Introduction
You live in a world that promised steady homogenization through the irresistible forces of global capitalism and open markets. Modernization theorists assured you that ancient tribal hatreds, religious fanaticism, and corrupt local loyalties would simply fade away under the bright lights of international trade.
Instead, ethnic bloodshed, nationalist rage, and criminal syndicates continue to dominate daily headlines and disrupt neat economic predictions. You need a reliable lens to examine these hidden political realities and understand how human societies actually function beneath the shiny veneer of global integration.
Soccer serves as a cultural mirror revealing the hidden tribalisms, criminal networks, and ethnic conflicts that defy the neat predictions of global capitalism.
Franklin Foer maps these turbulent global currents by traveling through violent hooligan enclaves, religious battlegrounds, oligarchic boardrooms, and ideological frontlines. You will discover answers to the following puzzles as you explore the sport:
- How did soccer fandom mutate into brutal paramilitary shock troops and ethnic cleansing units?
- Why do religious sectarianism and ethnic hatred remain immensely profitable business models for historic clubs?
- How do billionaires, oligarchs, and media moguls manipulate the sport to preserve state power and private fortunes?
1. Gangsters and Paramilitaries
Red Star Belgrade hooligans evolved into brutal paramilitary shock troops that fueled nationalist violence and ethnic cleansing under warlord leadership.
The Rise of the Ultra Bad Boys
Red Star Belgrade incorporated violent fan groups directly into its institutional structure. The club provided these groups with office space and stipends.
The Ultra Bad Boys coordinated violent ambushes against rival Partizan fans and police. They utilized metal bars and coordinated formations on the terraces.
Economic downsizing pushed men toward radical nationalism to reassert masculinity. Fans adopted foreign nicknames, apparel, and behavioral norms popularized by international gangsterism.
Serbian hooligans visited the British Cultural Center in Belgrade to read about English gangs. They adopted Adidas track suits, white sneakers, and gold chains alongside African American gangster rap aesthetics.
Arkan and the Tigers
Zeljko Raznatovic, known as Arkan, consolidated warring fan factions under his leadership. He imposed strict military discipline that banned drinking and erratic behavior.
Arkan organized Red Star fans into the Tigers. He trained them at a police base in Erdut and utilized stadium chants as direct preparation for military offensives.
This disciplined hooligan corps was used by the state to terrorize civilians and facilitate forced expulsions. State Department figures estimate a minimum of 2,000 men and women were killed by Arkan's Tigers in Croatia and Bosnia.
Arkan purchased the lower-division club Obilic in 1996. He turned it into a championship contender through explicit intimidation.
Arkan installed his pop-star wife Ceca as president of Obilic to bypass European soccer bans. Police raided Ceca's palace in 2003 following the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, discovering a secret bunker with weapons.
2. Sectarianism in Glasgow
The rivalry between the Glasgow Celtic and Rangers football clubs represents an unfinished religious war dating back to the Protestant Reformation. Modern social science predicted that industrialization and globalization would eliminate ancient tribalisms, yet Glasgow retained deep sectarian divisions. Celtic was founded by a Catholic monk to support marginalized Irish immigrants, while Rangers gradually adopted a Protestant-only identity, turning matches into arenas for religious and ethnic hostility.
The Old Firm rivalry between Celtic and Rangers represents an unfinished religious war where bigotry remains aggressively profitable.
Matches between Celtic and Rangers historically resulted in severe sectarian violence, such as the events of May 1999 when Rangers fans committed murders and assaults in the hours following a game. Glasgow emergency ward admissions increased nine-fold during derby weekends, and eight directly related deaths occurred in Glasgow over a seven-year period linked to the match.
The Protestant Reformation on the Pitch
The persistence of soccer tribalism in Glasgow contradicts traditional modernization theories that predicted economic advancement would lead to liberal tolerance. Cities like Glasgow maintained intense soccer sectarianism not due to poverty or job scarcity, but because it provided a form of emotional and cultural pleasure. Despite Glasgow being the city that nurtured Adam Smith and later aligning with liberal yuppie politics, its citizens fiercely preserved religious football rivalries.
Both Celtic and Rangers tried to expand beyond the Scottish market by appealing to global diasporas and seeking entry into the wealthier English League. Nevertheless, clubs continue to stoke ethnic hatred by selling partisan merchandise and playing provocative music, because losing extremist sloganeering risks alienating core supporters and losing revenue. Rangers continued to play Tina Turner's song Simply the Best on the Ibrox loudspeaker, which consistently culminated in 40,000 fans screaming anti-Catholic slogans.
Breaking the Religious Wall
Rangers abandoned its strict Protestants-only hiring policy in 1989 primarily for business reasons rather than humanitarian reform. Driven by rising television revenues and fears of European sanctions, club president David Murray and manager Graeme Souness signed an ex-Celtic Catholic player named Maurice Johnston. This decision sparked fierce backlash from traditional fans who viewed it as a betrayal of the club's Protestant identity.
Maurice Johnston faced immediate death threats upon signing with Rangers, with Celtic fans threatening his kneecaps and Rangers fans burning scarves, requiring him to be flown daily on a chartered jet to London for safety.
3. The Jewish Question
Muskeljudentum and Hakoah Vienna
Zionist ideologue Max Nordau created the doctrine of muscular Judaism to counter anti-Semitic stereotypes of the physical weakness and effeminacy of ghetto Jews. Nordau argued that victims of anti-Semitism suffered from a condition called Jewish distress, which made their limbs weak and voices anxious. He prescribed athletic training and gymnasia as a cure to restore vigor and strength to the Jewish body.
Historical Jewish sports clubs and philo-Semitic fan cultures challenge anti-Semitic stereotypes and map complex European identities.
Vienna's Hakoah soccer club, founded in 1909 by Zionist intellectuals, became one of the best teams on the planet and proudly displayed its Jewish identity. The club embraced the marketplace by paying players high salaries, recruited top Jewish talent from Austria and Hungary, and utilized gentile coaches to build a powerhouse that toured the world promoting Zionism. During the 1924-25 season, Hakoah's goalkeeper Alexander Fabian broke his arm, returned to the field with his arm in a sling as an outside attacker, and scored the winning goal to clinch the Austrian championship. Hakoah drew 46,000 fans to the Polo Grounds in New York and played before 18,000 seats in its Vienna stadium.
Modern Fan Culture and Anti-Semitism
Fans of the English soccer club Tottenham Hotspur defiantly adopted the anti-Semitic slur Yiddo as a badge of honor to disarm opposing fans' abuse. Faced with persistent anti-Semitic chants and death camp references from rival fans, Tottenham supporters embraced the moniker and chanted it proudly, transforming an insult into a core element of the club's culture. In the early 1980s during an away game against Manchester City, Tottenham's Jewish supporters dropped their pants and defiantly waved their circumcised members in response to a vulgar anti-Semitic chant about foreskins.
Ajax of Amsterdam incorporated Jewish symbols and philo-Semitic rituals into its fan culture, reflecting Dutch postwar guilt and reinvention. Ajax fans paint red Stars of David on their foreheads and decorate stadiums with Israeli flags, while the club's culture includes pregame kosher salami deliveries and Yiddish banter among players. Johan Cruyff, the master of Total Football, fostered a creative playing style and even wore a yarmulke with his number 14 stitched into it when visiting Israel.
Budapest's MTK Hungaria soccer club suffers from a lack of supporters and intense hostility because of its historical association with Jewish founders. Despite winning 21 national championships since it was founded in 1888, MTK struggles to attract fans because wearing an MTK jersey remains a social barrier, effectively making the team a modern-day ghetto. Fans of rival club Ferencvaros unfurl banners reading The trains are leaving for Auschwitz and use Dr. Mengele-inspired chants when playing against MTK in Judapest.
4. The Sentimental Hooligan
English soccer hooliganism emerged organically in the 1960s among working-class youths seeking camaraderie, adrenaline, and tribal dominance within stadium terraces. Club terraces like Chelsea's Shed were overcrowded and poorly regulated, offering an atmosphere of passion where violent crews developed spontaneously to defend their turf against visiting fans.
Alan Garrison and his Chelsea mates organized a stealth attack on Burnley fans in the North Stand during the 1963-1964 season, which helped pioneer the phenomenon of football hooliganism.
The Birth of the Shed and Gentrification
The gentrification and corporate globalization of English football systematically dismantled the traditional working-class culture of the game. Following disasters like Hillsborough, government mandates forced clubs to replace standing terraces with all-seater stadiums, import capital, raise ticket prices, and install heavy policing, which displaced traditional working-class fans in favor of affluent corporate clients.
Chelsea evolved from a notorious hooligan hub into a cosmopolitan club, hiring foreign managers, fielding squads without English players, and developing real estate around Stamford Bridge including luxury hotels and restaurants.
Adrenaline Addiction and Politics
Soccer hooliganism has been commodified and commercialized into a mainstream pop-culture industry, mirroring the trajectory of gangsta rap. Former hooligans and pop anthropologists capitalized on public fascination by publishing a vast genre of first-person memoirs, novels, and guides detailing football violence, while the media broadcasts documentaries and sells branded merchandise.
Former Chelsea hooligans like Steve Hickmont, Chris Henderson, and Martin King published memoirs, while brothers Dougie and Eddy Brimson built a franchise of books on soccer violence.
Modern football violence has moved away from stadium terraces and become domesticated through prearranged, appointment-based street fights.
Due to heavy police surveillance, closed-circuit cameras, and stadium safety regulations, hooligan firms now coordinate fights via telephone or messaging, stripping the subculture of its spontaneous integration with the match day itself. Alan Garrison and younger cohorts in the Youth Firm plan fights in advance, calling rival leaders to meet at specific locations like Trafalgar Square.
English hooligan networks frequently aligned with radical right-wing politics, neo-Nazism, and criminal syndicates during the 1970s and 1990s. As the hooligan subculture evolved, factions within clubs like Chelsea and splinter groups adopted white nationalist ideologies, engaged in drug peddling, and operated security details for extremist political parties.
Chelsea hooligans formed factions like the Headhunters, left calling cards with skull-and-bones logos, and groups like Combat 18 engaged in terrorist plots and bomb attacks.
Hooligans often view violence not purely as political hatred, but as a physiological addiction to adrenaline and the raw rush of mortal fear. Practitioners of football violence describe the pre-fight terror and combat as a powerful drug that rivals or exceeds sexual gratification, motivating individuals to maintain dual lives as soldiers and brawlers.
Alan Garrison served in an elite special services unit in the British army during the week while leading Chelsea hooligan crews on weekends, eventually receiving a prison sentence for attempted murder after a 1977 match against Plymouth.
5. Survival of the Top Hats
Brazilian soccer clubs operate as nonprofit amateur facilities that shield corrupt executives from accountability while talent migrates abroad.
Cartolas and Foreign Capital
You witness how Brazilian teams function as nonprofit amateur clubs complete with swimming pools and dues-paying members. This structure shields their financial management from public scrutiny and creates a haven for corrupt executives known as cartolas or top hats. These directors receive no salary yet manage to plunder team treasuries without legal accountability.
Eurico Miranda, president of Vasco da Gama and a federal congressman, diverted millions from a 34 million dollar investment by NationsBank into personal accounts and his election campaign. He spent 124,000 dollars of NationsBank funds on T-shirts and propaganda for his election campaign. A stadium crowd crush in 2000 caused by ticket over-sales resulted in 168 casualties.
Well-monied foreign investment funds from Europe and America failed to reform Brazilian soccer because they underestimated the entrenched power of corrupt local cartolas and cultural resistance. In the late 1990s, foreign investors like Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, ISL, and Parmalat injected millions into Brazilian clubs promising professional marketing and balance sheet accountability. They were eventually forced out in disgrace as debt and mismanagement worsened, leaving Flamengo of Rio de Janeiro facing 100 million dollars of debt in 2002.
Fans of Corinthians protested Hicks, Muse for failing to build a modern stadium, while ISL collapsed into bankruptcy at Flamengo. Cartolas like Eurico Miranda successfully maintain their base by weaponizing anti-globalization rhetoric, framing foreign investors as culture destroyers while acting as patrons who steal for themselves and deliver visible localized perks. Eurico Miranda signed Dejan Petkovic as a last-minute political maneuver to boost attendance and support for his reelection bid during a poor season prior to celebrating the 104th anniversary of Vasco da Gama.
Pelé and Brazilian Economic History
The life trajectory of Pelé mirrors the economic history of Brazil, transitioning from impoverished national symbolism under a state-driven industrial boom to exploitation by corrupt advisors and ultimate integration into global capitalism. Pelé rose from poverty to become a national symbol during the Brazilian Miracle and forced industrialization, earning a 125,000 dollar salary from Santos along with a Volkswagen and a house.
He repeatedly lost fortunes due to trusting unworldly advisors and being declared a non-exportable national treasure in 1960 before finding financial success in the United States. He later lost money to Spanish agent Pepe Gordo through poor real estate investments, then earned 7 million dollars playing three seasons for the New York Cosmos and now reportedly pockets 20 million dollars annually from sponsorships.
Appointed as sports minister, Pelé attempted to introduce market reforms known as the Pelé Laws to force transparency on clubs, but the legislation was eventually gutted by the soccer lobby after he returned to his private career. Teaming up with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Pelé pushed through laws requiring transparent capitalist ventures and player free agency. After his resignation, opponents dismantled the regulations and Pelé infamously allied with tainted official Ricardo Teixeira, staging a joint press conference in 2001 to announce a pact to save Brazilian soccer and drawing intense backlash from anti-corruption crusaders who noted he allegedly skimmed 700,000 dollars from a UNICEF charity match organized by his marketing company.
The severe economic and administrative crisis in domestic Brazilian soccer has triggered a massive talent drain, sending thousands of players abroad to foreign leagues. Fleeing the capricious rule of cartolas and disheveled domestic leagues, an estimated 5,000 Brazilians with contracts with foreign teams sign with foreign squads, leaving domestic stadiums sparsely attended and disconnecting local fans from their greatest stars. Out of the twenty-two players who won the World Cup for Brazil, only seven played in their home country, while a Botafogo game in the Maracanã stadium recorded a low attendance of 4,000.
6. The Black Carpathians
Post-communist Ukrainian soccer clubs were rescued by wealthy oligarchs who sparked a fad of buying Nigerian players to emulate Western European success. When state funding ended with communism, oligarchs stepped in as de facto owners. Believing that African players provided the speed and skill missing in Eastern Bloc teams, owners began paying high prices for talent.
Post-communist Ukrainian clubs imported Nigerian players to emulate Western success, sparking cultural clashes against scientific Marxism.
Ukrainian billionaire Petro Dyminskyy purchased Karpaty Lviv and paid $500,000 for Nigerian player Edward Anyamkyegh. Within a few months, nine Nigerians were signed to Ukraine's premier league.
Oligarchs and the Nigerian Fad
Karpaty Lviv had historically been composed of local men from Lviv, reflecting regional political resistance against Soviet control. When expensive foreign players were added, the team broke down into isolated factions that sat and ate separately.
Captain Yuri and the Ukrainian players grew resentful of the Nigerians, believing they did not work hard enough. Out of the 830,000 residents of Lviv, only fifty Africans resided in the city, creating an intense local fish-out-of-water dynamic.
Art Versus Science in the Locker Room
Ukrainian soccer is dominated by an authoritarian coaching system based on scientific Marxism that stifles individual creativity. Coach Valeri Lobanovsky, trained as a plumber, applied scientific Marxism to Dynamo Kiev and the national team by creating a system of numerical values for every action.
Nigerian soccer treats the game as an art form characterized by deliberate pace and cleverness. Edward Anyamkyegh struggled in Ukraine because he never learned the local art of tackling and was constantly penalized for mistimed slides.
The severe winter weather in Western Ukraine forces a four-month league hiatus. Karpaty played a match with the thermometer at minus 30 degrees centigrade, and an army unit had to spend seven days breaking through fifteen-centimeter-thick ice on the stadium crust.
7. The New Oligarchs
Italian soccer adopted the defensive catenaccio lock-down formation in the 1960s. Goals became exceedingly rare, and players constantly lobby and flop to influence the referee. Referees attain high celebrity status because officiating heavily dictates match outcomes. Pierluigi Collina became a globally renowned referee, appearing in Adidas advertisements and fashion magazines alongside star players.
Italian club owners and media moguls manipulate referees, press coverage, and state power to secure narrow championship margins.
Old Money and Juventus
Juventus represents the traditional, pre-globalization style of the Italian ruling class through its quiet, hidden control over state power. The Agnelli family owned Juventus, Fiat, and a third of the Milan stock exchange. They controlled businesses with a total market worth of 60 billion dollars in the early nineties and won 25 championships since 1930. Gianni Agnelli confessed that Fiat had paid 35 million dollars in political bribes over the preceding decade.
Powerful Italian clubs historically sought to influence referees through direct gifts and procedural control over assignments. A two-person committee often favored Juventus and Milan while marginalizing scrupulous referees like Pierluigi Collina. In 1999, a sports daily exposed the Night of the Watches, revealing that AS Roma had given each of Italy's top referees a 13,500 dollar Rolex watch, and none of them returned it.
Berlusconi and the New Oligarchy
Silvio Berlusconi pioneered a new, transparently flashy style of oligarchy by leveraging a massive media empire. After buying AC Milan in 1986, he transformed the club with foreign stars before using its success to become prime minister. AC Milan won 6 European Champions League titles. Berlusconi launched his party Forza Italia by converting millions of AC Milan supporters' clubs into local headquarters and adopting the national team's nickname Azuri.
Football clubs can manipulate sports media to pressure referees through public crusades. Mario Sconcerti explained that strategic media campaigns can increase a team's total by up to six points. The newspaper Corriere dello Sport launched a daily campaign against favoritism toward northern clubs during the 2000 and 2001 seasons.
Left-wing intellectuals romanticize Inter Milan as a moral counterweight to Berlusconi. The Comuna Baires theater hosted literary evenings honoring captain Javier Zanetti, surrounded by portraits of Che Guevara.
8. Bourgeois Nationalism and Islam's Hope
FC Barcelona champions civic nationalism against centralism, while Iranian soccer sparks popular uprisings against theocratic tyranny.
Barça and Catalan Identity
FC Barcelona operates as a bastion of bourgeois nationalism, embodying a cosmopolitan and civic form of patriotism that welcomes foreigners and rejects commercialization. The club was founded in 1899 by Swiss businessman Joan Gamper alongside English expats, demonstrating that Catalan identity is acquired through civic integration rather than ethnic descent.
Authoritarian regimes often tolerate dissent inside soccer stadiums because the matches act as a harmless safety valve for public frustration. Under Francisco Franco, Catalans were permitted to scream obscenities against the regime at the Camp Nou stadium, which prevented them from joining violent underground liberation fronts.
The Iranian Football Revolution
The November 1997 World Cup qualification match for Iran sparked a football revolution that provided a model for popular uprisings against theocratic tyranny. Iranian women defied state bans and police gates, muscling their way into the Azadi stadium and surrounding areas to participate in the homecoming celebrations of the national team.
Revived secular nationalism centered around international soccer can serve as a potent cultural antidote to radical Islamist fundamentalism in the Middle East. During World Cup qualifying matches, Iranian fans chanted long live freedom and praised the exiled son of the late shah while waving pre-Islamic national flags.
9. The American Culture Wars
American attitudes toward soccer reflect deep societal divisions over globalization, exceptionalism, and traditional cultural values.
Yuppies and Youth Soccer
Affluent, liberal yuppie parents in the 1970s and 1980s championed American youth soccer as a safe, egalitarian alternative to traditional American sports. Children of the 1960s counterculture rejected American football for its inherent violence, baseball for its stressful performance pressure, and basketball for ghetto associations. Soccer represented a tabula rasa that fostered self-esteem and minimized win-at-all-cost competition.
The author began playing soccer in 1982 at age eight in Upper Northwest Washington, D.C., where professional-class parents drove their children to distant suburban Maryland fields. American youth soccer leagues deliberately instituted rules to eliminate competitive stress and prevent adult over-involvement.
- Leagues required teams to be balanced and completely reconstituted every season rather than staying intact.
- Many leagues handed out participation trophies to every player or stopped keeping score entirely to protect children from competitive damage.
Dick Wilson, executive director of the American Youth Soccer Organization, described the philosophy of providing a less competitive, win-oriented atmosphere. Unlike the rest of the world where soccer is a working-class sport, the United States inverts this class structure by catering primarily to professional and affluent classes. Surveys by sporting goods manufacturers consistently indicate that middle-class and affluent families play soccer disproportionately, with half of all participants coming from households earning over $50,000, while the American working class largely ignores the sport.
The Conservative Anti-Soccer Lobby
A prominent American anti-soccer lobby views the sport not merely with indifference, but as a genuine threat to traditional American values and economic systems. Conservative political figures and radio shock jocks launch aggressive tirades against soccer, characterizing it as un-American or socialist while expressing fierce loyalty to traditional American pastimes like baseball.
In 1986, former Buffalo Bills quarterback and conservative politician Jack Kemp delivered a speech on the floor of the United States Congress arguing that baseball represents democracy and capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport. Popular media personalities capitalized on anti-soccer sentiment by constructing a distinct subculture based on rejection of foreign sporting trends. Radio shock jock Jim Rome built a large national audience by frequently launching tirades against soccer and declaring he would rather hand his son ice skates and a sequined blouse than a soccer ball.
Baseball's failure to adapt to the global economy has coincided with a severe decline in its youth participation and demographic reach. According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association of America, the number of teenagers playing baseball dropped by 47 percent between 1987 and 2000, while youth soccer grew exponentially, with 1.3 million more kids playing soccer than Little League by 2002. Attitudes toward soccer in America serve as an understated proxy for deeper societal divisions over globalization and international institutional deference. The American cultural split pits cosmopolitan internationalists who value secularism and multilateralism against proponents of American exceptionalism who reject international legal oversight and view European cultural mores with suspicion.
10. How to Win the World Cup
The political and economic systems of nations directly correlate with their success in winning the World Cup. You can analyze the 18 total number of World Cups used as a mass of empirical data for the author's political and economic analysis.
The political and economic systems of nations directly correlate with their success in winning the World Cup.
Social democracies out-produce other political systems in World Cup victories due to robust industrial bases, large urban working classes, and an ethos balancing individualism and solidarity. Conversely, command economies like communism fail because rigid metrics stifle creative risk-taking, while fascist regimes initially thrive on nationalist fervor and fitness cults but decline after losing their independent swagger.
Communist Hungary and Poland reached tournament heights in the 1950s and 1980s but collapsed in later rounds due to systemic rigidity, whereas social democracies like West Germany and Italy accumulated 6 number of World Cup championships delivered by social democratic nations.
Iron Laws of Forecasting
Communist teams achieved 46 wins, 32 draws, 40 losses - Communist teams' overall record against capitalist opponents in World Cup matches. You see the limits of command planning on the pitch.
10 Key Ideas
- Red Star Belgrade hooligans evolved into brutal paramilitary shock troops that fueled nationalist violence and ethnic cleansing under warlord leadership.
- The Old Firm rivalry between Celtic and Rangers represents an unfinished religious war where bigotry remains aggressively profitable.
- Historical Jewish sports clubs and philo-Semitic fan cultures challenge anti-Semitic stereotypes and map complex European identities.
- Modern football violence has moved away from stadium terraces and become domesticated through prearranged, appointment-based street fights.
- Brazilian soccer clubs operate as nonprofit amateur facilities that shield corrupt executives from accountability while talent migrates abroad.
- Post-communist Ukrainian clubs imported Nigerian players to emulate Western success, sparking cultural clashes against scientific Marxism.
- Italian club owners and media moguls manipulate referees, press coverage, and state power to secure narrow championship margins.
- FC Barcelona champions civic nationalism against centralism, while Iranian soccer sparks popular uprisings against theocratic tyranny.
- American attitudes toward soccer reflect deep societal divisions over globalization, exceptionalism, and traditional cultural values.
- The political and economic systems of nations directly correlate with their success in winning the World Cup.