How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (6 page)

The press likes to describe Celtic and Rangers as moral equals. And it’s true that Celtic has used its stadium for open-air celebration of mass; chunks of its management devotedly backed the Irish republican cause; and its directors consisted exclusively of Catholics up through the 1990s. There was, however, a substantial gulf between the practices of the two clubs. Celtic made an early calculation to field non-Catholics in their green and white jerseys; Rangers did no similar thing. Sometime in the vicinity of World War I, Rangers instituted a Protestants-only policy, extending from players to jani-tors. And it became even more stringent than that: The
club denied promotions to executives who
married
Catholics. Rangers allowed itself to become a staging ground for strident Protestant politics. It sent teams to Belfast for benefit matches, with proceeds going to Northern Irish chapters of the Orange Order—the anti-Catholic fraternal organization that seems to exist for no other reason than ominously marching through

Catholic neighborhoods on July twelfth, the anniversary of King Billy’s 1690 triumph at the Battle of Boyne.

Ibrox Stadium became the citywide focal point for Glasgow’s own July twelfth celebrations. One of the club’s oªcial histories describes its ethos bluntly enough: “a Protestant club for Protestant people.”

Considering postwar history—decolonization, civil rights, a global push toward liberalization—Rangers stubbornly held back until late in the program. Perhaps it was appropriate that Rangers tore down its religious wall in 1989, the year of the Velvet Revolution. The club’s new president, David Murray, prodded by his manager Graeme Souness, signed an ex-Celtic Catholic named Maurice Johnston. (Actually, Johnston’s father was a Protestant Rangers fan and he never really practiced Catholicism himself.) Even then, Rangers weren’t pushed into their decision by do-gooders. It was purely a business decision. During the 1980s, enticed by rising television revenues, a new generation of capitalists entered the game to make some real money, a breed far more sophisticated than the amateur rogues and phil-anthropically minded bourgeoisie who’d ruled before.

David Murray, for one, had made his fortune as a steel magnate. Although he hardly preached progressive politics, he understood that sectarianism had become a
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

potential financial drag. The European soccer federation, he feared, would impose costly sanctions on Rangers if it didn’t alter its hiring. He also understood that relying exclusively on Protestants had deprived Rangers of the talent to compete at the highest European levels, where top clubs like Real Madrid and AC

Milan had imported Latin American stars as Catholic as they come.

Rather predictably, the Catholic acquisition didn’t go down easy among the faithful. Fans gathered outside Ibrox to set fire to Rangers scarves and seasons tickets.

They laid wreaths to mourn the passing of the club’s Protestant identity. In Northern Ireland, supporters clubs passed resolutions banning travel to Glasgow for games and boycotting the purchase of Rangers products. Eªgies of Graeme Souness burned in Belfast streets.

By becoming the Jackie Robinson of Scottish soccer, Johnston put his own life in jeopardy. Celtic fans staged their own protests, denouncing him as a turncoat. They sprayed graªti threatening, “Collaborators Can’t Play Without Kneecaps.” For a while, it looked as though the authors of that phrase—or their sympathizers—might turn the threat into reality. A month after Johnston’s arrival, police detained Celtic fans who had allegedly plotted to assassinate him. To keep their new purchase alive, Rangers shipped him from Glasgow to London each night on a chartered jet; Johnston later moved into a safe-house outside Edinburgh. By the mid-nineties, he fled Scotland altogether, resettling in the friendlier confines of Kansas City.

Jackie Robinson’s presence transformed the culture of
baseball, slowly chipping away at clubhouse racism. Mo Johnston, strangely, had the opposite e¤ect. The team began to travel with a picture of the Queen that it hung in the dressing rooms it visited. Players began to appear in Northern Ireland, photographed alongside paramilitaries.

Scottish Protestant players allegedly defecated all over the Celtic changing room when Rangers borrowed it for a match. Even Mo Johnston himself was witnessed singing the “Sash,” a ballad with anti-Catholic inflections. And Rangers’s growing contingent of Catholics followed his lead in singing songs that insulted their faith.

How to explain this strange inversion? Glasgow is not an enormous city. Average people regularly encounter their soccer heroes. They run into them in the pubs and on the streets. If the players aren’t appropriately enthusiastic about the cause, their lives can become very diªcult. They already have to contend with half the town hating them; they don’t need their own fans turning on them, too. It creates a feedback loop that ensures sectarianism’s persistence. When Graeme Souness left the club in 1991, he told a press conference, “Bigotry never sat easily on my shoulders, and bigotry will always be at Ibrox.” With Dummy whispering into my ear —“I’ll never hire a Celtic supporter”— I think I know what he means.

III.

The next day, as I leave my hotel for the stadium, the sta¤ tries to give me advice. Most of them had never been to a Celtic-Rangers game, despite the importance
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

of the event in the life of the city. Still, they felt a sense of civic pride, constantly assuring me of my safety at Ibrox. As I departed, a receptionist rose from her chair.

“You’ll have a fantastic time,” she said, suddenly stopping me. “Hold on. Open your jacket.” A few days earlier, I’d told her that I su¤er from a very mild red-green colorblindness. Now, she wanted to proofread my clothes to make sure that I had filtered out all royalist blue, Ulster orange, and Irish green that might incite a drunken thug. Every sane Glaswegian had told me to advertise my neutrality as clearly as possible. “Wear black,” one friend advised. Before the receptionist’s intervention, I’d already set aside sweaters whose hues I didn’t want to risk. The receptionist laughed at herself for conducting this examination, “You’ll be fine. Just remember, whatever you hear, they don’t really mean it.”

Everything I do at the game to register my noncom-batant status seems to fail. Although I introduce myself as an American writer on a research mission, my neighbors in the Celtic stands insist on partisanship.

Frank, the roofer in the seat next to mine, tries to explain the atmosphere by pointing to the field and intoning, “Good versus evil.” Another neighbor wraps a

“Fighting Irish” scarf around my neck. He hoists my arms in the air above my head, a reverent gesture, during the singing of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

After Celtic score a goal twenty seconds into the game, a stranger’s embrace lifts me above my seat. My cell phone tumbles out of my pocket, two rows down.

Our section turns to the Rangers fans and sings about the exploits of the IRA. I don’t know the words, and
can’t always cut through the brogues to decipher them, but there are certain phrases that are easy enough to pick up.
Fuck the Queen. Orange Bastards.
Frank the roofer translates for me, until he explains that the vulgarity makes him feel ashamed.

Spurred on by the home fans, Rangers players

exude the dour Calvinism that they are supposed to represent. They tackle hard and neglect no defensive detail. Their midfielders slide into Celtic’s. Their e¤ort yields a string of three unanswered goals. When the Protestants sing “shit Fenian bastards,” we have no response other than to extend our middle fingers and use them as batons to ironically conduct their taunts.

Rangers wins the match three-two, and there’s only one explanation for the outcome: Celtic’s sluggish and sloppy back line of defense. That fact doesn’t interfere with the explanations I overhear for the defeat. “Give a goddam Orangeman a whistle. . . .” Another man refers to referees as the “masons in black.” Of course, grousing about refereeing is a bedrock right of sports fans.

Why blame the team that you love when culpability for defeats can be easily transported elsewhere?

Celtic fans are a special case. They don’t just believe that referees try to ruin them. They believe that they’ve definitively proved the phenomenon. The case against the “masons in black” has been made on the op-ed pages of broadsheets and in the pages of the Glasgow archdiocese’s newspaper, and, most elaborately, by a Jesuit priest called Peter Burns. Basing his study on several decades’ worth of game accounts in the
Glasgow
Herald,
Father Burns found that referees had disallowed sixteen Celtic goals, while denying Rangers a
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

mere four. Celtic had won two “dubious penalties” to Rangers’ eight. “It seems reasonable to conclude,” he wrote, adopting the tone of a disinterested academic,

“that the oft-made and oft-denied charge of Rangers-favoring bias by match oªcials, at least in Old Firm games, does indeed stand up to scrutiny.” When Celtic supporters make their case, they invariably point to a string of incidents. First, they point to a passage in the memoir of a Rangers player recounting a retired referee bragging to him of preserving Rangers victories with bogus calls. Next, they recount that a player was ejected from a game in 1996 for crossing himself upon enter-ing the pitch—a deliberately provocative gesture, the referee called it.

In the mainstream press, there is a phrase to

describe these complaints: Celtic paranoia. The notion is that Catholics have imagined the crimes committed against them, have grown too attached to the idea of su¤ering. This smells of victim blaming, but the closer one examines the evidence the more reasonable the thesis becomes. Celtic fans have a predilection for dredging up ancient history and conflating it with recent events. Burns’s Jesuitical study, for example, relies on newspaper clippings from the 1960s to make the case against the Scottish referees.

In a way, this confusion of past and present perfectly captures the Scottish Catholic condition. Without question, they continue to su¤er prejudice in the present day. But when asked to give examples of the wounds inflicted by Scottish Protestants, they fall back on stories they’ve inherited from their fathers and grandfathers. To be sure, these are often devastating
tales: Catholics denied jobs, shut out of universities, and prevented from falling in love with Protestant women. Western Scotland had been a place, in the words of the novelist Andrew O’Hagan, where “the birds on the trees sang sectarian songs.”

But the memories of the past are so easily accessible that they shade perceptions of the present. When commentators call for creation of a new secular school system that would abolish funding for parochial institutions, some Catholics smell the second coming of John Knox.

“We must try to be invisible or su¤er the inevitable dis-criminatory consequences,” the literary critic Patrick Reilly has fumed in response. They complained vociferously when the newly created Scottish parliament took up residence in the old Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland. Never mind that the Church of Scotland, like the rest of mainline Protestantism, has become a bastion of bleeding-heart liberalism, racked with guilt over its anti-Catholic past. And never mind that parliament only occupied the building for temporary accommodation.

While discrimination might not exist in spades, prejudice does. Sitting in Ibrox, listening to the taunts of Rangers supporters, Catholics know for certain that some of these fanatics are members of the Scottish parliament and critics of Catholic schools. It’s hard not to be wary.

IV.

With Dummy’s Guinness-stained gray sweatshirt and blue jeans, he looks undeniably like a soccer fan. Don-
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

ald Findlay does not. He wears a three-piece suit with striped pants and a navy jacket constructed from lush Saville Row cloth. Across his vest, a gold pocket watch chain holds a miniature crown and family keepsakes.

His Gilbert-and-Sullivan facial hair covers his cheeks and then stops at his chin. At Ibrox, they a¤ectionately refer to him as Muttonchops. In his career as one of Scotland’s greatest barristers, he evinced a melodra-matic persona to match his overwrought attire. Findlay achieved his infamy by freeing some of his hardest clients, including hooligans on both sides of the Old Firm. His flowery oratory flooded the jury box with tears.

After the match, I met Findlay at a hotel bar.

Despite a legal career filled with high-profile successes, he will always be best known for his time as the flamboyant vice-chairman of Rangers. Attending games at Celtic Park, he’d sit in the box reserved for the opposing management. He’d deliberately show disdain for his surroundings, kicking up his wingtips and placing them on the box’s polished wood. Besieged by a torrent of verbal abuses from Celtic fans, he’d take long drags on his pipe, appearing utterly unmoved. When his Rangers scored goals, Findlay liked to celebrate as ostentatiously and gleefully as possible, the only man standing and cheering amid a sea of dejection. In interviews, he’d go a step further. He made a running gag out of the fact that he didn’t celebrate his birthday, because it fell on St. Patrick’s Day. Instead, he said that he celebrated on July twelfth, the anniversary of King Billy’s triumph. In his living room, he would stage Orange marches.
On a May night in 1999, his tenure at Rangers

came to an abrupt end. Findlay sang, “We’re up to our knees in Fenian Blood” on the karaoke machine, his arm drunkenly draped over a player’s shoulder. He had gathered with the rest of the Rangers club to celebrate a victory over Celtic. In his jubilation, he had repeated lyrics that Rangers supporters blare on a weekly basis, that leading lights of society had sung for generations.

Most of them, however, hadn’t been captured on a video that would be handed over to the
Daily Record.
On the same spring evening that Findlay raised his pint glass and damned the papists, Rangers’ darkest impulses were responsible for dark acts. Rangers fans stabbed, shot, and beat senseless three young Celtic supporters.