| A couple of years ago, American journalist Franklin Foer took time off to write How Soccer Explains the World, a lively and often insightful attempt to connect changes in the "beautiful game" to the broader economic, cultural and technological impact of globalization in the 1980s and ‘90s. "Basque teams under the stewardship of Welsh coaches, stocked up on Dutch and Turkish players," he wrote. "Moldavian squads imported Nigerians. Everywhere you looked, it suddenly seemed, national boundaries and national identities had been swept into the dustbin of soccer history."
It was easy to accept much of Foer’s argument. After all, at the time Russian oil magnate Roman Abramovich had just purchased Chelsea FC, which soon became the first English club to field a team consisting entirely of foreign-born players. And the Brazil that entered this year’s FIFA World Cup as clear favourites did so with a squad that consists mostly of players who earn their living with European teams.
As such, it’s hard not to view soccer as a microcosm of the new capitalist global village. Or as one English fan put it, "Everyone just goes where the money is. It’s just a new world, innit?"
Or is it the other way round? Does an appreciation of globalization’s tendency to bulldoze over local sensitivities as well as blur national differences and reduce all of life’s nuances to a common market value in fact help us understand how and why soccer itself has changed so much over the past two decades? After all, if it’s no longer easy to distinguish between Manchester United (the team) and Manchester Unitedtm (the brand), then that’s because soccer — just like movies, music, food and so on — has become one more commodity aimed at the largest market possible, and not just those few thousand fans who turn out to watch their side play in the cold and rain, week after week.
And, yet, the belief persists that perhaps soccer does still reflect — if not quite explain — the vital differences between nations around the world, notwithstanding globalization’s levelling impact. "The oldest cliché in soccer journalism," wrote Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker recently, "holds that the style of play reflects national character." Thus it is, he notes, that Brazil is deemed to play with "Samba-infused joy and creativity," the Dutch with "meticulous precision," and the English with "stubborn determination." In short, players are unable to escape the forces and influences that built their home nations, and their every kick of the ball betrays part of their national heritage.
Watching the quarter-final matches last weekend, it was difficult to avoid this sort of thinking entirely. In their victory over Argentina, the Germans did seem to exhibit the cool-headed sense of organization we’ve come to associate with their nation. Similarly, the Italians’ 3 to 0 win against Ukraine was a flamboyant affair, in keeping with Italy’s romantic image. And England was typically English, of course, looking stiff, awkward and slightly embarrassed to be there in the first place.
Yet, such national generalizations rarely stand rigorous scrutiny. Having identified or accepted certain traits of this or that nation, we then attribute those same qualities, collectively, to the eleven players on the field. In turn, we explain the actual performance (good or bad) of each team in terms of those national characteristics. At best this is circular logic ("England always loses because losing is an English quality, proved by the fact that they always lose," etc.); at worst, it’s a kind of racial stereotyping we’d be unlikely to accept in other avenues of life.
So where does this leave us? Ruling out so-called "national characteristics," what else might explain why certain nations succeed and others fail when it comes to soccer? There are two obvious possibilities. One is population: the greater the mass of people you’re able to select eleven players from, the greater your chances are (statistically, at least) of producing a winning team. The second is national wealth: the more money your country produces and is willing to invest in sport, again the more likely you are to sustain a successful team over time.
Well, what about population? Eight teams qualified for the quarter-finals in Germany – Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Ukraine. Out of these, however, only Brazil ranks among the world’s top ten most populous nations, and only two others (Germany and France) make it even into the top twenty (see Sidebar I). On its own, then, size seems not to matter in this respect, a point underlined by the fact that the world’s three largest nations failed either to qualify completely for the finals (China and India) or else make it out of the first round (USA).
What about wealth? Does a nation’s prosperity translate into achievement on the field? Here the correlation is slightly greater, with four of the eight quarter-finalists (Germany, England, France and Italy) ranking among the ten wealthiest nations in the world (as measured by Gross Domestic Product). In fact, only Ukraine does not appear among the top fifty richest countries (see Sidebar II). But once again, the failure of some of the very wealthiest nations — USA, Japan, China and even Canada — to score any kind of World Cup success suggests that money alone is not enough.
If it’s not people or wealth, then perhaps it’s something as simple and elusive as "culture" that explains why some nations are better than others at soccer. Both Foer and Toobin make the point that while soccer is massively popular among American children, second only to basketball, it remains outside the mainstream culture. (Toobin’s essay was pointedly titled, "Un-American Activity.") "Hating soccer is more American than apple pie, driving a pickup, or spending Saturday afternoons channel surfing with the remote control," explains one prominent critic of the "beautiful game." Another is even more dismissive, rejecting soccer as a "European socialist sport," a two-for-one affront to the American way of life.
In the same way, it may be England’s deep cultural attachment to the game — plus cherished memories of the victory of ’66 — that explains why that nation always expects so much from its team, even though their kick-and-run style of play remains that of the school playground and its pudgy white faces always seem a little out of place.
Or perhaps there is no explanation at all, beyond what happens on the field in any given match. That’s why Brazil won’t be there in the final on Sunday, despite its unrivalled reputation and permanent status as tournament favourites. That’s why the U.S. (population 296 million; GDP $12.5 trillion) failed and Ghana (pop. 22 million; GDP $10.7 billion) succeeded this year.
That, among other reasons, is why it’s still good to call soccer the "beautiful game." |
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