Soccernomics (23 page)

Even now, no other European city has as many investors. When Roman Abramovich decided to buy a soccer club, it was inevitable that he would end up owning Chelsea rather than, say, Blackburn. The word is that he chose it because it was the nearest club to his house on Eaton Square. Similarly, Mohamed Al Fayed, who lives on Park Lane, bought Fulham. Even Queens Park Rangers were bought up by the Indian Lakshmi Mittal, the world’s fifth richest man, who of course lives around the corner in Kensington. Yes, other rich foreigners have bought Manchester City and Aston Villa, but London is still a touch more appealing to billionaires.

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The handful of biggest provincial clubs—Manchester United, Liverpool, Bayern, Barcelona, the two Milan clubs—have built up such strong brands that they will remain at the top of European soccer.

However, their new challengers will probably not be other provincial clubs but teams from London, Moscow, and perhaps Paris.

At last, being in a giant capital city is becoming a strategic asset to a soccer club. When Arsenal and Chelsea finished in the top two spots in the Premier League in 2004, it was the first time in history that two London teams had achieved that feat. In 2005 they did it again. From 2006 to 2008, they figured in two out of three Champions League finals. Soon one of these clubs could become the first London team to be champion of Europe. Then the city will dominate every aspect of British life.

FOOTBALL VERSUS FOOTBALL

When Nelson Mandela was a teenager in the Transkei region of South Africa, he was sent to a mock British boarding school. The Clarkebury Institute taught black students, but was of course run by a white man, the Reverend C. Harris. “The school itself consisted of a cluster of two dozen or so graceful, colonial-style buildings,” Mandela recalled in his autobiography,
Long Walk to Freedom
. “It was the first place I’d lived in that was western, not African, and I felt I was entering a new world whose rules were not yet clear to me.”

Like the Victorian British schools that it imitated, Clarkebury aimed to turn its pupils into Christian gentlemen. A gentleman, to Victorian Britons, was someone who spoke English and played British games. As Mandela describes his school days, “I participated in sports and games as often as I could, but my performances were no more than mediocre. . . . We played lawn tennis with home-made wooden rackets and soccer with bare feet on a field of dust.”

He had encountered the British Empire. The British colonial officers, merchants, and sailors who went around the world in the nineteenth century didn’t merely aim to exploit the natives. They also tried to teach them British values. They succeeded spectacularly with Mandela, who at an earlier school had acquired a new first name 157

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(Admiral Nelson was a British naval hero) and eventually became the epitome of the courtly British gentleman. However, his story is ex-emplary of millions of people around the world, both in Britain’s official colonies and in the “informal empire,” the countries where the Brits supposedly didn’t rule.

From about 1917 to 1947, the British gradually stopped running the world and handed over the keys to the Americans. But the American empire was much less ambitious. It barely spread Americanism. Football, the American empire’s most popular sport, still hardly exists outside the home country. In fact, when the American troops in Afghanistan wanted to woo natives, they were reduced to handing out soccer balls. (The exercise failed: Allah’s name was found to be printed on a ball, a blas-phemy for an object designed for kicking.)

At this point, let’s agree to call the global game “soccer” and the American game “football.” Many people, both in America and in Europe, imagine that
soccer
is an American term invented in the late twentieth century to distinguish the game from gridiron. Indeed, anti-American Europeans often frown on the use of the word. They consider it a mark of American imperialism. This is a silly position. “Soccer” was the most common name for the game in Britain from the 1890s until the 1970s.

As far as one can tell, when the North American Soccer League brought soccer to the Americans in the 1970s, and Americans quite reasonably adopted the English word, the British stopped using it and reverted to the word
football
. We will compare soccer with football, and the readers will know what we mean.

What follows is a tale of two games and two empires. Soccer spread around the world whereas football did not, largely because Victorian Britons were instinctive colonialists whereas today’s Americans are not.

But now, for the first time, the empires are going head-to-head as if in a kid’s computer game. Both the Premier League and the NFL want to rule the world. This is a struggle between two very different types of empire: the British (which contrary to popular opinion still exists), and the American (which contrary to popular opinion may not exist).

Emerging from the struggle is a new breed of sports fan.

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GENTLEMEN WITH LEATHER BALLS

In 1884 a nine-year-old boy named Charles Miller embarked on the S.S.
Elbe
in Brazil and set off for England. Miller’s father had emigrated from Britain to Brazil, where he became an engineer for the Sao Paolo Railway Company. Now Charles was making the return journey, to en-roll at an English boarding school. Like Mandela at Clarkebury, Miller at Banister Court learned games. “Just as a schoolboy, in the Garden of Childhood, listens to the teacher, so I, fascinated, saw my first game of Association Football,” he later wrote.

In 1894 Miller returned to Brazil with a leather ball and a set of rules in his luggage. He set up the first Brazilian soccer league, and lived long enough to see Brazil host the World Cup of 1950 and reach the final. He also introduced rugby to Brazil, though with rather less success. He died in 1953.

Miller’s story was typical of soccer pioneers in many countries.

First, he was posh, or at least posh enough to go to boarding school.

(Contrary to myth, it wasn’t on the whole British sailors who gave the world soccer. The upper classes had considerably more soft power.) Second, Miller was typical in that he spread soccer to a country that wasn’t a British colony. In the colonies, places like Australia or India, the British administrators mostly taught the natives cricket and rugby.

Soccer did best in the informal empire, the noncolonies: most of Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia. Here, it probably benefited from not being seen as a colonial ruler’s game. Brits in the informal empire were supposedly just businesspeople, even if in practice their commercial clout gave the British prime minister vast influence over many unlikely countries.

From about 1850 until the First World War, Britain was the sole economic superpower. As late as in 1914, Britons still owned about 42

percent of all the world’s foreign investment. The British expats who inhabited the informal empire represented the empire’s economic might. The men tended to work in the railways (like Miller’s father), or as businessmen (like the Charnock brothers, who set up Russia’s first

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soccer club for their mill employees outside Moscow), or as schoolteachers (like Alexander Watson Hutton, the Scottish teacher who in the early 1880s introduced soccer in Argentina).

These people had only “soft power”: the wealth and prestige of the British gentleman. That was enough to spread their games. Men like Hutton taught foreigners to see sports as an upper-class and hence aspirational product. If you were a young man like Mandela who wanted to become a British gentleman, one of the things you did was play soccer. That’s why the game’s early adopters in the informal empire tended to be rich people who had contact with British gentlemen. Pim Mulier, for instance, who introduced a whole list of sports to the Netherlands, first encountered soccer as a five year old at a Dutch boarding school that had some British pupils. In 1879, when Mulier was fourteen, he founded the first Dutch soccer club.

Soccer conquered the world so fast largely because the British gentleman was such an attractive ideal. A century later a new British ar-chetype, the hooligan, in his own way probably added to the game’s glamour.

By the 1930s, when Mandela went to Clarkebury, the British Empire had already begun to fade. However, many of the empire’s global networks outlived the loss of the colonies. The most important survivor would be the English language, even if it sustained its global reach largely thanks to the Americans. English gave people around the world an easy connection with Britain. Steven Stark, an American soccer fan, former speechwriter of Jimmy Carter, and a teacher of English rhetoric, asks, “Isn’t the best thing the Premiership has going for it that it’s in English? I mean, if everyone in France spoke English and everyone in England spoke French, we’d all be following the French league. In an international economy, English trumps the competition.”

Many people in former British colonies grew up absorbing British football from British media outlets that had also outlived the empire.

Peter Draper, when he was marketing director of Manchester United, noted that English football has been televised for decades in many Asian countries. That built loyalty. Real Madrid, Draper told us, “didn’t F O O T B A L L V E R S U S F O O T B A L L

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have the platform. Spanish television is nowhere in Asia. Best team of the 1950s? Sorry, didn’t see them in Asia.”

Mike Abrahams is a gangster-turned-intellectual who grew up in a poor nonwhite Cape Flats township outside Cape Town. As a child he used to sit in the local library reading British boys magazines like
Shoot
and
Tiger
. He admits that classic British soccer cartoons like
Billy’s
Magic Boots
shaped him.

Abrahams was a leftist who identified with only one product of white capitalist imperialist Britain: soccer. He says, “People in the Cape follow English football very seriously. One of my friends, his first child’s name is Shankly [after Bill Shankly, the former Liverpool manager]. And this is an activist! You can say England is a bitch on Friday night, and on Saturday afternoon you go to a sports pub to watch En -

glish soccer.”

People are always complaining that American culture has conquered the world. In fact, British culture probably remains more dominant.

This fading midsize island has kept a bizarre grip on the global imagination. It’s not only their sports that the Brits have exported. The world’s six best-selling novels of the past hundred years are all British: four Harry Potters, one Agatha Christie, and one J. R. Tolkien. The world’s best-selling band ever is the Beatles. And the sports league with the biggest global impact is surely the Premier League. England has produced few great soccer players, yet on an average Saturday people in Soweto and Shanghai gather in bars for the kickoff at White Hart Lane rather than for anything from Germany.

They certainly aren’t watching the NFL. In fact, the United States has rarely even aspired to vast cultural reach. The country fought wars, but mostly tried to avoid creating long-term colonies, notes John Gray, a professor at the London School of Economics. In Vietnam and Iraq, for instance, the aim was to “go in, do the job, get out.” Unlike Britons, Americans generally didn’t want to be in the business of empire. We know an American lawyer who spent a few months working for the British government during the occupation of Iraq. In the “Green Zone”

in Baghdad he noticed a difference between the way Brits and Americans 162

operated. When American officials wanted an Iraqi to do something, the lawyer said, they would generally call the person into the Green Zone and if necessary “bawl him out.” Sometimes this strategy worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But the Americans summoned Iraqis only when something needed fixing. British officials worked differently, said the lawyer. They were always inviting Iraqis in, for parties or just for chats, even when there was nothing in particular to discuss. This was exactly how the British had operated both in their colonies and in their “informal empire”: they made long-term contacts. The Reverend Harris at Clarkebury school may not entirely have known it, but in effect he was a British agent charged with teaching Mandela Britishness.

By contrast, few American Harrises ever taught baseball or football to budding foreign rulers. There have been a handful of prominent American colonialists, but they are so rare as to stand out. Douglas MacArthur ruled Japan for years. Hollywood makes its blockbusters chiefly for the global market. And in sports, the NBA’s commissioner, David Stern, has spent a quarter century interesting foreigners in basketball. But most American sporting moguls, like most American producers in general, have been satisfied with their giant domestic market.

Baseball’s last great overseas tour was in 1913–1914, after which Americans barely even tried to spread baseball or football abroad until the 1990s.

The American empire’s favorite games have been no good at cultural imperialism. It’s a story told in one statistic: the media agency Futures Sport & Entertainment estimates that of the 93 million people who saw the Super Bowl live in 2005, only 3 million were outside North America.