How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (26 page)

But the government probably didn’t ever seriously imagine that these political messages could break through—even subliminally—to transfixed fans. In fact, the crowds did something close to the opposite of shaking their fists and yelping Islamic chants. They laughed the religious cheerleaders out of the stadium.

An unequivocal message to get the mosque out of the sport that the state ultimately heard. The regime stopped shoveling agitprop into soccer. It began to chart a more realistic course with a focus on cutting its losses and limiting the un-Islamic influences that might accompany the game. In this, it has been extraordinar-ily savvy. For some games, it insists on a slight delay in
the broadcast, so that the censors have time to weed out the crowd’s foul language or political messages that might be overheard on television. For other games, it electronically softens fan noise to a barely audible din.

During the 1998 World Cup, the Iranian government lived in dread of its exiled opponents, especially a group of quasi-Marxists called the People’s Mujahideen, who filled the stadiums in France, bringing along banners and carefully preparing chants. To avoid transmitting their embarrassingly subversive messages, Iranian television didn’t shoot any footage of the actual crowd.

Instead, it edited in stock images, and not terribly convincing ones. The televised crowds were bundled in heavy winter coats, hardly attire suited to France in June.

So what does the regime fear from soccer? In a poignantly comic scene in the filmmaker Abbas

Kiarostami’s
Life Goes On,
set in the wake of an enormous earthquake, men struggle to adjust an antenna to receive a match between Austria and Scotland. These aren’t, it should be noted, giants of contemporary soccer. But that’s beside the point. Iranians crave international soccer because the game links them to the advanced, capitalist, un-Islamic West. When they broadcast games from the World Cup, they can’t avoid seeing the placards on the side of the pitch that advertise PlayStation, Doritos, and Nike, a way of life that Iranians are forbidden to join. Conservatives understand this connection. In their papers, photo editors blot out the advertising that graces the chests of Western jerseys.

But again, there’s only so much damage control that the conservatives can do. They can blot out the ads but
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

not the players themselves. Any photo of David Beckham, for example, with his protean hair always shifting from buzz to mohawk to ponytail, represents an idea of freedom. It’s an idea that Iranian players have picked up on. Almost to a man, the national team plays without beards and with carefully coifed hair. They are heartthrobs, and many of them have gone on to careers in Germany, England, Singapore, and other outposts of the global economy. They couldn’t be more di¤erent from the ideal of pious Iranian masculinity that the clerics in the holy city of Qum would like to project.

The 1997 presidential election featured the great white hope, the cleric and intellectual Mohammad Khatami.

In his writings, he’d argued the compatibility of Islam and liberalism. His supporters daydreamed aloud that his election would usher in a new era of democracy, civil society, free speech, and greater rights for women.

While the hopes of so many rested on Khatami, most Iranians didn’t allow themselves too much optimism.

Khatami was the overwhelming underdog in the race.

His opponent Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, also a cleric, came with the blessings of the nation’s top mullah, Ayatollah Khameni, and represented the forces of establishment conservatism. And in Iran, the clerics can, almost at will, bring down their strong arm, using militias to force their way.

Khatami articulated bits and pieces of a more liberal agenda. But Iranian political discourse is hardly a model marketplace of ideas. Certain thoughts can’t be shouted. They need to be conveyed with subtext and
symbols, like the athletes surrounding a candidate.

Among Iranian leisure games and activities, the most ancient and venerated is the
zurkhaneh,
the strong house. More precisely, the
zurkhaneh
isn’t a sport but a gymnasium where sport takes place—

indigenous games that involve the hoisting of heavy objects and other displays of brute strength that bear resemblance to wrestling and weightlifting. The rituals of the
zurkhaneh
are carefully prescribed. Moves begin with praise of the prophet’s family. Because of these Islamic roots, Iranian conservatives have an unsurprising aªnity for the
zurkhaneh.
Their newspapers devote heaps of coverage to the sport—and basically ignore soccer. In his campaign, Nateq-Nouri stumped with wrestling champions and let his devotion to the sport be widely known.

Unwittingly, Nateq-Nouri had turned himself into Khatami’s perfect foil. Without having to utter too many words about democracy or the West, Khatami could prove himself to the reform-starved Iranians by aligning himself with the soccer stadium. Khatami surrounded himself with famous players, who endorsed him. There’s no way to gauge the full e¤ect of this strategy. But the logic is clear enough. The burgeoning youth population of Iran looked West and toward soccer for inspiration. In their eyes, the alliance with soccer indicated where Khatami’s feelings truly rested. In the end, Khatami surprised the public and took the presidency.

But winning the presidency and satisfying the high hopes of your supporters are two di¤erent matters.

Unfortunately, Khatami could never fulfill the dreams of young, secularly inclined Iranians, because he was
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

never the creature they imagined. He was an intellectual without the courage or power to fully challenge the ruling clerics. More important, he was a traditional cleric himself.

For the past three years, from time to time, discontent with Khatami has emerged from its subterranean home. Many of these occasions of dissent have followed World Cup–related matches. As always, the regime has tried to preempt these eruptions with token gestures.

After a vital qualifier for the 2002 World Cup, the government baked a cake with 12,000 eggs, which it delivered across Tehran in refrigerated trucks. But sweets weren’t enough to restore the faith of youth. They have begun to seek out an alternative to both mullahs and reformist mullahs like Khatami. So far, the alternative hasn’t taken a clear shape, but there are signs of direction. There’s considerable nostalgia among youth for the days of the shah, even if they themselves never lived through them. Bootleg tapes of pop stars from the past have circulated widely; the necktie has been in resur-gence. It’s the same impulse behind the football revolutionaries shouting the name of the shah’s son.

What should the West make of the football revolution? It’s plausible that it represents the inevitable challenge that globalization poses to Islam. But that can’t be the whole story. Soccer thrives in much of the Muslim world without counteracting radicalism.

Hezbollah sponsors a soccer team in Lebanon and has in the past bought broadcasting rights to the Asian Nations’ Cup for its radio network. The

Wahabi-oriented Gulf States have imported aging Western stars for one last paycheck to play in their leagues.
They have built princely arenas with marble and gold leaf, like the awesome, Bedouin-inspired King Fadh International Stadium in Riyadh.

What makes the football revolution di¤erent is that it has tapped into nationalist fervor and turned it against the state. As great as the Iranian commitment to Islam is the Iranian commitment to Iran—the two haven’t always been one and the same. There’s a recent history of secular nationalism that serves as an alternative. It might not be the optimal alternative, but for now it will have to do.
d

H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

t h e A m e r i c a n C u l t u re Wa r s

I.

My soccer career began in 1982, at the age of eight.

This was an entirely di¤erent moment in the history of American soccer, well before the youth game acquired its current, highly evolved infrastructure. Our teams didn’t have names. We had jersey colors that we used to refer to ourselves: “Go Maroon!” Our coach, a bearded German named Gunther, would bark at us in continental nomenclature that didn’t quite translate into English. Urging me to stop a ball with my upper body, he would cry out, “Use your breasts, Frankie!”

That I should end up a soccer player defied the time-tested laws of sporting heredity. For generations, fathers bequeathed their sporting loves unto their sons. My father, like most men of his baby boom age, had grown up madly devoted to baseball. Why didn’t my dad adhere to the practice of handing his game to his son? The answer has to do with the times and the class to which my parents belonged, by which I mean, they were children of the sixties and we lived in the yuppie confines of Upper Northwest Washington, D.C., a dense aggregation of Ivy League lawyers with aggressively liberal politics and exceptionally protective parenting styles. Nearly everyone in our family’s social set signed up their children to play soccer. It was the fashionable thing to do. On Monday mornings, at school, we’d each walk around in the same cheaply made pair of white shorts with the logo of our league, Montgomery Soccer Inc.

Steering your child into soccer may have been fashionable, but it wasn’t a decision to be made lightly.

When my father played sandlot baseball, he could walk three blocks to his neighborhood diamond. With soccer, this simply wasn’t possible. At this early moment in the youth soccer boom, the city of Washington didn’t have any of its own leagues. My parents would load up our silver Honda Accord and drive me to fields deep in sub-urban Maryland, 40-minute drives made weekly across a landscape of oversized hardware stores and newly minted real estate developments. In part, these drives would take so long because my parents would circle, hopelessly lost, through neighborhoods they had never before visited and would likely never see again.

As I later discovered, my parents made this sacrifice of their leisure time because they believed that soccer could be transformational. I su¤ered from a painful, rather extreme case of shyness. I’m told that it extended beyond mere clinging to my mother’s leg. On the sidelines at halftime, I would sit quietly on the edge of the
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE AMERICAN CULTURE WARS

other kids’ conversations, never really interjecting myself. My parents had hoped that the game might necessitate my becoming more aggressive, a breaking through of inhibitions.

The idea that soccer could alleviate shyness was not an idiosyncratic parenting theory. It tapped into the conventional wisdom among yuppie parents. Soccer’s appeal lay in its opposition to the other popular sports.

For children of the sixties, there was something abhor-rent about enrolling kids in American football, a game where violence wasn’t just incidental but inherent.

They didn’t want to teach the acceptability of violence, let alone subject their precious children to the risk of physical maiming. Baseball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters. Basketball, before Larry Bird’s prime, still had the taint of the ghetto.

But soccer represented something very di¤erent. It was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values. Quickly, soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of
Sesame Street
and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

Unlike the other sports, it would foster self-esteem, minimize the pain of competition while still teaching life lessons. Dick Wilson, the executive director of the American Youth Soccer Organization since the early seventies, described the attitude this way: “We would like to provide the child a chance to participate in a less competitive, win-oriented atmosphere. . . . We require that teams be balanced; and that teams not remain intact from year to year, that they be dissolved and
totally reconstituted in the next season. This is done to preclude the adults from building their own dynasty

‘win at all cost’ situations.”

This was typical of the thinking of a generation of post-’60s parenting theories, which were an extension of the counterculture spirit—Theodor Adorno’s idea that strict, emotionally stultifying homes created authoritarian, bigoted kids. But for all the talk of freedom, the sixties parenting style had a far less laissez-faire side, too. Like the 1960s consumer movement which brought American car seatbelts and airbags, the soccer movement felt like it could create a set of rules and regulations that would protect both the child’s body and mind from damage. Leagues like the one I played in handed out “participation” trophies to every player, no matter how few games his (or her) team won. Other leagues had stopped posting the scores of games or keeping score altogether. Where most of the world accepts the practice of heading the ball as an essential element of the game, American soccer parents have fretted over the potential for injury to the brain. An entire industry sprouted to manufacture protective headgear, not that di¤erent-looking from a boxer’s spar-ring helmet, to soften the blows. Even though very little medical evidence supports this fear, some youth leagues have prohibited headers altogether.

This reveals a more fundamental di¤erence

between American youth soccer and the game as practiced in the rest of the world. In every other part of the world, soccer’s sociology varies little: it is the province of the working class. Sure, there might be aristocrats, like Gianni Agnelli, who take an interest, and instances
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE AMERICAN CULTURE WARS

like Barca, where the game transcendently grips the community. But these cases are rare. The United States is even rarer. It inverts the class structure of the game.

Here, aside from Latino immigrants, the professional classes follow the game most avidly and the working class couldn’t give a toss about it. Surveys, done by the sporting goods manufacturers, consistently show that children of middle class and aºuent families play the game disproportionately. Half the nation’s soccer participants come from households earning over $50,000.