How Soccer Explains The World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization
By Franklin Foer
Harper Perennial; paperback, 288 pages; $18.99; available today, Tuesday, April 7th
Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a former editor of The New Republic. His most recent book is The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future.
Foer's most well-known book is How Soccer Explains The World, and there is a new edition of this bestseller out with a fresh preface in time for the 2026 World Cup.
This World Cup will be hosted in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the first to encompass all three nations in North America. It also is one that shows how, to Foer, soccer is much more than a game, or even a way of life.
It is a window into the crosscurrents of modern globalization, with all of the benefits and pitfalls of that. One example of that is how the English club Chelsea was owned by a Russian oligrach, Roman Abramovich, until the team was seized, along with his other assets at the start of the Ukraine war. Chelsea was then sold to an American-led group, fronted by Todd Boehly, that also owns the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Unlike rivalries here like the Yankees and Red Sox, who basically just represent their cities, soccer clubs do that, but they also stand for social classes and political ideologies. Soccer is freighted with ancient hatreds and history, a sport with he power to ruin regimes and launch liberation movements.
Foer smashes myths and dire predictions, such as the left warning that soccer would destroy culture, but instead, as it has globalized, tribalism has been revived. The right felt confident that it would show the triumph of capitalism, but it has shown the entrenched corruption around the game. That is shown by some of the countries shown to host past and future World Cups by FIFA, and their awarding of a new "Peace Prize" to President Trump.
From Brazil to Bosnia, Italy to Iraq, Foer created this eye-opening chronicle of how a beautiful sports and its fervid following can illuminate the fault lines of a society, whether it be terrorism, poverty, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, or radical Islam, issues that affect everyone. This is all amidst a backlash against globalization, along with some Americans a yearning for a retreat from being involved in the world.
In this excerpt, Foer writes of how he came to love soccer as a kid in the 1990s: I suck at soccer.
When I was a boy, my parents would turn their backs to the field to avoid watching me play. I don't blame them. The game's fundamental principles only dawned on me slowly, after I had spent many seasons running in the opposite direction of the ball.
Despite these traumas, or perhaps because of them, my love for soccer later developed into something quite mad. I desperately wanted to master the game that had been the source of so much childhood shame. Because I would never achieve competence in the game itself, I could do the next best thing, to try and acquire a maven's understanding. For an American, this wasn't easy. During my childhood, public television would irregularly rebroadcast matches from Germany and Italy at televangelist hours on Sunday mornings. Those measly offerings would have to carry you through the four years between World Cups. That was it.
But slowly, technology filled in the gaps. First, praise God, came the internet, where you could read the British sports pages and closely follow the players that you encountered at the World Cup. Then Rupert Murdoch, blessed be his name, created a cable channel called Fox Sports World, dedicated almost entirely to airing European and Latin American soccer. Now, a rooftop dish brings into my living room a feed from the Spanish club Real Madrid's cable channel, as well as games from Paraguay, Honduras, the Netherlands, Scotland, and France, not to mention Brazil, Argentina, and England.
At about the same time these television stations began consuming disturbingly large chunks of my leisure time, op-ed columnists and economists began to talk about the era of globalization. Because I spend many of my non-soccer-watching hours as a political journalist in Washington, I found myself drawn into the thick of this discussion. Thanks to the collapse of trade barriers and new technologies, the world was said to have become more interdependent. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and high priest of the 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."
As a soccer fan, I understood exactly what he meant. It wasn't just the ways in which the internet and satellites had made the world of soccer so much smaller and more accessible. You could see globalization on the pitch: During the nineties, Basque teams, under the stewardship of Welch coaches, stocked up on Dutch and Turkish players; Moldavian squads imported Nigerians. Everywhere you looked, it suddenly seemed, national borders and national identities had been swept into the dustbin of soccer history. The best clubs now competed against one another on a near-weekly basis in transnational tournaments like the European Champions League or Latin America's Copa Libertadores.
It was easy to be wildly enthusiastic about the new order. These tournaments were a fan's sweet dream: the chance to see Juventus of Turin play Bayern Munich one week and Barcelona the next. When coaches created cultural alchemies out of their rosters, they often yielded wonderful new spectacles: The cynical, defensive-minded Italian style livened by an infusion of freewheeling Dutchmen and Brazilians; the English stiff-upper-lip style (or lack of style) tempered by a bit of continental flair, brought across the Channel in the form of French strikers. From the perspective of my couch, the game seemed much further along in the process of globalization than any other economy on the planet.
No comments:
Post a Comment