What Are They Thinking?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

One of the great pleasures of being a sports fan is that it gives you license to pose as the world’s foremost expert on something you actually know nothing about. I, for one, can barely throw a baseball without straining my shoulder, but find me a water cooler and I’ll tell you exactly what’s ailing Randy Johnson. And then there’s your chain-smoking buddy who expounds from his barstool on the physiological effects of Barry Bonds’s steroid use. Or Lou in the Bronx, who calls up his favorite talkradio host to rail about the Knicks’ selfish play, though he’s never even sniffed a professional locker room. It all adds up to a joyous cacophony of unfounded opinions.

Recent years, however, have seen the rise of a breed known as the “thinking fan.” Seeking to delve deeper into why on-field events occur the way they do, the thinking fan dives into statistical and strategic analysis. He seeks out new ideas via blogs, sports think tanks, and ESPN.com. And he takes pride in the generation of fans-turned-wonks (including the thinking fan’s spiritual godfather, baseball philosopher Bill James) currently invading professional teams’ front offices. It’s no exaggeration to say the thinking fan’s sober, fact-based approach is revolutionizing American sports management.

But the editors of “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup” (Harper Perennial, 397 pages, $14.95) have a different kind of thinking fan in mind. This odd collection of essays about each of the 32 countries participating in the 2006 World Cup caters to the omnivorous bookworm who casually seeks enlightenment about soccer via ethnographic sketches, geopolitical analyses, gonzo travel narratives, and personal histories. This fan may, on occasion, wish to learn about a country’s past World Cup performance – there are various useful historical tables included in “The Thinking Fan’s Guide” – but he’s not too interested in the current tournament: The 2006 rosters are nowhere to be found. In any case, he’d just as soon read about a country’s life expectancy and GDP, as attested to by the figures from the CIA’s “World Factbook” that accompany each essay.

The book’s editors and many of its contributors, it seems, believe that the way a country plays soccer is inseparable from – and to a large extent defined by – its history, politics, and social structure.That’s a dubious assumption, one that trivializes both politics and sports. (Though that won’t stop hordes of self-important pundits from repeating it as nauseum throughout the month to come.)

How does Poland’s fraught transition from dictatorship to democracy relate to its inconsistent national squad? James Surowiecki thinks it has something to do with the fact that “real life … is much messier and more complex than life during an uprising or a revolution.”What does Angola’s legacy of civil war and social chaos have to do with its chances on the field this month? According to Henning Mankell, “if people play together on a soccer team they can hardly leave the game and wage war against each other.” (The 1990 Yugoslavian quarterfinalists must not have gotten the memo.) How do Sweden’s prisons relate to its World Cup team? Eric Schlosser points out that both are increasingly multicultural.

Such dull, facile conclusions teach us nothing substantive about soccer. Worse, they sabotage otherwise wellreported and thoughtful essays about important issues. Messrs. Surowiecki, Mankell, and Schlosser, along with Jorge Castaneda (Mexico), Jake Silvertstein (Ecuador), Tim Adams (Czech Republic), Isabel Hilton (Paraguay), and Geoff Dyer (Serbia-Montenegro) should have spilled this ink on other pages, leaving soccer out of the mix altogether.

To be fair, it’s very hard to dissect a country’s national character in a sixpage essay, let alone prove how it is manifested in 11 shaggy-haired athletes. Which is why most of the writers here hedge their bets with tales of how the country at hand or its soccer traditions have affected their lives. Here’s a statistic for the thinking readers out there: The first-person voice appears in the lead paragraph of 20 of these 32 essays, including that of Peter Stamm (Switzerland), a candidate for the worst-lead-of-all-time award – “If I’m right, I’ve only ever once sat down to watch the whole of a football game, and that was the 1986 World Cup final between West Germany and Argentina.”

Some of these are skillfully written travel narratives, but they have a tendency to ramble. William Finnegan (Portugal), for example, waxes poetic about the demise of his favorite surf spot in Madeira, which relates to the World Cup … because Cristiano Ronaldo was born there. Robert Coover’s essay on watching soccer in Barcelona after the fall of Franco provides a vivid snapshot of a crucial moment in the development of Spain and its favorite sport – though still nothing about the 2006 World Cup.

The worst offenders, however, are those who neither write about their chosen countries nor about the soccer played there. Said Sayrafiezadeh (Iran), an Iranian-American, recounts how he tried in vain to learn Farsi and visit the homeland of his estranged father. Who plays for the Iranian team? What are the distinctive traditions of Iranian soccer? How might the team fare in Germany? Mr. Sayrafiezadeh offers few clues.

It’s a shame that so few of these essays tackle such questions, because those that do are must-reads for any soccer fan, thinking or otherwise. Jim Frederick compares how the Japanese relate to both baseball and soccer, and comes up with a thought-provoking set of observations about each sport’s role in Japanese society. Wendell Steavenson (Tunisia) and Sukhdev Sandhu (Saudi Arabia) offer intriguing, offbeat insights into the strange netherworld of soccer fandom in dictatorial societies. Nick Hornby (England) paints a whimsical portrait of a country trying to overcome soccer fanaticism and World Cup-induced defeatism.And Dave Eggers (United States) provides an even wittier sketch of a country that remains, by and large, strangely indifferent to the beautiful game.

Some of that indifference stems from Americans’ impulse to quantify the sports they watch – the same impulse that gave rise to the thinking fan. Indeed, soccer is proudly impermeable to statistical analysis, lacking as it does the discrete, stop-and-start quality that allows baseball, football, and basketball to be broken down into component parts and quantified. The contributions of most soccer players to any given game cannot be quantified in a meaningful way; team numbers, like corner kicks and shots toward the goal, are scarcely more useful.

Soccer, instead, rests on less tangible things: mood and momentum, form and flow, beauty and balance, skill and style. The thinking soccer fan conjures up images of crisp passes, darting runs, and dazzling bursts of creative energy. He daydreams about that cynical tackle deftly avoided with a flip of the ball and a twist of the torso; that screaming free kick curling around a wall of defenders and past a diving keeper; the sweat exploding off a rising head colliding with a well-struck ball.

Such moments defy analysis – and prose. As John Lanchester (Brazil) writes, “football is difficult to describe. Its texture is elusive and words make a poor fit with the game’s graces … The reason football snags us, and the reason it is difficult to write about – to write directly about what happens on the pitch – is connected through the idea of beauty.”That’s no excuse not to try, and Mr. Lanchester proceeds to offer a beautiful description of the beautiful game, along with a surprisingly original analysis of what makes the Brazilian game, from Pele to Ronaldinho, so special.

Mr. Lanchester is one of the very few seasoned soccer writers in this book, and it should come as no surprise that his is the book’s best essay. After all, even Lou in the Bronx could tell you that in order to write well about a sport, you need to watch it, engage with it, and, well, write about it.

mwoodsworth@nysun.com


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