Bin Laden, football
fever and the art of war By
Tony Karon
I have a pretty good idea where Osama
bin Laden will be on June 14 - and June 19, and
again on June 23. Not his exact location, but it's
a safe bet he'll be in front of a TV tuned in to
Saudi Arabia's World Cup soccer (football to some)
matches with, respectively, Tunisia, Ukraine
and Spain.
Legend has it that soccer is
one of bin Laden's guilty pleasures. He's unlikely
to miss the spectacle of the men from the land of
the Prophet taking on the infidels of al-Andalus.
He probably has a soft spot for Tunisia too, that
country being the only one on record thus far to
see one of its professional soccer players attempt
to join al-Qaeda's martyrs.
Nor will bin
Laden be alone among America's enemies in
spending June engrossed
in the quadrennial spectacle of the World Cup, staged this time
in Germany. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad
has even threatened to show up if Iran progresses
beyond the first round. Seeking to burnish his
populist credentials at home, Ahmadinejad recently
allowed himself to be photographed in sweats
kicking a ball around with the Iranian
team during a training session. You
can bet Kim Jong-il will watch, too, even though
it is South Korea that represents his nation's
hopes this year.
President George W Bush
may give the event a miss - one can only wonder
what he would make of a game in which the US has a
negligible chance of being world champion; for
Americans with qualms about their country's
imperial role, by contrast, supporting the plucky
and rather well-liked outsiders of Team USA is an
opportunity for guilt-free patriotic fervor. But
you can be sure that Bush allies like Tony Blair,
Angela Merkel, Jacques Chirac, Junichiro Koizumi
and Silvio Berlusconi (who actually owns AC Milan,
one of Italy's top teams) will watch their country
every game.
No global event commands
anything close to the attention paid the World Cup
on all five continents. As many as 3 billion
people are expected to watch some of it on TV,
while 250 million more will cluster around radios
to follow every play. Having caught the 1974 and
1978 tournaments by radio from a South Africa
without TV coverage, I can sympathize with the
TV-less Angolans, Togoans, Ghanaians, and
Ivoirians of today. (I took in the live drama via
the BBC on short-wave, then waited two weeks for
the visuals, courtesy of the White House Hotel, a
Cape Town brothel that was diversifying its
revenue stream by showing imported pirate videos
of the games.)
The billions who tune into
the World Cup are watching a game that, at the
highest level, largely negates all advantages of
social class or even physical stature - the
combination of speed, skill, imagination and
organization required to prevail is a great
leveler. But at the World Cup, soccer is far more
than a game.
"What do they of cricket know
who only cricket know," wrote the legendary
Trinidadian historian and socialist CLR James,
insisting that the spectacle of men in white
flannels on a grassy oval engaged in a five-day
contest of bat and ball, with strictly observed
breaks for lunch and afternoon tea, could only be
properly understood in the context of the
political and cultural conflicts of the British
Empire.
If James had lived long enough to
see the national team of his beloved Trinidad
qualify for the elite 32 teams that will contest
the 2006 World Cup, he'd surely have made the same
point about soccer (even if, like most of
humanity, he'd have called it "football").
James recognized sport as a ritualized
combat, matching only war in its ability to
channel national passions. Those passions are
tied, for better or worse, to an almost mythic
connection fans make between their team and their
national narrative - when facing Germany, English
fans routinely chant lines like: "Two World Wars
and one World Cup" (linking their defeats of
Germany on the battlefield and the soccer field).
As James saw it, playing cricket matches
against England offered its former colonial
subjects, at least ritually, a chance to demolish
the claims of cultural superiority through which
the British had for so long rationalized imperial
rule. So, too, soccer: the roar heard across the
Irish diaspora when the Republic of Ireland team
scores against England expresses a passion that
long predates the game of soccer - the more
jingoistic among the English fans respond with
bloodcurdling anti-Irish Republican Army songs.
Millions of Africans walked a little
taller that summer's day four years ago when
Senegal beat its former colonial master, France,
then the reigning world champion.
James
also noted the tendency of colonized peoples to
develop their own idiom of play, evolving styles
based on their skills and patterns of social
organization that tended to confound the colonizer
even while playing within his rules.
The
last World Cup final pitted Brazil against
Germany, teams that represent global North-South
polar opposites in the way the game is played. As
Muhammad Ali was celebrated not just for his
unique skills in the ring but for his iconic
resistance to the racial order, so the universal
popularity of Brazil is based not only on its
exquisitely poetic style - the joga bonito
(beautiful game) - but also on its role as a proxy
representative of the global South.
The
German game epitomizes the industrialized West:
physical power, relentless drive, unshakable
organization and a machine-like efficiency in
punishing opponents' mistakes. It's a kind of
Blitzkrieg - the modern German game, as Simon
Kuper has noted, had its roots in Nazi sports
culture and the militaristic virtues it lionized -
that overwhelms opponents with physical power on
the ground and in the air, often winning "ugly" by
a single goal.
The best-known German
players of the past half century have been
goalkeepers, field commanders in defense and
midfield, as well as clinical if artless
goal-poaching forwards. There has never been a
Pele on the German team; in Brazil, by contrast,
each year brings a new crop of awesomely talented
teenagers from the favelas (shantytown)
whose audacious skill and flair inevitably anoints
them as "the next Pele".
Brazil's style is
more akin to advanced guerrilla warfare in which
the insurgents have the momentum and the
confidence. They combine impossible skill with
breathtaking audacity and guile, an ability to
shoot from great distances and apply boot to ball
in a manner that improbably "bends" its
trajectory. The telepathy with which they are able
to anticipate each other's movements allows them
to dazzle both the opposition and the crowd with
the fluidity of their passing movements and their
propensity for doing the unexpected.
The
adversary literally never knows where the next
attack will come from, or what it will be. And the
smiles of the Brazilians, even in crucial games,
tell you that they're enjoying themselves. On the
field, you'll rarely see a German player smile.
When Ronaldinho, currently rated the
greatest player in the world, spotted English
goalkeeper David Seaman two yards off the goal
line in their 2002 World Cup clash, he unleashed a
40-yard free kick that looped over Seaman's
outstretched gloves, wickedly dipping and curling
into the top corner of England's goal. So
thunderstruck were the English TV commentators
that they insisted the strike was a fluke, a pass
that went fortuitously awry. It's for such moments
that the soccer fans of the global South live.
Globalizing the local game National
idioms of play may, however, be on the wane, as
Europe's professional club leagues - housing
almost all of the world's leading players - create
nearly year-round the sort of spectacle for a
global-satellite TV audience once restricted to
the World Cup.
In many developing
countries today (including Brazil), ever fewer
people attend domestic league games, reserving
their soccer time religiously for TV broadcasts of
the top European leagues where they're more likely
to see the best players from their own countries.
Today, a match in London between Arsenal
and Manchester United involves players from Latin
America, much of West Africa, the Arab world,
northern, southern, and eastern Europe, and Asia.
The global TV audience it attracts is good news
for the marketers of players' jerseys and other
soccer paraphernalia, even if it's a tad bizarre
for a British army squaddie patrolling Basra in
southern Iraq to encounter a Mehdi Army militiaman
sporting the shirt of Arsenal, the soldier's
"local" London team - a jersey that he and his
mates might wear on a night out back home to
signify a kind of tribal identity.
But
there's nothing "local" about Arsenal anymore:
When it played Real Madrid earlier this year in
the Champion's League, there were only two
Englishmen on the field, both playing for the
Spanish side.
With this rapid
globalization of the "local" game comes a
homogenization of styles: England, today, has one
or two players who like to run at the defense with
the ball at their feet and can bend a shot from 40
yards; Brazil now plays with one or two "holding"
midfielders, that traditional European demolition
man whose job is simply to break up opposition
attacks and win the ball for his more creative
teammates.
By some estimates, there are
now more than 4,000 Brazilians playing
professional soccer abroad, which is why Brazil's
starting lineup in Germany will consist entirely
of European-based players. (Indeed, Brazil could
probably field two teams for the tournament, each
of which would feature many of Europe's leading
club players.) Germany's squad, by contrast, is
almost entirely home grown, although even in the
German league, many of the leading lights are
Brazilian imports.
This fusing of
different styles has been accelerated by the
migration of coaches as well as players. Last
season, the coaches of the top five clubs in
England's Premier League were Portuguese,
Scottish, Spanish, French and Dutch. Three Dutch
coaches are bringing non-Dutch teams to the World
Cup; most African teams are coached by Frenchmen
and Germans, the English team by a Swede,
Australia by a Dutch and Portugal by a Brazilian.
Kicking people, not
balls Despite the urge of fans to invoke
national mythologies from a distant past, many
European national teams now reflect the
continent's increasingly cosmopolitan makeup.
Thanks to postwar economic migrations into Europe
from former colonies, many of the best players
available to a European national team are second
and even third-generation immigrants. France
fields a team in which all but one, sometimes two,
players are of African or Arab origin.
Racist politician Jean Marie Le Pen
actually complained in 1998 that the World Cup
winners were "not a real French team". Some
English fans are more accepting of their
cosmopolitan fate, as reflected in one of their
chants that extols Britain's new national cuisine:
"And we all love vindaloo ..."
The world
soccer authority FIFA allows players to play for
the country of their citizenship or the one of
their origins. This creates oddities: Dakar-born
Patrick Vieira marshals France's midfield, while
Paris-born Khalilou Fadiga stars for Senegal. In
addition, the ability of emerging players to make
professional migrations seeking fame and fortune
sometimes tempts soccer federations to recruit for
the national team by fast-tracking the citizenship
of promising players. In recent weeks, a Dutch
effort to expedite the citizenship process for
Ivoirian striker Salomon Kalou fell afoul of that
country's new chill on immigration.
If it
had succeeded, Kalou would have been in the
bizarre position of playing against an Ivory Coast
team that happens to include his brother,
Bonaventure. Meanwhile, the luckiest Brazilian
going to Germany is surely Francileudo dos Santos,
a France-based striker who wouldn't even come in
tenth among contenders for his position on the
Brazilian team; but fast-tracked into instant
citizenship by Tunisia, he is now that country's
leading goal-scorer. (Hopefully he will have
learned to avoid offending the fans of his adopted
country, as he did two years ago by draping
himself in the Brazilian flag to celebrate
victory.)
Although many of the stars of
almost every domestic league from Russia westward
are from the African diaspora (which includes
Brazil), an astonishing level of racism persists
among fans and even coaches at the highest levels
of the game. Ukraine coach Oleg Blokhin, for
example, bemoaned the globalization of his
domestic league thus: "The more Ukrainians there
are playing in the national league, the more
examples there are for the young generation. Let
them learn from [our players] and not some
zumba-bumba whom they took off a tree, gave
two bananas and now he plays in the Ukrainian
league."
Then there was the Spanish team's
coach, Luis Aragones, caught on TV telling striker
Jose Antonio Reyes that he was better than his
French Arsenal teammate Thierry Henry. Except
Aragones didn't say Henry's name, he said, "that
black shit". A few days later, he insisted that
there was nothing racist about the remark: "Reyes
is ethnically a gypsy," said Aragones. "I have got
a lot of gypsy and black friends. All I did was to
motivate the gypsy by telling him he was better
than the black."
In many European
stadiums, today, black players are targeted for
racial abuse in the form of ape noises and bananas
thrown from the stands. In fact, the World Cup
offers a range of opportunities for the racist
xenophobes in the ranks of many countries' "ultra"
football fans - those who go to games not only to
support their side in a ritual of combat, but to
seek actual combat against the ultras of the other
side.
For years, England's games were a
rallying and brawling point for the racist far
right. They nonetheless looked positively tame
when compared with the Serbian ultras originally
grouped around the fan club of Red Star Belgrade.
Under their leader Arkan, they became the core of
the notorious "Tiger" militia accused by the Hague
War Crimes Tribunal of some of the most brutal
"ethnic cleansing" violence in Bosnia from 1991 to
1993.
As Europe confronts the challenge of
integrating millions of immigrants on whose labor
the survival of their welfare economies depend,
soccer matches increasingly become the avenue for
a political ritual of a different type -
channeling rampant racism. Not without reason do
German authorities fear that the country's
resurgent neo-Nazis will use the World Cup as an
opportunity to announce their presence to a
watching world. If they do, they will have plenty
of allies in the "ultras" of Serbia, Poland, Italy
and even England.
Branding the
game Although the "national narrative" that
binds fans to their teams is open to progressive
or reactionary appropriation, it's not the game's
driving force any more. Soccer, today, is a
multibillion-dollar global industry whose power
centers are transnational corporations - the
moneyed clubs of Europe whose financial well-being
depends on the ability of their "brand" to sell
merchandise from Baghdad to Beijing.
Manchester United may be based in a city
whose prosperity has declined with that of the
British textile industry, but most of the young
men sporting its jersey from Gaza to Guangdong
would undoubtedly struggle to locate the home of
"their" team on a map. And it's a safe bet that
the Ecuadorian busboy and the Bangkok cab driver
wearing the blue and red jersey of Barcelona are
blissfully unaware of "their" team's centrality to
Catalan nationalism.
Local icons have
become global brands. Mancunians might put away
their Manchester United jerseys and don England's
colors during the World Cup, but most of their
team's stars will actually be playing against
England in the shirts of Holland, Portugal,
Argentina, Serbia and France. For Manchester
United's management, however, having their stars
represent any nation's team is a problem. Wayne
Rooney, United's star striker, for example, is
being raced back to fitness from a broken foot
because England's hopes depend on him.
Should he aggravate the injury playing in
the World Cup, Manchester United - which paid
close to $40 million to sign Rooney - could suffer
potentially huge financial losses once the league
season resumes in September. That's why Manchester
United and 17 other top clubs in Europe are
agitating to be given a share of the revenues
generated by the World Cup.
They argue
that it is their "assets" who are generating the
revenue, at great risk to the clubs that hold
their contracts. As the employers of most of the
world's best players, soccer's collective
corporate management has considerable leverage in
challenging the sovereignty of national
federations in the organization of the game.
No such problem exists for the other major
corporate interest in the game, the makers of
equipment and apparel. Their sponsorship of the
World Cup and its teams stands to make them
billions of dollars in revenues. Nike has an
advantage, sponsoring Team Brazil as it does, as
well as Holland, Portugal, Mexico, South Korea,
and the US among others. Adidas holds its own with
Germany, France, Spain, Argentina, Japan and
Trinidad (whose shirts will no doubt become a
nightclub standard, and have already been adopted
as the fetish of choice by Scottish fans whose own
team failed to qualify). Puma sponsors mostly
outsiders like Ivory Coast and Iran, although
Italy remains a credible contender.
Adidas
could, however, be said to have the killer
advantage. It supplies the tournament ball, whose
appeal crosses all affiliations. Having already
sold 10 million World Cup balls, and expecting
another 5 million to bounce out of the stores by
year's end, they could rack up close to a billion
dollars in sales simply by catering to the desire
of the rest of us to kick the "same" ball the
stars do.
From contemporary geopolitical
and cultural conflicts (or their historic echoes)
to the impact of globalization, the World Cup
offers a real-time snapshot of the state of our
world. This summer, when Portugal plays Angola or
England meets Trinidad, colonial history won't be
forgotten among the fans of the formerly
colonized.
Whenever England has played
Argentina in the past 24 years, the fans of both
countries have been asked to relive the
Falklands/Malvinas War - and I'd be surprised if
World War II memories escape a mention when
Australia plays Japan. Yet, the game will also be
infused with contemporary political drama, should
fate decree that the US meets Iran.
Sometimes more than just a game, the World
Cup nonetheless remains a contest whose outcome is
never certain. Winners are still determined by an
alchemy of balletics and poetics, skill and
cooperation, athleticism and sheer luck.
Orchestrating the movement of a ball and 11
players across the field with such rapidity would
be hard enough, even without 11 other players
trying to disrupt them.
The power
relations that prevail in the real world count for
little in those 90 minutes of play - and, no
matter how fierce the "combat", at game's end, in
a time-honored World Cup ritual, players from both
sides exchange shirts in a mark of respect and
friendship. A snapshot, then, not only of a world
in conflict, but also of the possibilities of
resolution by means other than war.
Tony Karon is a senior editor at
TIME.com, where he analyzes the Middle East and
other international conflicts. South African-born
and raised, yet a lifelong fan of Liverpool, he
offers comment and analysis - as well as a World
Cup blog - on his own web site Rootless
Cosmopolitan. He also edits Global Beat, an
annotated weekly digest of international conflict
coverage.
team during a training session. You
can bet Kim Jong-il will watch, too, even though
it is South Korea that represents his nation's
hopes this year. 
