Andrei Markovits on Global Sport

Tell me about your first book, Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski

I like this book because it is breezily written and the authors clearly display a solid mastery of their subject. The book discusses ‘soccer’, which of course is the shortened Oxbridge term for association football emanating from the 1860s. Contrary to the common view in Britain and Europe that this term comprises prima facie evidence of yet another American bastardisation of a European cultural icon, the term is not an American invention at all but British slang.

Soccernomics is really the most insightful book about the globalisation of the sport and its current state. Simon Kuper writes for The Financial Times and is a very accomplished journalist on many subjects, including sports. What the book picks up on is that England typically always fails in penalty shoot-outs, whereas countries like Germany normally win in similar situations, apart from once in 1976 when Uli Hoeness – to his everlasting shame – sent his potentially game-deciding shot over the crossbar, thus making Germany the loser to Czechoslovakia in the European Nations’ Championship final in Yugoslavia.

I am less impressed with the authors’ trying to explain this – and similar – oddities of the game, but I am fully aware that they are not trying to do so in a serious manner but rather choose to use these wonderful tidbits to catch the reader’s attention for their larger project, which is to explain why and how soccer has become far and away the world’s most important game. The authors, in my opinion, rightly tie the game’s current global status to its emergence in the latter half of the 19th century.

They also examine how other countries that at the moment still seem peripheral to the game could very well become central to its future. It is in this context that they offer a fine analysis of soccer’s status in the United States. The authors are among a very small number of European football experts who truly understand the game’s different gestalt in America. Moreover, they genuinely engage in American soccer on its own terms, which they do not deride as yet another American abomination and/or a deformation of a European cultural treasure, but appreciate fully as a different social construct and cultural expression of the game’s being in football-traditional places like Europe and Latin America. The authors gained my respect and admiration for their thoughtful contrasting of American soccer to English or European football without letting their normative orientation colour their analyses.

As to their belief that such peripheral countries to the world of global football as the United States, Japan and even Iraq might indeed mutate into powerhouses and potentially win such major tournaments as the World Cup, I remain a good deal more sceptical. Personally, I am quite convinced – as this World Cup will show – that the football giants of Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Germany, England and Holland will continue to get bigger and that Iraq, Australia and the US are a long way off from winning. As in most things, on football, too, what sociologists call the Matthew Effect remains fully operative and displays an immense resilience: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Let’s move on to From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports, by Allen Guttmann.

This is a classic. The book argues very well how modern sports arose mainly in England in the 19th century and to a lesser degree in the United States. This entity called sports, which had myriad precursors in the form of localised games, competitions and various physical pursuits that were quite disorganised and, above all, not intelligible to outsiders, changed in the 19th century in these capitalist countries that created a world of organised leisure. And this then becomes the bailiwick for modern sports, which features secularisation, quantification, equality of opportunity to compete, the establishment of uniforms, of institutions, of written rules and the quest for records, which incidentally was not something that concerned the Greeks in their Olympic Games many centuries before. By creating records and rules you create an awareness of the sport over time, you permit a discourse with history and over different eras that has become such an essential ingredient of all our modern sports languages.

This modern construct of sport became part of an overall educational mission of the English public schools, in which the idea of a healthy mind and a healthy body assumed pride of place. Furthered at Oxbridge, sports mutated into an integral part of what constituted a real gentleman. In this milieu, the only thing that mattered in sports was participating, not winning, a rather understandable phenomenon since most of sports’ protagonists were already winners by dint of their social standing and wealth. But once sports – particularly association football, but others as well – entered the world of workers, to whom this formerly leisurely pastime mutated into a welcomed means of livelihood, winning not only became everything, it was the only thing, to paraphrase Vince Lombardi, the legendary NFL coach of the Green Bay Packers.

Your next book, Global Games by Maarten Van Bottenburg, leads on from this and looks at the idea of why some sports thrive in different areas and become global.

Yes, it takes the Guttmann analysis one step further and picks up on the legendary works of Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning.