So is Simon Kuper. Born in Uganda to South African Jewish parents, raised and educated in the Netherlands and in Britain, and now a French citizen, Kuper—like Koestler, and like me—is someone Stalin might have called a “rootless cosmopolitan.” But he is an ardent supporter of the Dutch national team, whose players wear the orange colors of the Dutch royal house. He loves their free-flowing style. Kuper was, however, only four years old when his adopted team was defeated by Germany in 1974. His take on that loss is that the Dutch didn’t really mind, because, with their beautiful attacking game, they had been the moral victors. Actually, no, people did mind, deeply. To be beaten by the krauts felt like the Second World War all over again.
A stocky ex-soccer player named Rinus Michels was the Dutch coach at the time. He liked to claim that “football is something like war.” A touch hyperbolic, perhaps, but in contrast to many other sports—tennis, say, or swimming—soccer does tend to stir up primitive tribal instincts. The flag-waving, the face paint, the pugnacious songs, the banners, the bellicose taunts at the opponents, the arms flung out in unison foster a collective spirit that can turn violent at times. It also has a quasi-religious aspect. After a big international game, I once saw fans in the street kneeling on the flag of their victorious team with their arms outstretched and their heads banging the ground, like religious fanatics.
Baseball and American football doubtless inspire feelings of mad intensity as well. But the frenzy of soccer fans has resulted in an actual war. This happened in 1969, when the so-called Soccer War broke out between El Salvador and Honduras. Tensions had already been running high, over borders and other issues, but a World Cup qualifying game in Mexico (won by El Salvador) pushed the two nations over the edge.
Perhaps the nearest thing in U.S. sporting history to a political confrontation was the rematch, in 1938, of the boxers Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. The fight was touted by the Nazis as a would-be demonstration of “Aryan” racial superiority. Louis, “the Brown Bomber,” had lost the first bout, in 1936. Two years later, Louis beat Schmeling in the first round. “I knew I had to get Schmeling good,” he later wrote. “I had my own personal reasons, and the whole damned country was depending on me.” (Schmeling may have been the Nazis’ great white hope, but he wasn’t a bad man. He refused to join the Nazi Party, and he and Louis became good friends.)
Still, Americans have no memories of foreign invasions that can be displaced onto athletic contests. To get the flavor of the kind of resentments I mean, think of the ice-hockey game in Stockholm between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, in March, 1969, seven months after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. The Czechs refused to shake hands with their opponents on the ice. When they triumphed, after fighting like hell, Prague exploded in riotous celebrations. Vengeance was sweet that night.
There is another difference. In the U.S., hand-on-heart, support-our-veterans, flag-waving patriotism is widely regarded as legitimate, even laudable. In much of Europe, by contrast, the chauvinism that had fuelled two devastating World Wars rendered such displays largely taboo after Hitler’s defeat. The British, having escaped German occupation, could still indulge in military pomp; elsewhere in Western Europe, martial pride and overt patriotism were distasteful reminders of a dark past. European unification was meant, chiefly, to put all that behind them. Peace and prosperity were the goals.
This was particularly true, for obvious reasons, in the Federal Republic of Germany. And yet football nationalism could not be entirely repressed even there. Kuper recounts “the miracle of Bern,” when the West German team beat the formidable Hungarians in the 1954 World Cup final in Bern, Switzerland. The humiliation of wartime defeat could be forgotten in that delicious moment of victory on the soccer field. Popular feeling was expressed in the phrase “Wir sind wieder wer!”—“We’re somebody again!” Peco Bauwens, the president of the German Football Association, celebrated the victory in a Munich beer hall (of all places), praising the German players for showing what “a healthy German, who is loyal to his country, can achieve” and even extolling “the Führer Principle.”
“She’s actually a little cuddle monkey, as long as you don’t question any of her long-held political beliefs.”
Cartoon by Lars Kenseth
Kuper’s point is that Bauwens, in his boorish way, had “grasped a new truth: after 1945, football had started to replace war in Europe as a source of national pride.” What was shunned in other public venues found an outlet in soccer stadiums. That was where historical wrongs could be ritually avenged and raw nationalism celebrated, sometimes in a carnival spirit—Dutch fans in orange bearing models of fat yellow cheeses on their heads, French fans holding up live roosters (le coq gaulois), Scots in kilts, English fans dressed up like King Arthur’s knights—and sometimes in a more brutal fashion.