In an interview on Soccer as a Second Language

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.