Kick back: the curious appeal of soccer's tribalism

Washington Monthly, July-August, 2004 by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

But most memorable are a pair of characters, Zeljko Raznatovic and Alan Garrison. Raznatovic, known as Arkan, was a Serbian thug of the first order, a gangster who in the 1980s turned the most violent, fractious hooligan groups supporting the Belgrade club Red Star into organized and disciplined paramilitary death squads. Foer's book is horrifying, and terrific, when he describes the way in which the Serbian government cultivated these hooligans, and then used them and their casual, sporadic violence in lieu of a regular army. By the tense end of the Balkan wars, these death squads had been credited by the State Department with murdering 2,000 Croats and Muslims, and Arkan, since assassinated, became a national hero and martyr.

Garrison, a middle-aged leader of the hooligan gangs supporting the (once gritty, now tony) West London side Chelsea, is less frightening, though no less compelling--the living, anachronistic legacy of that hooliganism in yuppie climes. Half-Jewish himself, Garrison leads vicious anti-Semitic chants directed at the rival, historically Jewish club Tottenham Hotspur. He made his chops leading hooligans in street knife fights and, in good meritocratic fashion, had this talent recognized by the establishment: He now works for a German company that hires out mercenaries--mostly, he has trained street fighters in the Balkans. He is shopping a screenplay about his exploits. Garrison, hunched and glowering at a profound cultural crossroads, is less shocking than befuddling: Is he the last vestige of a culture about to be swept away, or a marker of the rough side of an essential European working class spirit that is bound to endure?

This book doesn't quite formulate a cohesive answer. In a lovely essay on soccer and the Iranian resistance, Foer argues that soccer can be a wedge for Western, aspirational values to crack open even the most oppressive of societies; and, in a chapter on his beloved Barcelona, suggests that in the most cosmopolitan of cultures, there is an admirable sort of "bourgeois nationalism" afoot, impassioned but tolerant. But little of this comes as news, and the conversion of any significant part of the world into little Barcelonas--with similarly rich histories of diversity, wealth, and tolerance--remains an impossible project. The book's optimistic sections fail to resolve a difficult tension within the text: Foer, a deft and nimble thinker, seems to want to be more hopeful than much of his reporting will let him. He wants a theory that leaves room for his intuitive faith in growth and modernization, but his anecdotes and details are mostly illustrate of an ugly anachronism.

The problem, I think, is that soccer doesn't quite explain the world--it illuminates, more precisely, a rough and declining side of it. For all the fierce sectarian tendencies of the diehards, fandom is only one part of their lives. The most violent Celtic and Rangers hooligans, who spend their weekends encumbered by glower and shiv, show up at work Monday morning and calmly sort mail next to one another; they talk happily about Britney Spears and the stock market when they go together to lunch, drinking Coke and eating falafel. Europe, clearly, believes in its working class heritage, finds some spirit there that makes tribalism a little more difficult to eradicate; soccer has become one of the last ways in which that history is announced. But for most, like for the yuppies in the Dupont Circle bar, this tribalism is a fetish, a release valve, a reminder of an ugly past that, in the right light, can sometimes look quaint. The goons write screenplays about their street-fighting days. The revolutionary club hosts poetry readings. The world moves on.