How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

Madrid exploited a sympathetic city council, Barca has tried to do the same. But bumbling Catalan politicians have interfered with the sweetheart deal. When they describe Aznar as the new Franco, they are being highly ungrateful. For many years, Aznar included the Catalan nationalists in his governing coalition, plying them with lots of state spending and never saying a word against Catalan nationalism. Nor can they prove that Aznar has ever thrown his political weight around on behalf of his beloved club. Nevertheless, they go berserk over Aznar’s sympathies. After the president dined with Real’s directors, Barcelona’s president demanded that he be accorded the same honor. When Real fans hear these accusations, they say

that they are symptomatic of the Catalan mau-mau.

They argue that the Catalans like to cry over their

“victimization” so that they can bully the central government—and the Spanish soccer federation—into giving them undeserved favors. How else can Catalonia get so much more money from the central government than any other Spanish region?

This explanation, while containing a seed of truth, lacks any empathy. Barca fans hate Madrid, because they also feel a measure of survivor’s guilt. Their fathers and grandfathers su¤ered under the tyranny of Madrid; they died in the civil war; they couldn’t speak their own language. But in the prosperity of the democratic era, Catalans have no objective basis for complaint. Their wealth and cultural renaissance should have provoked triumphalist celebrations. It hasn’t, because most Catalans aren’t in a mood to gloat. After witnessing their fathers’ heroism, they feel as if they have lived lives devoid of struggle and without any epic dimension. They worry that their fathers would be disappointed with their staid existence.

Barca is a balm to these feelings. In its small measure, it allows Catalans to imagine they have joined the centuries-old struggle against Madrid and Castilian centralism. It lets them feel as if they, in the same way as their ancestors, have been stuck under the thumb of the arrogant imperialists. “Catalans don’t want Barca to win,” the journalist Joan Poqui says. “If they did, they wouldn’t enjoy being victims so much.”

But even in this unbecoming, self-pitying side of Barca, there’s a becoming side. Contrast Barca to Celtic HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE DISCREET CHARM OF BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

or Rangers. The Scottish fans consider one another enemy tribes with inferior beliefs, who don’t really deserve to occupy their town. It is stunning that, for all the rage toward Real, Barca fans feel so little animus toward the supporters of the club. There are scant examples of Barca hooligans battling Real. That’s because they don’t hate an opposing group of people; they feel rage toward an idea, the idea of Castilian centralism. And you can’t beat up an idea.

Without a group of enemies to focus attention, there’s an aimless, scattershot quality to the hatred of Barca fans. Consequently, they turn their rage on themselves as often as they turn it on others. During my visit, I watched the city rise up against the club’s Dutch manager, Louis van Gaal. The city has a particularly robust press covering the club. Two daily sports papers have no other obvious purpose than expending approximately 280 pages each week delving into every bit of the club’s minutiae. For months they devoted this space to vilifying Van Gaal. A typical story analyzes lunches consumed by the Dutch coach, alongside photographs documenting the growth of his belly. When he sits in the thirteenth row of the team plane, reporters interpret this as a sign of his poor judgment and imminent demise. Remarkably, this only begins to chart the Catalan media landscape and its hatreds. A weekly TV segment parodies Barca, using puppets to produce cruelly cutting send-ups of players and management, regularly portraying Van Gaal as a pile of bricks topped by a mop. For a week, fans held anti–Van Gaal rallies in front of the Camp Nou. At times, the hecklers turned so vile, so personal, and so distracting that Van Gaal interrupted his training sessions and moved them to another, more private pitch. When I visited the protes-tors, they looked to be mostly a group of middle-aged men. They stood behind a black iron gate and shouted toward the field, about thirty yards away. Although they only numbered about two dozen, they amplified

magnificently. They didn’t have a single message, just insults and quixotic demands for new lineups and new strategies. Because they had been protesting for a week already—and their demand that Van Gaal be fired seemed so close to being met—neither the team nor the media paid them much attention. They solemnly went about their business.

I tried to talk to these malcontents. A short stocky man with a combover in a sweater and blazer allowed himself to be momentarily distracted from his shouting. As I approached, his abuses came out so fast that I couldn’t really follow him. It was an unseasonably warm Mediterranean day and he constantly wiped his brow dry with a handkerchief.

“Why are you so angry?” I asked.

He grabbed my forearm with one hand. It was hard to know if this was a gesture of hostility or intimacy. In the moment, he might not have known himself.

“We hate him so much, because we love Barca so much. It hurts.” s

H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

I s l a m ’s H o p e

I.

The biggest stadium in Tehran, in the world for that matter, is the 120,000-seat Azadi. Its name comes straight from the lexicon of Orwellian Newspeak. Even though it translates as “freedom,” it represents something close to the opposite. Ever since the Islamic revolution of 1979, females have been forbidden to watch soccer in the Azadi. This prohibition isn’t exclusive to the venue or even to Iran. It applies in broad swaths of the Muslim world, where it holds without much contro-versy. But the fundamental fact of Iran is that it is not Saudi Arabia. During the