As he drank tea, Yuri explained this history.
“Karpaty never had political power; it never will have more money than the clubs in Kiev or Donetsk [the industrial capital of Eastern Ukraine]. But it has had a sense of spirit that has helped make up for these disadvantages. The big moments in Karpaty’s history happened when the team had local players and unity.”
With the arrival of the foreigners, the team had nothing resembling unity. It broke down into factions.
You would walk into the team dining room and find the various nationalities eating at their own separate tables.
They would sit apart on the team bus and at practice.
For sure, it didn’t help matters that the Ukrainians couldn’t converse with the Nigerians. (They had a much easier time integrating the Yugoslavs, whose language has close relations with Ukrainian and whose culture has the same Slavic underpinnings.) There were, how-ever, less appealing reasons for this split within the team. Edward had been the most expensive acquisition in the history of the club. He earned, his teammates imagined, much more than they did.
Yuri had become particularly perturbed with the Nigerians. Too many of his fellow Ukrainians complained that the Nigerians weren’t trying very hard. Yuri agreed with this assessment. He felt the Nigerians didn’t run enough or sacrifice their bodies. The Karpaty jersey didn’t mean anything to them. For goodness sake, Edward and Samson said quite freely that they viewed the Ukraine as a mere way station on their routes toward the leagues of Western Europe. He felt their arrogance and indi¤erence would tear the club apart.
After one practice, Yuri pulled Edward and Samson aside. He told them that they needed to increase their e¤ort, to work with the rest of the team. “They were somehow o¤ended with such a conversation,” he
recounted to me. The next thing he knew, “Edward and Sampson went to Dyminskyy [the president of the club]
and told him that players weren’t giving passes to the Nigerians. The president met with me. He was furious,
‘Why isn’t the team giving passes to the Nigerians?’ I told him, ‘Do you not think I’m giving my best? I live for this team.’ ”
A day after meeting Yuri, I watched Karpaty practice. They trained in a village meadow. A rusty old rail car stood at one end of the field, a place for players to change clothes, although most players preferred to strip in public view. Team owner Petro Dyminskyy sat under an awning in front of this car. Even though it was a hot HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS
spring day, he wore black. He remained ominously silent through the proceedings. The team went through its drills—small groups playing games of keep away, exercises in crossing and heading the ball. For each of these, Edward and Samson worked together. None of the other players volunteered to join them. Coaches filled those vacancies, even the Serbian head coach joined to give enough bodies. Under the blazing May sun, they worked their well-fed middle-aged bodies into supersaturated sponges of sweat.
IV.
On a street corner outside my hotel, I tried to make conversation with two sportswriters. One had been trained as an atomic scientist. Neither really spoke much English. We waited for a translator to arrive. As they filled the awkward silences with the phrases they knew, Edward serendipitously drove past us in an old beat-up cab with a cracked windshield. His driver slowed down for a moment and he put his hand out the window. I grabbed it. The other writers nodded in his direction. When Edward turned the corner, one of them chuckled. “Monkey,” he said in English. “Bananas,” the other one chimed.
It is diªcult to gauge how much of the resentment toward the Nigerians should be described as racism.
Clearly, many of the Ukrainian players feel the same as the journalists. They would complain to team oªcials that “they didn’t want to play with monkeys.” The Serbian coach told me, “I was surprised that some of the young kids on the team don’t like black kids. This is not the way we should think in Europe. You associate Europe with civilization. That’s typical thinking for primitive people. You can feel how isolated [the Ukrainians] were in lots of manners and their way of thinking and so on.”
Yet their hatred doesn’t betray isolation, but the opposite. There’s a strange uniformity in the vocabulary European soccer fans use to hate black people. The same primate insults get hurled. Although they’ve gotten better over time, the English and Italians developed the tradition of making ape noises when black players touched the ball. The Poles toss bananas on the field.
This consistency owes nothing to television, which rarely shows these finer points of fan behavior. Nor are these insults considered polite to discuss in public.
This trope has simply become a continent-wide folk tradition, transmitted via the stadium, from fan to fan, from father to son.
Based on its history, you might imagine racism to be the logical conclusion of Lviv’s historical trajectory away from pluralism. Once upon a time, Lviv truly exuded cosmopolitanism. It was the kind of place you might expect to find odd cultural alchemies. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled, until World War I, the town was filled with grand opera houses and ornate co¤ee houses, like the one where Yuri and I took tea. It acquired the frilly atmospherics of
