How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, Franklin Foer [reading eggs books txt] 📗

Ceca, as his replacement. It didn’t take a prosecutor from The Hague to poke holes in this sleight of hand. When I interviewed Ceca, she told me, “I was the president. He was the advisor.” She chuckled at the mention of both president and advisor.

Obilic never flourished in continental competition.

Arkan hadn’t dared lock players from Bayern Munich and other giant European clubs in garages. Soon, Obilic began to slip in the domestic game, too. After Obilic’s championship season, clubs understood that throwing the championship to Arkan had exacted too great a financial cost. They banded together and dared Arkan to kill them all. “The teams called one another and said,

‘We can’t let this happen again,’ ” the theater director and soccer columnist Gorcin Stojanovic told me. With the clubs aligned against him, Arkan deployed intimidation less frequently. Obilic began to fade into the middle of the league table.

In the end, Obilic may have been Arkan’s undoing.

There are many theories to explain why in January 2000 he was gunned down in the lobby of the Inter-continental Hotel, where he liked to take his morning co¤ee and use the gym. One holds that Milosevic’s son Marko had resented the monopoly that Arkan possessed on the black market. Another holds that the secret police needed to eliminate Arkan. He knew too much and could be too easily lured to The Hague to tes-tify against Milosevic. Or perhaps it was simply a gang-land battle over turf. There is, however, another explanation, one that I favor for its poetic justice. Obilic might have been the proximate cause of his death. His partners had resented that he took such a large share of the profits from the sale of players; they felt that they could no longer do business with him. After he exploited soccer to destroy lives, soccer would now destroy his own.

IV.

There had always been a small, liberal anti-Milosevic opposition within Belgrade. Around the time of Arkan’s death, their moment finally arrived. Hardship had brought Serbs to an epiphany: What had a decade of warfare achieved, except international isolation and stupendous inflation? To jump-start the anti-Milosevic movement, the liberal leaders called in two groups to HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

provide bodies for demonstrations, the student union and Red Star’s Delije. Ever since the late eighties, Milosevic had worried that the Delije’s sincere attachment to Serbian nationalism might stand in the way of his cynical machinations. Now, the Delije rose to obstruct him.

Red Star fans like to say that they were the agents of political change. Indeed, the guys at the front of the barricades and the ones who stormed government buildings in search of evidence proving Milosevic’s corruption wore replica Red Star jerseys. They would leave games to fight with police near Milosevic’s villa. There, Delije members like Krle and Draza shouted for opposition politicians to “Save Serbia from this mad house.”

At games, they sang, “Kill yourself, Slobodan.” To prevent protests, at one point, Milosevic’s regime allegedly began buying up tickets to national team matches and distributing them to friendly faces.

Serbs have placed Milosevic’s overthrow in 2000—

the Red Star Revolution, let’s call it—in the pantheon of great anticommunist revolts. They see it as the conclusion to the Velvet Revolution that began in 1989. But had this revolt changed a nation, with anything like the transformative e¤ect of Havel’s ascent to the Prague castle, or Walesa’s presidency? For a revolt to change a nation, the Serbs wouldn’t just have to pull down the iconography of the dictator Milosevic, as the Russians had knocked over the figures of Lenin. They would have had to topple Arkan, the wicked id of the country, from his central place in the culture.

When I visited Belgrade, Arkan’s image remained upright. Two years after the Red Star Revolution, and three years after his death, he still haunted the streets of Belgrade. At newsstands, his mug gleamed on the glossy covers of big-selling tabloids. In bookstalls, he stared heroically from dust jackets. Notices fixed to lampposts advertised a kickboxing match held in the commandant’s memory.

Obilic exists as the greatest monument to the man.

Its stadium may be the most thoroughly modern building in Belgrade, with swooping steel, glass, and a row of plush executive suites. Arkan’s old oªce overlooks the field from the top of an adjoining tower. By postcommunist standards, it’s a remarkable room. Marble and Persian rugs cover the floors. On top of a wooden bookshelf, a framed photo lovingly captures the warlord in his battle garb. The room’s massive wooden desk displays a bronze statue of Arkan with Obilic’s championship medals draped from his neck. In a far corner, a collection of swords pays homage to the warrior Obilic as does a canvas-and-oil portrait of the medieval swain.

On a shelf, in plain sight, a box advertises itself as containing a laser-guide for a pistol.

In Arkan’s old oªce, I’d been granted an audience with his widow, the pop idol Ceca, the woman he had married on national television. She entered the room smoking a cigarette. Everyone had told me about her body. Now I understood what they meant. Her shiny green blouse failed to contain her enormous, silicone-filled breasts. This was not an unusual flaunting. Ceca won international renown for standing on the sidelines during Obilic matches in skintight leopard print outfits.

She sat across from me on a leather couch. Before the meeting, my translator cautioned me to tread carefully. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

Arkan’s family, he said, still had access to Arkan’s henchmen. I was not inclined to push the envelope that far. Besides, it wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere.

From her experiences traveling in Europe with Obilic, she acquired savvy about Western journalists. She understood the need to puncture the aura of war criminality. “It’s horrible to make connections between politics and sports. I condemn any e¤ort to turn the game into politics,” she said with a look of earnest disgust.

Over and over, she repeated, “This is a business, a game. Nothing more.”

With her banality, it became easy