Soccer Still Has Some Explaining to Do

When this whole White House soccer lovefest began a month ago, I had just finished re-reading How Soccer Explains the World. Published in 2004, Franklin Foer’s bestseller used the beautiful game to explain the nature of globalization as it appeared at the time. Foer traveled the world, watching games, interviewing supporters, and weaving it all into a story about where the world was going. In Foer’s telling, soccer represented a range of responses to the seemingly inevitable rise of free-market Western liberalism. Among genocidal fans of Serbia’s Red Star Belgrade, soccer stood for the atavistic Balkan tribalism that thwarted globalization’s peaceful promise. Among Iranian women sneaking into soccer stadiums, the game reflected their craving for the “advanced, capitalist, un-Islamic West.”

Two decades later, though, the sport seems to reflect a decidedly more sinister side of globalization. The last two World Cups, in Russia and Qatar, were brought about by a mix of bribes and forced labor. Watching the world’s most famous footballer appear at the White House alongside two global icons of corruption and authoritarianism, I couldn’t help thinking that soccer still has some explaining to do.

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Twenty years on, I had been thinking fondly of the book and decided to dust off my copy. I was surprised at how little I actually remembered. I knew there was a chapter on internecine strife between Glasgow’s two big clubs and a chapter that explained how London’s Tottenham Hotspur developed a quasi-Jewish identity. I was also pretty sure I remembered an analysis of Silvio Berlusconi’s rise in Italian politics (my memory was correct, there is) and was confident that there was a chapter on the historically racist, anti-Arab supporters of Israeli club Beitar Jerusalem (there is not).

Mostly, I was surprised at how little of the world that I had lived in for the past 20 years could be found in this book. For all its readability and interesting vignettes, How Soccer Explains the World anticipated few of the dynamics that would animate world affairs in the 21st century. Foer alludes to writing at the end of some kind of historical epoch—for example, he calls 2001 “the exhausted end to an era of rapid globalization”—but gives no sense of what might come next, nor really why the era had come to an end. The answer seems obvious (9/11), but it’s unclear why Foer didn’t address it.

At its heart, this is travel writing. Foer dropped in to various locations around the world; chatted up supporters, players, and officials at clubs; and painted vivid pictures of how questions of identity play out in a soccer context. And as travel writing, it remains an immensely entertaining read. The characters he followed come alive on the page and he captured the complexities of their allegiances and passions well. In his chapter on the Catholic-Protestant rivalry of Glasgow’s two biggest clubs, he took the ferry to Belfast after the Celtic-Rangers match along with hordes of drunken Northern Irish fans of both teams. In this moment, he shows how the Glasgow soccer rivalry is less a Scottish thing and more a proxy for simmering animosity in Northern Ireland.

The book is nominally about the world, but ultimately, it’s about the West. Every chapter or case study is either set in the West or examines other parts of the world from the perspective of the West. In that sense, it feels very much of its time. One chapter follows a Nigerian player who plays in the Ukrainian league. Foer visits his apartment in Lviv, and dissects the cultural adjustments, the food, and the dismally cold winters. It prompts an intriguing question: How did the son of a farmer from southeast Nigeria make it to Ukraine? Foer explains the machinations: A local agent in Nigeria promised him a French club but was taking money behind his back, so his European move was delayed and he initially ended up in Moldova.

Here, more than elsewhere in the book, the power dynamics of world football loom so large—and Foer almost completely ignores them. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw Nigeria explode onto the world soccer scene. So why were its players desperate to move to even the most minor European leagues in countries whose national teams could never compete with Nigeria’s?

Again, the answer lies in Foer’s difficulty explaining much of anything outside the context of the West. In the early 2000s, there were lots of stories to tell about how globalization had shaped African soccer. An astonishing flow of Chinese capital funded the building of new stadiums across sub-Saharan Africa, often creating a link between oil-exporting countries and the place where they sent most of their oil. Foer might have noted how African players have been willing to go virtually anywhere outside their home continent to make a living—not just European leagues, but also Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Laos, and China. There’s a presumption that readers would automatically get why a Nigerian would go to Tiraspol, Moldova, to play professional soccer, but that assumption rests upon big, longer term, historical dynamics.

Among other things, Foer was on a quest for authenticity, to discover how the local could survive in the midst of globalization. In the prologue, Foer admits that he expected to find “the power of mega-brands like the clubs Manchester United and Real Madrid, backed by Nike and Adidas … prying fans away from their old allegiances.” But he is relieved to find that the expected “homogenization” of soccer culture was not there.

Foer identifies a positive example in FC Barcelona, proof that despite his fears, the worst aspects of globalization could be tamed. He praised Barca for their “pious refusal to turn their jerseys into a billboard,” as all their global rivals had long since done.

But here too Foer’s optimism proved misplaced. In the mid-2000s, the sport was on the cusp of a revolution. What came next in world football was a more concerted, coordinated effort on the part of big clubs, clothing companies, and media conglomerates to globalize in the worst way. The result was a sort of football monoculture centered around television rights and global branding that undoubtedly weakened lesser leagues around the world to the benefit of the big leagues of Europe, especially the English Premier League.

In the 10 years after the book’s publication, the mega-brands exploded. The Adidas-Nike rivalry, unofficially launched during the 1998 World Cup with Nike’s sponsorship of Brazil, escalated, while the biggest European clubs vied for new possible markets in Asia, the Middle East, and North America. Clubs started planning preseason tours of Thailand, China, and Pittsburgh where they could sell out stadiums, hawk jerseys, and grow their fanbase. A few years after the book, the Italian Serie A was playing cup finals in China, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar; the Spanish Super Cup has now been played in Saudi Arabia multiple times. La Liga (one of Spain’s major leagues) even tried to stage a regular season game this year in Miami, before coach and player pushback scuttled the plan.

Even Foer’s beloved, idealistic Barca could not resist the commercial turn. By 2010, they, too, succumbed to the temptation and has since had Qatar Airways, Rakuten, and Spotify emblazoned on the front of their famous red-and-blue striped uniforms. As part of that Spotify deal, the Rolling Stones’ tongue logo appeared on their jerseys two years ago; this year, it was the name of Ed Sheeran’s latest album.

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In his Iran chapter, Foer points to the pitch-side advertisements during a World Cup match for PlayStation, Doritos, and Nike—which Iranian authorities could not censor on the broadcast—as the ultimate temptation for Iranians. Could there be a more early-aughts take? Did Iranians demand that women be allowed in football stadiums because of their desire for cool ranch? It’s not a big jump from this logic to Foer’s support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in which his basic premise was that the Iraqi people deserved better (however true) and would welcome U.S. forces as liberators.

Soccer remains a geopolitically versatile phenomenon. But using it to understand today’s world requires a distinctly more cynical view of the role of money in geopolitics than was popular in the early 2000s.

This is the benefit of David Goldblatt’s more recent book, The Age of Football. Goldblatt carefully illustrates how the massive amount of wealth in a handful of leagues has siphoned off the best players and coaches from lesser leagues around the world, making the local product often far less watchable than the Premier League or La Liga. Attendance for local leagues is low because there are better products available elsewhere, and the sense of place and community these leagues fostered is fading.

In Goldblatt’s telling, soccer reveals “the Faustian bargain that all modern societies have made with the forces of money and power.” Nowhere is this more apparent than the aggressive sportswashing by the Saudis, Emiratis, and Qataris. In hosting numerous international competitions and in investing heavily in storied European clubs, they’ve successfully cultivated a more positive global public image. The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar saw hundreds if not thousands of primarily South Asian migrant workers die in the construction of new stadiums for the tournament. FIFA has been happy to play along, to the point where it now needs to launder the taint of its own complicity in sportswashing. The result has been a series of generic public campaigns for concepts like Indigenous rights, gender equality, and ending violence against women.

Of course, Trump’s newest acolyte, Ronaldo, is the poster boy for sportswashing. He shocked the world when he signed with the Saudi professional league in 2022, giving it the legitimacy it craved in return for an unprecedented 200 million euros per year in total compensation. FIFA has already awarded the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia after a strangely uncompetitive bid process that basically ensured the Saudis would win.

Perhaps it is time for Foer to write a sequel in this spirit. He might examine the networks in Africa that help funnel players from small village clubs to Europe’s richest teams as well as to minor clubs in Vietnam and Albania. Or Foer might look at how clubs he visited in the 1990s, like Chelsea and Tottenham, have become massive global brands with huge followings in Asia and North America. If hooliganism has subsided, it may be because tickets are now too expensive for ordinary fans—violent and law abiding alike.

Foer’s instinct to animate the everyday characters that support teams and operate clubs was right. There were and are so many stories to tell. But the capitalist West can’t always be the star.