How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (19 page)

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HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

Our conversation put me in the mind of the previous week. After presiding over a string of bitter losses, the coach had decided to call on God for help. The team visited a village church, not far from Karpaty’s training complex, fifteen minutes from Lviv’s city center.

On the Christian family tree, Ukrainians have their own divergent branch called Greek Catholicism. As church architecture evinces, the denomination shares many of Russian Orthodoxy’s traits and traditions. This small village church has a cupola with a Red

Square – like cap of silver that tapers around a distinctly eastern curve. Inside, icons of the medieval, pre-perspective style abound. They are displayed in a three-tiered gold-leaf altarpiece.

As the team bus made its way to the church, it passed a family in a horse-drawn cart and peasant women using shovels to dig rows in front-yard plots. When Karpaty arrived at church, the last service hadn’t yet finished.

The team piled out of the bus and bided time on the rocky road in front of the church. As always, Edward and Samson stood together. In their tracksuits and sneakers, they hardly looked prepared for the sacred.

Across the road, the coaches and trainers waited in their own group. The club’s chief assistant coach, a hard-looking man with a martial flattop, entertained them. “Edward is always crossing himself.” He bowed his head and made the Greek Catholic gesture with vaudevillian exaggeration. The management laughed.

“I wish the Ukrainian boys did the same more often.”

He clasped his hands, looked toward the sky, and sarcastically smiled. The management laughed some more.
After a few minutes of awkwardly waiting, the club’s executive director signaled that Karpaty should file into the church. The Ukrainians traced crosses on their chests in rapid succession at almost every door jam and juncture; their hands never falling to their sides. In an entryway, they stopped to kiss the feet of a crucifix hung on an almost-hidden sidewall. A thickly bearded priest in billowing white robes chanted the end of the liturgy.

While the Ukrainians enthusiastically moved

toward the priest, Karpaty’s two Muslim players, both from the ex-Yugoslavia, stopped near the back of the church. Although they seemed to concentrate hard on the ritual, they shifted their hands from their pockets to behind their backs and into their pockets again. The Ukrainians—and the Greek Catholic church—had

robustly backed their Slavic Serb brothers in their war against Bosnia’s Muslims. When the priest’s scepter lobbed holy water over Karpaty, the two players took matador steps to the side.

Without a word of explanation, the priest then disappeared behind the altar and resumed chanting. One by one, players moved toward the front of the church and performed the Greek Catholic rituals. Edward tried to imitate the Ukrainians: a cross of the chest; a kneel to the ground, a kiss on an icon of Jesus in his death shroud; a wiping away of lip marks with cloth; the cycle repeated.

Edward rose. Following his teammates, he walked to the gold altar. In front of the icons, he went down to his knees. He crossed himself, folded his hands, closed his eyes, and prayed.
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H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

t h e N e w O l i g a rc h s

I.

Pierluigi Collina’s fame defies all the laws of sporting celebrity. His haunted-house looks include a Kojak pate, tubercular gauntness, and Beetlejuice eyes springing forth from their sockets. He runs like an ostrich. There is, however, something far stranger about his celebrity: He is not a player but a referee.

To be fair, he isn’t just any bureaucratic enforcer of the rulebook. Collina is roundly considered the premier practitioner of his trade. He has presided—with a combination of exceptional hardheadedness and sensitive diplomacy—over World Cup finals and heated rivalries like the Falkland War rematches between England and Argentina. His renown is now such that he appears in Adidas ads alongside David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane, and other virtuosos.
GQ
fashion spreads, and countless magazine profiles, capture him in his manicured villa, playing lovingly with his pet dogs.

Not just in America, but in any country, this adoration would seem strange. But Italians have endowed their referees with celebrity. Collina’s colleagues have stood for parliament and retired into comfy careers as television commentators. Referees have achieved this notoriety, because Italian media devotes so much careful attention to every yellow card disbursed and every sweeping tackle ignored. Newspapers use star rating systems to judge their work, as with restaurants or movies. They regularly publish statistical analyses—

down to the second decimal point—that try to uncover the true biases of referees. A highly watched television program called
Il Processo,
the trial, sits a jury of journalists and retired players that vivisects the minutiae of controversial calls. In refereeing the referees, the jurors rely on an array of technological tools. Super slow motion can show a player onside by sixteen centimeters. Like a Cindy Sherman art film,
Il Processo
endlessly repeats footage of falling players, so that the jury can precisely determine if he faked his plummet.

To understand the importance of refereeing requires a brief word on the paradox of Italian soccer. As everyone knows, Italian men are the most foppish representatives of their sex on the planet. They smear on substantial quantities of hair care products and expend considerable mental energies color-coordinating socks with belts.

Because of their dandyism, the world has Vespa, Prada, and Renzo Piano. With such theological devotion to aesthetic pleasure, it is truly perplexing that their national style of soccer should be so devoid of this quality.
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

Starting in the 1960s, the Italians began practicing a highly defensive strategy called
catenaccio,
the lock-down. This formation adds an extra layer of defense, a sweeper, bringing up the rear of an already robust back line that marks man-to-man. O¤ense doesn’t usually receive many resources in this arrangement. Goals are scored in bursts of counterattack, with the ball quickly sent up the field in flashes. This way, goals come with great rarity, usually only once or twice a game. With so few opportunities to score, and so little margin of error, players must do whatever they can to gain the upper hand. Thus, the greatest cliché of Italian soccer—the impassioned two-handed
mamma mia
pleading with the referee.

Even as the old
catenaccio
style has been heavily modified in recent years to provide more o¤ense, the tropes of the system remain. Complaints and games-manship are still meant to provide the decisive advantage in games. Players flop in hopes of deceiving the referee into awarding a penalty. They argue the justice of every decision, calculating that they can plant enough doubt to earn a make-up call later in the game.

After every goal, defenders hold up their arms in protest, as if this gesture might pry up a linesman’s o¤side flag.

Because of the referee’s centrality to the outcome of games, teams do whatever they can to influence him.

Almost every year, there’s a new debate over the proce-dure for assigning referees. Under the current system, a two-person committee winnows down the pool of referees before their names go into a random draw. One member of the committee is known to be backed by the
most powerful clubs, Juventus of Turin and AC Milan.

The other represents the rest of the league. The result is that Juve and Milan often can rig the system to assign themselves the most mediocre, provincially minded referees, who are (subconsciously) more deferential toward their prestige clubs. The famed Collina and similarly scrupulous colleagues are rarely ever sent to preside over Juve matches. Other referees who have issued critical penalties against Juve have found themselves working games in the lowly Serie B.

This is only the overt rigging that we know about.

Clearly, much more goes on behind the scenes. The fact that Milan and Juventus have so much power over the selection process is itself damning evidence of funny business, begging a long series of questions about the transactions between club chairmen in smoky rooms. Everyone testifies to these sub rosa shenanigans but they rarely have concrete evidence to prove it. On only a few occasions have some of the sub-merged sordid details come to surface. In 1999, the daily sports paper
Gazzetta dello Sport
exposed that the club AS Roma had given each of Italy’s top referees a $13,500 Rolex—an event dubbed “Night of the

Watches.” Not one of the referees, the report revealed, had voluntarily returned the gift.

Undeniably, the benefits of friendly refereeing accrue to Juventus and Milan more than any other clubs in Italy. And in a way, that’s not shocking. Big, historically dominant teams universally seem to get the benefit of the doubt. But Italian manipulation of referees is a far more deliberate a¤air. Juventus and Milan take two very di¤erent paths to winning generous treat-
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

ment, and these two di¤erent modes don’t just reveal contrasting organizations. They reveal critical di¤erences between their owners—the most powerful forces in postwar Italy and representatives of two very di¤erent styles of oligarchy.

Juve is a toy of the Agnelli family, owners of Fiat and of a substantial percentage of the Milan stock exchange. As much as anyone in Europe, the Agnellis represent the preglobalization style of ruling class that dominated much of the Latin world for the twentieth century. Even though the Agnellis are industrialists, at the height of their powers they behaved like the landowning families that ruled Central America. They did little to advertise their influence, preferring to hide behind the curtains, while they quietly controlled the politicians who regulated their business empires. Their shyness contributed to a longstanding problem in Italian politics: Nobody could locate the true centers of power, a condition that exacerbated the longstanding Italian penchant for worrying about conspiracies.

Despite the system’s obtuseness, it has become clear that it worked like this: a coalition of northern industrialists, corrupt Christian Democratic politicians, and the southern Mafia ran the country. Politicians lived o¤

bribes from industrialists, and the industrialists survived on the state contracts they received in return. Only with the “clean hands” anti-corruption investigations of the early nineties, and the indictment of hundreds of politicians, did this system topple.

For most of the postwar era, Juventus has had the same sort of dominance as the Agnellis, broken only for a short spell in the sixties. It became a kind of
national squad for Italians, with more followers scattered across the peninsula than any other team. But in the eighties, Juve found its stranglehold seriously challenged by AC Milan. The arrivistes owed their new success almost entirely to their flamboyant owner, Silvio Berlusconi. Within the course of two decades, he built his own massive empire, starting with real estate, extending to television, newspapers, advertising, and insurance. Eight years after buying the club in 1986, he rode its success to the pinnacle of power, the Italian premier-ship, an oªce he now occupies for the second time.

According to Berlusconi’s critics on the left, his tangle of interests represents a danger to democracy, the harbinger of the new dictator: the Citizen Kane media mogul who can manipulate and control public discourse to ensure such profits and power that he will never be e¤ectively challenged. And in the globalized economy, they argue, the media has so much more power. No longer do these moguls really have to compete with state-owned television networks, or fight for market share against state companies, which have been enfeebled by privatization and deregulation. Now that moguls like Silvio Berlusconi can operate on a global stage, they can develop economies of scale that make them even more oligarchic and politically untouchable.

But there are key di¤erences that separate the new oligarchs from their forerunners. Because they trade shares of their companies on stock markets and cut deals with multinational corporations, the current breed of mogul has a harder time obscuring wealth and influence. And even if they could, such humility would
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

play counter to type. Like Berlusconi, they are new money inclined to flaunt their riches. Consequently, everyone knows and understands their conflicts of interest. Of course, this doesn’t excuse the sins of the new moguls—and it certainly doesn’t excuse Berlusconi’s bribes, manipulation of government to promote his own interests, and other alleged criminalities—but it makes them more transparent, and in an odd way a democratic advance over the old regimes.

II.

When Berlusconi bought Milan, it was a team with a glorious past that had stumbled onto hard times. He made it great again, by infusing it with flash, foreign players, and his nose for spectacle. Juventus has an entirely di¤erent style. They have always been great and exuded the understatement of old money. Its owners, the Agnellis, are often referred to as the “unoªcial Italian monarchy.” Where Berlusconi tries to cast a populist persona, the Agnellis prefer a patrician one. The cravat-wearing, late paterfamilias Gianni Agnelli was the dashing European playboy par excellence. He cavorted with Jackie Kennedy and Rita Hayworth. He spent years tuning out Italy’s postwar devastation, lounging on the Riviera.

Because the Agnellis didn’t advertise their wealth and power, it is easy to underestimate them. By one count, in the early nineties, the Agnellis influenced or controlled banking, insurance, chemicals, textiles, armaments, financial services, cement, and publishing
businesses with a total market worth of about $60 billion. That’s roughly a third of the entire capitalization of the Milan stock exchange. Fiat controlled a substantial share of the Rizzoli publishing empire and important papers, including the
Corriere della Sera,
the
New
York Times
of Italy. It would be odd if this much money and influence didn’t buy enormous power. According to an old joke, the role of the Italian prime minister is to polish the Agnellis’ doorknob. They considered it their right to exert influence on policy. “Industrialists are ministerial by definition,” Gianni Agnelli’s grandfather once proclaimed.