oeR from how socceR exPlaIns The woRlD 639 FraNkLiN FoEr From how Soccer Explains the World: an Unlikely Theory of Globalization Franklin Foer is the editor of The New Republic, a magazine that covers a broad spectrum of political and cultural topics. He has worked as a journal- ist, publishing in U.S. News & World Report, Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Spin. This reading is taken from How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (2004), a book that brought Foer to the attention of many sports fans. Although soccer does not have the same hold on Americans that it has on people in other parts of the world, Foer uses soccer—“its fans, its players, and strategies” (para. 4)— to address larger issues. Foer writes in a tradition of sports reporting that goes far beyond describing the plays and scores of the game. Like other writers who look at the business and influence of sports such as golf, tennis, and football, Foer is interested in the culture of sport, and how and why it has such a grip on the imaginations of fans. In this reading, we reproduce the prologue and last chapter of Foer’s book about soccer. In the prologue, he lays out his rationale for his “unlikely” method of using soccer as a way to examine a series of national and global dynamics. As you read, consider what he accomplishes there by proposing that soccer can be used “as a way of thinking about how people would identify themselves in this new era” of globalization (para. 4). How 640 chaPTeR 15 InTeRnaTIonal RelaTIons are these ideas in conversation with the material that follows on “How Soc- cer Explains the American Culture Wars”? Foer includes autobiographical anecdotes in this section, humorously describing his own shameful childhood soccer career in the early 1980s, before suburban soccer leagues became so highly organized and before the term “soccer mom” was coined to describe the necessary parental sup- port system for this pastime. Although Foer does not use MLA style to cite sources in the text, notice the ways he includes the ideas and comments of others to give context to the “culture war” that raged over soccer in the 1980s. How does the anxiety Foer describes here about soccer seeming “un- American” apply to current political and cultural conversations in which we Americans are encouraged to think of ourselves as different from others for a variety of reasons? How does Foer explain the political and cultural conflicts that soccer has come to exemplify? What solutions does he offer, if any? Finally, what does imported goat cheese (para. 28) have to do with soccer? Read on, and see if you can make other connections between soc- cer and globalization. As Foer demonstrates, if you can offer clear and per- suasive examples, any connection can be fair game. n n n Prologue t about the time that I started working on this book, in the fall of 2001, 1 A the consensus on globalization changed considerably — for obvious reasons. It was no longer possible to speak so breathlessly, so messiani- cally of the political promise of economic interdependence. And there was another problem. The world’s brief experiment in interdependence didn’t come close to delivering the advertised result of prosperity. [I] use the meta- phor of soccer to address some of the nagging questions about this failure: Why have some nations remained poor, even though they had so much foreign investment coursing through them? How dangerous are the multi- national corporations that the Left rails against? This is not to dredge up the tired old Marxist criticisms of corporate 2 capitalism— the big question of the book is less economic than cultural. The innovation of the anti-globalization left is its embrace of tradition- alism: its worry that global tastes and brands will steamroll indigenous cultures. Of course, soccer isn’t the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the commu- nity’s fabric, a repository of traditions. During Franco’s rule, the clubs Ath- letic Bilbao and Real Sociedad were the only venues where Basque people could express their cultural pride without winding up in jail. In English industrial towns like Coventry and Derby, soccer clubs helped glue together small cities amid oppressive dinginess. By the logic of both its critics and proponents, the global culture should 3 have wiped away these local institutions. Indeed, traveling the world, it’s foeR from how socceR exPlaIns The woRlD 641 hard not to be awed by the power of mega-brands like the clubs Man- chester United and Real Madrid, backed by Nike and Adidas, who have cultivated support across continents, prying fans away from their old alle- giances. But that homogenization turned out to be more of an exception than I had anticipated. Wandering among lunatic fans, gangster owners, and crazed Bulgarian strikers, I kept noticing the ways that globalization had failed to diminish the game’s local cultures, local blood feuds, and even local corruption. In fact, I began to suspect that globalization had actu- ally increased the power of these local entities — and not always in such a good way. On my travels, I tried to use soccer — its fans, its players, and 4 strategies — as a way of thinking about how people would identify them- selves in this new era. Would they embrace new, more globalized labels? Would people stop thinking of themselves as English and Brazilian and begin to define themselves as Europeans and Latin Americans? Or would those new identities be meaningless, with shallow roots in history? Would people revert back to older identities, like religion and tribe? If soccer is an object lesson, then perhaps religion and tribe have too much going for them. The story begins bleakly and grows progressively more optimistic. In the 5 end, I found it hard to be too hostile toward globalization. For all its many faults, it has brought soccer to the far corners of the world and into my life. how Soccer Explains the american culture Wars I. My soccer career began in 1982, at the age of eight. This was an entirely 6 different 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. Urg- ing 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 7 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 chil- dren of the sixties and we lived in the yuppie confines of Upper Northwest Washington, D.C., a dense aggregation of Ivy League lawyers with aggres- sively liberal politics and exceptionally protective parenting styles. Nearly 642 chaPTeR 15 InTeRnaTIonal RelaTIons 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 8 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 suburban 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 9 time because they believed that soccer could be transformational. I suf- fered 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 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 10 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 abhorrent 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. Base- ball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters.