How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (16 page)

This is highly disingenuous, to say the least.

Miranda cut the deal with NationsBank, inviting them into his club. The bank never had anywhere the influence over the club that he alleges. But his use of this rhetoric is incontestably masterful. He’s maintained his political base for so long because he’s tapped into a powerful line of argument.

Sitting across a conference room table, twirling in his chair, Miranda tells me, “Vasco’s a club of immigrants. It was founded by Portuguese and Brazilians.
And Vasco’s the only club that has some history. Vasco had the first black player in history. Football was practiced by elites. This is the only club where the associates bought every inch of land with no help from the government. None. It’s a pioneer club.” Miranda argues that the multinationals will inevitably eviscerate these traditions. The foreign investors will bring in guys

“who barely speak Portuguese.” In the interest of profit, the foreign investors will try to market the clubs to the widest possible audience. At Palmeiras, the Italian multinational Parmalat changed the team colors. At Corinthians and Flamengo, the foreign investors sold star players to hated cross-town rivals—previously an unthinkable act. Everywhere they went they bragged about their marketing plans. Miranda is trying to argue that foreigners created the impression that clubs are just businesses, not repositories of tradition and superior morality. Miranda’s genius was that he only began making these anti-globalization arguments after he robbed the foreign investors blind.

With the departure of foreign investors, Miranda doesn’t have any compelling scapegoat that he can flog to distract from his own failings. He campaigns for reelection in the shadow of an atrocious season. Now he doesn’t watch games from the honor tribunal, a box at midfield where team presidents traditionally sit. He watches from his own oªce, which overlooks the pitch, behind dark glass.

Just after visiting with Miranda, I met with an aging ex-Olympic volleyball player named Fernandão. He leads the underground anti-Miranda group, the

Moviemento Unido Vascainos.
It’s underground, because
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

Miranda has thrown Fernandão and his friends out of the club. Today, they buy anti-Miranda billboards near São Januario. They hand out leaflets to Vascainos on their way to watch games at the stadium. Fernandão tells me that the wealth from the NationsBank deal has made Miranda “drunk with power.”

A few months later, Fernandão’s assessment is borne out. Miranda shows up at the polls with two armed bodyguards. He insists on cutting in front of long lines of voters. Along the way, he pauses to verbally assault a woman reporter. It was too much, even for supporters of Vasco. At the polling place, a revolt begins. Voters start chanting “ladrão,” thief. By the end of the day, the unthinkable had happened. Miranda had lost, not just his seat in congress, but the parliamentary immunity that came with the seat. The federal prosecutors have been waiting for this day. They have been sitting on a thirty-seven page memo listing Miranda’s crimes. After defeating the foreign investors, he is now himself defeated.

With foreign investors out of Brazil, the leading proponent of soccer capitalism became the sports minister, a lifelong technocrat and old friend of President Cardoso called José Luis Portella. He invited me to watch his weekly soccer game, played in a field in northern São Paulo. The players in his league are, by rule, all at least forty-five years old. Portella is a short man, without obvious soccer gifts. He couldn’t be further from Pelé, whose old ministry he now occupies. But he’s not nearly as physically challenged as some of his teammates. A
few are so rotund—diet and fitness have no place in Brazilian masculinity—that they don’t ever run for longer than five seconds at a stretch. Several of Portella’s teammates are in their mid-sixties. These limitations, however, do little to deter Portella and his teammates from treating the game with the utmost seriousness.

The teams have coaches who pace the sidelines cursing their lack of e¤ort and stray passes. They’ve hired a referee who just retired from administering games in the top Brazilian league. Despite the referee’s experience, the players argue with him as much as any group of professionals, if not more. By the end of the first half, the sports minister himself has received a yellow card for screaming in the referee’s face.

When Portella and I sit down, he doesn’t hide his pessimism about the future of the game. Not even the indictment of Eurico Miranda, he says, would alleviate soccer’s deep crisis. But watching Portella play, he undermines his own argument. Even this group of unfit men plays stylishly. They use spin to pass the ball in entirely unexpected directions, shoot with the back of their heals, and showboat their dribbling skills.

Despite the persistence of corruption, Brazil’s mania for soccer has hardly abated; its natural soccer resources don’t seem close to exhausted. It’s too essential a part of the national character. As Portella’s team scores, the middle-aged men kiss the club’s insignia on their jerseys and kiss one another; they tumble into a heap on the field. Even among Brazil’s accountants, taxi drivers, and government technocrats, there are moments that make you want to get down on your knees and give thanks to Our Lady of Victories.
o

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

t h e B l a c k C a r p a t h i a n s

I.

Edward Anyamkyegh disembarked at Lviv Interna-

tional Airport in the Ukraine precisely ten years into postcommunism. Hints of the old regime could still be detected in the small building. A fading frieze paid tribute to heroic workers carrying their metal tools like swords. Police in brown military hats with large swooping crowns, the kind that used to populate Kremlin Square parades, stared self-importantly at arrivals.

Because they were trained to be suspicious of visitors, and because Edward looked so di¤erent, the police pulled him aside.
Why have you come to the Ukraine?

The sight of Edward Anyamkyegh in 2001 may have shocked the police. But in those days, the exhausted end of an era of rapid globalization, his arrival shouldn’t have been so disconcerting. It could even be described as one sign of the fading times. In that epoch, strange cultural alchemies had proliferated: Eastern Europeans harvesting Tuscan olive groves; Bengalis answering customer service calls for Delaware credit card companies; and, as in the case of Edward Anyamkyegh, Nigerians playing professional soccer in the Ukraine.

Around the time of Edward’s arrival, Nigerians had become a Ukrainian fad. Within a few months, nine Nigerians were signed to play in Ukraine’s premier league. They were the most prestigious purchases a club could make. A roster devoid of Nigerians wasn’t considered a serious roster; an owner who didn’t buy Nigerians wasn’t an ambitious owner.

Like all boom markets, the Nigerian fixation betrayed an irrational exuberance. But there was logic behind it, too. During communism, Ukrainian soccer clubs had been state-run enterprises. When the regime ended, however, nobody bothered to privatize them. In many cases, nobody even paid their bills. The situation grew so dire that the Ukrainian game might have disappeared altogether. But the game found its saviors in the country’s richest men, the oligarchs. The Ukrainian oligarchs were men who had transitioned seamlessly to capitalism from their slots in the Communist Party bureaucracy, turning insider ties to the old state into new wealth. By covering the expenses, the oligarchs became de facto owners.

The oligarchs announced great ambitions for their new possessions. They told fans that they wanted their teams to take places alongside the greatest clubs of Italy, Spain, and England. To accomplish such a gargan-tuan task, they would have to imitate the approach of these clubs. One thing in particular caught their attention: the prevalence of black faces. You could see why
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

the Western Europeans had so many of them. Africans had the skills and speed that Ukrainians lacked. They had ingenuity that could make a bland Eastern Bloc team look downright continental.

Lviv had its own oligarch, Petro Dyminskyy. In communism, he’d managed the region’s coal mines. After communism, he amassed an incredible fortune—several hundred million dollars reportedly—buying and selling Western Ukraine’s bountiful gas, oil, and coal reserves.

In the spring of 2001, he added to his holdings the local soccer club, named Karpaty Lviv after the nearby Carpathian mountain range. By investing a small bit of his fortune, Dyminskyy hoped that he could create his own, massively successful team. And with the media glow from this success, he planned on launching a career as a politician, following the Silvio Berlusconi model.

Dyminskyy was no professional soccer man. But he could see the thinking behind the Nigerian purchases made by his fellow owners, and it appealed to him.

When an agent from the former Soviet republic of Moldova o¤ered Edward Anyamkyegh for $500,000, Dyminskyy made the purchase. It seemed like a great deal. Everywhere Edward had played, he had scored goals. His c.v. included stints with Nigeria’s national under-17 team. He had youth, only twenty-three years, and a muscular upper body that looked suited to the physicality of the Ukrainian game. So when Dyminskyy unveiled his purchase to the people of Lviv, he promised that Edward would help catapult Karpaty to success.

At the time, Dyminskyy showed no signs that he considered this venture to be at all risky. But he had put Edward into Karpaty’s green-and-white jersey, covered
in Cyrillic lettering, a symbol of Lviv and Ukrainian nationalism. So Edward’s arrival at Karpaty represented more than the purchase of a contract, more than a test of a player’s mettle and an owner’s ability to put together a club. His arrival in the Ukraine was a cross-cultural experiment. In theory, Karpaty’s purchase of Edward had followed the rules of globalization to perfection. The Ukrainians had tapped the international labor market and come back with a bargain. To accommodate their new English-speaking purchase, they brought in a new coach who could speak in a language that their new star could understand. Like many companies from the poorer parts of Eastern Europe, they were adhering to the one-world model that had brought great success to thousands of American and European firms. The western strategy of globalization had, in e¤ect, been globalized. But was it suited to the rigors of life and soccer in the Western Ukraine?

II.

Edward walks me to his apartment. It is several blocks deep into one of the old Soviet neighborhoods of endless, relentlessly linear concrete. We met at the neighborhood McDonald’s. He brought along his wife and two-year-old girl. His wife, Brecing, has a sincere, soft voice. “You’re married? Give a hug to your wife for us. Give her a big kiss,” she says, tilting her head. Edward’s daughter, wearing cornrows and a jean jacket, stays close to his leg.

For nearly two years, they have lived in this complex. Their daughter was born here. “You see, everyone
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS

knows me. We’ve got no problems. They like me so much.” Edward always talks quickly, in a singsong cadence. When he describes his neighbors’ a¤ection, he looks to the ground and smirks. As we slowly move toward his home, he points to landmarks. “This is where I play ball with kids . . . this is the bank. You see, bank.” He translates the letters from the Cyrillic, one of the few Ukrainian words he says that he can decipher.

The communists didn’t build to last; and the postcommunists haven’t had the resources or desire to repair. Sidewalks and roads have a topography that alternates between piles of pavement and craters. All around, glass facades have shattered. Soot covers the shards that remain in place. Shirts and bags and socks hang from the branches of trees like ornaments.

Although there’s nothing too fancy or warm about the interior of the Anyamkyegh apartment, it is an immaculately tended contrast to the dark, dingy hall-way. A tiny oil painting of a flower hangs alone in the living room, with action photos of Edward stu¤ed into the corner of the frame. In a corner, a mattress lies on the floor with blankets and sheets neatly piled on top.

Edward and Brecing sleep here. They like to fall asleep in front of the television. “Sit down,” Edward directs me into a chair. He perches on its arm and reaches for the remote. “I have satellite and cable,” he says and turns on African American rap music videos.

Edward removes his black Reebok baseball hat, puts his elbow on his knee, and leans on his palm.

“How does a Nigerian find his way to the Ukraine?”

He rubs his hand over his face and begins to nar-rate his journey through the global soccer economy.
For generations, the Anyamkyegh family farmed

near the provincial capital of Gboko, not far from Nigeria’s eastern border with Cameroon. Edward’s father did well by his profession. In a nearby village, he owned groves of mangoes and guava, which he trucked to corners of Nigeria that didn’t have such fertile land as Gboko. Returning from his farm one evening, he tried passing a concrete truck in his small car on a narrow highway. Edward was seven when he died.

A decade or two earlier, Edward would have followed his late father into agriculture. Now, there were many distractions. Agents scoured places like Gboko for teens they could sell to European soccer clubs. This sounded glamorous and an opportunity to make unthinkable sums. Boys began to dream of playing on the continent. Enough local examples made these fantasies seem plausible. Queen’s Park Rangers of London bought Edward’s own older brother, one of seven siblings. And from the time of his father’s death, Edward began telling friends that he would become a European star, too.

There was another reason that this wasn’t such an implausible notion for Edward: He was a man-child. At fifteen, he had sprouted pectorals and biceps. When the best local professional club bought him, the papers predicted that he would be one of the greatest strikers to ever emerge from Gboko. Word of Edward’s talent, how he could outrun the older players and out-muscle the younger ones, reached the coaches of the national squad. They plucked him for a spot on the team sent to the Under-17 World Cup in Ecuador.