Can Football Survive the Future?

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Where Foer succeeds brilliantly is in his reporting. He takes his readers onto the Glasgow terraces for an engaging first-hand account of the sectarian rivalry, a theme he echoes in his discussions with an organized group of hooligan supporters of Red Star Belgrade whose fan base were the shock troops of Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" campaign, and were later organized into militias.

Even more enlightening his account of the experiences of young African players on the margins of European football. He tracks the story of Edward Anyamkyegh, a young Nigerian star 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 clubs in Western Europe are going to take the cream of the world's soccer talent, clubs in the Ukraine and Russia — and France and Belgium — who can't afford top-tier Brazilians, Frenchmen, Scandinavians or even the established stars of African football have looked increasingly to Africa's second tier as the prime source of imported talent to raise their game. KSK Beveren, the Antwerp team who reached last season's Belgian cup final, has been known to field a team composed entirely of players from Cote D'Ivoire.

It can't be much fun emigrating from the sunshine of Africa to the icy wastes of the former Soviet Union's rundown industrial cities brimming with angry, racist skinheads. But there's more than money to compensate: the Russian and Ukrainian teams play in the pan-European tournaments, offering their imports a platform on which to impress the scouts of clubs in Italy, Spain and Britain, who'll offer a better wage and more benign living conditions. Today's estimates are that around 1,000 African players earn their keep in Europe, a low figure compared with the Brazilian pro Diaspora which is believed to number in the region of 5,000 players. And none of the African players who regularly start for an English Premiership team was recruited directly from Africa — all were bought from other European teams.

How the World Explains Soccer
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.

The cosmopolitan impulse in European soccer hails originally from the quest for talent: Differing idioms in how the game is played, organized and coached across the continents over the past century has created a reality where today's winning formula requires blending of a variety of these traditions. But at a business level, also, the clubs are beginning to reflect the impact of globalization. A quarter century ago, the best-capitalized clubs, who could buy the contracts of the best players from lesser clubs and offer them more lucrative deals, were those who could fill the biggest stadiums week in and week out — hence the anomaly that Spain and Italy, two of Europe's weaker economies in the postwar years were nonetheless home to football clubs that could buy the best players from rivals in Germany, France and Britain. Today, however, global capital markets may be starting to play more of a role: Manchester United is traded on the London Stock Exchange, and one of its largest shareholders is American. The west-London club Chelsea look set to debunk the maxim that success can't be bought, following its acquisition by émigré Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who has added close to $200 million to the team's war-chest for buying as many of the world's best players as they can find. And the fans of Liverpool F.C., whose status as a local icon may be even greater than that of the Beatles, are facing the uncomfortable reality that the club may soon be partly owned by a consortium organized by the prime minister of Thailand.

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