Outside the stadium, thirty minutes to game time, a crowd of Rangers supporters makes a move toward the visitors’ entrance. When police on horseback halt their progress, they extend their arms forward in a sti¤
salute and belt “Rule Britannia,” the anthem of the empire. It goes without saying, they believe that Britannia should rule the Celtic stock of Irish Catholics. Compared to the rest of their gestures and songs, this hardly o¤ends. Scattered across the stands, Rangers fans wear orange shirts and hold orange banners to commemorate the ejection of the Catholic monarchy in 1688 by William of Orange, or “King Billy” as they call him.
King Billy’s modern-day heirs receive their dues as well.
Encomiums to the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defense Association, the Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, have been stitched into scarves and written into songs. When Rangers sing, “Hello, hello, we are the Billy Boys,” they are associating themselves with a gang that rampaged against Glasgow’s Catholics between the wars. In the 1920s, the Billy Boys established the local aªliate of the Ku Klux Klan.
Matches between cross-town rivals always make for the most combustible dates on the schedule. These rivalries generate the game’s horror stories: jobs denied because of allegiance to the foe; fans murdered for wearing the wrong jersey in the wrong neighborhood.
Nobody, it seems, hates like a neighbor. But the Celtic-Rangers rivalry represents something more than the enmity of proximity. It is an unfinished fight over the Protestant Reformation.
Some of the consequences of the Celtic-Rangers derby can be tabulated. According to an activist group that monitors Glasgow’s sectarianism, during such weekends, admissions in the city’s emergency wards HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
increase nine-fold. Over the last seven years, the match has run up a toll of eight directly related deaths in Glasgow. In the two and a half hours following a match in May 1999, the police blotter recorded these crimes committed by Rangers fans in their saturnalia: Karl McGraorty, twenty years old, shot in the chest with a crossbow leaving a Celtic pub.
Liam Sweeney, twenty-five years old, in a green shirt, beaten by four assailants in a Chinese carryout.
Thomas McFadden, sixteen years of age, stabbed in the chest, stomach, and groin—killed after
watching the game in an Irish pub.
In the stadium, the intensity can be gauged without numbers. Across the police line, a pimply pubescent with red hair and an orange jersey furiously thrusts a poster-size Union Jack with his hands. Like winter breath, the bile blows from his mouth. When he screams— Up to our knees in Fenian blood—I’m quite sure that he means it. Right next to him, a man who must be his father sings along.
All this in Glasgow, the city that nurtured Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, and the no-nonsense northern wing of the Enlightenment. A bit more than one hundred years later, Charles Rennie Mackintosh gave its downtown a singular, modern architectural vernacular.
Even when Glasgow hit the post-industrial economic skids, it didn’t turn reactionary. Its polity aligned itself with liberal yuppie Britain in the Labour coalition. On Buchanan Street, with the commercial bustle, unavoidable Starbucks, prosperous immigrant merchants, and overwhelming modernist concert hall at its head, it’s possible to believe that you’re standing at the urbane intersection where, as the political theorist Frances Fukuyama imagined it, history ends.
According to most schools of social science, places like Glasgow were supposed to have conquered ancient tribalism. This was the theory of modernization, handed down from Karl Marx, refined in the sixties by academics like Daniel Bell, enshrined in the foreign policy of the United States government, and rehashed by the globalization enthusiasts of the nineties. It posited that once a society becomes economically advanced, it would become politically advanced—liberal, tolerant, democratic. Sure, tinges of racism would continue to exist in its working classes, and it could be hard to transcend poverty, but that’s why social safety nets existed.
When the globalization theorists of the nineties posited the thesis, they added that business was supposed to play a part in this triumph of tolerance. Everyone would assimilate into a homogenizing mass entertainment culture, where TV comedies and cinematic romances bind together di¤erent races into a new union of common pop references. And to attain the ultimate prize of global reach, business would exude multiculturalism—
“the United Colors of. . . .”
Indeed, the Celtic and Rangers organizations want to convert themselves into international capitalist entities and entertainment conglomerates. They understand that they have to become something more than adversaries in a centuries-old religious war. Graeme HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
Souness, a manager of Rangers in the late eighties and early nineties, explained that his club faced a choice between “success and sectarianism.” At the time, he believed that his organization had opted for the former.
Like Celtic’s management, Rangers have done everything possible to move beyond the relatively small Scottish market—sending clothing catalogues to the Scottish and Irish diasporas in North America; campaigning to move from the Scottish Premier League to the bigger, wealthier English League.
At the game’s end, on the field, these capitalist aspirations are plenty apparent. As the Protestants celebrate a goal, they’re egged on by the team captain, a long-haired Italian called Lorenzo Amoruso, who has the look of a 1980s male model. Flailing his arms, he urges them to sing their anti-Catholic songs louder. The irony is obvious: Amoruso is a Catholic. For that matter, so are most of the Rangers players. Since the late nineties, Rangers routinely field nearly as many Catholics as Celtic. Their players come from Georgia, Argentina, Germany, Sweden, Portugal, and Holland, because money can buy no better ones. Championships mean more than religious purity.
For all their capitalist
