In September 2011, the Turkish Football Federation carried out a marvelous experiment. A few months earlier, a game in Istanbul involving the team Fenerbahçe had ended in violence, with fans attacking opposing fans and then invading the pitch. The game was canceled and the stadium evacuated, but many people were injured in the chaos. Police and soccer authorities have long struggled with how to stamp out such fan violence. One technique they have used is to punish the teams for the behavior of their fans, notably by forcing them to play in empty stadiums. Eliminating the crowd can clearly resolve security problems—no fans, no violence—but it also destroys the very spirit of the game. After all, what is a team playing for if not for the fans?
Struggling with how to respond, the Turkish soccer authorities came up with a novel idea. Instead of banning all fans from the stadium, why not just exclude the problem demographic: men? Fenerbahçe would be allowed to play in front of their fans, so long as those fans included only women and young children.1
It worked. Forty thousand women, along with a small number of children, attended the match. The only men in the packed stadium were the players and staff from the two teams, along with referees. Even the security forces in the stands and around the field that day were all women. As the game unfolded, there were some differences: the opposing team was greeted with applause, not boos, for instance, and the players threw flowers up toward the fans. Otherwise, everything was the same. There was a sea of yellow Fenerbahçe jerseys in the stands, and tens of thousands of voices singing songs and chants in support of their team.2
The experiment exposed a fundamental truth about being a soccer fan. It’s not who you are that makes you a fan. It’s what you do. You come to the stadium ready not just to watch but also to participate. You wear a jersey. You know the songs, and if you don’t know them you learn them. You cheer even the smallest of victories—a header won, a beautiful dribble—and jeer with boundless rage when the referee makes a call against your team that you don’t like. And what you do in the stadium is part of a larger story, of games from the past that you saw or heard about, and of hopes stretching forward. In the stadium, in the crowd, you are part of a web of meaning and action that spreads outward, uncontained and uncontainable.
Who is soccer for? What does it mean—or should it mean—to be a soccer fan? Naturally, in soccer fandom, as in seemingly every other realm of human life, there are self-appointed gatekeepers and judges who concern themselves with who is a “true” fan of one team or another and what that means. Yet soccer is welcoming, and there are many ways in which you can choose to be a fan and make the game yours. For some, fandom is part of a deep, ancestral tradition of rooting for a long-established local club. For others, it is as evanescent as can be, an affinity that lasts the course of a World Cup tournament, or even a single game. Soccer fans are as diverse as humanity. Fandom offers a spectrum of possibilities that is reshaped and reconstituted by those who decide to be fans at any one place and time.
What unites soccer fans of every affiliation and across the various degrees of affinity is the way in which they experience the sport as a source of joy and possibility, a way to be surprised, to revel in the unexpected. As Nick Hornby writes, being at a soccer game can make you feel that you are at the center of the world, offering “this powerful sensation of being exactly in the right place at the right time.… When else does that happen in life?”3
At the heart of fandom is a sense of possibility. Soccer never ends. It will always come up with some new surprise. That is, as scholar Grant Farred notes, what makes the game “life-sustaining.” It is “the prospect and reality of pleasure—of utterly surrendering yourself to the experience of the game, of submerging yourself totally in an experience over which you have no control,” that makes it a seemingly inexhaustible source of possibility. “The game becomes all, becomes pure pleasure: the prospect of infinite joy.”4
The archetypal soccer fan is a man who, as a boy, was initiated into fandom by his father, whose fandom is a lifelong devotion to a single team and, through that team, a specific place. In Fever Pitch, his memoir about his years as a long-suffering Arsenal fan, Hornby offers a moving and humorous account of this kind of fandom. As he makes clear, for him, soccer was at first the only way he and his father connected in their otherwise difficult and strained relationship. Hornby shows how fandom and masculinity can become tightly intertwined, and how being linked to a team becomes a way of being a man in the world.
On his first trip to the stadium, Hornby writes, he was immediately struck by “the overwhelming maleness of it all.” He also quickly noted something many fans know all too well: the game involves a striking amount of suffering. “What impressed me most,” Hornby writes, “was just how much most of the men around me hated, really hated, being there. As far as I could tell, nobody seemed to enjoy, in a way that I understood the word, anything that happened during the entire afternoon.” Hornby watched in wonder as men yelled in “real anger” at their own players—“You’re a DISGRACE”—and, as time went on and the game went badly, “anger turned into outrage, and then seemed to curdle into sullen, silent discontent.” “The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score,” Hornby opines. “Football teams are extraordinarily inventive in the ways they find to cause their supporters sorrow.… Always, when you think you have anticipated the worst that can happen they come up with something new.” Hornby also recounts his early perplexity at the ways in which fans could recover rapidly from an awful defeat. After watching Arsenal lose horribly in a critical game at Wembley Stadium, Hornby attended another match not long after, still in a funk. Arsenal won this match, and he noted that for most fans, it was as if everything was just fine, even though the outcome of this game didn’t matter nearly as much as the last one.5
In time Hornby came to understand that soccer fans take these rare moments of joy deadly seriously, and live them as deeply as possible. Indeed, fans feel they have earned them by suffering through so much disappointment and frustration along the way. As the literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes, fans make a kind of deal when they enter a stadium. They have “invested their emotions” in the outcome of one game, “they have risked disappointment, perhaps even depression, in exchange for a chance to be present at a dramatic performance.” A soccer season is a dramatic unfolding story, and fan culture is woven from its particular details, with songs and chants that make reference to prior games. Hornby writes about worrying over missing a single game; he fears that at the next one he “won’t understand something that’s going on, a chant or the crowd’s antipathy to one of the players.” It is by being there throughout, he argues, that one earns the kind of redemptive victory that comes along every once in a while. It is because you have seen so many tedious, frustrating games that “there is real joy to be had from those others that come once every six, seven, ten years.”6
There was a time in his life, Hornby recalls, when “Saturdays were whole the point of my entire week, and whatever happened at school or at home was just so much fluff, the adverts in between the two halves of the Big Match. In that time football was life, and I am not speaking metaphorically.” This level of devotion, as Hornby readily admits, can border on an unhealthy obsession. And certainly many a case of the flu has been caught during some awful, boring, rainy English Premier League game. The soccer fandom he depicts is not the kind you see in an advertisement for beer or chips, in which happy groups of friends are perpetually gathered around the screen, cheering a goal. Instead, Hornby suggests, it can be a lonely and rather weird pursuit. Soccer is “an alternative universe, as serious and stressful as work, with the same worries and hopes and disappointments and occasional elations.” It “is not an escape, or a form of entertainment, but a different version of the world.”7
Gumbrecht describes sports fandom as involving two connected sides: analysis and communion. Scholars Andrei Markovits and Emily Albertson similarly write that most fans combine knowing and loving a team or sport. When you watch a game as a fan of a team, you want to understand what is happening right in front of you, how a play can open the way for scoring, and therefore victory, for your team. Yet the flow of the game gains greater meaning when you know how it fits into a broader story. That story can be about the course of a given season or tournament, and what each game means within it. It can be about a beloved player whose moves and skills are riveting to watch, or who has faced and overcome significant challenges. Yet the circles of meaning can also stretch out much further, to the history of the team, to prior seasons or tournaments, to legacies of past victories and defeats. All of these infuse the specific moment of watching a game with significance and emotion, making what is happening in front of you part of a much larger story linking past, present, and potential futures. The feeling of being a fan is something you feel in your body, too, even outside of games. Gumbrecht, a professor of literature who is also a passionate sports fan, writes that every time he drives by the stadium at Stanford University, his heart beats a little faster.8
The meaning of fandom is also deeply social. It matters to you because it matters to other people, to fans you know because they are family or friends, or to those you don’t know but nevertheless feel connected to thanks to the game. That is what makes sports fandom a kind of ritual. You can describe the connections between fans—the way their chants and shouts and emotions link up, the way they share in moments of remarkable intensity—as a kind of communion. This is true for all sports, but it is especially forceful in soccer simply because of its status as the most popular and beloved game on the planet. The intensity reaches its peak around men’s World Cup matches, which are the most watched events in human history. Victories in these competitions, not only in the final but in earlier games as well, generate mass national celebrations that are so intense that they can only be compared to dramatic moments of political euphoria—such as the liberation of Paris in 1944 or the celebrations of Barack Obama’s election in 2008—but they happen more frequently, and sometimes last even longer. Most of those who participate in these celebrations are not devoted soccer fans, and often have only tuned in for a part of the tournament. People remember these moments for lifetimes, even across generations. Across the world, soccer produces uniquely electric, beautifully convivial, and surprisingly intense moments of celebration and communion.
What explains this depth of emotion experienced by soccer fans? For those don’t care about soccer, after all, it can seem strange that people feel so strongly about something that is, objectively, totally meaningless. As one philosopher writes in a meditation on soccer fandom, the question of “whether a ball of about 430 grams of weight and a circumference of sixty-nine centimeters has passed through, with its full diameter, an absolutely arbitrary surface defined by goals placed on a patch of lawn” can hardly be considered a “world-shattering event.” It is, objectively, “of no more importance than a leaf dropping from some tree.” Goals, furthermore, are banal, happening “by the dozens every weekend,” and the only thing winning a game leads to is playing another game, which also has to be won, and so on and so forth. As Christian Bromberger observes, it would be extremely difficult to explain to an alien coming to earth the intensity and passion with which human beings approach watching other people play the “futile” game of soccer.9
What seems like a contradiction, though, really isn’t one. It is precisely the concrete meaninglessness of sports that allows fans to infuse them with such meaning. Being a fan is freedom to feel, and to share in feelings, in a way that you don’t have to explain. “That is one of the things I like about football,” writes the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard. “You don’t have to justify your opinions. You don’t have to argue for anything at all. You can leave everything to feelings. Argentina plays shit football? I love them. Germany plays beautiful football? Who cares.” You can support a team for many different reasons: how they play, what they symbolize, or just the fact that you happen to be attending one of their games. You can keep at it for decades, lifetimes, generations, or just for the space of a game. You can even change your mind during a game, as I have once or twice. If it weren’t futile, it wouldn’t be so fun, and therefore so important.10
The term “fan” comes from the word “fanatic,” and it contains a tint of judgment: that there is something slightly irrational, or even dangerous, about the kind of attachment that ties individuals to a sports team. There have long been critics of the amount of energy and attention people put into sports. Some leftists have wondered, reasonably enough, whether all that energy among working-class fans could be better spent carrying out a revolution, or at least a strike. Some intellectuals pointedly distance themselves from what they see as the mania and distractions of fandom. Eduardo Galeano points out, for example, that the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges “gave a lecture on the subject of immortality on the same day and at the same hour that Argentina was playing its first game in the ’78 World Cup.”11
Governments and police, meanwhile, are often most concerned about the unruliness of soccer fans, and the potential for violence that surrounds the game. During the 1980s, authorities—along with academics and journalists—in Europe, and particularly England, struggled to understand the root causes of the violent behavior of “hooligans.” These groups of fans, mostly young men, often fought with opposing fans before, during, and after games, as well as turned their anger toward police and security forces that sought to contain them. Inside stadiums that had bleacher seating, groups of fans would sometimes charge at one another during the games, creating chaos in the stands. They threw bottles, coins, batteries, or even flares onto the pitch. In some cases, there were connections between far-right organizations and fan groups, many of whom used racist and anti-Semitic chants and symbols against opposing teams. The period saw a series of horrible footballing tragedies, including in 1985 at Heysel Stadium in Brussels and then 1989 at Hillsborough in England, in which a lethal combination of repressive policing tactics and crowd behavior led to people being crushed to death—thirty-nine in Heysel, and ninety-six in Hillsborough—and hundreds of others injured.12
In the past decades, the incidents of violence in European soccer have decreased, in part because most stadiums in England and elsewhere eliminated bleachers and moved to assigned seating. Policing of violent fans has intensified, with the stadiums becoming spaces of increased surveillance. Under pressure from authorities and teams, fan organizations have worked to contain or exclude violent members of their groups.
Nevertheless, violence around soccer is far from gone, and many games are heavily policed. At a game I attended in 2007 at the Parc des Princes, where the team Paris Saint-Germain plays on the outskirts of Paris, fans of the opposing team were escorted into the stadium by police on horseback through a separate entrance. Inside the stadium, they were contained in an area surrounded by a very high orange metal fence. Outside the fence were lines of security, and the fans were covered by netting, to protect them from objects thrown at them from other parts of the stadium. As recently as the 2016 European Cup, there were fights between fans in the streets of Marseille and flares thrown onto the pitch during one of the games.
The problem is that the crowd is fundamental to the existence of soccer. Crowds can be unruly, and sometimes dangerous, but they are also what makes the game live. Crowds are also a constitutive part of the spectacle of soccer. No one really wants to attend or watch a game where eighty thousand people sit politely and occasionally clap, or spend the match checking their phones. The thousands of people jumping up and down in unison, intoning age-old songs, jeering or cheering together—that is what in many ways gives soccer its meaning. To police the boundaries of that, identifying what is acceptable and what is not, is a delicate and complicated operation.
In the late 1980s, at the height of the problem of the hooligans in England, the writer Bill Buford spent a year embedded in various fan groups and wrote about his experience in a book called Among the Thugs. He wanted to understand how the act of being a fan, of attending a soccer game, can lead someone to participate actively, even joyously, in forms of violence most people see as reprehensible. He describes how, after a frustrating game against Chelsea, he joins a group of Manchester United fans who are waiting, seeking, hoping for a clash with opposing fans, or police, or anyone. “A crowd is forming,” he writes, “and the effect is of something coming alive.” He stands with others, waiting, “alive to the possibility that something is going to happen.” Finally, it lets loose. The group begins to run, together. “I am enjoying this,” writes Buford. “I am excited by it.” Unable to catch up to a group of Chelsea fans, the group turns its energy against buildings, smashing windows. “And then they are gone. They go over the crest. There is a roar, and then everyone flies—as though beyond gravity—into violence. They are lawless.” Buford refuses to describe the details of the violence, instead trying to capture the “sensual intensity” of that moment when the crowd suddenly takes flight. In that instant, he finally understands what all the people he has interviewed for his book have been trying to explain about being part of the crowd. “They talk about being sustained by it, telling and retelling what happened and what it felt like,” speaking about it “with the pride of the privileged, of those who have had, seen, felt, been through something that other people have not.” He understands the attraction of the “absoluteness” of violence, of the “state of adrenaline euphoria” it can produce. “What was it like for me? An experience of absolute completeness.”13
That search for completeness, of course, doesn’t have to lead to the kind of violence Buford describes. It can be found in the more joyous, and comparatively peaceful, way that fans join together each week in soccer matches throughout the world. There is, as many have noted, something quasi-religious about soccer fandom. “Manchester United: The Religion” reads one banner hanging from the stands of that team’s home stadium. A soccer match is a mass public ritual, complete with codes of dress and a kind of liturgy. Central to it is the faith that, by gathering together and cheering the team and jeering the referee and singing the songs, the crowd makes a difference. This belief in the crowd’s power to affect the outcome is widespread enough that it is part of the structure of the game in many cases. In the European Champions League, where matchups in the final stages of the competition involve two games, one in the home stadium of each team, goals scored in the away stadium count more.
During the most intense moments of games, fans literally feel a kind of fusion with the players they are rooting for. It is a moment, writes Gumbrecht, when the “combined physical energy” of the crowd “connects with the players’ energy and makes the players’ energy grow,” and “the separation between the crowd and the players seems to vanish.” The crowd becomes one, as Hornby describes when retelling one particularly thrilling goal he witnessed: “The rows of people disappeared and were replaced by one shuddering heap of ecstatic humanity.” Hornby insists that being a fan “is not a vicarious pleasure, despite all appearances to the contrary.” Part of what makes being a fan so powerful is that you are a participant, with the capacity to change what happens in front of you. “Football is a context in which watching becomes doing,” Hornby explains. In fact, he argues, it is even more than that: for fans, when their team wins, it is the expression of their power and devotion, the realization of all that they have put into the team over many years. At that moment, they celebrate their own “good fortune.” In insisting how important fans are, Hornby reaches for a striking metaphor. “The players,” he writes, “are merely our representatives, chosen by the manager rather than elected by us, but our representatives nonetheless, and sometimes if you look hard you can see the little poles that join them together, and the handles at the side that enable us to move them.” Players, of course, might object to Hornby’s characterization of them as parts of a foosball table being controlled by the fans. Yet he captures a truth about soccer: fans last longer than players and managers. While those on the pitch come and go, those in the stands often spend a lifetime there. “The only difference between me and them,” Hornby writes provocatively, “is that I have put in more hours, more years, more decades than them.”14
To be a fan is to go into a public space and perform a kind of belonging. You do it with your body. In England, fans are sometimes called supporters, and there is a way in which they feel that they are carrying the team with their bodies and voices and songs. In a study of the notorious fans of the English football club Millwall, Garry Robson describes how they learn to move, talk, and walk in certain ways that express their belonging as they go in and out of the stadium. Everything about them declares: “I am Millwall. I belong here. I know the ropes.” While they spend much of the match caught in what Robson describes as “a kind of ballet of bad emotions and physical tension,” when a goal comes they move together in raucous celebration—running onto the field, setting off fireworks, scuffling with police, unable to contain their “general hilarity.” The entire section of the stadium occupied by the Millwall fans becomes “a pandemonious swirl of sound and movement, of screams and songs, shouts and dances, shakings and arms raised, as if in supplication, to the heavens.”15
The Millwall supporters Robson studied largely live in the neighborhood their team is from, and their fandom is connected to the life and identity of their local working-class community. There and elsewhere in England, and throughout the world, people can be born into soccer fandom, with memories of players, victories, and defeats, along with repertoires of songs and chants, passed on from one generation to another.
Soccer, however, has been both local and global for a long time. Since the early twentieth century, journalists have had to find ways to share news of sporting events across long distances. Already in 1924, massive crowds gathered in a central plaza in Montevideo to cheer and follow the Uruguayan team as they played in the final of the Olympics. The technology was rudimentary: every few minutes, a reporter at the games in Paris sent a telegram with a few sparse details of the game. This was then read out to the crowd from a stage. When the final telegram came in, announcing a victory, the crowd burst into rapturous celebration. By the 1930s, radio had spread throughout Latin America, with inexpensive sets enabling more and more people to tune in from home. In 1938, when the Brazilian team traveled to Italy for the third World Cup, they were accompanied by a team of journalists, including a radio commentator named Gagliano Neto. His voice became the main medium through which Brazilians followed the news of their team’s exploits, and they hung onto his every word as he narrated each moment in the match. The symbiosis between media and soccer was just beginning, but the basic relationship was in place: new technologies like radio, and later television and the Internet, enabled fans to follow games even when they couldn’t be there in person. The global passion for soccer provided an eager audience for the new technologies.16
Although this media at first developed so that people could get news about their local or national teams playing far away, in time it created another possibility. Fandom no longer had to be local. You could read or hear or watch any team play, and fall in love. That is what happened to Farred as a boy in apartheid-era South Africa, when he read about a victory by a team called Liverpool, in England, in his local newspaper. This random encounter developed into a long-term and passionate connection to the team that over the years sedimented with new meaning. He didn’t attend a Liverpool match until he was much older, and yet his fandom developed into one of the most important parts of who he is. He calls this kind of attachment “long distance love,” and writes that it “teaches the fan to think, feel and be in entirely unexpected ways.”17
When I teach my course on soccer at Duke University, I always come to know students who, without ever having left the United States, have become passionate fans of European soccer teams. Today, you can grow up in Ohio and become a die-hard Bayern Munich fan, owning jerseys and posters, and as deeply familiar with the team’s history as any German. These connections are powerful, and they open fans up to new worlds of meaning, history, language, and geography. Soccer becomes a kind of pedagogy. For Farred, it was soccer that “engendered in me the need to know about other places, other histories, other forms of violence and oppression” than those he experienced firsthand. There was an irony in his Liverpool fandom, as he admits, for he was a black South African and the team did not have any black players, until a forward named John Barnes joined it in 1987. At Liverpool, as well as on the English national team, Barnes was repeatedly subjected to racial abuse, but the way he responded with a “deft, complicated awareness of race,” inspired and taught Farred. Rooting for Barnes and for Liverpool at the same time, Farred felt his connection to the team deepen. “Any time I want, I can call up those loping, powerful runs,” Farred writes lovingly, “shoulders dropped just a little, almost squared, like a boxer, cutting across the field, most often from his position wide of the left flank, feinting, picking up pace with an almost invisible burst of speed.”18
Like many other black athletes, Barnes became a political symbol simply because he was challenging racial exclusion with his presence on the field. The beauty of his play, and his many goals, made fans adore him, and in the process challenged racism. Rooting for Barnes became a way of imagining a different kind of society. This has been true throughout the world, as fans have, at times, rooted for players or teams who challenged the social order in one way or another. In the British protectorate of Zanzibar in the early twentieth century, for instance, the men who worked as caddies on a golf course decided to form their own football team. These men were considered social inferiors by the European colonizers whose golf clubs they carried around. However, the colonial team turned the tables when, in front of thousands of spectators, they trounced a team of European men. The colonial authorities always did their best to suppress the political implications of soccer. Yet, over the subsequent decades, in Zanzibar and throughout the African continent, soccer fandom was often used to challenge and contest colonial power.19
The anticolonial dimensions of soccer were part of its appeal throughout Africa. Fans were also eager to see players move in particular ways that they felt represented their communities and their culture. Historian Peter Alegi writes that, as the game spread in colonies in Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, matches became “spectacles, feasts, and popular entertainment all wrapped into one.” Fans came dressed in the colors of their clubs, of course, but they also brought music to the stands, and “drums and other percussion instruments provided the soundtrack to matches.” In South Africa, drawing on a long cultural tradition of creating praise names for warriors, including the Zulu people who fought the English, fans developed names for successful players. In Brazzaville, Congo, meanwhile, as historian Laura Fair writes, fans “christened players according to their technical quality and styles, as in the case of a goalkeeper named ‘Elastic,’ and other stars named ‘Dancer,’ ‘Phantom,’ ‘Magician,’ ‘Steamboat,’ and ‘the Law.’” Through their celebration of certain players, African fans communicated the kind of game they wanted to see. They often preferred the improvisational play that they were familiar with from their own informal play in streets and sandlots. With many games played without referees, it was the spectators themselves who determined who the real “winners” were “through their endless analysis of players, strategy and style,” argues Fair. “Good moves often made a bigger impression on fans than the actual score.” As Alegi writes, there was a celebration, throughout the continent, of styles focused on “the cleverness, beauty and excitement of feinting and dribbling.” Fans enjoyed such “delightful moves” for their virtuosity, but also because they saw in them an embodiment of cultural values that emphasized the importance of “creativity, deception and skill in getting around difficulties and dangerous situations in colonial societies.”20
In the early 1950s, a Senegalese radio announcer known as Allou developed a style of match reporting on the radio that delved deep into West African storytelling traditions. He drew on the styles of the griot—hereditary musicians who for generations have spoken the history of families and communities—to recount the exploits of these new heroes in real time. In one memorably tragic match, he recounted live as the player Iba Mar Diop scored a penalty kick at the last minute, winning the game for his team—only to collapse from a heart attack and die moments afterward. Radio journalists such as Allou gave audiences a way to experience and understand such dramatic moments by connecting them to broader cultural narratives about heroism and sacrifice.21
Allou’s full name was Alassane Ndiaye. He was part of a distinguished Senegalese family. His uncle was Blaise Diagne, who had represented Senegal in the French National Assembly for decades, and was the father of the soccer star and later Senegalese national team coach Raoul Diagne. Another of his relatives, Lamine Guèye, was mayor of Dakar and later the first president of the Senegalese National Assembly. Ndiaye grew up on Gorée, an island near Dakar. He attended university in Dakar and became a distinguished history teacher, and hosted a radio show about Senegalese history. Ndiaye had loved playing soccer as a child, and that is when he was given the nickname Allou, a shortened version of his first name, by his teammates.
Allou began his career as a sports commentator by accident. One day at the Parc Municipal des Sports in Dakar, he suddenly found the microphone thrust in front of him. It was just after World War II, and football was booming in Senegal. But there was only one journalist calling the games on the radio, a man named Pierre Véran. Perhaps he was tired, or perhaps he wanted to play a trick on Ndiaye. “I’m handing the microphone to my young colleague Allou,” Véran declared suddenly. As he later remembered, Allou had hesitated for a minute or two, “as if drowning in an endless sea,” and Véran looked at him expectantly. Somehow, though, Allou found his voice and began to narrate the match. Unexpectedly, he had found a new calling.22
From that moment on, he never stopped, and eventually became the most beloved soccer commentator of his generation in Senegal. Allou played a key role in the expanding popularity of the sport in his country. As was the case throughout the world during that period, media and soccer expanded together: the radio brought new fans, and the fans bought more radios. As historian Bocar Ly writes, Allou cut a striking figure along the side of the pitch with his microphone, always “elegantly dressed.” He started each match the same way: “Thank you to the studio! Allou here, reporting from the Parc Municipal des Sports.” Back home, people gathered around the radio, “ready to let themselves be seduced” by his electrifying voice. Allou had to help listeners visualize what was happening and, like other radio announcers, developed a rich and evocative language that brought together detailed description of plays and moves with a larger, poetic celebration of the meaning of the game. Fans were “transported into another world” as Allou turned the narration of games into an opportunity to reflect on almost all aspects of human life. He infused his accounts of matches with rich historical, cultural, and philosophical references. There was, Ly notes, no “lyric theme” that he hadn’t at some point talked about in relation to soccer: “Love, death, human destiny, nature’s charms and mysteries, the world and its abysses, grandeur, the beauty and nobility of sport, the power of God and his ineluctable decisions.” Delving deep into Senegalese tradition, Allou created a universe of sound and reflection around each match.23
Though Allou was well versed in tactical questions, Ly argues that a game of soccer for him was always much more than “an abstract and narrow game of chess, a problem of applied tactics.” It was an opportunity to create a work of verbal performance, a spectacle of vocal sound. He had an “ample and easy eloquence,” and “an incomparable verbal richness and sumptuousness.” He offered up a “spontaneous profusion of images,” and used the rhythm of his voice to communicate the drama and emotion of the match to those who could not see it. “His voice, slow and suave when the game was calmly being played in the midfield,” was “amplified and fired up when the action got closer to the penalty area or when danger became imminent,” so that those who listened on their radios felt all the emotions that “constricted the hearts” of those in the stadium. Allou’s live accounts of the games were “prose poems,” a “poetry at once lyric and epic.” In this, he was also teaching fans how to connect soccer to other aspects of their culture. His commentary gave fans new ways of thinking, and feeling, through a game.24
Allou also helped make certain players stars thanks to the way he talked about them. He lavished praise on a player named Mbaye Parka who was a forward for the Jeanne d’Arc team in the late 1940s. Allou called him a “prince of football,” a “genius” in the attack whose playing was a “work of art.” Allou effused, “Each of his plays is a delicious poem that brings value back to football by raising it to the level of the most exquisite of artistic representations.” Allou described how Parka stepped out of his chauffeur-driven car, something then reserved only for the most important politicians and biggest celebrities. Parka was always somehow perfectly dressed: a towel thrown around his neck, his shoes, in Allou’s words, “shining and lovingly tied.” For those who gathered around to watch him walk into the stadium, Parka seemed “a god of the ball.” As soon as the whistle blew, it “obeyed his most capricious moves,” and he “manipulated it with a science, a dexterity, never seen in Senegal.” More than any other player of his generation, Allou said, Parka had “penetrated” into the “very essence of football, its spirit, its magic spells, expressing its splendors with an ease and intelligence that no one will ever surpass.”25
Given their prominence and following, soccer stars could also play a political role. During the struggles for independence in Africa, soccer was often mobilized for revolutionary purposes, most forcefully through the creation of the FLN team in Algeria in the late 1950s. Soccer also played an important role in struggles against apartheid, notably at Robben Island, where inmates including Nelson Mandela sustained their community and developed political skills by organizing a soccer league within the notorious prison. More recently, at the beginning of the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, it was the fans of some of Cairo’s oldest soccer teams, Al Ahly and Zamalek, who were often on the frontlines of the protests. There was a tradition of political organizing within the large, formal associations of fans tied to these teams. And the members of these groups had experience engaging in public conflicts with the police in soccer stadiums and before and after games. In these contexts, fandom has become explicitly political.26
Soccer and politics have also been intertwined in Latin America throughout much of the twentieth century. Amateur clubs in Chile, for instance, were often the place where Chileans began to practice politics as they organized their institutions and negotiated with local and national officials. During the years surrounding the election of the popular socialist Salvador Allende to the presidency in 1970, amateur soccer clubs in urban areas became important venues for political debate and mobilization. When the United States, intent on undermining and containing Allende’s government, blockaded Chile and began supporting plots against the president, soccer clubs were part of a web of civic institutions that organized to provide necessities to communities and to defend the government.27
When Allende was overthrown on September 11, 1973, through a CIA-supported coup, the new military regime ruthlessly attacked civic organizations, including soccer clubs. The new junta banned elections within soccer clubs, seeing any form of democratic practice, no matter how small, as a threat. The military regime also used the soccer stadiums where Chileans had rooted for their national and professional teams to detain, torture, and execute the people they rounded up in the wake of the coup. Decades later, these stadiums became sites of mourning and commemoration. In 2003, Estadio Chile, where the popular folk singer Víctor Jara was executed in September 1973, was renamed Víctor Jara Stadium. And in the Estadio Nacional, a section of the stadium is now set aside as a memorial. The seats there remain empty during games—as many seats as there were prisoners killed in the stadium by the military regime.28
In the United States, politics infuses soccer as well. In the regional Gold Cup tournament, played every two years, immigrant communities in the United States get a rare chance to see their national teams play. The tournament is organized by the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF), which also organizes the qualifying process for the World Cup. Gold Cup games take place throughout the United States, and Haitians, Salvadorans, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Costa Ricans, and Hondurans pack into stadiums wearing their jerseys and waving national flags. During the 2011 Gold Cup, I traveled to watch a doubleheader—El Salvador versus Costa Rica and Mexico versus Cuba—in Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium, a place usually reserved for professional American football games. That day, most of the forty-six thousand fans were waving Mexican and Salvadoran flags. As their team scored one goal after another against Cuba—five in total—Mexican fans roared and jumped and tossed beer in the air. When the US faces off against other teams during the Gold Cup tournament, they often play in stadiums where their own supporters are outnumbered by those of the other team. This is especially true for games between the US and Mexico, the two teams that most often end up facing off in the final. But even teams from smaller nations attract massive numbers of fans. In a September 2017 World Cup qualifying match between the US and Costa Rica, it was supporters of the Ticos, as the Central American team is affectionately known, who were the majority in the stadium in New Jersey. And, in a defeat that contributed to undermining the US’s chance to go to the 2018 World Cup, Costa Rica won 2–0.
This situation causes soul-searching, and occasional outbreaks of xenophobia, among some US fans. They ask, why does our national team have to play what amounts to an “away” game on US soil? And why don’t immigrants, many of them US residents or citizens, root for this country’s team instead of that of Mexico, Jamaica, or Costa Rica? In 2011, US goalkeeper Tim Howard—frustrated after a grueling 4–2 defeat at the hands of Mexico in the Gold Cup final—complained that the trophy ceremony was held in Spanish. The use of Spanish in the ceremony was a recognition that it is the most common language among the nations who compete in the tournament, and that much of the viewing audience in the US watched on Spanish-language television. Howard’s comments, however, clearly called up broader tensions about immigration and language in the United States, stirring up debate among fans, many of whom criticized Howard. Players on the US men’s team, which features many athletes of immigrant background, have since commented on political topics varying from protests of the national anthem to President Donald Trump’s polices. As athletes become increasingly political across the US sporting world, the political stances and interventions of national team players will inevitably gain more and more attention.
There is a parallel debate in France, where French citizens of Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan background often pack into stadiums to root for the North African teams in games against the French national team. In 2001, a game at the Stade de France in Paris was even canceled after fans of the Algerian team invaded the pitch to prevent the French team from winning a much-anticipated “friendly” match between the two countries. In these contexts, the question of who people root for, and what it means, channels larger debates about immigration, identification, and national belonging. The tensions around this can ebb and flow, depending both on the broader political situation at the time and what happens in any given game. A tournament like the Gold Cup can also offer an opportunity for soccer fandom to be a positive, and convivial, space that represents the diversity of the United States and helps us embrace the fact that people can identify with multiple histories, places, and colors.29
Soccer in the United States has also been a crucial space for debates around gender and sexuality. In 2013, Robbie Rogers, a star forward on the LA Galaxy who had also played on the US international team, came out as gay. He was greeted warmly by fans and supported by coaches and players, as he recounted in his 2014 autobiography. At many MLS games, some fans and fan groups regularly wave rainbow flags and place them around the side of the pitch as a way of explicitly identifying soccer fandom with support of gay rights.30
Women’s soccer in the United States is, in a sense, an inherently political space. The inequalities surrounding the women’s game have led to consistent protests by players. The most recent was a lawsuit filed against the US Soccer Federation by a number of star players, including Hope Solo and Carli Lloyd, alleging that the fact that they are paid less than players on the men’s national team is discriminatory. Although the US women’s team has won three World Cups, and the men’s team none, they are paid less and received far less prize money in 2015 than the men’s team did for their appearance in the 2014 men’s World Cup. Star players Megan Rapinoe and Abby Wambach have long been out as lesbians and vocal supporters of gay rights. After winning the 2015 Women’s World Cup, an event which coincided with the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage, Wambach rushed to the sidelines and kissed her wife, surrounded by American flags draped from the stands by fans, creating a powerful image of openness and inclusion. The impressive expansion of women’s soccer worldwide over the past decade offers encouraging examples of the possibility for political change. At the same time, it is clear that women’s soccer—and women’s sports more broadly—continues to represent a vital challenge both to many social attitudes and to structures of gender inequality. For many fans of women’s soccer, that is part of the appeal of supporting women’s professional and national teams. There is a connection and symbiosis between players and fans who share a common desire to create a different social reality.
In many parts of the world, there is still great resistance to the presence of women as players, and even as fans. This hostility takes its most extreme form in a practice depicted in the 2006 film Offside, by Iranian director Jafar Panahi. In Iran, women are not allowed into the stadium to watch soccer games. Some die-hard female fans try to sneak in, but they can be detained and even arrested and imprisoned for doing so. Panahi decided to represent, and critique, this practice by making a film depicting women who attempt to get into the stadium to see the Iranian national team playing in a men’s World Cup qualifying match. He managed to get a permit from the government to film outside the stadium during an actual game between Iran and Bahrain, a pivotal match which would determine whether Iran would participate in the 2006 men’s World Cup. The camera follows a group of women dressed like men—one wears a baseball cap with an Iranian flag tucked into it, draped around her neck—who one by one are caught and stopped by soldiers as they try to enter the stadium. Most of the film involves the group of women, detained in a pen outside the stadium, arguing with the young, rather feckless soldiers who are guarding them. What unites all of them is that they would rather be watching the game, though the women know far more about the match than any of the male soldiers.31
The outright exclusion of women from Iran’s stadiums is extreme, but throughout the world men usually make up the vast majority of spectators in stadiums. As the experiment carried out in Turkey in 2011 suggests, that is not because women don’t want to go, and probably has more to do with the fact that women feel uncomfortable, perhaps even unsafe, in the predominantly male space of the stadium. This is part of a much larger system of structures and habits that tend to exclude or marginalize women from many kinds of sports fandom. Throughout the world, notes one scholar, there is a deep relationship between “masculinity and sports,” and usually male fans determine the codes and language surrounding fandom. In the United States, notably thanks to Title IX, which mandated equal access to sports opportunities for men and women at colleges and universities, this has changed in recent decades. Women are increasingly present as sports commentators and journalists, and women’s soccer is gaining increasing recognition.32
Panahi’s film Offside also hints at the possibility for something different. Throughout the film, some of the men help the women, understanding them as equals in the realm of fandom. At one point, one of the captive women manages to escape briefly and see the inside of the stadium. The contrast between the claustrophobic space of confinement and argument, which fills most of the film, and the open roar of the stadium and the sight of the green pitch in the middle is striking. Iran qualified for the men’s World Cup that day, and at the end of the film, as the bus taking the women to prison winds through Tehran, crowds erupt into celebration in the streets. Some men eventually help the women escape into the crowd. Soccer, Panahi clearly shows, is for all Iranians.33
Today, fandom is global, with people rooting for teams far from their homes. Television, and live video streamed over the web, has become the dominant medium through which most people watch soccer, enabling new global connections while also teaching us to see and interpret the experience of the game in different ways. In the late 1980s, when Rupert Murdoch was pioneering the development of cable television in England, he quickly realized that soccer would be the key to getting people to do what they had never done before: pay for TV. Having failed to garner sufficient audiences by showing Hollywood movies, Murdoch began acquiring the rights to air English soccer matches. The sport, he explained candidly, was the “battering ram” that got his cable boxes into people’s living rooms.34
Now, most people who watch soccer the world over are sitting in front of televisions or computer screens. This shapes how they view and think about the game, for there is a profound difference between watching a game in a stadium and watching the same game through curated camera angles. While the camera sometimes offers, briefly, a broad view—and today you can often tune in to a “tactical cam” on some networks that allows you to see the whole picture—what we largely get is a finely crafted drama in which the ball is the star of the show. You rarely see the entire field, so the way a team is occupying the space, and the way players who are far from the ball are moving, is hard to understand. While the sounds of fans are transmitted over television, they are flattened, and the intricate relationship between the roars, chants, sighs, and chatter and what is happening on the field is lost, though of course it can be replaced by a similar experience in a sports bar or living room.
In this context, the voice of the commentator on television is an essential accompaniment to our experience of soccer, shaping what we see and how we think about it. The best commentators find a way not to be too present or insistent in their reading of the match, and they use a richness of vocabulary that makes listening to them interesting. English commentators, who are masters of the genre, might describe a long ball as “speculative” if it is not clear where it was meant to go, or they might refer to a clearance as “agricultural” if the ball is sent off into the stands, suggesting it was almost kicked into nearby fields. Commentators describe the mood of teams as well. They might be playing “with their tails up,” for instance. Commentators have even been known to speculate about what is going on in the minds of players. Once I heard an announcer on Univision describe the arrival of Michael Bradley on the pitch for the US Men’s National Team, when they were down against Mexico, by saying, “He runs onto the pitch, his bald head full of dreams!” At their best, commentators offer humor, even absurdity, as they try to capture the madness of the game. “Newcastle players might fear that when they get home tonight, [N’Golo] Kanté will be waiting for them on their doorstep,” said Arlo White, the English commentator who frequently narrates Premier League matches aired in the United States on NBC Sports during a match between Leicester City and Newcastle United in March 2016. The comment humorously captured how relentless Kanté’s defending is.
It is not only what the commentators say, of course, that matters, but also the energy and tone of their voice, the way it rises and falls with the action. You can listen to match commentary in a language you don’t understand and still basically comprehend the ebb and flow of the game just from the changes in speed and intensity. In the United States, the long “Goooooool!” celebrations of some of the great Spanish-language commentators have become a defining piece of soccer culture.
Commentators are supposed to be relatively objective, though of course sometimes their preference for a team comes through, especially when they are commenting on an international game. There are also some delightful moments when commentators effuse wildly about a goal or win. In 1982, when Norway defeated England in a men’s World Cup qualifier, the radio commentator Bjorge Lillelien drifted into what Jonathan Wilson calls a “barely coherent delirium.” He represented the victory in exaggerated terms as a win over a long string of English leaders, including Lord Nelson, Winston Churchill, and Princess Diana. “We have beaten them all, we have beaten them all!” he cried. “Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Maggie Thatcher… your boys took a hell of a beating! Your boys took a hell of a beating!” In the 2016 European Cup, an Icelandic commentator rivaled Lillelien in celebrating his team’s defeat of England just days after the Brexit vote. He taunted them in an inimitable falsetto voice: “You can go home. You can go out of Europe. You can go wherever the hell you want.… England 1 Iceland 2 is the closing score here in Nice. And the fairy tale continues.”35
The voice of commentators shapes the experiences of those who watch, and it can ultimately shape the game. In the film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, Zidane recalls himself as a child hearing the sound of the French television commentator Pierre Cangioni. Born in Corsica, Cangioni created the show Téléfoot in 1977 and offered news and commentary on matches on the show until 1982. “When I was a child,” Zidane recalls, “I had a running commentary in my head when I was playing.… It wasn’t really my own voice.” It was Cangioni’s. “Every time I heard his voice, I would run towards the TV, as close as I could get, for as long as I could. It wasn’t that his words were so important. But the tone, the accent, the atmosphere was everything.” The moment in the film is a powerful one, because you realize that Zidane is navigating a kind of time-spiral as he plays. As a child, he imagined himself on the pitch, his actions narrated by someone like Cangioni. In time, he actually made his way to the pitch and ultimately to the heights of the sport, his actions narrated by another generation of commentators. In a sense, as he is playing, he is always part of a script, an endless story that he writes and rewrites on the field.36
Part of being a fan is becoming slightly obsessed with certain players—with the way they move on the pitch, the way they look and dress, and their lives off the pitch as well. However we express it, there is a special sense of connection between fans and players that comes from the fact that we feel like they represent us—that, in a sense, they are us—as we watch them play. Social media now gives us new ways to express and share this feeling. Many of us now watch games as part of a virtual community, connected via Twitter or other social media platforms. When a player makes a great move, it instantly gets turned into a GIF and is circulated lovingly across the globe. In this way, we share our sense of delight about individual players and striking moments, often focusing not on a goal but on a delightful dribble—nutmegs, where the ball is passed between the legs of a defending player, are a particular favorite—or an expression of delight or despair. We can rapidly write about and share our enthusiasms, as literature scholar Jeff Nunokawa did on Facebook with an ode to Spanish striker Fernando Torres. Video games, meanwhile, have brought the link between player and fan to a whole new level. The immensely popular FIFA game enables players to actually feel like they are in the bodies of their favorite athletes, whose virtual selves are based on their real way of playing and moving. There are increasing numbers of people who may never play an actual game of soccer in their own bodies, but who play constantly through a video game. Additionally, the game is popular among players, and seems to even be changing the way real-life soccer is played, as they try moves out in the game that then migrate onto the pitch.37
Today the sight of soccer flashing across a television is a kind of universal visual language, something you can see almost anywhere. When it comes time for the World Cup, people across the globe are tuned in to the same games in a powerful moment of global communion. Several film directors have movingly, and humorously, captured this phenomenon, and the feeling that some games simply cannot be missed. In The Cup, the 1998 men’s World Cup tournament is followed obsessively by young boys in a Tibetan monastery, who sneak off nightly to watch the game in a nearby village, ultimately discovering that the stern and ordinarily quite serious monks who are their teachers are just as enraptured by the tournament. The Great Match, set during the 2002 men’s World Cup, follows three small groups—one on the steppes of Mongolia, another in the Amazonian rainforest, and a third traveling across the Sahara—as they desperately try to find a television in time to watch the final between Germany and Brazil.38
In his film about the devastating 1990 earthquake in Iran, Life, and Nothing More, director Abbas Kiarostami also captured the ways in which soccer can become all-important, as essential as life itself. Journeying through the disaster zone, Kiarostami searches for the actors from one of his previous films. Kiarostami eventually finds one of these actors, a young boy, and is relieved to discover he survived the earthquake. After they meet, Kiarostami asks the boy to recount what happened to him. Immediately, the boy starts talking about soccer. The earthquake hit a little after midnight, on an evening when four World Cup group matches had been played. For the boy, that was a crucial part of narrating the event, and in fact he begins the story by narrating the game and a goal scored. Kiarostami, clearly irritated, interrupts him to specify that he wants to hear how the boy survived the earthquake. The boy then recounts a terrifying tale, including the death of family members.39
Later, Kiarostami encounters a man who is setting up an antenna on a hilltop above a devastated village so that he can watch another World Cup match. Kiarostami asks the man if it might be a little bit inappropriate to watch soccer at a time like this. The man replies that he, like so many others, is in mourning, having lost many family members. Then again, the man says with a light smile and a small shrug, the World Cup only comes every four years. Kiarostami smiles too. He seems to understand, then, that the tournament is one of those things that has to be attended to, even in the midst of disaster. Perhaps that is precisely the point: even at the worst of moments, soccer can offer a kind of solace.
The men’s World Cup takes place every four years. It is the most-watched soccer tournament and also the one that draws in and welcomes the largest group of fans. It is, in fact, the most-watched event on the planet. More people watched the 2014 World Cup final than had ever watched anything before in human history, and a new record will doubtless be set again in 2018. During the weeks of the World Cup, across most of the globe, everything seems to revolve around the tournament.
The World Cup was dreamed up in Europe in the years after World War I. But the man who created it, the Frenchman Jules Rimet, is surprisingly unknown. Like many of us, he didn’t play soccer particularly well, but he believed in soccer with a quiet, quasi-religious fervor. He was of the generation that had gone through World War I, a conflict that left a monument in every French town with a list of the young men who died in the trenches. Rimet came home from war with a dream. Rather than sending their young to massacre each other with machine guns or stab one another with bayonets, nations might instead compete on the pitch. The idea was that national teams could celebrate their pride and difference through what he considered to be the most universal language on the planet: soccer. In 1920, Rimet became president of FIFA, which had been founded in 1904. Rimet immediately declared that his hope was that sport could help direct conflicts between nations in the modern world “towards peaceful contests in the stadium.” There, he went on hopefully, “foundational violence is submitted to discipline and the rules of the game,” and the only thing the victor takes home is “the joy of winning.”40
Rimet’s vision of the ways in which soccer can crystallize and channel nationalism was prophetic. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim, in his study of religious life, famously described what he called “collective representations” as being at the heart of social, political, and religious rituals in human society. A community, Durkheim argues, is something greater than the sum of its parts. When individual people come together to form a collective, they can do and be more than if they remain dispersed. Yet that sense of community can be relatively abstract unless it is represented in a concrete object—a collective representation. Durkheim focuses on the example of totems in Native American societies, but he points out that a flag does something similar. These objects serve as visible and tactile representations of the community. When you look at them, you see—and feel—the power of the collective.41
Soccer teams may be today’s most powerful form of global collective representation. They are not, however, stationary objects like a totem or flag. A team is a collective representation in motion. The eleven players on the field stand for the nation, and through their individual and collective action determine its fate within the international competition. In the process, they vividly represent the broader community, which is connected to the collective through the actions and emotions of fans. The outcome of the game depends on the intricacies of individual choices by players, but those choices end up taking on symbolic meaning for entire nations.
Part of the draw of the World Cup is that many people who might rarely make a show of nationalism can, in the festival atmosphere, deck themselves out in flags and national symbols in a way that feels joyful and playful and creates connections across social and class barriers. In European countries such as France and Germany, where popular use of flags and other national symbols is ordinarily relatively rare, the World Cup and other major tournaments create a sudden explosion of public flag carrying, face painting, and anthem singing.
During a World Cup, national narratives take shape in the stories and actions of individual players. In fact, in a World Cup, it can often seem like a single player’s entire life has been directed toward the instant when he scores a game-winning goal, bringing glory and fame to his nation. There is Diego Maradona’s journey from a shantytown outside Buenos Aires to the moment when he used his hand, and then his foot, to defeat England in the 1986 men’s World Cup. Or Zinedine Zidane’s road from his parents’ colonial-era migration to France, to the concrete plaza in the Marseille projects—where he played all day long but never liked to head the ball—to the moment when he scored two headers against Brazil to win France its first World Cup in 1998. In those instants, nations and individuals appear to merge. Maradona becomes Argentina, and all Argentineans are Maradona; Zidane is France, and all the French are Zidane. The crossroads between a player, his moment of glory, the fans, and the nation is what makes the World Cup into the unforgettable global spectacle it has become.
Most of those who watch the World Cup, however, are not rooting for their national teams. In 2018, only 32 nations will compete in the men’s World Cup tournament out of 211 FIFA members. Even if your team makes it into the tournament, there is a fifty-fifty chance it won’t make it past the group stage. So, you have to be open-minded, a little flexible. Many World Cup fans begin with vague allegiances, or sometimes multiple allegiances, and their fandom is shaped by the tale that unfolds in the course of the tournament. Part of the joy and allure of fandom in these contexts is precisely the freedom to choose any team you desire and later to change your mind. You can decide whom you want to stand with, for a time, based on any number of reasons. You might like how a team plays, or like the story of one or more of the players. You might just hate the opposing team. The connections may be ephemeral in many cases, but sometimes they grow into more. 42
There is a great humanity to this. I personally watch many games in the World Cup rooting for both teams at the same time, feeling both happy and sad when someone scores a goal. I sometimes feel delight for those celebrating alongside a nagging sorrow for the losing team. There are just too many good stories out there: every team, and perhaps every player, has one. The composition of teams changes, too, and so as fans we need to always be ready to change with them. Many fans don’t stand for a nation, but rather a way of playing and therefore a way of being. Those who rooted for the French national team of the 1990s, like me, were often drawn by the spectrum of backgrounds represented—Algerian, Armenian, Guadeloupean—a kind of global crossroads made up of many immigrant journeys, coming together on the pitch. The team became a potent political symbol in France, a response to the parochialism and xenophobia of the far right, especially once the team secured the country’s first World Cup victory in 1998. As a collective, they could serve as this kind of symbol only because they also played beautiful soccer. Though the team has had ups and downs since, for many fans outside the country it remains a favorite.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Germany was the team most Europeans loved to hate, mostly because of their infuriating habit of winning all the time with an effective, indeed often unstoppable, style that many found boring to watch. The English player Gary Lineker famously and accurately once quipped: “Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.” One of the most memorable of these victories was the 1982 semifinal against France, during which Harald Schumacher’s foul against Patrick Battiston was not called by referee Charles Corver. A friend of mine, the French historian Jean Hébard, once vividly recounted to me the experience of listening to that game on the radio. He never forgot the anguish he felt at that moment. In 2016, we watched a European Cup game between France and Germany together in Paris, ruefully ready for another German victory. The last time France had beaten Germany in international competition was 1958, after all. When, instead, France won—thanks notably to brilliant playing by the ebullient star Paul Pogba, a child of immigrants from Guinea—we couldn’t quite believe it. As we joined cheering crowds gathering to celebrate at the Place Saint-Michel, Jean told me he had been waiting for this moment since 1982, but had never expected it to come. The beatific smile on his face said it all.43
The Slovene writer Uroš Zupan movingly describes his own painful relationship to the German team. As someone who had grown up in post–World War II Europe playing games in which the Germans were always the bad guys, their endless victories on the soccer pitch left “scars, wounds on the soul, deep cracks on the face of beauty represented by the technical perfection and improvisational flair of the teams I loved.” The Germans defeated the Dutch team, at the height of Total Football, in the 1974 men’s World Cup final, and the French in the famously grueling 1982 men’s World Cup semifinal. “With the Germans it was all tactics and power and, above all, a fanatical endurance that would not yield, that swept away all beauty and softness.… The Germans,” laments Zupan, “did not outplay the teams they defeated; they simply ground them down with their endurance.”44
These German teams included very few players of immigrant background, in contrast to the French team of the 1980s, for instance, which included a number of players with roots in the Caribbean and Africa. Then, after France’s 1998 men’s World Cup victory and in the context of increasing debates about the place of immigrants in German society, the German national soccer federation increasingly emphasized training and recruiting players from a variety of different backgrounds. By 2006, the German team was pleasingly global, playing the kind of beautiful flowing soccer many fans claim to want to see. Many who at one time would have rooted against Germany now find themselves drawn to the team’s flair and style, though of course some remain unpersuaded. Teams change, nations change, and our affinities and affiliations do too, thankfully. In this, soccer can sometimes offer a model of openness and freedom.45
In every tournament, there are teams from small countries, too, that become darlings simply because their presence and unexpected victories make us feel as if anything is possible. Even scoring one goal on the stage of the World Cup can turn a player into a legend. The Haitian national team has only been in the World Cup once in its history, in 1974. They faced Italy, which was one of the greatest teams in the world at the time, known for its impenetrable defense. After a scoreless first half, Haiti surprised the Italian team with three passes forward up the pitch. Philippe Vorbe slid the ball past Italian defenders to forward Manno Sanon, who rushed toward goal and scored against the legendary goalkeeper Dino Zoff. It was the first time any team had scored against Italy in nineteen games. As my Haitian friends who remember the moment tell me, the whole country seemed to shake as everyone jumped up and down in wild celebration. Italy came back and won the game 3–1, and Haiti lost its next two games as well. No matter: Sanon had, in that instant, become a national hero. Decades later, in 2009, a richly colorful mural in downtown Port-au-Prince celebrated the soccer player as part of a venerable pantheon of Caribbean national heroes. The Cuban revolutionaries Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were next to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s venerated founder, and completing the group was Sanon, the goal scorer of 1974. To understand what the World Cup means to many people, you have to see how putting Sanon like this alongside major political leaders makes perfect sense. “Now and forever,” noted the New York Times in 2010, “Manno is running, taking a pass from Philippe Vorbe, outrunning a defender, zipping past Zoff, shooting and—goal!”46
Other island nations have also surprised the world on the international stage. During the 2016 European Cup, the Icelandic team—managed by a man whose main career is as a dentist in a small town—defeated a series of supposedly superior teams, including England, playing in a crowd that included fully one tenth of the island’s population of three hundred thousand. The Gold Cup tournament in the United States often features island territories that are not nations, notably the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. While they are not members of FIFA, they are part of the CONCACAF regional confederation, and so are able to send teams to this tournament. When Martinique competed in the 2017 tournament, the team was made up almost entirely of semiprofessional players from the island’s small league. They played beautiful and riveting soccer, including a hard-fought match against the US team. Watching such games, learning the names of players you have never heard of before, and rooting for unlikely victories is part of the joy of watching international tournaments.
The reality, though, is that whomever you root for, they will almost certainly end up losing at some point during a tournament. When a World Cup begins, anything seems possible, but that is ultimately a fleeting feeling. The trajectory, after all, is slow elimination of one team after another. If you are deeply committed to just one team, the fleeting moments of joy are inextricable from many more moments of disappointment and pain. Especially in a tournament like the World Cup, loss is the defining experience. Every team loses, in the end, except for one. As the games go on, one story after another ends. One absolutely brilliant goalie after another, each making a series of seemingly perfect saves, is beaten in the end. Resigned, sad beyond measure at the fact that one moment of defeat can erase all the other triumphs: that is the root of the feeling of melancholy that can set in as a tournament progresses.
It is for this reason that the climax of the tournament is often the end of the initial group phase and the move into the first elimination games. This is a time when there are still many teams, many possibilities, and when the games are often extremely exciting and open-ended. It is in this phase of the tournament that the most memorable games are played: Ghana’s heartbreaking loss to Uruguay in 2010, for example, or the riveting matches between Belgium and the US and between Algeria and Germany in 2014. The later games of the World Cup, while they are often global spectacles, often deliver up disappointing, even conservative, soccer.
What makes participation in the World Cup so ebullient and addictive, nevertheless, is the potential to feel connected to so many places, the fact of knowing that you are part of a mass of humanity, perhaps billions strong, all watching exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. The experience of being at the tournament in person encourages a heightened version of this feeling. You, too, become a part of the spectacle, part of the team, part of the game, and its rituals. This is what makes the tournament humanity’s greatest theater.47
When I went to the 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa, I learned to use and love a plastic horn known as the vuvuzela, which was commonly played by fans in the country. The vuvuzela became famous—and infamous—during the tournament, in part because many found the drone of the instrument, flattened through the sound on television, distracting and annoying. People at the tournament were annoyed too, and in fact on the way into the stadium the same merchants were often selling vuvuzelas and earplugs side by side.
Yet inside the stadium, the way this instrument accompanied the games was powerful, even spiritual. It infused the stadium with an indescribable energy. The vuvuzela, blown by tens of thousands, rises and falls in response to what is happening on the pitch. It reaches a climax when the teams walk out of the tunnel, calms down during the national anthems and picks up again during the first minutes of the match. Every moment from then on—every dangerous free, corner, or penalty kick—is punctuated by a shower of sound. This tsunami, humming throughout the stadium, can be hypnotic, especially during the celebration of a goal. When the game becomes boring, fans in one part of the stadium begin blowing the vuvuzela, and then it spreads like a breaking wave, pushing the players on the pitch toward the goal. It was the sound of the vuvuzela that offered the pilgrims from around the world, who shared neither language nor songs, a way of participating in creating the unique sonic geography of the stadium. Newcomers to South Africa for the World Cup understood this, and quickly acquired their vuvuzelas. During the different games, Mexicans, Japanese, Italians, Brazilians together created a choir that accompanied the players on the field. The vuvuzela became part of an act of communion that enabled fans from all over the world to share moments of a unique intensity.48
Events like this feel like a kind of miracle and an occasion for gratitude. That is the feeling that, Gumbrecht ultimately explains, most defines his relationship to the beauty of athletic events. For Gumbrecht, the answer to why people watch sports is ultimately simple. People are seeking beauty. And when they encounter it in a game, they are grateful for the gift. “Watching sports,” he writes, “is a way of waiting for that which may occasionally happen but is never guaranteed to happen, because it lies beyond the pre-calculated limits of human performance.” What is ultimately most fulfilling, even redemptive, in watching sports is this: “To see happen, occasionally, what we have no right to expect.”49
“Years have gone by,” writes Galeano in his “author’s confession” at the beginning of his famous ode to soccer, “and I’ve finally come to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good soccer. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’” For Galeano, this allegiance to beauty is greater than loyalty to any team, or any specific country. “When good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle,” he writes, “and I don’t give a damn which country performs it.”50
In the end, it is that search for beauty, for transcendence, for communion with others in moments of joy, that keeps people returning to this game. There is a mystery at the heart of soccer fandom, an unanswered question about precisely why this form of play can feel so powerful, even divine, again and again, to people in so many different parts of the world and in such different social circumstances. What is soccer? What makes this game what it is everywhere on the planet, a script endlessly repeating, with different players every time, altogether infuriating, unpredictable, and wondrous? The answer to that question lies in the experience each of us brings to it, to knowing and loving the sport, returning to it always, even when it disappoints us, seeking some form of redemption as yet unknown and unseen.
Soccer is yours. So take it. Make of it what you will: a symbol, a mirror, a story. Watch it. Talk about it endlessly. Speak it, this precious human language. Hold on to the delight it offers. For joy is a universal right. Play it. Find something, anything—a rock, a bicycle, a bag, a coconut—and make a goal. Put the ball down on grass, dirt, asphalt, sand. And then begin with a dribble, a pass, a kick. Everything lies ahead.