. He knew that a clever politician could make people feel anything; Tito had even made them feel Yugoslav. When Yugoslavia beat the USSR in the 1950s, and loudspeakers broadcast the match into the streets, Croats, fresh from massacring Serbs and Jews, began feeling proud of the new state. The feeling grew. On the night in 1980 that the news came of Tito’s death, the Croatian crowd and all the players at a Hajduk Split match burst into tears. The game had to be abandoned, and the crying was shown on TV. But Professor Puhovski told me: “Now many of the players are saying that they weren’t there, or that the TV pictures are bad, and so on.” Everyone’s a Croat now.

  I went looking for Tomaslav Ivic at halftime of a minor match in Zagreb. Suddenly a small, neat man was hugging me. Unsure whether or not he was Ivic, I began by asking him, “So, what are you doing now?” It emerged that he was Ivic, that he was about to go off and coach the United Arab Emirates, and that he now felt completely Croatian. I told him about the magazine interview three years before in which he had said he could not understand the war. “No, no,” he said. “That was not me.”

  People are malleable. To make all his people Croatian like Ivic, Tudjman wants the new Croatia to do great things. It can’t go and conquer the world, because it has a smaller population than Denmark. But quite by chance, Croatia today has a pretty good generation of soccer players.

  “It’s not nice to say it, but those players can do more for Croatia than a soldier giving his life,” I was told by Mark Viduka, an Australian Croat who plays at center-forward for Dynamo. Viduka, whose uncle and grandfather were killed in one night by the Yugoslav army, was unhappy in Croatia, fed up with bad weather and filling in forms. He had not planned to come to Dynamo at all, but Tudjman had telephoned him at home in Melbourne and asked him to. The president thinks that soccer equals prestige.

  “It’s the same with Miss World,” Makovic had told me. “A Croatian girl is always in the top five—well, always since we became independent three years ago. This year Miss Croatia came second, even though in my view she is nothing special, and these things are very important. The Eurovision Song Festival too—these things are questions of prestige.”

  The Croatian players know this, and go on ad tedium about how much their country means to them. They even paid some of their own airfares to play for Croatia. Normal people only briefly get excited about having a new nation, and then get back to their everyday life of working and drinking. I asked Viduka if there had been people celebrating on the streets after Croatia qualified for the European Championships. “No,” he said. But people who play for their country’s soccer team, and are told by their president that they are helping him to build the new nation, stay patriotic.

  Boban, the team captain, is from the south of Croatia, where people are notoriously patriotic, and he never stops talking about his country. However, on the day before Croatia vs. Italy, he admitted to the Italian paper La Gazzetta dello Sport that if the match were between Croatian and Italian literary classics
instead of soccer players Italy would win hands down. “Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi . . . it wouldn’t be a contest,” he confessed. Boban should know. He told the Gazzetta that his first book had been The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, that he had “grown up” on Chekhov and Dostoevsky, that he “adored” Borges, but Marquez less so, and that Roberto Baggio should read Siddharta by Hermann Hesse. To Matarrese, the president of the Italian FA, Boban recommended Nietzsche.

  I met Miroslav Blazevic, the national team manager, in the press lounge after a Dynamo game. He spoke good French and I spoke bad French. As far as I know, he told me: “On every occasion before a match I speak to the players of Croatia’s problems, the suffering of all our patriots. Because in soccer motivation is very important.” Yugoslavia, an unmotivated side, had never won anything, despite always having had some of the best players in Europe.

  Was it true that Blazevic discussed tactics with Tudjman before a game? “I speak to him about soccer, because he is an expert on soccer.” Or as he once told the president: “After you, I am the one who knows most about soccer.”

  Tudjman and the manager have a special friendship. Tudjman once even helped Blazevic become both owner and manager of Dynamo Zagreb. But then the name was changed, the club started doing badly, there was management infighting, and Tudjman helped oust Blazevic as owner.

  Blazevic, in a Croatian newspaper, recalls a day around this time when Tudjman was playing cards with his ministers and his personal doctor after a game of tennis. (Tudjman wins most of his tennis matches these days.) Blazevic, as usual, was sitting on a small chair behind Tudjman watching the card game. No one was paying any attention to him, and Blazevic could see that they were all fed up with him. However, he stayed. “At that moment pride was born in me, so I sat in a rocking chair and watched TV. Everyone was tacitly asking me, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”