In an interview 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.