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

But she had a long history of dabbling in extremist politics. During the war, she played benefit concerts for Arkan’s ultranationalist political party. “You can be happy as me—just join the Serbian Unity Party,” she would announce to her many adoring fans. As the Serbian Unity Party’s Web site describes, she continues to fund a campaign to defend the Serb nation against the

“white plague” of “non-Serb nationalities.” Even without Arkan, his party is run from her home. Last summer, she performed a concert at Red Star stadium, dedicated to Arkan, where she led 100,000 fans in chanting his name.

But with her homespun charms and kitschy dance music, called “turbo-folk,” she succeeds wildly in fulfilling both parts of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase about the banality of evil. “I’m the team mama,” she says. “That’s how they think of me. I want my players to look the best, so I give them Armani.” She describes a forthcoming trip to the NBA All Star game in Atlanta and speaks of the pleasures of decorating Arkan’s oªce. Under Ceca’s presidency, since Arkan’s death,

Obilic hasn’t had much luck. This is strangely fitting.

The club really only existed as a tribute to the man—

and what he represented. After I interviewed Ceca, she invited me to visit the club’s museum. Obilic’s top executive, a retired player, led me around the room. He showed me medals and photos. But the heart of the exhibit was a wall of photos that documented Arkan’s revival of Obilic’s fortunes. My tour guide pointed proudly and said, “Our father.”

Serbia’s prime minister Zoran Djindjic frequently played soccer. In part, he played out of genuine enthusiasm for the game. In part, he liked the image that the game created, of youthful vigor. Elected in 2000, Djindjic sold himself to the country as the reformer who would reverse the damages wrought by the Milosevic regime. This was a program that necessarily put him on a collision course with organized crime, the bureaucracy, and the mafia-linked security services. It made him despised by the Serbian people, who hated his anti-inflationary policies and his close relations with the same European and American governments that had bombed Belgrade. With the political deck so stacked against him, Djindjic needed every Kennedyesque image he could get.

Early in March of 2003, Djindjic played in a match between a government team and police oªcers. He arrived unannounced. Surprised police oªcers didn’t know how to play against a prime minister. Should they throw him the match or play extra hard so that they HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

could later brag about beating the most powerful Serb?

They must have decided that they would tackle him as hard as any opponent. In the match, the prime minister injured his Achilles tendon. For the next few weeks, he hobbled around on crutches. At lunchtime on March 12, he exited his car and began to move slowly toward a government oªce building. A man masquerading as a maintenance worker trained a Heckler & Koch G3 gun on the prime minister. A bullet pushed Djindjic’s heart from his body.

The Djindjic assassination shocked Serbia into carrying out part of the Djindjic program. Outraged and mournful, the public finally got behind his plans for cleaning up organized crime. Police rounded up as many gangsters and their fellow travelers as they could find. Five days into this purge, they arrived at Ceca’s house across from the Red Star stadium and placed her under arrest. They had come after her because she had met frequently with suspected accomplices in the murder, including rendezvous before and after the dastardly deed.

When police arrived, they found a door to a secret bunker beneath Ceca’s palace. It took several hours to break through the entrance, but when they did, they found quite a cache, dozens of guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, silencers, and laser guides, just like the one I had seen on the shelf in her oªce. The police locked Ceca in solitary confinement and left her there for a month. In the meantime, they began scour-ing her finances, especially related to Obilic, and found that there had barely been the pretense of legality in the operation. After selling her players, Ceca would allegedly stu¤ the profits into her personal accounts in Cyprus and Hungary.

To be sure, Serbia hadn’t fully taken on its problem.

Nobody particularly questioned the ideology of Serb nationalism, the idea that Serbs possess a morality and character superior to their non-Serb neighbors. Nobody questioned the idea of the Serbs’ eternal victimhood. In fact, the Djindjic assassination was cast as another instance of history screwing them. And, of course, the Ultra Bad Boys of Red Star continued to be ultra bad.

But, finally, there were subtle signs of discomfort with the national culture of gangsterism.

Ceca tried many stunts to yank the public into her corner, but none really worked. A hunger strike ended quickly after it began. When her friends held a rally on her thirtieth birthday, only 1,500 loyalists showed—a far cry from the 100,000 that attended her last concert in the Red Star stadium. Ultimately, a court ruled her incarceration unconstitutional, after she had spent four months behind bars. But for once, in Serbia, evil shed its coat of banality and could be identified as itself. r

H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

t h e Po rn o g ra p h y o f S e c t s

I.

In full throat, they sing in praise of our slaughter.

We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood. There are 44,000

of them, mostly Protestant supporters of the Glasgow Rangers Football Club. As this is their home stadium, Ibrox, they can make their songs as virulent as they please. If you hate the fuckin’ Fenians clap your hands.

We, the 7,000 supporters of Glasgow’s traditionally Catholic Celtic Football Club, sit in a separate section of the