How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization
Soccer is much more than a game, or even a way of life. It is a perfect window into the crosscurrents of today's world, with all of its joys and sorrows. Soccer clubs don't represent geographic areas; they stand for social classes and political ideologies, and often command more faith than religion. Unlike baseball or tennis, soccer is freighted with the weight of ancient hatreds and history. It's a sport with real stakes -- one that is capable of ruining regimes and launching liberation movements. In this remarkably insightful, wide-ranging work of reportage, Franklin Foer takes us on a surprising tour through the world of soccer, shattering the myths of our new global age along the way. He finds that instead of destroying local cultures, as the Left predicted, globalization has revived tribalism. And far from the triumph of capitalism that the Right predicted, it has entrenched corruption. In his travels, Foer encounters a collection of fans that is stranger than fiction: an English hooligan with a Jewish mother, a Nazi father, and a career as a soldier of fortune; a soccer fan club in Serbia that turns into a brutal anti-Muslim paramilitary unit; and a raucous crowd of Scots who urge him to take sides in their age-old rivalry between Catholic and Protestant teams. Telling stories in turns wild, violent, funny, and tragic, the author is able to shine a spotlight on the clash of civilizations, the international economy, and just about everything in between. From Brazil to Bosnia and from Italy to Iran, How Soccer Explains the World is an eye-opening chronicle of how a beautiful sport and its fanatical followers can illuminate the fault lines of a society, whether poverty, anti-Semitism, or radical Islam. Filled with blazing intelligence, colorful characters, wry humor, and an equal passion for soccer and humanity, this is an utterly original book that makes sense of our troubled times.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Foer, a New Republic editor, scores a game-winning goal with this analysis of the interchange between soccer and the new global economy. The subtitle is a bit misleading, though: he doesn't really use soccer to develop a theory; instead, he focuses on how examining soccer in different countries allows us to understand how international forces affect politics and life around the globe. The book is full of colorful reporting, strong characters and insightful analysis: In one of the most compelling chapters, Foer shows how a soccer thug in Serbia helped to organize troops who committed atrocities in the Balkan War-by the end of the war, the thug's men, with the acquiescence of Serbian leaders, had killed at least 2,000 Croats and Bosnians. Then he bought his own soccer club and, before he was gunned down in 2000, intimidated other teams into losing. Most of the stories aren't as gruesome, but they're equally fascinating. The crude hatred, racism and anti-Semitism on display in many soccer stadiums is simply amazing, and Foer offers context for them, including how current economic conditions are affecting these manifestations. In Scotland, the management of some teams have kept religious hatreds alive in order to sell tickets and team merchandise. But Foer, a diehard soccer enthusiast, is no anti-globalist. In Iran, for example, he depicts how soccer works as a modernizing force: thousands of women forced police to allow them into a men's-only stadium to celebrate the national team's triumph in an international match. One doesn't have to be a soccer fan to truly appreciate this absorbing book. (July) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
The ironic title is certainly audacious, but this book does not disappoint even though it fails to deliver on the full potential of what it promises. Interestingly, the truth freelancer Foer most helpfully finds in soccer is not globalization but its older and sometimes murderously persistent converse, nationalism, as engrossing chapters on professional teams in Serbia, Italy, and Spain and the commercialization of English hooliganism show in complex detail. Foer's look at the religious and ethnic sectarianism behind rival Glasgow football clubs should be required reading for stateside Irvine Welsh devotees. Indeed, except for a history of an interwar Jewish team based in Vienna, which saps some of the book's narrative energy, each chapter is a small journalistic masterpiece. That each can stand on its own is partly a drawback, for the book lacks the sustained, treatise-like argument that such a title would need were it more manifestly earnest. Written for open-minded but soccer-indifferent American readers, this book is recommended for all public and academic libraries. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A novel look at how the world is everywhere becoming more alike, and everywhere more different, as people seek to define themselves through football. "I suck at soccer," young New Republic staffer Foer offers by way of an opening. And why not? He's an American, and Americans see soccer-what the rest of the world calls "football"-differently. Where in Italy or Brazil or Kenya, say, it's a working-class sport laden with working-class aspirations, in the US it's inverted: "Here, aside from Latino immigrants, the professional classes follow the game most avidly and the working class couldn't give a toss about it." Yet everywhere the game is politicized as none other: In the US, "soccer moms" are alternately reviled and courted while reactionary politicos insist that soccer is fundamentally un-American (and probably socialist, too, as Jack Kemp once urged). In Scotland, Foer writes, the game affords a screen behind which to play out fantastic anti-Catholic hatreds. (Glasgow, Foer brightly adds, provides a fine rebuttal to the capitalist theory that "once a society becomes economically advanced, it becomes politically advanced-liberal, tolerant, democratic.") In the heart of the former Yugoslavia, where the soccer hooligans are so tough that they regularly beat up their own teams, professional football has provided shibboleths by which to separate and massacre Croats, Bosnians, Slovenians, and other non-Serbian types. In Spain, football arenas still resound with echoes of the civil war of the 1930s. In the Middle East, the game provides a means of expressing anti-fundamentalist sentiment. And so on. One day soccer/football will be played everywhere, Foer hints, and fans in Benin and Burlingtonwill cheer players in Belgrade and Botswana; but in each place, even as the sport remakes the planet, those big and little cultural differences will remain, perhaps some day to provoke future wars, revolutions, or renaissances. Though the globalism thread sometimes disappears, the author is unfailingly interesting. Lively and provocative-even for those who just don't get what FIFA is all about. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn/Sagalyn Literary Agency
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Mark (debate@pullman.com), a sociologist and a soccer fan., December 3, 2004,
Good Primer
While this book is not an academic tome on globalization it does a good job of explaining globalization using an easy example in soccer. The book is entertaining and takes the reader acorss the globe to visit the various manifestations, both culturally and athletically, of the Beautiful Game.
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