Soccer Against the Enemy by Simon Kuper was first published in 1994 with the subtitle “How the world’s most popular sport starts and fuels revolutions and keeps dictators in power.” I recently read the updated 2006 version, but since a lot has happened in those intervening years, like for example a World Cup in Qatar, this book is just exhibit A.
This book is about Simon’s research by being boots on the ground in places like Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Germany, the Baltics, Russia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Cameroon, South Africa, Botswana, United States, Argentina, and Brazil.
The culture that soccer has around the world makes a book like this foreign in the United States. Sure sometimes the market goes up or down based on who wins the World Series, but the leaders and politics and revolutions that are spoken of in this book, and quite a few that have happened since, all relate to soccer, as the sport of any given country, as the lifeblood of a country.
The most important quote and lesson from Kuper’s book is the “greater truth about soccer and politics: the game is a good way of studying what is going on in repressed societies, but it rarely changes these societies.”
I live in the United States. I enjoy soccer in all of its many forms; club and country. But I don’t have a club to really call my own. I enjoy when the US Men’s or Women’s National Teams do well, but I don’t see it as a reflection of who happens to be President at the time or if I will vote for them again. I don’t see our National Teams as a reflection of our national pride, and that’s what this book does a great job of explaining.
For the country and sometimes for the country’s most popular club, yes it is a reflection of those in power, and that’s just the way it is. Have the politics in many of the countries that Kuper visited changed since 1994, sure they have. Has the fervor around soccer changed, perhaps, but not nearly on the same scale.
And if you want to understand more about what real fandom is, it’s not Saturdays in the South at a college football game, or Sundays in the NFL, and it certainly isn’t baseball or basketball. It’s a World Cup qualifier between any two countries that aren’t the United States. Perhaps our own access to so many other professional sports is our misunderstanding.
But this book will put concrete examples of how dictators and mafias not only get involved in soccer but also how their involvement means the reflection of themselves to their region or nation. Soccer is by far the world’s most popular sport, but it hasn’t changed, and neither has the idea that it’s the most powerful. So if you’re interested in how that may be the case, this is the book you’ll want to pick up. It’s an enthralling read for fans of the sport or fans of politics, and the criminal elements that are involved here will make the average true crime buff blush in scope. It’s just that big.
Still not convinced, just remember as Kuper discovered, “Soccer fanatics, religious fanatics, political fanatics–fanatics are always dangerous.”