Football Fables

In early 2007, I happened to find myself in Oman during the Gulf Cup of Nations—a soccer tournament properly called Khaleeji 18. Khaleeji pits genuinely awful teams, like Bahrain or Kuwait, against the somewhat less wretched, such as repeat World Cup finalists Saudi Arabia. Crappy football notwithstanding, there was something transformative going on in Oman—a small Middle Eastern country only 20 years removed from being the most benighted in the world. As its national team rocketed toward a berth in the final, the wins brought a sense of confidence and a blush of what locals described as western-style modernity. Front page news: pictures of women cheering in the stands in nearby Abu Dhabi, veiled in the Omani flag. On the jammed streets following the Omani semifinal triumph, I watched tribes unite. Eleven men and a soccer ball had managed what six centuries of colonialism and 40 years of independence could not. This moment would forever be woven into the sense of Omani national self.

John Doyle—Globe and Mail television critic and lifelong soccer aficionado—would like this story. If his new book, The World Is a Ball: The Joy, Madness and Meaning of Soccer, is anything to go by, he has an ecstatic belief in the transformative power of football or, more specifically, football tournaments. He takes us on a journey through four massive post-9/11 sporting events: two World Cup finals (Japan/South Korea in 2002 and Germany in 2006) and two Euro Cup finals (Portugal in 2004 and Austria/Switzerland in 2008). Where most of us would expect to find only bitterness and suspicion, xenophobia and tribal sectarianism, Doyle finds hundreds of thousands of people pleasantly drunk on booze and football, draped in their national colours. He witnesses no violence; he espies no racism to speak of. He watches the world knit itself together as Oman did during Khaleeji 18.

The World Is a Ball arrives as something of a puzzle to those of us who have come to understand globalization in binary terms—rich versus poor, developed versus developing—or as a process of steady homogenization. As New Republic editor Franklin Foer made clear in his own football travelogue, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, the game provides the ultimate globalization metaphor. Foer introduced us to a Serb war criminal who learned his trade as a football thug; he showed how football teams in Scotland keep religious hatreds aflame to sell soccer tickets. Foer has nothing on Simon Kuper’s Soccer Against the Enemy: How the World’s Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power, the subtitle of which says it all.

While Foer, Kuper and Doyle may not share an outlook, they all have an exquisite understanding of the beautiful game. Without this, it becomes impossible to parse soccer’s elemental power; nor can one comprehend how soccer transmutes itself nationally and internationally as both a battleground and a binding force. Doyle speaks often of the dream logic that unfolds during a truly brilliant match, a zone of unreality that grips the game and hurls its narrative into the realm of the oneiric and thus into the mythic: an otherworldly experience shared by those who watch, a communal event on a massive scale that can only be called religious, because we have no other means of describing it.

Doyle, Irish born, kicks things off in Toronto, as he watches a World Cup qualifying game between Ireland and Iran in a downtown bar. (Insert multi- cultural banalities here.) We then flash back to the Ireland of Doyle’s boyhood, and watch him fall in love with a sport that was loathed by his compatriots as a “garrison game.” Soccer was an English invasion, effete and ephemeral, its lightness and speed a reminder of the fact that Ireland was a conquered outpost of a great empire, etiolated as that empire might have been by the 1960s. In these bravura early chapters (Doyle has written well on Ireland before, in his memoir A Great Feast of Light), we witness a boy become a fan: “I had a child’s unerring sense that what I was watching was forbidden because it had a languid, honeyed pleasure to it.” He watched soccer like many of us viewed porn: it was illicit, it was morally abhorrent, it would ruin him.

Shortly, we are flung into the tumult of Japan, co-host of the 2002 World Cup finals, a country terrified of the fans who have landed on its shores, braced for a tsunami of hooliganism. Doyle makes the case that sophisticated police work has all but eliminated thuggery at the international level— news to German and Polish hooligans who clashed in Dortmund in 2008—and he reveals a country losing its suspicion of outsiders as it falls in love with football. The book’s essential pattern reveals itself here. Doyle toggles back and forth between detailed descriptions of games themselves, always keeping in mind the larger geopolitical implications of winning and losing, and the fans and fan-fare outside stadiums. He describes great city after great city, transformed by visiting legions who have come—flâneurs en masse—to own the streets of capitals from which soldiers may once have been sent to conquer them.

Consider the subtext: in 2002 Senegal vanquishes 1998 World Cup winners France. This is post-colonial wish fulfillment playing out on a perfectly manicured soccer field; a game with stakes far beyond the stadium and the 90-minute playing time. Soccer, Doyle contends, has the ability to temporarily erase the wounds of history. When the Turkish national team was so narrowly defeated by the Germans in the semifinals of the 2008 Euro Cup, it was understood who had won: the millions and millions of Turks who are Europe’s underclass. The Turkish team, decimated by injuries, was a proxy for a nation that desperately wanted a new self-image. When the world watched Istanbul ignite with joy, we knew that Turkey was rising.

Doyle relates all this in a style blessedly free of leftist pieties or rightest assumptions. His manner could be described as “emotionally observational.” He scolds Chinese fans for their poor spirit in Korea, he wails on the Italian team for scratching their asses when they should be organizing a mid-field attack. (These details are heaven for the soccer fan.) Like any good Irishman, he saves the bulk of his broad-sides for the English team and their travelling circus of insane tabloid hacks and primped soccer brides, ignoring the data in Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey and Even Iraq Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport, in which the numbers prove that the English side actually over performs at international tournaments.

But inherent in The World Is a Ball’s celebratory flim-flam is a tragic flaw, one that undermines the book even as the soccer fan gobbles up the minutiae. Doyle is blind to the flip side of the outsized displays of nationalism that are par for the course in international tournaments. He refuses to acknowledge the dark undertones in the Orange Army—the Dutch fans who follow their team everywhere—or the Green Army—his own team’s drunken hordes. “I distinguish,” wrote Michael Ignatieff, “between nationalism and patriotism.” That’s a nice sentiment, but in the tumult of the Omani semifinal win, I could do nothing of the sort. Nor could I in The World Is a Ball.