John Turnbull on Soccer as a Second Language

Our topic today is Soccer as a Second Language, which is the subtitle of your blog, The Global Game

Yes. The books I’ve chosen are very broadly oriented, but the one aspect they all have in common is that soccer is both primary and secondary at the same time. Soccer is the reason for the books being written, but the writers’ interest is everything that goes on outside the stadium. Which makes it more effective and more interesting than writing that just covers the game itself, which is very hard to describe. As Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer, says, ‘Football is faster than words.’ It’s very hard to capture, but it becomes something more transcendent when you look at what happens outside the arena.

What does that mean?

I believe the game affects how people orient themselves to the world and conduct themselves in their daily lives. I think in the United States there’s this underdeveloped appreciation for the fact that around the world people not only support clubs, but in countries in Latin America and Africa, towns and communities are oriented around the soccer field. It’s a space that I have always thought of as a liturgical space. It’s both space and time that is separated from the mundane. Sport is a place of transcendence, like the arts, and I think a lot of cultures and societies around the world have an intuitive understanding of that. There’s one story I remember: a woman who is a mission worker in Guatemala told me that she has women who are illiterate, and they draw maps of their villages. And the maps they draw are invariably oriented so that the soccer pitch is at the centre. And I think how people draw maps of their world is pretty indicative of how they think about it.

Let’s talk about your first book, by the Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano. One of the reviews I read called it ‘the most lyrical, whimsical book ever written about football’.

I haven’t read all books on soccer, but I think it would certainly be up there. Lyrical is true, though of course I’ve only read it in translation by Mark Fried. Interestingly, the title works well both in Spanish and in English: in Spanish it’s El fútbol a sol y sombra and in English it’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow. The metaphor refers to the football stadium, where you can buy seats on one side or the other. Some are in the sun and they are cheaper, or you can buy seats in the shady part which is preferable but more pricey. And the very first sentence of the book is: ‘The history of football is a sad voyage from beauty to duty.’ What Galeano means is that sport as play has been lost as an idea in Western capitalist culture. Sport is now competition and sport is consumable. The World Cup in South Africa will be a spectacle, something for consumption. The television rights will have been sold, the areas around the stadium in South Africa will be zones of exclusion, limited to sales by the sponsors – Coca-Cola etc. It won’t be the local sellers who make their own beer. So that’s an example of the kind of thing that Galeano is talking about. In South African culture football has been very important, a place of everyday interaction, but that element will be lost. The tournament could really be held anywhere; you wouldn’t especially know that it’s in South Africa.

So are social divisions, the difference between those who sit in the sun and those who can afford to sit in the shade, a big theme of the book?

Galeano is, of course, well-known for his social activism, his writing about the marginalised, and the underside of Latin America. But it’s a complex metaphor; really it could be taken many different ways. The soccer in the sun could be what everyone sees on TV but the shadow side may be more interesting. But in this book he argues that the idea of play as a philosophy in sport is very important to humanity, and it gets minimised or cheapened when sport gets commodified. I think that’s what Galeano means. He’s looking for playfulness in soccer, he’s looking for a beauty in it, and when we only focus on the élite, and the very upper levels of the game, you miss some of that – the beauty of the shadow, the hidden part. Soccer is played every day, all over the world, in much more extraordinary circumstances than you’ll see at the World Cup. That’s what he’s trying to recapture. Although the odd thing is that he writes about the World Cup every four years and updates this book. He’s written about the 2002 and the 2006 World Cups and he’ll write about this one again.

Is he looking mainly at Uruguay or around the world?

He starts there [in Uruguay]. All his work is written in what in Latin America is called the crónica form, which are very short episodes. He has great credibility because, of course, Uruguay hosted the first World Cup and won the first World Cup. And so he reaches back to those kinds of memories. I suppose, maybe, in the way of nostalgia, things always seem sweeter and more innocent and more playful looking back. But I think he’s probably right in some sense. His books were the first that I read when I started writing about soccer, and they influenced me to look elsewhere. I’m not interested in the big matches. I like seeing how people play soccer every day.

Tell me about Simon Kuper’s book, Football against the Enemy.

This book was published in the United Kingdom in 1994 and, to me, it’s the most important book on soccer in English. He wrote this as a very young person, just out of university, and what really impressed me is that early on in the book, in the first couple of pages, he confesses he knows very little about big soccer, big football, and that he’s never sat in a press box or spoken to a professional footballer. This is pretty unique for sports writers, who are usually claiming an expertise they don’t have. Early on he describes interviewing Roger Milla, the Cameroonian forward, and not being able to look up from his list of questions. I like that kind of openness, his willingness to learn about the sport. His father is Adam Kuper, a well-known anthropologist who’s done a lot of ethnographic studies in Southern Africa, and I’m sure that influenced Simon and the questions that he brought to the game. His questions are anthropological ones, in a sense, and that’s an influence for the good when writing about football. Another thing that he does, which is probably unique for that time, is he doesn’t take an England-centred view of football. The London publishing market, and the English press in particular, are infatuated with English football. Simon has one chapter on Celtic and Rangers, who are in Glasgow and so from a Londoner’s point of view might as well be on the moon. So he’s not going to the power centres of world soccer. Instead he goes to Ukraine, for example, and to South Africa.

What kind of people is he interviewing?

He has little success speaking to footballers themselves, which is what football analysts are addicted to – getting footballers’ input on the game, which normally is not very revealing. It’s hard to narrate something that you’re participating in. So, he’s speaking to artists, to people who really hadn’t been spoken to, certainly by English-language writers, to academics, sociologists, political scientists. He’s looking outside the arena, for what those on the outside notice about the sport.

OK. But who is the enemy then?

That’s a good question. I’ve asked myself that many times. I think it’s a very clever title and I keep forgetting to ask him who really came up with it, because it’s quite brilliant. He writes, of course, about football and politics, and the relationship between them is very important. You can find the enemy in many places, I suppose, but he asks why so many political leaders and ambitious politicians around the world attach themselves to football clubs. There’s Berlusconi in Italy, who owns AC Milan, and in African and Latin American countries there’s often this relationship between political leaders and particular football clubs. But it’s also true that, historically, supporters have attached themselves to teams and seen football as a place of resistance. This was true in the former Soviet Union and it’s true in Burma today. People see the football stadium as a space where they can speak their mind. Perhaps under militaristic or overly repressive regimes it’s a free-speech zone that exists where none other does. So perhaps that’s one expression of football against the enemy, football against the state. But you’d have to ask him, as I may be over-reaching…

What’s the over-all message of the book?

It’s episodic. It would be diminishing it to call it a travelogue, but that’s what it is, superficially. It is a nine-month journey he makes on £5,000, in the early 90s (when you could still travel the world on £5,000), watching football and talking to people. That’s what it is in some sense, but it’s also more than that. The power in it is that he’s not trying to get one theme or one message from his journey; he just allows it to happen.

Let’s go on to your next book, Goldblatt’s The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football.

This book was published in 2006 in the UK and was sent to me. It’s about 1,000 pages long and the copy I got was a hardback and I remember the impact it made as it hit my doorstep. I think for a book on sport that’s unique, a book of that length. But, setting sport aside, I think it’s one of the best English-language narrative histories that I’ve read on any subject, certainly from the first decade of the 21st century. Goldblatt is an amazing, very gifted storyteller. He’s a football reporter for the BBC, and his work is a treasure, I think.

You had no trouble getting through the 1,000 pages?

Oh, no. It’s extraordinarily well-crafted.

What is it exactly?

It’s a chronological re-telling. He starts out in pre-history, and there’s any number of pre-historical football-like ball games from an array of cultures, from Asian cultures, from Mesoamerican cultures. He looks at those and does a very good job of not linking those directly to modern-day football, as that would not be right historically.

But he sees those games as expressions of the truth, these societies who value sport and have this very early intuition about sport as a possible place of transcendence. In Mesoamerican cultures the ball game is a place where you can encounter the gods; it’s almost a mythological setting. He starts from there and quickly gets to the modern game, association football, and goes through its development on every continent. And, like Kuper and Galeano, he’s interested in the social mechanisms that work outside the sporting complex. He has that same awareness of context, that football never exists on its own, but that it shapes culture and is shaped by cultural forces. It’s more a work of history and sociology: the game, the matches that are played, are just a way of illustrating the social forces at work.

Oh dear, that doesn’t say great things about British and Dutch culture, if you think about the hooliganism.

He does talk a lot about the violent aspects and the sublimated violence of soccer. He writes about hooliganism in England in the 1980s, in the context of Thatcherite Britain. The hooliganism that was seen at that time, and that was seen as so appalling in US and in various places around the world, was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy of the policies of that time. Thatcher had made enemies of the underclass and those on the dole.

He argues this?

He puts it in that frame. The violence that you see at football stadiums isn’t just because it’s football: there’s violence for a reason, and there are many deeper reasons that one finds. I should add that another important contribution of his is that, early in the book, he notes that religion and food and rites of passage vary from one place to another. But soccer is played in more or less the same circumstances, by the same rules, around the globe. This is an aspect of soccer as language. It really requires no translation to be able to play it; it is its own language. It’s intuitively understood, you don’t need to say anything to be able to play it.