Krle had been a Red Star thug during the club’s most glorious year. In 1991, the team won the European Champions Cup—the most prestigious annual prize in club competition. That team had been a metaphor for the crumbling hulk of Yugoslavia. Despite its history as a vehicle for Serb nationalism, Red Star had included players from across the country, even a vociferous Croatian separatist. Each state of the old Yugoslavia had developed widely accepted ethnic stereotypes that sports commentators then transposed to its players. Slovenians were superb defenders, tirelessly trailing opposing forwards. Croatians possessed a Ger-manic penchant for pouncing on scoring opportunities.
Bosnians and Serbs were creative dribblers and passers, but occasionally lacking in tactical acumen. At Red Star, an amalgam of disparate Yugoslavs bundled their specialties and beat the superpowers of Western Europe.
This performance should have given a modicum of hope for the salvage of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia. But in the shadow of this championship season, in Red Star’s headquarters and stadium, the destruction of this HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE
Yugoslavia was being plotted. From Red Star’s own ranks, a hooligan paramilitary force was organized and armed. Krle, who took a bullet in his leg, would serve in this army. The Red Star fans would become Milosevic’s shock troops, the most active agents of ethnic cleansing, highly eªcient practitioners of genocide.
It’s hard to imagine that Ultra Bad Boys are typical figures. They seem a product of a war-torn country and its diseased ideology. But they’re really not such a homegrown oddity. Starting in the 1980s, the soccer hooligan widely came to be considered a leading enemy of the West. “A disgrace to civilized society,” Margaret Thatcher once said. Based on death toll—more than one hundred in the 1980s—the English were the
world’s leading producer of deranged fans, but they were far from alone. Throughout Europe, Latin America, and Africa, violence had become part of soccer’s culture. And even in places where violence had long accompanied soccer, it became more widespread and destructive in the eighties and nineties. The Serbian fans were merely a bit better organized and much better armed than the rest of the world.
Susan Faludi and a phalanx of sociologists have an explanation for this outburst. They have written about downsized men, the ones whose industrial jobs were outsourced to third-world labor. Deprived of traditional work and knocked o¤ patriarchal pedestals, these men desperately wanted to reassert their masculinity. Soccer violence gave them a rare opportunity to actually exert control. When these fans dabbled in racism and radical nationalism, it was because those ideologies worked as metaphors for their own lives. Their nations and races had been victimized by the world just as badly as they had been themselves.
Economic deprivation and displacement are obvious explanations. But there’s so much these factors can’t explain. Ultra Bad Boys like Draza can also be college boys with decent prospects. The Chelsea Headhunters, the most notorious English hooligan gang, include stockbrokers and middle-class thrill seekers.
Besides, human history is filled with poor people, and rarely do they get together in groups to maim for maiming’s sake.
Something di¤erent happened in this era. An ethos of gangsterism—spread by movies, music, and fashion—conquered the world. The Red Star fans modeled themselves after foreigners they admired, especially the Western European hooligans. The name Ultra Bad Boys was ripped o¤ from Italian supporters’ clubs.
Another fan club called itself the Red Devils, after British club Manchester United’s nickname. In the late eighties and early nineties, the Red Star hooligans would go to the British Cultural Center in downtown Belgrade to scan the papers for the latest antics of English hooligans. The Serb hooligans also paid tribute with their fashion. They wore Adidas track suits, gold chains, and white leather sneakers, just like the crazed fans they read about on the other side of the continent.
Of course, the genealogy of this aesthetic had other roots than England. It borrowed heavily from African American gangster rap, a favorite genre of Serb youth, HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE
and filched mores from the emerging Russian mafia.
Gangsterism and its nihilistic violence had become fully globalized. And it was in the Balkans that this subculture became the culture and unfolded toward its logical conclusion.
II.
In the history of hooligan warfare, no battle has been quite so spectacular. A year before Red Star lifted its European Cup, it traveled to Croatia for a match against the rival club Dinamo Zagreb. Signs that the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia might not have much more life could be seen all around Zagreb. Two weeks earlier, the Croats had elected the ultranationalist Franjo Tudjman, a former general and former president of the Partizan Belgrade soccer club. Tudjman’s adoption of Ustache icons—the symbols of the Croatian fascists who collaborated with Nazis to kill hundreds of thousands of Serbs—roused the long-dormant national passions of his people.
During the thirty-five years the charismatic communist Marshal Tito ruled Yugoslavia, he had suppressed bad feelings over World War II, simply declaring the expression of such feelings illegal. Yugoslavia had never come to terms with the fact that its two largest constituents had slaughtered one another. Now, with communism dissolving, the old wounds reopened. Serbs and Croats began to openly expose one another’s war crimes—and demand justice for them. A rush of
breathless revisionist literature described the “hidden history” of World War II. The books were turned into TV documentaries. And the TV documentaries were reduced to potent political slogans that moved the national agendas in nationalist directions. As one of his first acts, Tudjman “demoted” Serbs from the Croatian constitution. The new, or rather old, enmity could be seen visibly at the soccer stadium. In matches between Serb and Croat teams, fans sang about their respective slaughters.
The match between Red Star and Dinamo, however, was the first time in fifty years that Yugoslavia had seen its ethnic groups openly battle one another.
