How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (5 page)

King Billy’s modern-day heirs receive their dues as well.

Encomiums to the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defense Association, the Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, have been stitched into scarves and written into songs. When Rangers sing, “Hello, hello, we are the Billy Boys,” they are associating themselves with a gang that rampaged against Glasgow’s Catholics between the wars. In the 1920s, the Billy Boys established the local aªliate of the Ku Klux Klan.

Matches between cross-town rivals always make for the most combustible dates on the schedule. These rivalries generate the game’s horror stories: jobs denied because of allegiance to the foe; fans murdered for wearing the wrong jersey in the wrong neighborhood.

Nobody, it seems, hates like a neighbor. But the Celtic-Rangers rivalry represents something more than the enmity of proximity. It is an unfinished fight over the Protestant Reformation.

Some of the consequences of the Celtic-Rangers derby can be tabulated. According to an activist group that monitors Glasgow’s sectarianism, during such weekends, admissions in the city’s emergency wards
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

increase nine-fold. Over the last seven years, the match has run up a toll of eight directly related deaths in Glasgow. In the two and a half hours following a match in May 1999, the police blotter recorded these crimes committed by Rangers fans in their saturnalia: Karl McGraorty, twenty years old, shot in the chest with a crossbow leaving a Celtic pub.

Liam Sweeney, twenty-five years old, in a green shirt, beaten by four assailants in a Chinese carryout.

Thomas McFadden, sixteen years of age, stabbed in the chest, stomach, and groin—killed after

watching the game in an Irish pub.

In the stadium, the intensity can be gauged without numbers. Across the police line, a pimply pubescent with red hair and an orange jersey furiously thrusts a poster-size Union Jack with his hands. Like winter breath, the bile blows from his mouth. When he screams—
Up to our knees in Fenian blood
—I’m quite sure that he means it. Right next to him, a man who must be his father sings along.

All this in Glasgow, the city that nurtured Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, and the no-nonsense northern wing of the Enlightenment. A bit more than one hundred years later, Charles Rennie Mackintosh gave its downtown a singular, modern architectural vernacular.

Even when Glasgow hit the post-industrial economic skids, it didn’t turn reactionary. Its polity aligned itself with liberal yuppie Britain in the Labour coalition. On
Buchanan Street, with the commercial bustle, unavoidable Starbucks, prosperous immigrant merchants, and overwhelming modernist concert hall at its head, it’s possible to believe that you’re standing at the urbane intersection where, as the political theorist Frances Fukuyama imagined it, history ends.

According to most schools of social science, places like Glasgow were supposed to have conquered ancient tribalism. This was the theory of modernization, handed down from Karl Marx, refined in the sixties by academics like Daniel Bell, enshrined in the foreign policy of the United States government, and rehashed by the globalization enthusiasts of the nineties. It posited that once a society becomes economically advanced, it would become politically advanced—liberal, tolerant, democratic. Sure, tinges of racism would continue to exist in its working classes, and it could be hard to transcend poverty, but that’s why social safety nets existed.

When the globalization theorists of the nineties posited the thesis, they added that business was supposed to play a part in this triumph of tolerance. Everyone would assimilate into a homogenizing mass entertainment culture, where TV comedies and cinematic romances bind together di¤erent races into a new union of common pop references. And to attain the ultimate prize of global reach, business would exude multiculturalism—

“the United Colors of. . . .”

Indeed, the Celtic and Rangers organizations want to convert themselves into international capitalist entities and entertainment conglomerates. They understand that they have to become something more than adversaries in a centuries-old religious war. Graeme
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

Souness, a manager of Rangers in the late eighties and early nineties, explained that his club faced a choice between “success and sectarianism.” At the time, he believed that his organization had opted for the former.

Like Celtic’s management, Rangers have done everything possible to move beyond the relatively small Scottish market—sending clothing catalogues to the Scottish and Irish diasporas in North America; campaigning to move from the Scottish Premier League to the bigger, wealthier English League.

At the game’s end, on the field, these capitalist aspirations are plenty apparent. As the Protestants celebrate a goal, they’re egged on by the team captain, a long-haired Italian called Lorenzo Amoruso, who has the look of a 1980s male model. Flailing his arms, he urges them to sing their anti-Catholic songs louder. The irony is obvious: Amoruso is a Catholic. For that matter, so are most of the Rangers players. Since the late nineties, Rangers routinely field nearly as many Catholics as Celtic. Their players come from Georgia, Argentina, Germany, Sweden, Portugal, and Holland, because money can buy no better ones. Championships mean more than religious purity.

For all their capitalist goals, however, Rangers don’t try too hard to discourage religious bigotry. They continue to hawk orange jerseys. They play songs on the Ibrox loudspeaker that they know will provoke anti-Catholic lyrics: Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best” culminates in 40,000 screams of “Fuck the pope!” The clubs stoke ethnic hatred, or make only periodic attempts to discourage it, because they know ethnic hatred makes good business sense. Even in the global market, they
draw supporters who crave ethnic identification—to join an existential fight on behalf of their tribe. If they lost their extremist sloganeering, they’d lose money. In fact, from the start of their rivalry, Celtic and Rangers have been nicknamed the “Old Firm,” because they’re seen as colluding to profit from their mutual hatreds.

Of course, the modernization thesis provides plenty of explanations for illiberal hatreds—competition for scarce jobs, an inadequate welfare state—but none of those conditions exists in any great concentration in Glasgow. Discrimination has faded. Its unemployment problem is now no better or worse than the rest of Britain. The city has kept alive its soccer tribalism, despite the logic of history, because it provides the city with a kind of pornographic pleasure.

II.

The night before the Old Firm match, I have drinks at the Grapes pub, an epicenter of Rangers fandom on the south bank of the Clyde River. Picture postcards of Queen Elizabeth have been strung in a row and hang over the bar. Union Jacks cover most surfaces on the wall not occupied by framed photos of Rangers players.

The exterior has been pointedly painted a royalist blue.

Outsiders who enter the pub are looked upon as potential Celtic infiltrators. To ease my assimilation at the Grapes, I have a friend call a regular who vouches for me with the clientele. My connection doesn’t help with some of the drunks. They laugh when I introduce myself as Frank. “That’s not short for Francis?” one
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

asks. “You aren’t a Tim, are ya?” And nobody especially wants to talk to a journalist, who I’m sure they suspect will lampoon them for their deeply held beliefs. After a while, I give up and sit at the bar, staring at a drunk making clumsy passes at the only two women in the room. That’s when a man called Dummy drapes his arm around me and blows his whiskey breath in my ear. “In 1979,” he says, “I spent sixteen hours getting pissed in a bar outside Bu¤alo.”

Dummy introduces himself as James, but

announces that he prefers to go by his nickname. It conveys recklessness, he says, and recklessness is a prime characteristic of movie mobsters. From the start, Dummy makes a big point of establishing his hard man bona fides. He shows me two fresh knife scars on his face from pub brawls over money owed to him—

“just from the last six months,” he claims. But those fights were atavistic. Dummy’s career as a hard man is in the past. He’s over forty now, with a wizened face, a wife, teenage children, and a legitimate business. In fact, he says that he has become rich from his firm, which deploys sca¤olding to building sites.

Dummy comes from the west coast of Scotland but lives in an English factory town, several hours from Glasgow by car. His father had moved the family south to follow the migration of industry in the 1960s. He took with him his intense Scottish pride and his love of Rangers. Although he couldn’t indoctrinate Dummy’s siblings, Dummy bit hard. Dummy dreams of retiring to Glasgow one day. “It’s not Florida, okay,” he says, pressing his belly into the bar, trying to grab the bar-tender’s attention. “This is the greatest place on the
planet. The water tastes better. The people aren’t English. Top quality people, here.”

Dummy makes it his mission to convert me to the Rangers cause. “There’s no way that you, a smart man, especially a smart American, will come away from this game without loving Glasgow Rangers. Celtic are terrorists. Listen to all the songs about the IRA. After eleventh of September, how can they do that?” Because he’s bought me two glasses of cheap house scotch, his arguments make a measure of sense. But Dummy’s biggest selling point is the medium of his message, not the substance; he has a life-consuming passion for his team. He points in the direction of his Rangers boxer shorts. “I love Rangers football club. If I had to choose between my job and Rangers, I’d choose Rangers. If I had to choose between my wife and Rangers, I’d choose Rangers.” Indeed, about sixteen weekends a year, he chooses Rangers over his wife, gathering his mates, drinking two tall glasses of whiskey for the road, putting sectarian tunes into the car sound system, and making the long drive north.

Among soccer fans, there’s a continuum of hooliganism. On one extreme exist true thugs like the notorious supporters of such British clubs as Millwall and Cardi¤ City. Although they’ll profess love of club, beating the shit out of people (including fellow fans) is their telos. Those kinds of thugs, however, are few and far between, and many have been priced out of attending games in bigger cities like Glasgow, Manchester, and London. Next, quite a few steps closer to sanity, there’s a vast lumpen proletariat. Where the thugs are often organized into marauding “firms,” the lumpen proleta-
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

riat belongs to benign supporters clubs, meeting for pints and traveling to games together in chartered coaches. They are not innately violent men. They hold down good jobs and have loving families. But like much of Britain, when vast quantities of lager courses through them they can become a bit brutish. On weekends, they find themselves screaming at a cab driver who supports Celtic, or getting into a scuºe outside the Celtic bar down the block. Dummy is an avatar of this vast lumpen proletariat.

There’s a tendency to caricature the feelings of soccer fans like Dummy. These men are often depicted as dupes of jingoistic politicians, driven to hatred by ignorance or economic resentment or just deep-seated inferiority. But it’s hard to detect any of these qualities in Rangers fans. In fact, far from sounding like ignora-muses, they possess remarkable historical literacy.

Describing his love of Rangers, Dummy provides a cogent narrative of Scottish Protestantism: “In 1646 at Portadown. . . .” O¤ the top of his head, even in his sot-ted state, he spews dozens of important dates.

As Dummy points out, the story of Celtic and

Rangers traces back to the sixeenth century. The Protestant reformation sank its talons into Scotland with greater ferocity than anywhere else in Europe.

When John Knox’s disciples spread north from their bases in Glasgow and Edinburgh, they violently stamped out Catholic strongholds, resorting to ethnic cleansing in a few cases. Their theocracy executed Edinburgh students for casually doubting the existence of the Lord — and purged society of most hints of papistry. By the end of the eighteenth century, Glasgow
possessed thirty-nine Catholics and forty-three anti-Catholic societies.

Three hundred years into the reformation, however, Catholics began to reappear in their midst in a major way. With potato blight making life across the Irish Sea untenable, thousands of immigrants escaped to Glasgow seeking relief. They’d been among the poorest, least educated émigrés—the ones who couldn’t a¤ord tickets to Boston and New York. Dazed by their new home and excluded from the rest of society, they had little choice but to stick mostly to themselves. A structure of virtual apartheid evolved. Glasgow’s Catholics attended separate schools. Shut out of Protestant professional firms, Catholics started their own. And in 1888, a Marist monk named Father Walfrid began the community’s own soccer club, Celtic.

Walfrid created Celtic out of fear. By the late nineteenth century, Catholics had good reasons to worry about the influence of Protestant missionaries, whose wealth and soup kitchens allowed them to evangelize in the Catholic strongholds. Leisure time of Catholic youth needed to be filled by Catholic institutions, or else Protestant ones would claim the void. A winning football club, Walfrid also hoped, could puncture the myth of Catholic inferiority. Indeed, Celtic succeeded wildly. Because it played with something to prove, Celtic soon captured four of six league championships.

Protestant Scotland didn’t passively accept Celtic’s success. The soccer press put out the call for a “Scottish” team to retake the championship. Rangers began with no particular religious or political aspirations. But when it racked up wins against Celtic, Protestant Scot-
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land imposed religious and political aspirations upon the club and gradually adopted Rangers as its own.

The Old Firm hadn’t started as an especially violent a¤air, but it quickly became one. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, ethnic hatred in Glasgow ratcheted up. The Harland and Wol¤ Shipbuilding Company, a Protestant firm, relocated from Belfast, bringing with it thousands of Protestant workers and their expertise in despising Catholics. The new yard, however, couldn’t compensate for the woes of Glasgow shipbuilding. In the 1920s, as German and American industry surged, Scotland felt the Great Depression ten years earlier than anyone else. With intense competition for limited jobs, the inevitable religious scapegoat-ing kicked in, and the Church of Scotland began grousing about the Irish menace. That’s when the Old Firm first turned poisonous. The Billy Boys gang of Rangers thugs, along with Celtic equivalents like McGrory Boys and McGlynn Push, fought one another with guns, knives, and no restraint.