David Goldblatt's history of soccer

The title of this book comes from a quote that could have been a line in a Humphrey Bogart movie:

"The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes. Everything else is theory.

Bogart would never have said that, of course. His movies catered to American audiences, who would have wondered what he was talking about. Ninety minutes? What game lasts 90 minutes?

David Goldblatt's The Ball is Round tells how soccer spread around the world from its origins in elite English schools in the 19th Century to become humankind's primary spectator sport. When a new nation takes its place on the world stage, it establishes its existence by (1) joining the United Nations and (2) joining FIFA, soccer's international governing body. Not necessarily in that order. Joining FIFA gives a nation a say in matters that have a more noticeable effect on the day-to-day lives of its citizens and the fortunes of its politicians.

Africans vs. white masters

The history of the game most non-Americans call football is intimately intertwined with the general political and economic history of the last 150 years. During the colonial period in Africa, for example, anti-colonial leaders used football clubs to sharpen their organizational skills. The game itself offered them a chance to prove they could beat their white masters at their own sport.

The interaction with general history continues right up to the present. When Goldblatt describes the history of soccer in Latin America during the last three decades, his story becomes mired in a depressing chronicle of chaos, drug trafficking and violence. When he turns his spotlight on Asia during the same period, it becomes as upbeat as the drive for economic growth that characterizes countries like China, Singapore, and South Korea.

Diplomatic solutions

Football has become one of humanity's great global institutions. Its professionals bargain in an international market in which athletes from impoverished African nations can become wealthy by playing for European clubs. Its governing body creates its own solutions to diplomatic issues like the status of Taiwan and Hong Kong. Its commercial operations crisscross the map with odd relationships.

In Southeast Asia the most popular spectator sport is European football, watched on TV. The marketing executives of Britain's Manchester United team thought their Asian audience was merely an interesting quirk until they discovered ManU had 10 million fans there. Then they started scheduling exhibition tours and intensifying their merchandising (the sale of merchandise like team jerseys being a major source of team revenue.)

How did this happen? How did we arrive at a world in which half of mankind watches the final of the World Cup on TV? And most Americans wonder why they do it?

Headmaster's vision

Blame Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby from 1828-1848. Dr. Arnold promoted an educational ideology that favored character over intellect. Rugby and the other elite schools were preparing the future leaders of a global empire. Character would be developed through sport, not book learning— and no sport developed it better than football.

Football developed hardiness and physical courage, and it rewarded players who could combine teamwork with the ability to seize individual opportunities as circumstances changed. The boys played football every day and took the game with them wherever they went.

The football played in the schools grew out of the "folk football" played in the villages of England and other parts of Europe. At the beginning of the 19th Century, many observers felt this sport was dying out. The first sports organized into clubs in the 18th Century were horse racing, boxing and rowing. Arnold's ideology brought football to the center.

Every school played by its own rules. Some emphasized kicking, others carrying and throwing. In 1863, the newly formed British Football Association codified the rules of the kicking game and gave us Association Football—soccer, in one of those odd wordplays our Transatlantic cousins fancy. The carrying game became rugby.

Rise of the working class

Association Football became the first mass spectator sport because it arrived on the scene when social and economic development provided the appropriate infrastructure. The incomes of the British working classes rose 30% during the last quarter of the 19th Century, and the workweek had been shortened to five and a half days; so a workingman could buy a ticket to a football game Saturday afternoon and argue about the match in the pub Saturday evening. The railways could transport teams through league schedules that spanned the entire country. The burgeoning publishing industry provided newspapers and magazines that stirred up interest.

The British spread the game through the nations they ruled and the "informal empire" created by enclaves of British administrators and technical experts in places like Brazil and Holland. The nations that didn't succumb to the virus included, oddly, English-speaking countries with strong historical ties to Great Britain: Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S.

American tastes

These nations remained immune partly because of a strong urge to assert their national individuality. But timing played a role, too. The U.S. and Australia codified their own versions of football while the new spectator sport was still establishing itself in Britain. When "soccer" reached our shores, gridiron football had become firmly entrenched in our colleges.

In his introduction to the U.S. edition, Goldblatt concludes that American soccer leagues will always have problems competing with sports shaped by American tastes. But he also argues that soccer offers Americans a "conduit" to the "genius and tragedies" of the rest of mankind, in the same way he has learned that American sports can offer outsiders a conduit to the genius and tragedies of American society.

The sheer size of his 900-page saga may daunt potential customers, but they'll miss a good summer read if they let that deter them. The Ball is Round is an entertaining, offbeat look at the political, social and economic turbulence that has brought us to the age of global communications, global environmental problems and relentless, unending technological change.♦


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