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Article Excerpt
How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, by Franklin Foer, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005
How Soccer Explains the World is both delightful and frustrating at the same time. In fact, I am about to blast the book. Truth be told, though, I enjoyed it.
I often scour bookstores for interesting material for my students. A non-technical book on Globalization can contain deep ideas, and can stimulate interest and class discussion. Globalization affects everyone in tangible and intangible ways. It is easy for students to grasp how labor and capital mobility affect cultures, economies, politics, and world-views. Globalization excites hope and incites rage. With a title like How Soccer explains the World: An unlikely theory of globalization, Franklin Foer's book could have addressed all these issues. The title is a bit deceiving, though. So let me be up front about it: soccer does not explain the world, and there is no well-articulated theory of globalization in the book. This is not to say that one cannot be inferred from it, if one reads between the lines, and gives Foer a generous interpretation. That will be my role in this review.
The book is a series of disconnected vignettes, each a delight to read. Each chapter illustrates some aspect of soccer culture, and the author tries to put it in terms relating to globalization. With the exception of two chapters, each is simply an illustration, not an explanation, of globalization.
The author admits up front that the book is "less economic than cultural" (p. 4). Globalization is an economic phenomenon with cultural implications, so the reader is fight to be skeptical, at the outset, whether Foer will provide a "theory of globalization."
The book's ten vignettes are simply ten cultural examples of conflict, couched in the terms of the globalization debate.
The immediate message of this book as a scholarly text, is that the fates of many soccer clubs were and are intimately tied up in the cultural and political contexts that they find themselves in. That is, when a country has issues, its teams face many of those same issues. But this is a no-brainer. It is interesting to see how governmental and political decisions, wars, laws, and the like influence soccer clubs. But again, the club becomes the illustration, not the explanation.
Proponents of globalization, such as Thomas Friedman, believe that the expansion of capitalism, and the integration of national economies, would lead to a supra-national mentality. Countries would be less likely to attack trading partners and citizens would feel more of kinship across national boundaries than before. Foer then sets out on his mission to explain "the failure of globalization to erode ancient hatreds in the game's great rivalries." The two most striking examples are to be found in the Balkans, and Ireland/Scotland. Sociologists explain hooliganism as an expression of working-class frustrations over the loss of incomes from jobs-exportation. Foer is correct to point out that many hooligans...
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