Word: soccers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Soccer has, as long as anyone can remember, served as a form of ritual combat onto which neighborhoods, tribes and even nations could project their most passionate enmities. When Real Sociedad, the pride of the Basque country, comes up against Real Madrid, the soccer symbol of the Spanish crown, it's more than simply an athletic spectacle involving 22 men and a ball. And when a Republic of Ireland striker puts one past the England goalkeeper in an international fixture, the roar heard across the Irish Diaspora expresses a passion that long predates the game of soccer itself. But just...
...passions does an IRA anthem stir in the heart of Celtic's favorite forward, Henrik Larsson, whose mother is Swedish and whose father hails from the West African island of Cabo Verde? Once, Rangers only signed Protestant players; today, like Celtic, they've followed the trend of shopping in soccer's global labor market in order to make themselves competitive in the pan-European leagues that are the most lucrative for the continent's clubs. So, while the fans treat the game as a tableux enactment of ancient tribal battles, the "actors" are Dutchmen, Georgians, Danes, Brazilians, Portuguese, Swedes, Frenchmen...
...into this complex, often darkly funny nexus of soccer's traditional role as metaphor for national and ethnic warfare and the forces of globalization that are changing the face of the game that New Republic writer Franklin Foer steps in his new book, "How Soccer Explains the World". It's a compelling and ambitious project that seeks to chart the impact of the crashing waves of globalization on the traditional tribal barriers that have long defined the culture of soccer, at least among fans if not on the field. And as an American, Foer must be further commended for venturing...
...margins of European football in his chapter on the "Black Carpathians." Here, he tracks the story of Edward Anyamkyegh, a Nigerian starlet playing at Karpaty Lviv, a Ukrainian team with a fiercely nationalist tradition. In the Soviet era, the Ukraine was recognized as the cradle of the Union's soccer talent, regularly supplying a majority of the national team's players. But despite its tradition of representing Ukrainian pride (particularly against Russian teams during the Soviet era), the accepted wisdom in independent Ukraine is that soccer success requires buying the best talent available - and given the fact that far wealthier...
...Although a growing elite of international stars have played outside their national borders for much of the postwar period, the globalizing of soccer's labor market really began in earnest during the 1990s. Today's English champions, the London club Arsenal, are managed by a Frenchman, and only two English players feature in their typical starting lineup. When the same club won the championship 15 years ago, a solitary Swede was the only foreigner aboard...