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How Soccer Explains the World:
An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer
Harper Perenial, ISBN: 0060731427

Reviewed by Margaret Teichert and Oleg Kaganovich

For those of us who thought soccer was just a game, political journalist Franklin Foer’s “How Soccer Explains the World” offers an interesting, if slightly disconnected view into the politics, business and influence of this global phenomenon. Beyond the fact that it is played by more people in more countries than any other sport, in many parts of the world soccer is “more deeply felt than religion and just as much a part of the community’s fabric, a repository of traditions,” writes Foer.
    Be warned, however: If you’re not already a fan of the sport, this isn’t an easy read. The book does little to explore how or why soccer became the world’s most popular sport, spreading farther and wider than any religion ever has.
    If that caveat doesn’t dissuade you, the book presents some thought-provoking ideas. In the prologue, Foer eloquently presents the theory he hopes to prove, that soccer is a force for globalization. “During the nineties,” he writes, “Basque teams, under the stewardship of Welsh coaches, stocked up on Dutch and Turkish players; Moldavian squads imported Nigerians.
    Everywhere you looked, it suddenly seemed national borders and national identities had been swept into the dustbin of soccer history.” But that theory, as his collected evidence makes clear, is flawed.
    Take Ukraine, for example. After Communism fell, the government could no longer afford to pay its soccer team. Rather than letting it disappear, one particular oligarch-turned-industrialist from the city of Lviv recognized early on that the surest way to garner popular support (which could be parlayed into a career in politics) was to create a world class team that could compete against the dream teams of Western Europe. To do this, he realized, he would need to follow the Western European business model, including hiring Nigerian players. (To contextualize: Lviv was a city with 830,000 residents, of whom only 50 were black.)
    While they had been superstars in their own country, the Nigerians quickly discovered that their style of play, communication barriers and insurmountable “outsider” status made it impossible to perform to expectation. For the Ukrainians, the notion that talent had to be imported at all was a serious blow to their national ego. The cultural divide that might have been bridged grew wider.
    In another section, Foer describes how market demand has created opportunities to break down barriers as surely as either diplomacy or war. Take the chapter on the Glasgow Rangers (a Protestant team who didn’t hire their first Catholic until 1989). Foer describes how centuries-old animosities and discrimination were diminished, not because of progressive politics, but due to the potential financial losses from sanctions by the European soccer federation coupled with the team’s inability to hire talented players from Catholic countries.
    The result was not a Protestant team that grew to appreciate Catholic doctrine, but Catholic players that reveled in the anti-Papal cheers of their Protestant fans.
    Rather than a continuous narrative, the book is instead a collection of 10 different stories that have only soccer as a unifying theme and whose topic is often quite barbaric. The opening chapter on gangster violence and ethnic cleansing in Serbia (as sublimated through soccer fandom) is quite troubling. In fact, if you can get past the first several chapters, Foer draws interesting connections between soccer and other larger social phenomena, though the picture is often bleak.
    The book seems to be less about globalization and more about soccer’s surprising link to worldwide incidents of politics, corruption, violence and greed. While interesting as individual narratives, the stories fail to find a theme that elevates soccer, truly a global common denominator, into a vehicle for understanding or peace.
The book’s biggest problem is not the content. The stories are quite well-written and interesting. However, the title sets misleading expectations. Certainly any book that attempts to “explain the world” is necessarily biting off more than it can chew, regardless of the appetite.
    There may not be any single leader, religion or political movement that can successfully bring understanding, cultural acceptance or world peace. That said, soccer continues to bring the world together more than any other movement, using a single set of rules. And in this, there is hope.

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