Soccernomics (29 page)

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F I G U R E 9 . 5
Least-enthusiastic nations

Core TV viewing rating for soccer

Team

as percentage of households with TV sets

Australia

2.7

New Zealand

2.5

Ukraine

2.1

Mexico

2.0

Lithuania

1.8

Canada

1.7

Latvia

1.6

India

1.2

US

0.6

Taiwan

-0.8

the World Cup of 2006, viewers there preferred watching Brazil, Italy, and Mexico. For many people living in the US, of course, these are their true “home” teams.

Americans, Indians, and Taiwanese at least have an excuse for not watching soccer: they prefer other sports. The nations that stand out among Alavy’s least enthusiastic are Mexico and Ukraine, which both have respectable traditions in soccer. Indeed, several other countries that don’t care much—Spain, Portugal, and France—have some of the best soccer teams on earth. Alavy notes that Spanish audiences for international sports tend to be relatively low, perhaps because of the country’s regional divides. Basques, say, might not want to follow a Spanish “national” team. That may now be changing: Spanish viewing figures shot up during Euro 2008 even before they reached the final.

THE KING AS SPURS FAN:

THE COUNTRY IN LOVE WITH SOCCER

Heia, Norge
. Norway is officially Europe’s kookiest nation about soccer.

“Why soccer in Norway?” ruminates Matti Goksøyr, the well-known Norwegian sports historian, when we break the happy news to him. He admits to being baffled: “Norway, a winter nation. Impossible to play soccer in wintertime. It’s really a mystery.”

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Just to recap: here is how Norway won our award. In our first category, playing soccer, Germany and the Faeroes scored highest in Europe, at least according to FIFA. Austria, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, Iceland, Holland, and Ireland followed at some distance.

Of these enthusiastic playing countries, the only ones that were also unusually enthusiastic on spectating were Norway and Iceland. Cypri-ots and Scots were avid spectators, too.

So our third category, TV viewing, had to provide the decider between the front runners, Norway and Iceland. It may be that the entire Icelandic population watches every game of every World Cup, even the goalless tie between Bolivia and South Korea in 1994, but if so we will have to wait a couple of years to find out, because the country introduced people meters only in 2007. However, Norway did register among the continent’s leading couch potatoes as compiled by Kevin Alavy, alongside Denmark, Croatia, and Holland. (The Dutch and Icelanders deserve special mentions for scoring high in two of our three categories.)

Admittedly, Norway got a boost from the peculiarity of its TV market. Crucially, commercial TV took a long time to get going in the country. This means that Norwegians for a long time had fewer channels than most Europeans, which in turn means that programs on their few channels could get a larger share of the market than elsewhere. On the other hand, the Norwegian enthusiasm for watching soccer is remarkable because it isn’t even their favorite TV sport. In surveys people claim to prefer biathlon and langlauf, says Knut Helland, a Bergen university professor. So Norway wins our award.

Why Norway, indeed? Early signs of dangerous obsession emerged in the late 1940s, when soccer pools were introduced into the country.

Nowadays, the whole world gambles on soccer, but the Norwegian oddity was that even back then, all the games on the betting form were from English soccer. Goksøyr adds: “And that was self-evident. It had to be like that.”

Had there been an award for most Anglophile country in Europe, Norway would probably have won that, too (with Scotland and Serbia T H E C O U N T R Y T H AT L O V E S S O C C E R M O S T

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finishing joint last). When the Germans invaded in 1940, it seemed natural that King Haakon and his Oxford-educated son Olav should flee to London, along with the Norwegian government. Later, after Olav became king he always tried to make an autumn pilgrimage to England, where as well as dropping in on his cousin Queen Elizabeth he did his best to catch a soccer match. Olav supported Arsenal, which must have made for awkward dinnertime conversation with his son Harald, the current king, who is a Spurs fan.

Obsession with English soccer is now almost a human universal—

South African cabinet meetings sometimes get interrupted by quarrels over the previous night’s English games—but Norway got there first.

On Saturday, November 29, 1969, decades before the Premier League formulated its secret plans for world domination, Norwegian TV

broadcast its first-ever live English soccer match: Wolves 1, Sunderland 0. Naturally, the nation was hooked. The Saturday game from England fast became an institution. “The most important thing in Norway when it comes to affection for soccer is the Saturday TV games,” says Andreas Selliaas, special adviser to the Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports. “My father supports Leyton Orient. Why?”

Orient isn’t even the worst of it. Tiny British neighborhood teams like Barnet and Rushden and Diamonds have Norwegian fan clubs. According to the
Aftenposten
newspaper, fifty thousand Norwegians belonged to supporters’ clubs of British teams in 2003. King Harald was an honorary member of the Spurs fan club. That’s not to mention the planeloads of Norwegians who commute to Old Trafford. And while doing all this, the Norwegians still find time to lead the world at winter sports.

When they turn to soccer, in summer, the local peculiarity is that Norwegian women play it almost as enthusiastically as men. The country’s FA started hunting for women way back in the 1970s. Today about one in twenty-three Norwegian females is a registered soccer player, the highest proportion of any country on earth. In fact, Norway has more registered female players than England despite having less than a tenth 202

of its population. Even the Norwegian FA’s general secretary is a woman. It’s surely no coincidence that the world’s most developed country (according to the United Nations’ rankings) is also the one that gives the largest share of its inhabitants the opportunity to play and watch soccer.

Norwegians have always played the game, and obsessed over En -

glish teams, but for decades they barely bothered to develop an elite game of their own. Their domestic league was amateur, and the national team’s matches weren’t shown live on the country’s sole TV channel but were squeezed into a couple of minutes on the evening news. Then, in 1992, Norwegian TV finally embraced Norwegian soccer. The league took off, gaining status from returning Norwegian players who had actually clumped around the holy sanctum that is English soccer. Many fans adopted a local team to supplement their British one.

Now one in twenty-seven of Norway’s inhabitants is a regular spectator in their domestic league, a mania untempered by the dreadfulness of the teams. Other Scandinavians, reflecting on Norway’s love for almost any kind of soccer, like to say, “Norwegians are not used to much.”

Norway’s national team has seldom been up to much either, even if it is the only team in the world with a winning record against Brazil (played four, won two, tied two). The number of Norwegians that glue themselves to a World Cup is especially outrageous given that they usually don’t have a dog anywhere in the race. Though Norway didn’t qualify for Euro 2004, for instance, Norwegians watched more of the tournament than most nations that were there. If they ever get a decent team, they might really start to like soccer.

10

ARE SOCCER FANS

POLYGAMISTS?

A Critique of the Nick Hornby

Model of Fandom

Just this one afternoon started the whole thing off—there was no prolonged courtship. . . . In a desperate and percipient attempt to stop the inevitable, Dad quickly took me to Spurs to see Jimmy Greaves score four against Sunderland in a 5–1 win, but the damage had been done, and the six goals and all the great players left me cold: I’d already fallen for the team that beat Stoke 1–0 from a penalty rebound.

—Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch (1992),

on the origin of his lifelong love of Arsenal

Fever Pitch
is a wonderful memoir, the most influential soccer book ever written, and an important source for our image of the soccer fan. The

“Fan,” as most Britons have come to think of him, is a creature tied for life to the club he first “fell for” as a child. Hornby says his love of Arsenal has lasted “longer than any relationship I have made of my own 203

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free will.” But is Hornby’s “Fan” found much in real life? Or are most British soccer supporters much less loyal than the world imagines them to be?

Let’s start with Hornby’s version, because it is the accepted story of the British Fan. As far as life allows, the Hornbyesque Fan sees all his club’s home games. (It’s accepted even in the rhetoric of fandom that traveling to away games is best left to unmarried men under the age of twenty-five.) No matter how bad his team gets, the Fan cannot abandon it. When Hornby watched the Arsenal of the late 1960s with his dad, the team’s incompetence shamed him but he could not leave: “I was chained to Arsenal and my dad was chained to me, and there was no way out for any of us.”

“Chained” is a very Hornbyesque word for a Fan’s feelings for his club. Often, the Fan uses metaphors from drugs (“hooked”) or romantic love (“relationship,” “fell for”). Indeed, some adult Englishmen who would hardly dare tell their wives that they love them will happily appear in public singing of their love for a club, or for a player who would snub them in a nightclub if they ever managed to sneak past his entourage.

No wonder the Fan’s loyalty to his club is sometimes described as a bond stronger than marriage. Rick Parry, as chief executive of the Premier League in the 1990s, recited the then dominant cliché about fandom: “You can change your job, you can change your wife, but you can’t change your soccer team. . . . You can move from one end of the country to another, but you never, ever lose your allegiance to your first team.

That’s what English soccer is all about. It’s about fierce loyalty, about dedication.” (The Argentine variant: “You can change your wife—but your club and your mother, never.”) Recently, in more metrosexual times, soccer officials trying to emphasize the strength of club brands have extended the cliché by one more attachment: you can even change your gender, the officials say, but not your club.

Ideally, the Hornbyesque Fan supports his local team (even if Hornby did not). This gives the Fan roots, a sense of belonging. In a A R E S O C C E R F A N S P O LY G A M I S T S ?

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wonderful essay on fandom in the highbrow journal
Prospect
, Gideon Rachman quotes an archetypal declaration of faith from a Carlisle Fan called Charles Burgess, who wrote in
The Guardian
: “There never was any choice. My dad . . . took me down to Brunton Park to watch the derby match against Workington Town just after Christmas 41 years ago—I was hooked and have been ever since. . . . My support has been about who we are and where we are from.”

In real life Rachman is a commentator on international politics in the
Financial Times
, but his essay in
Prospect
is a key text in the British debate about fandom. It is the anti–
Fever Pitch.
In it, Rachman outs himself as a “fair-weather fan, an allegiance-switcher,” who at different times in his life has supported Chelsea, QPR, and Spurs. So casual are his allegiances that he registered with FIFA for the World Cup of 2006

as an Ivory Coast supporter, figuring that he wouldn’t face as much competition for tickets. He got into every round including the final. For the World Cup in South Africa, Rachman is a registered Paraguay fan.

He treats the passions of Hornbyesque Fans as slightly bizarre. After all, in England a Fan’s choice of team is largely random. Few clubs have particular religious or class affiliations, and few English people have an attachment dating back generations to any particular location. Some children become fans of their local team, however terrible it might be, but if you live in Cornwall or Somerset or Oxfordshire you will have no local team, while if you live in London or around Manchester you have many. As Rachman asks, “Why devote a huge amount of emotion to favouring one part of west London over another?”

Nonetheless, the Hornbyesque Fan is a widely admired figure in Britain, at least among men. Whereas
fanatic
is usually a pejorative word, a
Fan
is someone who has roots somewhere. As we will argue later, this respect is connected to the quirks of British history: in that country, roots of any kind are in short supply.

However, our first question is: how true is the Hornby model of fandom? Does it really describe the way most British fans feel about their clubs?

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THE CHINESE SERIAL FAN

Very little is known about sports fans who are not hooligans. The academics D. L. Wann and M. A. Hamlet estimated in 1995 that only 4

percent of research on sports concentrated on the spectator.

So we start our quest into the nature of fandom with only one or two fairly safe premises. One is that foreign fans of English clubs, at least, are not all monogamous in their devotion. Rowan Simons explains in
Bamboo Goalposts
, his book about Chinese soccer, that many Chinese fans support “a number of rival teams at the same time,” and are always changing their favorite club. Simons adds, “So dominant is the serial supporter in China that it is quite rare to find a fan with a real unflinching loyalty to one team.”

Stephanus Tekle, senior consultant at the market researchers Sport+Markt, has polling data to back up Simons’s claim. Tekle says that since the late 1990s hordes of new fans around the world—particularly women—have come to soccer without long-standing loyalties. Many of these people appear to be “serial supporters” who probably support Manchester United and Liverpool, or Real Madrid and Barcelona, simultaneously. No wonder that clubs like United or Real keep changing their guesses as to how many fans they have worldwide. Figure 10.1