How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (2 page)

My translator had arranged for me to meet with Draza, a leader of a Red Star fan club that calls itself the Ultra Bad Boys. He had persuaded him with the

overblown promise that an interview would bring glory unto the club and world renown unto the achievements of the Red Star fans. Six of Draza’s loquacious colleagues join him. At first glance, the Bad Boys look entirely unworthy of the first part of their name and too worthy of the second. Aside from the big red tattoos of
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

their gang name on their calves, they seem like relatively upstanding young men. Draza wears a fleece jacket and chinos. His head of overgrown yet obviously manicured hair has the aura of a freshman philosophy student. As it turns out, he
is
a college student, swamped with preparations for exams. His comrades aren’t any more menacing. One of them has a bowl haircut, a pudgy face, and an oversized ski parka that he never removes—he looks like the kind of guy who’s been shoved into his fair share of lockers.

Perhaps to increase their credibility, the Bad Boys have brought along a gray-haired man called Krle, who wears a ratty black San Antonio Spurs jacket. Krle’s sinewy frame gives the impression that he fills his leisure time with pull-ups on a door frame in his flat.

Many years of living a hooligan life have aged him pre-maturely. (When I ask his age and occupation, he changes the subject.) Unlike the naïve enthusiasm exhibited by the teens, who greet me warmly, Krle blares indi¤erence.

He tells my translator that he has only joined our interview because Draza insisted. His one gesture of bon-homie is to continually pour me warm Serbian beer from a plastic bottle. After I taste the beer, it hardly seems like such a friendly gesture. But because of his angry gray eyes, I find myself drinking glass after glass.

Krle serves as senior advisor to the group, a mentor to the aspiring hooligans. Putting aside his intense glare and unfriendly demeanor, I was actually glad for his presence. My interest in Red Star centers on the 1990s, his heyday as thug, when the fan clubs played a pivotal role in the revival of Serbian nationalism—the idea that the Serbs are eternal victims of history who
must fight to preserve a shred of their dignity. With little prodding, Draza speaks openly about the connections. Unfortunately, his monologue doesn’t last long.

Exerting his authority with volatile glances and brusque interruptions, Krle seizes control of the conversation.

He answers questions curtly.

“Who do you hate most?”

A pause for a few seconds’ worth of consideration.

“A Croatian, a cop: it doesn’t make a di¤erence. I’d kill them all.”

“What’s your preferred method for beating a guy?”

“Metal bars, a special kick that breaks a leg, when a guy’s not noticing.” He sharply stomps down a leg, an obviously well-practiced move.

Because the beer has kicked in, I try to get closer to the reason for my visit. “I noticed that you call Arkan

‘commandant.’ Could you tell me a little more about how he organized the fans?”

His look is one of deep o¤ense and then unmitigated fury. Even before the translation comes, his meaning is clear. “I shouldn’t be answering your questions. You’re an American. And your country bombed us. You killed good Serb men.”

As good a reason as any to redirect the conversation to another topic. In an aside to my translator, which he didn’t tell me about until after our interview, Krle announces, “If I met this American asshole on the street, I’d beat the shit out of him.” Krle then drops out of the conversation. At first, he stands impatiently on the far side of the room. Then he plops into a chair and leans back on its hind legs. When this ceases to hold his attention, he stands again and paces.
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

In the meantime, his protégés continue their enthusiastic descriptions of violence. They tell me their favorite guerilla tactic: dressing in the opposition’s jersey. This enables them to befriend visiting fans, lure them into their cars, transport them to remote locales, and beat them. They boast about their domination of fans from Partizan, their Belgrade rivals. Draza especially relishes describing a game against Partizan the previous season. Thirty minutes before kick o¤, the Ultra Bad Boys had quietly gathered their toughest guys at one end of the stadium by a small outcropping of trees. Each thug carried a metal bar or wooden bat.

They formed a V-shaped formation and began to rampage their way around the stadium, beating anyone in their path. First, they attacked the visiting fans. Then, they slugged their way through a horde of police. The Ultra Bad Boys attacked so quickly that neither the cops nor the Partizan fans had time to respond. In their path, they left lines of casualties, like the fresh tracks of a lawnmower. “We made it around the stadium in five minutes,” says Draza. “It was incredible.”

Aside from Krle’s paroxysms, the Ultra Bad Boys never curse. They consider themselves to occupy higher moral terrain than their foes: no use of firearms, no beating of the enemy after he loses consciousness.

Draza explains, “Partizan fans once killed a fifteen-year-old Red Star supporter. He was sitting in the stadium, and they fired flares at his chest. Those monsters killed the boy. They observe no limits.” The Ultra Bad Boys speak until they exhaust my questions.

As I put away my pen and notebook, Krle reengages the group. He stands over me and demonstrates the
three-fingered salute of Serb nationalism, the peace sign plus a thumb. The gesture signifies both the holy trinity and the Serb belief that they are the planet’s most authentic representatives of the holy trinity. “Now you,” he says in English. I comply. Before I leave the room, Krle makes me repeat the gesture four more times. When I later describe this moment to a human rights activist who has spent many years in Belgrade, he tells me that, during the war, paramilitaries forced Muslims and Croats to make this salute before their rape or murder.

Krle had been a Red Star thug during the club’s most glorious year. In 1991, the team won the European Champions Cup—the most prestigious annual prize in club competition. That team had been a metaphor for the crumbling hulk of Yugoslavia. Despite its history as a vehicle for Serb nationalism, Red Star had included players from across the country, even a vociferous Croatian separatist. Each state of the old Yugoslavia had developed widely accepted ethnic stereotypes that sports commentators then transposed to its players. Slovenians were superb defenders, tirelessly trailing opposing forwards. Croatians possessed a Ger-manic penchant for pouncing on scoring opportunities.

Bosnians and Serbs were creative dribblers and passers, but occasionally lacking in tactical acumen. At Red Star, an amalgam of disparate Yugoslavs bundled their specialties and beat the superpowers of Western Europe.

This performance should have given a modicum of hope for the salvage of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia. But in the shadow of this championship season, in Red Star’s headquarters and stadium, the destruction of this
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

Yugoslavia was being plotted. From Red Star’s own ranks, a hooligan paramilitary force was organized and armed. Krle, who took a bullet in his leg, would serve in this army. The Red Star fans would become Milosevic’s shock troops, the most active agents of ethnic cleansing, highly eªcient practitioners of genocide.

It’s hard to imagine that Ultra Bad Boys are typical figures. They seem a product of a war-torn country and its diseased ideology. But they’re really not such a homegrown oddity. Starting in the 1980s, the soccer hooligan widely came to be considered a leading enemy of the West. “A disgrace to civilized society,” Margaret Thatcher once said. Based on death toll—more than one hundred in the 1980s—the English were the

world’s leading producer of deranged fans, but they were far from alone. Throughout Europe, Latin America, and Africa, violence had become part of soccer’s culture. And even in places where violence had long accompanied soccer, it became more widespread and destructive in the eighties and nineties. The Serbian fans were merely a bit better organized and much better armed than the rest of the world.

Susan Faludi and a phalanx of sociologists have an explanation for this outburst. They have written about downsized men, the ones whose industrial jobs were outsourced to third-world labor. Deprived of traditional work and knocked o¤ patriarchal pedestals, these men desperately wanted to reassert their masculinity. Soccer violence gave them a rare opportunity to actually exert
control. When these fans dabbled in racism and radical nationalism, it was because those ideologies worked as metaphors for their own lives. Their nations and races had been victimized by the world just as badly as they had been themselves.

Economic deprivation and displacement are obvious explanations. But there’s so much these factors can’t explain. Ultra Bad Boys like Draza can also be college boys with decent prospects. The Chelsea Headhunters, the most notorious English hooligan gang, include stockbrokers and middle-class thrill seekers.

Besides, human history is filled with poor people, and rarely do they get together in groups to maim for maiming’s sake.

Something di¤erent happened in this era. An ethos of gangsterism—spread by movies, music, and fashion—conquered the world. The Red Star fans modeled themselves after foreigners they admired, especially the Western European hooligans. The name Ultra Bad Boys was ripped o¤ from Italian supporters’ clubs.

Another fan club called itself the Red Devils, after British club Manchester United’s nickname. In the late eighties and early nineties, the Red Star hooligans would go to the British Cultural Center in downtown Belgrade to scan the papers for the latest antics of English hooligans. The Serb hooligans also paid tribute with their fashion. They wore Adidas track suits, gold chains, and white leather sneakers, just like the crazed fans they read about on the other side of the continent.

Of course, the genealogy of this aesthetic had other roots than England. It borrowed heavily from African American gangster rap, a favorite genre of Serb youth,
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

and filched mores from the emerging Russian mafia.

Gangsterism and its nihilistic violence had become fully globalized. And it was in the Balkans that this subculture became the culture and unfolded toward its logical conclusion.

II.

In the history of hooligan warfare, no battle has been quite so spectacular. A year before Red Star lifted its European Cup, it traveled to Croatia for a match against the rival club Dinamo Zagreb. Signs that the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia might not have much more life could be seen all around Zagreb. Two weeks earlier, the Croats had elected the ultranationalist Franjo Tudjman, a former general and former president of the Partizan Belgrade soccer club. Tudjman’s adoption of Ustache icons—the symbols of the Croatian fascists who collaborated with Nazis to kill hundreds of thousands of Serbs—roused the long-dormant national passions of his people.

During the thirty-five years the charismatic communist Marshal Tito ruled Yugoslavia, he had suppressed bad feelings over World War II, simply declaring the expression of such feelings illegal. Yugoslavia had never come to terms with the fact that its two largest constituents had slaughtered one another. Now, with communism dissolving, the old wounds reopened. Serbs and Croats began to openly expose one another’s war crimes—and demand justice for them. A rush of

breathless revisionist literature described the “hidden
history” of World War II. The books were turned into TV documentaries. And the TV documentaries were reduced to potent political slogans that moved the national agendas in nationalist directions. As one of his first acts, Tudjman “demoted” Serbs from the Croatian constitution. The new, or rather old, enmity could be seen visibly at the soccer stadium. In matches between Serb and Croat teams, fans sang about their respective slaughters.

The match between Red Star and Dinamo, however, was the first time in fifty years that Yugoslavia had seen its ethnic groups openly battle one another. At first, the trouble seemed manageable by the standards of the European game. Red Star fans ripped down billboards and shouted, “We will kill Tudjman.” When the

Dinamo fans began throwing stones at them, the Red Star fans used the billboards as shields. Fences that separated the opposing fans mysteriously disappeared.

A brawl engulfed the entire stadium, with the combat-ants identified by the color of their shirts, and then moved onto the field. The police handled the situation with ineptitude. As a cop beat a Zagreb fan, a Dinamo player called Zvonimir Boban intervened with a flying kick into the oªcer’s gut. Helicopters descended on the stadium to evacuate the Serb players from the melee.

To anyone watching, it was clear that both Serbs and Croats had come ready to fight. Rocks had been carefully stockpiled in the stadium before the game, waiting to be thrown. Acid had been strategically stored so that Croatian fans could burn through the fences separating them from their Serbian counterparts.

Standing next to the Red Star coach, guarding him
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE

from the violence, was an even more ominous presence, a secret-police hit man called Zeljko Raznatovic.

Through his career as a gangster, he’d reached mythical proportions, so much so that everyone simply referred to him by one of his approximately forty aliases. Considering all the Muslims he would later massacre, it is ironic that he went by the Turkish name Arkan.

Arkan came of age in the placidity of Tito’s Yugoslavia, a Balkan’s version of June-and-Ward’s America, where Serbs and Croats were supposed to be happy neighbors.

But Arkan had bucked communist conformism. His father had served as an oªcer in Tito’s air force and used the military rulebook as a Dr. Spock–like guide for raising his son. Predictably, the harsh discipline backfired. By about age sixteen, Arkan had dropped out of a naval acad-emy, stowed away to Italy, and taken up life as a petty criminal in Paris. Not long into this stint, he was nabbed and sentenced to three years in juvenile detention. Unlike the other Yugoslav criminals with whom he teamed, Arkan hadn’t become a thief to fund a luxurious gangster lifestyle. One of his cronies recounted celebrating a heist in Milan with whiskey and whores. Arkan refused to join the party. He sat alone in a room with the window open, letting cigarette smoke escape, performing calisthenics.